By Cynthia R. Nielsen
By Michael Vendsel
Having drawn these distinctions (i.e., between necessity of consequence and necessity of the consequent—see part IV), Vermigli proceeds to consider the question of free will in light of them. “Our actions have no intrinsic necessity,” he writes. “Willing is of its own nature (as God created it) mutable and flexible to either side.”[1] The will is not inherently disposed to any one option, then, just as water is not inherently disposed to be solid, liquid, or gas. However, “it has a hypothetical necessity.”[2] That is to say, there are certain antecedent conditions under which the will must, of necessity, incline in one direction. “As soon as you consider the foreknowledge and predestination of God,” he writes, “it follows of necessity that it will come about just as God foreknows and predestines it.”[3] Just as water must freeze if located in a zero degree climate, so our will must choose x if God has predestined that it choose x. But our will is just as capable in itself of choosing x or y as water is of being frozen or gaseous. “The necessity falls on the connection and conjunction of God’s predestination with our works….”[4]
There is a further similarity, however, which Vermigli thinks is all important. Earlier we said that frozen water is not hypothetically necessitated in a way that runs contrary to its nature but rather in conjunction with its nature. Vermigli thinks the same thing is true with respect to the human will. In his terminology, the necessity created by God’s predestination is one of certainty, but not of compulsion. “Nor do we grant that predestination brings any necessity of compulsion,” he writes, “for compulsion and violence are against the nature of the will. If the will should do anything unwillingly it would not be called will but “nil” (if one may so call it), and it would be destroyed.”[5] God’s predestination does not force the will to do something contrary to its nature any more than zero degree temperatures force water to do something contrary to its nature. God’s predestination works through the natural process of human choosing; it does not run contrary to that process. “This will neither subverts nor destroys natures,” he writes,
“but works in them so that it agrees with them. Therefore, since the nature and property of the human will is to work freely and by choice, God’s foreknowledge and will do not take this power or faculty from it…. The will and foreknowledge of God employs itself in such a way that it does not overthrow the faulty or power of man’s will…the determination in God is of the kind that agrees with the property or nature of will. It is proper to its nature to will one part in one way and it can also will another part in another way. Therefore, we confess that if we consider God, it is appointed and decreed what we shall do…but this determination and certainty of His…does not subvert the nature of things or take away liberty from our nature.”[6]
But what is the nature of this will that God’s providence works through? How does Vermigli understand the mechanics of human choosing? He describes his view elsewhere in this fashion:
“it appears we have free will when the appetite is moved by itself toward what the understanding or power of knowing reveals to it. It is indeed in the will, but it takes root in the understanding since it is appropriate that something is judged and measured first, and then follows either refusal or endorsement…. Accordingly, we may define free will as a certain faculty of the will that follows the directive of the intellect to refuse or desire something by itself….Whatever we choose, we do so for the sake of something else, not for itself but through some previous deliberation. For we do not choose unless things have been identified, and distinguishing must be done by the understanding.”[7]
He subscribes, then, to a basically Thomistic picture of the will, where choice is directed toward the desires as they have been processed by the intellect. And this, he says, is the process that God’s decree works through. Vermigli gives a rather vivid description of this,
“let us say that it [the will] receives from God such impulses and motions as he wants to give, and meanwhile, let us note that God so works in our will that it gladly, willingly, and of its own accord receives the motions that God puts into us.”[8]
Thus far, then, we have a fairly clear answer to the first two of the questions mentioned at the beginning. He sees God’s providence as including the human will, but he does not think that is inconsistent with its freedom, because the very thing that makes the will free – the governance of impulse by reason – is the very thing that providence works through. It is also worth noting that Vermigli does not seem to be self-consciously distancing himself from the medieval tradition. His anthropology (at least so far as the will is concerned) is basically Aristotelian and Thomistic, as is the principle that God builds upon and completes nature rather than overruling it. Moreover, the distinction he is using is borrowed from the Scholastics. In spite of the fact that he prefers the terms “necessity of compulsion” and “necessity of certainty”, he understands the distinction to be the same; for example, he writes,
“that necessity comes from foreknowledge and…such a necessity is not absolute, but hypothetical, which we call a necessity of consequence, of infallibility, and of certainty, but not of compulsion,”[9] and
“it has the necessity we call the necessity of certainty and others the necessity of consequence,”[10] as well as
“the necessity falls on connection and conjunction of God’s predestination with our works, by which they mean the compound sense and the necessity of consequence.”[11]
In these passages he seems willing to use the scholastic terminology interchangeably with his own.
As to the third question, Vermigli’s treatment of the moral freedom of the will is conveniently summarized in a lecture he delivered on January 25, 1560, the text of which was later appended to certain editions of the Loci Communes.[12] “Regarding the state of the first man,” he writes, “we have but little in Holy Scripture, except we know that God made him righteous and that he fell by his free will.”[13] Regarding the state of man after the Fall, however, Vermigli is concerned to say more and to draw careful distinctions. The sort of freedom just described – the sort involved in following the dictates of reason, free from blind impulses or external compulsions – is essential to human nature and cannot be lost. Beyond that, fallen man also has the freedom to perform certain works of civil goodness. However,
“if the law of God is understood properly and truly we cannot by such freedom perform what agrees with it. The law does not require of us mere externals…above all it requires good inward motives, that we should love God with all our heart…”[14]
And that sort of obedience is entirely beyond the power of the unregenerate to offer:
“What is done by the unregenerate lacks the proper goal because it is not referred to God. So they cannot love God above all, which is nothing else than to refer all things to him; all their works are corrupt and therefore sins, since they are without faith. For whatever is not of faith is sin. What God requires of us in impossible compared to that state of which we speak.”[15]
Matters are different, however, for the regenerate. “The regenerate can know spiritual things,” he writes, “[and] can also choose and to some extent perform them; for they are not now merely and only human but people of God; they are engrafted into Christ, they are members and therefore partakers of His freedom.”[16]
This obedience is partial and incomplete in this life, of course, but will be brought to completion at the end of time, in what Vermigli (following New Testament usage) calls “the final regeneration.”[17]
For Vermigli, then, 1) free will functions the way Aristotle/Thomas described it, 2) God’s sovereignty most definitely encompasses human will, but works through those features of it that serve to make it free, and thus it does not counteract the will’s freedom, and 3) the will in sin remains free from necessity, but is capable at most of a hollow, civil obedience that falls short of the law of God.
Shifting attention to Turretin now, I will try to show that he falls within the same trajectory.
Notes
[1] Vermigli, Peter Martyr, Presdestination and Justification: Two Theological Loci (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 2003).
[2] Idem
[3] Idem
[4] Idem
[5] Idem
[6] Ibid, 73-74
[7] Vermigli, Philosophical Works, 272
[8] Vermigli, Predestination and Justification, 81
[9] Ibid, 82
[10] Ibid, 71
[11] Ibid, 70
[12] Ibid, 265, see especially footnote 3
[13] Ibid, 273
[14] Idem
[15] Ibid, 278
[16] Ibid, 317
[17] Ibid, 318