Soul and Free Will

Perhaps one important Biblical passage for Augustine is Genesis 2:7--"Then the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."  For, the Greek for 'soul' is 'psyche', meaning 'breath, so the passage presents for Augustine a possible fruitful intersection of Philosophy and Christianity.  In particular, the breath-dust contrast of the passage easily lends itself to Platonist soul-body dualism, with the potential of soul to survive bodily death, at which point it returns to God, and to eternal life.  On the other hand, while the Platonist soul is, by nature, wisdom-seeking, the Augustinian soul, by nature, is content to obey God's warning to avoid knowledge of good and evil.  Furthermore, Platonism has no faculty of 'free will', which only underscores the problematic status of the latter for Augustine, i. e. as a power to choose between obedience to God and corporeal temptation, it must be, in itself, neither soul nor body.  So Platonism does not seem to help Augustine escape the suspicion that his concept of 'free will' is no more than an ad hoc device to resolve the apparent inconsistency between a good omnipotent creator and the existence of evil.