Augustine of Hippo in his attack on Pelagius, the British monk who alleged that man has free will and thus can do good acts and achieve salvation, restructured the concept of free will and introduced the concept of grace and perforce led the way to predestination. Simply man cannot achieve salvation unless God grants him individually grace and then his salvation is preordained since he cannot do anything which would then mitigate that end result.
What is the will and what do we mean by free will? Both have
significant philosophical and theological facets and understandings.
Augustine fought Pelagius and to do so he had need of
clarifying two elements; free will and grace. Now the will was well discussed
in philosophical literature with Aristotle expanding upon it in Nicomachean
Ethics. The concept of grace as a facilitator was a residual from Paul and his
writings. The interaction of the two became a major factor in Augustine’s
thought.
Let me first begin with the concept of free will, or the
will. In broad terms the will is the human element which allows the individual
to make a choice, and in an sense as used by Augustine a moral choice. In
contrast the ideas of Schopenhauer allows the will to be expansive and become
an integral part of every human action. We will not look at the conjoined will
of Schopenhauer but the more dualist will of Augustine. In our particular
example the will to say no to a piece of cake or a serving of French fries.
Stump makes the following assessments regarding free will
and Augustine (Stump, p 124, Augustine, Cambridge) which I shall paraphrase
somewhat. She argues that there are at least two schools of thought regarding
free will and they can be characterized as follows:
Compatibilism: The world can be causally determined yet a
person can commit free acts with full moral responsibility.
Libertarianism: Consists of two claims:
(i) a person acts with free will only if the act is not
causally determined by some exogenous agent, or:
(ii) a person acts with free will only if the person could
have acted otherwise.
Stump adds a third form of a “Modified Libertarianism”, it
is defined as:
(iii) A person acts with free will only if their intellect
and will are the sole determinants of the act.
In all of these cases the will is in many ways a dualistic
forced, within the person, whereby the act they take is one amongst many yet
this force allows the person to make a choice. The choice presented for
selection one could argue have relatively equal compelling arguments, a
possibly poor term but reasonable under the selection of having the intellect
involved, for their selection.
Thus one may ask does a person who is “addicted” to say
heroin have the free will to say no and eliminate that dependence? This would
be problematic under many of the above definitions. However we know by
experience that people can and do choose to stop drug use, tobacco use, even
caffeine use. People stop consuming certain types of food, by choice. Thus is
this not a clear example of free will. Yet we know that physiologically the
drug addict finds the cessation a painful experience, the cessation of eating
can also be physically painful and socially difficult.
Thus free will is part of the equation for Augustine. The
other element is Grace, the “gift of God” to assist the will and the intellect
in making the correct moral choice. Grace is needed according to Augustine
because without it man is all too often prone to make the bad choice, read it
evil or sinful. One must wonder whether this would apply to all things that the
Augustinian will would be involved in, say eating a date versus a fig. But it is
the need for this Grace that allows the will to act in a correct and moral
manner. If God gives you grace then you can act accordingly, if God withholds
grace then you cannot do the right thing, and for Augustine that would mean
ever do the right thing.
Thus in the Augustine context one has a duality of body and
will, a will which is fee, and a need for Grace to facilitate right choices.
For Pelagius man could perforce of his fee will make those choices, and in a
natural extension it would be via that free will per say that many passes or
fails the acid test of living a moral life. To Augustine man needed Grace and
thus God, by himself, with free will, he was still lost. Thus the Augustinian
view of Grace is that being God given you need it to do truly good works,
devoid of such good works one is lost, and God grants grace on his own choices
and thus one has the Augustinian basis for predestination, and the resultant
Calvinistic views.
Now to obesity and genes. Instead of Grace we have genes,
and instead of the free will to do right and wrong in a simply moral manner we
have the will, assumed to be free, to eat or not eat. The current world view by
many is in a sense an Augustinian extension of predestination, if you have the
right genes you are fine and if not it is not your fault, the genes made you do
it. Namely the strength of will alone is useless.
We need a Pelagius, we need the anti-Augustine to state that
indeed man has free will, and that it is the will, in what may be a dualist
manner, which can save us, genes notwithstanding. Pelagius may have had a
point, albeit pushed to an extreme at the time. Pelagius recognized the power
of the will for good and evil, the power of the will to select between what is
good for one, albeit uncomfortable, and what is bad. Choosing is what makes
humans somewhat unique. Understanding that was Pelagius’ contribution. We
should dismiss the Augustinian crutch of some exogenous factor which lets our
free will take a back seat.
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