By Michael Vendsel
The medievals generally favored Aristotle’s conception over Plato’s. For them, then, the metaphysical portrait of human choosing was an inner drive channeling through the intellect to influence the human will. The same basic debate just described, however, re-emerged within this tradition. Some, in a more Platonic fashion, thought that the intellect exerts a decisive control over the will – that the will can only choose in the direction of what the intellect has already judged to be good. On that account, one’s range of choice would be circumscribed the number of goods presented to the intellect and a choice was free insomuch as it was informed by reason rather than brute impulse. Others, in a more Aristotelian fashion, claimed that the essence of human freedom is a certain independence of the will such that it can even choose contrary to the deliverances of reason. According to J.B. Korolec, between these two traditions, “eventually it came to be characteristic of Dominican writers to link freedom very closely with reason and of Franciscan writers to locate…[it] rather in the will.”[1] The former was especially characteristic of Thomas Aquinas:
“For Thomas it is not the will but the intellect which has the major role in the moral activity of human beings. For the intellect is the final or teleological cause of the will’s action. It is the intellect which presents to the will its ultimate aims. This last opinion gained wide popularity through its acceptance by the Thomist school….”[2]
The latter, Franciscan position, however, was especially characteristic of later medieval voluntarism. For the voluntarists, “the will is independent of the intellect in the sense that whatever object the intellect presents to it may be freely chosen or rejected.”[3] This position was particularly influential on Scotus and Ockham.
As to the first question, then, by the late Middle Ages there was a broadly Aristotelian analysis of the metaphysics of human choice, within which some located freedom in the role of the intellect (the Dominican and Thomistic tradition) and others located it in the power of contrary choice (voluntarism and those who followed Scotus and Ockham).
As for the second question, the medieval tradition was similarly divided. The tendency to take theological cues from Plato’s idea of The One and from Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover made it difficult for some to conceive of God knowing changing particulars and contingent things. In those situations, the idea of a universal providence of God was somewhat problematic in itself, and so the tension between sovereignty and free will may have been less acute.[4] However, there were also those who held that God’s providence is all encompassing (or at least encompassing enough to include the human will) and made efforts to explain how that is consistent with freedom and moral responsibility. According to Korolec,
“…[this] is most fully discussed in Thomas Bradwardine’s treatise De causa Dei, written before 1325 against the Pelagian heresy. Bradwardine emphasizes the absolute dependence of man’s will on God’s. Human beings can free themselves from the influence of psychological forces and from the influence of the stars, but they cannot become independent of God. But in spite of the absolute divine influence on human behavior, it is man and not God who is the cause of sin. The action itself is caused by God, but its sinfulness is caused by man himself.”[5]
As will be seen, Vermigli and Turretin both attempt to identify themselves within strands of the medieval tradition on each of these first two questions. Matters are different, however, on the third question. There was an undeniable attempt throughout the medieval period to be faithful to Augustine’s theology. In the view of the Reformed, however, by the end of the period the view of the human heart as morally impotent had slipped into a sort of semi-Pelagianism. Whether they were right or wrong about this, the result was that both thinkers see themselves making a sharp break with the later medieval tradition in favor of an earlier and more robust Augustinianism on this third question. If it can be put this way, then, the characterizations discussed above may perhaps be true to Reformed theology if the freedom in question has to do with freedom to choose the good. If the question, however, is whether the sovereignty of God covers the human will and thereby cancels out the significance of human choices, the above characterization is probably unfair. Vermigli and Turretin gave an answer that was, in their minds, continuous with the medieval Catholic tradition. That, at any rate, is what I will try to show in what follows.
With these observations in place, we’ll begin by looking at Vermigli.
Notes
[1] Korolec, J.B., “Free Will and Free Choice”, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, et al (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1982) 634
[2] Ibid, 635
[3] Ibid, 636
[4] Both Turretin and Vermigli find it necessary to respond to this line of medieval reasoning. Vermigli, for example, writes: “God works according to His purpose; all things are subject to His providence…. Yet some dare to deny it, ascribing only the greatest and principal things to divine care and attributing the rest if they are of little account, to natural causes, while greater matters they leave for angles or demons to accomplish.” He cites Plato’s Protagoras as an example. Turretin also writes about “those who, although seeming to acknowledge the providence of God, still shut it up in too narrow limits. These either restrict it to heavenly things only, so that in the sublunary there is room for chance and fortune and the contingency of things (as the Peripatetics); or extend it to the sublunary also, but natural, not free and contingent (as the Pelagians, who to make men free have made them sacrilegious); or refer it to great things, the mean and minute being excepted, which after the Peripatetics some of the Scholastics also held. Thomas Aquinas especially asserts this: ‘Although God may know the number of individuals, yet the number of oxen and gnats and other similar things was not preordained by him….’” See Vermigli, Peter Martyr, Philosophical Works: On the Relation of Philosophy to Theology (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996) 178, and Turretin, Francis, Institutes of Elenctic Theology v1 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992) 497-498.
[5] Korolec, 640