Complete the account of the divided will.
Augustine describes wanting and not wanting one thing at the same ______, and locates the conflict inside a single ______ rather than between two ______. The experience is available to anyone who has broken a ______.
Word bank: moment · will · souls · resolution · body · century
Hints
- The Manichaean alternative explained inner conflict by positing two souls.
- Augustine keeps one will and puts the division inside it.
Show the answer
Augustine describes wanting and not wanting one thing at the same moment, and locates the conflict inside a single will rather than between two souls. The experience is available to anyone who has broken a resolution.
Keeping the will single is the whole move. Two souls would explain the conflict too easily and make the person a spectator of it; one divided will makes the failure genuinely the person’s own, which is what the experience of breaking a resolution actually feels like.
Practise Augustine’s Confessions: the Invention of Interiority
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Augustine’s Confessions: the Invention of Interiority
- Arrange the episodes of Augustine’s narrative in the order the Confessions gives them.
- The Confessions is addressed to its readers, who are asked to judge Augustine’s account of his life.
- Which are true of the pear theft in book two?
- The Confessions covers Augustine’s life from infancy to roughly what age, in years, at the point where the…
- Match each analytical book of the Confessions to the problem it takes up.
- Augustine’s analysis of memory in book ten is a digression from the autobiography rather than a consequence…
- Augustine writes the Confessions directly to an omniscient God rather than to human readers. What literary…