MIND AND SOUL is suYcient in itself for the lover.’ This is quite parallel to Aristotle’s account of practical reasoning (NE 1112b 18 V.; EE 1218b8–24) Both Aristotle and Augustine imagine the will, or practical reason, as an issuer of commands, and both of them are keenly interested in the possibility of disobedience to these commands, in the sinner (Augustine) or in the incontinent person (Aristotle, NE 1147a32) But Augustine exploits the analogy much more fully He regards every voluntary motion of the body as an obedience to a command of the will; and he is fascinated by the possibility of second-order volition, where the will is issuing commands to itself The mind (animus) commands the body, and obedience is instant; the mind commands itself and meets resistance The mind tells the hand to move, and all goes so smoothly that it is hard to distinguish the command from its execution Yet the mind is the mind, and the hand is a body The mind tells the mind to will; one is the same as the other, and yet it does not what it is told (Conf VIII 21) What is really happening in such a case, when, for instance, a man wants to will to be chaste and yet does not really will to be chaste? How can the will command itself and yet not obey? The command to will, Augustine says, is half-hearted: if it were wholehearted, the will to be chaste would already be there In his own case, he says, while he was hesitating about the service of God ‘I who was willing to serve was the same I who was unwilling; I was neither wholly willing nor wholly unwilling’ Such self-conXict, such inner dissociation, is possible only because we are the descendants of Adam, inheriting his sin It is the consideration of Adam that leads Augustine to diVer signiWcantly from Aristotle on an important point Aristotle accepted that a man may act against the dictates of the rational will, but he envisaged this as happening through the stress of animal passion But Adam fell into sin in Eden, at a time when he had no disordered passions; again, Lucifer and his angels fell into sin, though they had no animal bodies So Augustine is led to postulate uncaused acts of evil will ‘If you look for an eYcient cause of such an evil volition, you will Wnd nothing What is it that makes a will evil, when it is doing an evil deed? The evil will is the eYcient cause of the evil deed, but of an evil will there is no eYcient cause’ (DCD XII 6) However one tries to trace back the cause of an evil action, sooner or later one will arrive at a sheer act of evil will Suppose that we imagine two 221