Simplicianus has asked Augustine to explicate a verse from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “It is not in the power of the one who wills, nor of the one who runs, but in the power of God, who has pity” (IX. 16: “neque volentis neque currentis sed miserentis est Dei”). Interpreting the verse, Augustine argues that the human being cannot hope by his own will and effort to be adequate for his own salvation. His own activity – both external (running) and internal (willing) – always proves insufficient. Or to put it more precisely, his own effort is insufficient for the right sort of internal and external activity. Right willing itself, he now insists, depends upon desire for a good object; and desire itself is a response of delight and love that is summoned up in us by an external call and is not perfectly ours to control. Unless something “happens our way” (“occurat”) which delights and moves the soul’s faculty of desire in the appropriate manner, the will can in no way be moved. “But that this something should happen our way, is not in the power of the human being” (Ad Simplic. I.Qu 2.22). We can be moved to faith and appropriate effort only by being struck in such a way that our will is correctly set in motion. “But who embraces in his soul something that gives him no delight? And who has it in his power to determine that that which can delight him should happen his way, or to determine that it should delight him when it does happen his way?” (I.Qu 2.21). Different people are moved and touched in different ways, by different sorts of external calls (14); desire’s responses are idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and not transparent to reason. God’s call may come to us in such a way that it moves us, or it may not. He may choose to move us to delight and love (for He always can do this), or He may allow our hearts to remain cold (16). This may seem unfair; but these are the ways of God’s secret justice, which we cannot hope to understand. As Paul has written, “He pities those he wishes, and He hardens those he wishes” (“quem vult obdurat”). And there is no reliable relationship between the character of our human efforts and the likelihood of being called in the requisite way. As Brown writes, “Augustine now moves in a world of ‘love at first sight,’ of chance encounters, and, just as important, of sudden, equally inexplicable patches of deadness.”[^11]