Some Notes on Free Will

Aquinas uses the Latin liberum arbitrium,  meaning “free judgment” when he talks about free will in the Prima Pars (the first part of the Summa Theologica), henceforth referenced by the Roman numeral I).  The idea of “judgment” is important for his parsing out what he means by free will.

He says in I, Q. 83, art. I that some things act without judgments, like a stone moving downward when dropped.  Other things move with judgment but without knowledge like animals who judge a something like a steak to be good, but judge according to instinct, not reason.  Humans, however, act from judgment with knowledge, meaning that humans reason that something should be sought or avoided, not on instinct, but according to reason.

One advantage of acting according to judgment with knowledge is that human beings can be inclined to various “good” things like studying for comps or blogging, but not to any particular good.  Now, that does not mean that the will is not moved of necessity.  In Q. 82, art. 2, Aquinas says that the will must of necessity tend towards the good.  This means that the will has to will anything that it wills because it sees it as a good.  The reason that free will is still possible in light of this is that the will is not bound to any particular good.  Blogging and studying for comprehensive exams are both goods, and my will can choose either one of them because it judges one to be a particular good worthy of pursuit over the other (which is why I am blogging at midnight rather than studying or sleeping, other, perhaps better goods).

The idea of free will got a little distorted in the 14th c. in what is known as the Nominalist movement.  Figures like Duns Scotus and William Occam read that the will was bound by necessity to the good (that it must will the good) and assumed that this undermined human freedom.  Occam posited instead the freedom of indifference for the will, meaning that the will was not bound by anything.  It could choose evil if it wanted to, or it could choose good.  For Occam and others during this time, this was the only conception of freedom that made sense.

For Aquinas, freedom is not the capacity to choose between contraries.  The will is created to be inclined towards the good and so it simply cannot choose evil.  To understand this, let’s think of the stone falling to the ground.  The stone has to fall towards the ground.  This is simply the way God created the universe and the natural laws according to which the universe operate says that a stone dropped on earth will fall to the ground.  In a similar way, the will has to move towards the good.  The difference is that, whereas there is only one place for the stone to go, namely down, there are many places the will can go.  There are many different goods it can choose.  But just because God created it to tend towards the good does not mean that it isn’t free:

Free-will is the cause of its own movement because by his free-will, man moves himself to act.  But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself. . .God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary.  And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature (I, Q. 83, art. 1).

What I think is so interesting about Aquinas’ treatment of free will is the extent to which he emphasizes how the exercise of the free will depends on the help of God.  In the reply to 83.1, Obj. 2, he says that free-will is not sufficient, “unless it be moved and helped by God.”  In the reply to Obj. 4 of the same article, he says “man’s way is said no be his in the execution of his choice, wherein he may be impeded, whether he will or not.  The choice itself, however, is in us, but presupposes the help of God.”  In the next article, he says that “free will is the subject of grace, by the help of which it chooses what is good.”

The reformer Martin Luther is famous for saying that there is no such thing as free will.  What he means is that  human beings are incapable of doing good unless helped by grace.  To illustrate this point in a work called The Bondage of the Will, he borrows an image from Augustine of the will being ridden (enslaved) by Satan, unless it be justified, whereby it is then ridden or “enslaved” to God.

The tendency in moral theology has been to place Aquinas and Luther on opposite sides of the spectrum, with Aquinas emphasizing the good that human beings are capable of, and Luther emphasizing the complete and utter dependence on grace.  I am not so sure this is fair to Aquinas.  In I, Q. 83, art.2, ad. 3, Aquinas says “man is said to have lost free will by falling into sin, not as to natural liberty, which is freedom from coercion, but as regards freedom from fault and unhappiness.”

It seems to me that Luther and Aquinas are closer than they are thought to be.  Luther thinks that with grace, and only with grace, can the will do what it is supposed to do.  He uses the metaphor of enslavement to God to illustrate the point.  Aquinas agrees that only with grace can the will do what it is supposed to do (not just in its fallen state but in its natural state as well).  Rather than enslavement, however, Aquinas talks about necessity to clarify the sense in which the will is free.  In Q. 82, art. 2, he says that the will can freely choose among various goods that are not necessary for happiness, “but there are some things that have a necessary connection with happiness, by means of which things man adheres to God, in Whom alone true happiness consists.  Nevertheless, until through the certitude of the Divine Vision the necessity of such connection be shown, the will does not adhere to God of necessity, nor to those things which are of God.  But the will of the man who sees God in His essence of necessity adheres to God, just as now we desire of necessity to be happy” (emphasis mine).  What Aquinas is saying here is really very similar to Luther–the will needs grace to do what it is supposed to do as a will, and to do what a will is supposed to do is the only meaning of “freedom” that makes any sense.