Charles Mathewes, trying to gesture at a more robust anthropology than the one undergirding consumer capitalism, which assumes that “individual choice” is the fundamental category of agency:

For Augustine, the fullest picture of good human agency is human agency as it will be exercised in the eschaton. He characterized that agency in a famous Latin phrase, non posse peccare, when humans will find it “not possible to sin.” For him, true, fully achieved human agency was not one where “choice” played any role at all, but rather was a kind of full voluntary exercise of one’s being, where one is wholly and willingly engaged—but where one seems to have no choice about this. This does not require compulsion of any dangerous sort; after all, it is “involuntary” in much the same way that one has no choice about laughing at a funny movie, but one laughs, at times (if it is really funny) with more than one’s voice—with one’s whole being. For this to happen we must be liberated from the slavery to sin to which we are all manifestly, for Augustine, captive. It is that enslavement that divides or splits our will and so sunders our integrity. Here is a picture of idealized agency where the center of the picture is not a wide range of options, but no options at all—a picture of human agency whose flourishing lies wholly in the complete and unimpeded engagement of the whole person in the dynamic joy of paradise.

This is an entirely different picture of agency, one that highlights humans' capacities of participation, receptivity, and particularly love: aspects of agency that subvert a picture of the human as fundamentally active. Love is the “root” of the soul, and so we are in a way composed by our cares: we do not make things valuable, the things that we value “make” us—or better, reveal who we truly are. When the soul is properly oriented in the love that is caritas, it is a unifying force, equally for our own self-integrity, our relationship with God, and our relationship with our neighbor. But love is not only an affective orientation toward things we care about, it is also intelligent, an articulate cognition of our situation, an attempt at assessing the true value of the world and the things within it. So when Augustine (in)famously says “love and do what you will,” he does not mean do what you will, insofar as the you is the you that you were before you felt God’s love; rather, that love has so transformed you that you now will to do love.

On this picture, joy is what we receive, a gift. We do not pursue it; we are always surprised by it. And what we do is bear it to others; it is by nature communicative. In loving, you become an instrument of God, and a vehicle for God’s love of the world. Hence caritas is politically unifying: as this energy has been directed toward the conversion of the self back to God, so it in turn energizes the self to seek communion with others. This is not a form of violence; we love others in friendship and treat them as would God.

This understanding of freedom entails a particular picture of the nature of human agency, one that sees such agency, at its core, as a matter of response to God’s action upon it, not as a matter of simply self-starting willy-nilly into the world. Furthermore, it is fundamentally responsive to a longing that is primordial to its being, the longing for God, so that all our acts are to be understood as forms of seeking our true home in God, a seeking that is also a beseeching, a pleading to God to come to us. As such it is both active and passive, with the passivity taking the lead. The primordial act of our agency, that is, is to respond to the eliciting call of God—to listen, or hear, or attend, or—most properly—wait on God. In doing this, we should see ourselves not as desiring but as desired, as objects of love before we are agents of love. Our destiny is not primarily to do something, but first and foremost to be loved.