But Augustine philosophically breaks with his own Platonism at one point, and finds not in the intellect, but in the will, the primary characteristic of this consciousness of inner certainty. The will is the inmost core of our being. All our mental states are formed under the direction of the purposes of the will. The striking exception to this is the cognition of the higher divine truth, in the presence of which the mind can be only passive. Revelation cannot be the production of the finite activity, but it is an act of grace before which the will is expectant and passive. Knowledge of the divine truths of the reason is the blessedness that results from the will of God and not of man. The will of man is transformed into faith, and yet even then an element of the human will is present, although passive, for the appropriation of the truth is an act of will. Thus, in regard to this difficult subject of the nature of the will, there are two observations to be made: (1) Augustine conceives the will, memory, and intellect as so intimately related as not to be faculties of the personality like the properties of a substance. They rather form an indissoluble unity of the substance of the soul. (2) The will is theoretically free, and Augustine is one of the most forcible defenders of free-will because he is also a defender of ethical responsibility and the justice of God. Theoretically the will is a force existing above sensuous nature and formally possesses the capacity of following or resisting inclination. Actually it is never free to choose, but it has the higher function of being determined by the Good. Only the good will is free.[54] =The Authority of the Church according to Augustine.= With the fall of ancient Rome, the church was hard pressed, for the young peoples who came into the church were Arian and the only German Catholic nation was the Franks. Augustine was a man of vigor, but he seemed to lack the peculiar power of forcing the church to adopt as dogma the truths for which he stood. He always submitted himself absolutely to the tradition of the church, and yet in a general way he accomplished two things for the church at large: (1) He established tradition as the authority and law of the church; (2) He offered the church a scientifically constructed plan of salvation.