Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of premodernity 143
essential to human responsibility, but asserted that it could not be eff ective
without grace. While he believed that grace was necessary to salvation, he
was also clear that once the bonds of sin were removed, the individual will
had to will the good in order to merit salvation.
Scholasticism revived and formalized this Augustinian notion of the
will and as a result was forced to confront the question that Augustine
had papered over, that is, how human will could be free in a world ruled
by an omnipotent and omniscient God. Th is proved diffi cult. Anselm, for
example, denied that divine foreknowledge and predestination deprived
humans of free will, while simultaneously asserting that events do happen
by necessity. Bernard of Clairvaux denied that human will and divine will
could each be a partial cause, asserting instead that each had its proper
sphere; but what the natures of these spheres were and how they related
to one another remained obscure. Bonaventure too thought that the will
remained free even in the face of divine preordination because no external
force limited it, but this did not answer the question of the necessitating internal
sources of the will, and he thus solved the problem only by defi ning
it out of existence. Aquinas, by contrast, sought to harmonize divine and
human will by imagining they were both subordinate to reason. However,
as we have seen, this rationalist solution opened up the question of God’s
absolute power and thus his divinity.
It was this claim that was so unacceptable to Scotus, Ockham and their
followers, for they saw it as a denial of God’s power and divinity. Already
in 1277 Henry of Ghent condemned any suggestion that the intellect determined
the will. Scotus similarly reasserted the primacy of will in both
God and man and the impossibility of subordinating God’s will to reason.
However, he did not explain how in this light the human and divine wills
could be compatible with one another. And as we have seen, the nominalists
themselves were divided on this crucial point.
Within the nominalist movement, there were clearly those who put
greater emphasis on divine omnipotence and preordination and those who
left greater space for human initiative. Th at said, it is oft en diffi cult to determine
where diff erent thinkers stood on this issue. Th e one thing that does
seem relatively clear is that Biel moved considerably closer to Pelagianism
than his predecessors. He argued, for example, that fallen reason and will
were suffi cient for humans to begin their journey to God. 34 Grace was thus
not strictly necessary since God would save all those who did everything
that they could to lead a Christian life. Luther’s Augustinian teacher Usingen
was a member of the Biel school. It was this semi-Pelagianism, practically
embodied in the Facientibus principle, that shaped and tormented