Theological Origins of Modernity

142 chapter five
clear is how these are compatible with one another. If God is omnipotent,
how can human beings be responsible for anything at all? And if they are
not responsible, how can they be guilty? And if they are not guilty, how
can they be justly punished? And if their punishment is not just, how can
God be good? Ancient Christianity recognized this problem and struggled
to fi nd a solution.
Th e Greek fathers fi rst raised the question of the free will of individual
human beings in their struggles against the Stoics and Gnostics, arguing
that the human will is free both before and aft er the Fall. 32 Th e notion of
the freedom of the will within early Christianity, however, was still essentially
rationalist and saw the will as subordinate to either divine or human
reason. Reason in this sense points the will in a particular direction
and there is no diminution in divine or human freedom from doing what
reason dictates. Th e will wills what reason tells it is good, and it thereby
acts freely.
Augustine was the fi rst to assert that the will can supersede reason, arguing
that the will can do evil even when reason tells it this is wrong. 33
In making this argument, he built on the idea that reason can become
enslaved to libidinous passions fi rst suggested by Cicero and Seneca.
Augustine employed this notion of the will in his early struggles against
the Manicheans. Th e Manicheans had suggested that if God were omnipotent,
he must be the source not merely of good but of evil. And if he were
not the source of evil, then there must not be one God, but two, an evil
creator and a good redeemer. Augustine countered this argument by asserting
the independence of the human will not as a foundation for human
dignity but in order to show that the source of evil lay not in God but in
man. God grants humans freedom, and they freely choose to do evil. In
this way Augustine was able to make divine unity or simplicity compatible
with divine goodness.
Th e problem with the attribution of such freedom to man is that it might
be construed to imply that just as humans chose to sin and therefore merited
damnation, so they can choose not to sin and thereby earn salvation.
Th is was precisely the conclusion that Pelagius drew. Th is idea, however,
was anathema to Christians because it implied that Christ and his sacrifi ce
were unnecessary. In his attacks upon this position, Augustine was forced
to rethink his earlier notion of freedom. In the earlier debate he used the
term libero arbitrio. In the later debate he sometimes used the term servum
arbitrium, but more characteristically employed the phrase liberum
arbitrium captivatum, the free will that has been taken captive by sin.
Augustine thus did not abandon the idea of the freedom of the will that is