Easter 2026 - Reading #23 - Fortitude
Reading
Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, describes the interior struggle that the gift of fortitude ultimately resolved: "I was frantic, overcome by violent anger with myself for not accepting Your will and entering into Your covenant. All my bones were crying out to me to enter into that covenant, and they were praising it to the skies. It was not necessary to take ship or even to go any distance at all. For the journey was no farther than from the house to the place where I was sitting. All I had to do was to will to go. But to will powerfully and wholly, not merely to turn and twist a half-wounded will, struggling with one part rising up while another part sank down."
Augustine continues: "The mind commands the body, and it obeys forthwith. The mind commands itself, and is resisted. Whence this strange anomaly? The mind commands the hand to move, and so easily is it done that the command is barely distinguished from obedience. Yet the mind is the mind, and the hand is the body. The mind commands the mind to will, and yet though it is itself, it does not obey. Whence this monstrous thing?"
Augustine's tortured self-analysis reveals why the gift of fortitude is necessary: the human will, divided against itself, cannot be healed by human effort alone. Only the Spirit can unify what sin has fragmented.
Reflection
Twenty-four days into Easter, Augustine takes us inside the experience of a divided will, the struggle that every honest person recognizes. "The mind commands the mind to will, and yet it does not obey." This is the human condition in a sentence. We know what we should do. We want to want it. And yet something within us resists, sabotages, drags its feet. Without the gift of fortitude, this divided will is our permanent condition.
Augustine's conversion was ultimately not a triumph of willpower. It was a surrender. In the garden at Milan, he did not grit his teeth harder. He wept, he cried out, and the Spirit broke through the resistance that Augustine could not break through himself. "Take it up and read. Take it up and read." The gift came from outside, from a child's voice, from a passage of Scripture, from the Holy Spirit working through the most ordinary means to accomplish what the greatest intellect in the ancient world could not accomplish on his own.
This is profoundly consoling for anyone who has ever tried to change and failed, who has ever made promises and broken them, who has ever looked at the gap between the person they are and the person they want to be and felt despair. The gift of fortitude says: that gap is real, but it is not permanent. The power that unified Augustine's divided will is the same power available to you. The Easter season is precisely the time to ask for it, to stop trying to heal yourself and to let the Spirit do what only the Spirit can do. Today, name your divided will. Bring it to God. And ask for the gift that Augustine received in the garden: the fortitude to finally, completely, say yes.