Freedom vs. Freedom, Part 1: Voluntarism
Looking Back to Our Present
If there is one word that defines and directs modern American social and political thought, surely it is freedom. If you pay attention to the way that anyone, of any political persuasion, talks about their political views, invariably they will argue that they (alone!) care about Americans’ freedom. Everyone is (apparently) pro-freedom, and thinks that the solution to our problems is more of it. Both major parties claim that they will bring more freedom, and that the other party is out to destroy the freedom you already have. At first glance, this may seem odd: how is that everyone, no matter how much they disagree with each other, agrees that freedom is the utmost good, the thing that the political system should be seeking to maximize at all times?
It’s worth pointing out that it has not always been thus: not every human society has been obsessed with freedom; medieval European feudalism certainly wasn’t, nor was the Roman Imperium concerned much with freedom. At no point in its long and storied history has Chinese society emphasized freedom as the utmost social good. Even those western governments that we look to as the wellsprings of modern democratic thinking—ancient Greece and republican Rome—were really only marginally concerned with individual liberty. It was Athens, after all, who condemned perhaps the sharpest of all Greek philosophers to death for being a little too curious about the nature of divinity.
No, the obsession with freedom is a very modern thing, a peculiar way of looking at the world and at human beings that not only shapes contemporary thought, but also demarcates our world from the worlds we have left in the past. How did we get here, what does “freedom” really mean, and are we getting any closer to achieving it?
Ad Fontes
These questions are a major focus of two books that attempt to make sense of the rise of modernity: Some New World by Peter Harrison and The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie.1 Both texts argue that our relatively secular society can trace its ideological roots to developments in late western scholastic Christian theology.
The story goes like this: during the middle medieval period in western Europe, scholasticism reigned supreme in theology and philosophy.2 Scholasticism, to summarize massively, sought a synthesis between Platonic and Aristotelean metaphysics. Aristotle’s thought had received renewed attention in part due to new Latin translations of his works that had been “lost” to the west for many centuries and had been reintroduced through Arabic translations in the work of philosophers like Ibn Sina (“Avicenna”) and Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”). Thomas Aquinas is undoubtedly the best-known and most influential of these Aristotelean scholastics, but this general method predominated for many centuries, from around 1100 AD (or so) on until the 15th century, at least.
This new synthesis emphasized the idea of crafting a truly comprehensive metaphysics, one that drew on the best of ancient and classical Greek philosophy as well as the canonical insights of Christian orthodoxy to provide a sort of pre-modern “theory of everything”. An ambitious goal, to be sure. Yet pretty quickly, this effort met criticism, not from outside the academy, but from within it. This attempt to craft a theory of all things meant that theology itself needed to get ever-more technical in its discourse about God. Whereas pre-scholastic theology had often emphasized the apophatic Neoplatonic insistence that the Holy One was a vast mystery beyond any cognition and therefore beyond any systemization (a position that perhaps reached its apogee in John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon), the new scholasticism increasingly wanted to fit God into the system. Though many, very much including Aquinas himself, continued to insist that God was indeed beyond any human conception, this increasingly became a marginalized position within theology and philosophy.
These metaphysical developments eventually resulted in two new perspectives, the first theological and the second metaphysical. As scholasticism provided an ever-more sophisticated concept of God, many theologians (rightly, I think) worried that God was being circumscribed by human intellectual ambition. But instead of recovering the older appropriation of apophatic Neoplatonic thought to secure God’s utter transcendence, this new movement in theology sought to secure God’s freedom by radically limiting the possible meaning of the very idea of divinity itself.
Where There’s a Will…
Classical Christian theology, in either its pre-scholastic or scholastic forms, argued that God’s decision-making, God’s willing, God’s freedom was broadly analogous (but not identical!) to our own: that is, God’s will was informed by God’s overall “nature” or other attributes, and then God’s will sought to express or achieve whatever God’s nature “told” the will to do. So, if God’s nature is fundamentally loving, compassionate, restorative, creative, etc., then God’s will would always seek to express love and to act in order to preserve and save God’s beloved. Meanwhile, if God was best understood as just, as a law-giver, as a mighty king, then God’s will might instead act to assert divine law over the world, even if that resulted in suffering. And of course, if God was all of these things, then God’s will would somehow express a synthesis of these attributes.3
Under this more traditional view of God, God’s will was either “subordinate” to God’s overall nature, or at the very least, God’s will was equal to, and indeed an integrated part of that nature—the will certainly didn’t act on its own, in isolation from God’s various attributes, or God’s essence or nature as such.
But a number of theologians became concerned with this view of God. It seemed to them not only that such a view might raise confusing questions about God’s willing (how can God reconcile mercy and justice, for example)4 but even more to the point, they worried that tying God’s will to God’s overall nature put an undue burden on the will, on God’s freedom. For these thinkers, who would come to be known as voluntarists, the primary attribute of God was sovereignty: God’s will was totally untethered, not limited by anything other than itself. This meant not only that God’s decision-making was not hampered by any created thing (any aspect of our world), which was uncontroversial, but also that God’s will could not be limited even by any other “aspect” of God. This latter interpretation was indeed new. For the voluntarists, God’s will had to be so free that we could not even say that it expressed, or sought to achieve the goals of, any other “aspect” of God. The will had to be sovereign over and autonomous from everything, even God’s own essence. In other words, according to voluntarism, God’s will does not seek to achieve loving or just ends. Rather, God’s will simply wills. It is completely free to act however it chooses, without any limitation by any other goal, framework, metaphysic, or divine reality.
What this means is that for the voluntarists, God just is sovereign will, full stop. We cannot say anything about God other than that God is an omnipotent will that wills what it wills for no reason that a human could ever discern. The voluntarists refused to say that God’s will sought to achieve love, or justice, or anything else. Instead: the divine will willed. Period. In this sense, every other part of God’s “essence” was essentially lopped off: if God happened to will in a loving way, or a just way, or a merciful way, that was great. But God could choose to do otherwise.
This maneuver certainly did safeguard God’s freedom, and preempted any theology that might “domesticate” God under human assumptions—the voluntarist deity could not easily be systematized. But it did so at an incredible cost, for this new conception of God could not really be said to be anything at all accept sovereign and omnipotent: God wasn’t really loving, or just, or merciful, or even creative, for the voluntarists. Though God might will to be any of these things, God could just as easily stop willing to be so at any time, for reasons totally undiscernible from the human perspective. Indeed, for the voluntarists, God’s willing could not even be limited by God’s past willing; God had to be so free that God could choose to violate God’s own past promises. This meant that for the voluntarists, God could not even be understand as truly faithful, not to any human interlocutors, but oddly enough, not even to God’s own self—God’s “past” willing could not restrict God’s “present” willing.
Under this voluntarist view, the whole of the created cosmos was made by God not for any discernible reason, but simply because God willed it. And the fate of creatures in that cosmos would be determined by God’s will, for no reason that any creature could ever discern, but simply due to whatever God’s sovereign will dictated. This understanding of God as nothing but pure will turned God into a conceptual black box: sovereign decisions came out of this box, but there was no way to understand what was going on “under the hood”. While pre-scholastic thought had agreed that God’s nature was ultimately beyond human conception, it had also argued that we could, nonetheless, learn about God both from revelation but also through natural theology, by reflecting on the cosmos itself. In other words, since God was the creator, we could learn something about God by looking at the creation that God created.
But for the voluntarists, natural theology told us nothing, and revelation only revealed God as a sovereign will. There was nothing else that should or could be said.
Importantly, this voluntarist view of God was easy to reconcile with the (later) Augustinian understanding of predestination: if God is nothing but pure will, unrestricted by any other divine aspect, then the idea that God might will to save some and condemn others, for reasons we could not discern and with no connection to the actions of the humans themselves, looks more sensible than it otherwise did to traditional Christian thought.5 As we will see, this consonance between voluntarism and (certain aspects of) Augustinian thought would come to be crucial in the Protestant Reformation—and, indeed, to modern social and political ideas of human nature. But before we can get to that part of the story, we need to discuss metaphysics—which we will do next week.
Here are the links to each book’s publisher’s page: Some New World and The Theological Origins of Modernity.
I will have more to say on scholasticism itself in the future.
I am massively simplifying for the sake of brevity and clarity here. It’s worth noting that the best of western Christian theology in this period insisted that all of God’s attributes were actually identical to God’s essence and therefore to each other, because God is metaphysically simple. This is an important topic for conversation, but one that I won’t address in depth here.
It is no coincidence, I think, that it was precisely this question that vexed Anselm and led to his writing Cur Deus Homo, a text that I believe played a huge role in derailing western theology. But more about that at a later time!
Augustine received heavy resistance to his ideas not only from many eastern Christian thinkers but also from John Cassian.
Good post. I was just starting to read the theological origins of modernity. How is the other book you mentioned?
Either way, it is interesting how much the premodern push toward nominalism seems to have allowed for Descartes to speak of God in these terms. Your insight into the loss of apophatic theology after acquinas’ synthesis and how it led to the emergence of volunteerism is quite interesting.