THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
a a a ne ee a eee
“contingency,” which consequently may disappear according as the will decides. Man has a free will, which Pelagius estimated merely as a divine gift, not an ideal factor of the good. In the judgment of Pelagianism, in its first stage, the excess of Augustine should be borne in mind which served as an irritant and was the product of three unsound motives; namely, survivals of Platonism and Stoicism, Manicheistic views, and the overmastering interest of the Church upon his mind. While Pelagius dwells upon the logical side of formal freedom, Augustine naturally takes the religious side of real freedom (power to do good), without, however, keeping clear of the other. Semi-Pelagianism distinguished between the acts, more or less free, of the inclination toward the good; one person seizes with conscious longing the grace not yet effective in him, another is suddenly overtaken and possessed by prevenient grace without his own action. Hach is free to resist grace; and no one is (according to Augustine) morally dead, no one (according to Pelagius) morally sound, but all are morally diseased, and as the diseased must turn to the physician, the sinner must, of his own free will, offer himself to grace.
Medieval theology on the whole did not materially advance beyond the patristic state of the problem. According to Bernard of Clairvaux (q.v.), free will remains also after the fall, wretched, to be sure, but intact. Only with volition itself its freedom would cease. ‘‘ Remove grace, and you have
nothing whereby to be saved; remove 4. Medieval free will and you have nothing that Catholicism. could be saved.’’ Anselm (q.v.) re-
jects the judgment that the depraved are free only to do evil (Augustine), but censures also the presumption that the freedom to do good was as unbiased as that to do evil. True freedom is a divinely given power to preserve divinely given virtue. Prevenient grace gives the power, subsequent grace aids the will to keep it; but also this will is a gift. Thomas Aquinas (q.v.), in an anti- Pelagian manner, declares, that not only the perfection, but the very beginning of virtue is the work of God. Duns Scotus (q.v.) reverts decidedly to the Pelagian mode of thought. As God the type is free, so also man, his image; it was the purpose of the Creator that man as will should be absolutely free; that the deed only, not the volition, should be subject to external necessity. Willing is the original essence, he teaches, like Schelling and Schopenhauer; to go back further to a causality beyond will, would be absurd. Albert the Great (see ALBERTUS Macnus) held that by grace virtue is established in the believer, but the decision whether to follow virtue or its opposite, belongs to the hegemony of the will. The greatest opponent of the nominalistic doctrine of freedom by Duns was the wholly deterministic Thomas Bradwardine (q.v.), seconded by Albert of Halberstadt. The mystics produced the dual consequences, the logical result of such a determinism; namely, that sin is willed of God and therefore not really sin; and that the will of man and the will of God merge into amystic unity. A revolutionizing influence on the doctrine was the secular philosophy since Descartes, especially of Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant. In spite of its new points of view, the pre-
Kantian philosophy does not get beyond the older forms of conceptual construction and analysis of problems. The contentions of Luther
5. The Ref- and Erasmus (q.v.), the synergistic ormation controversies (see SYNERGISM), and the
Period. variance between Luther and Melanch-
thon, did not move the problem, inasmuch as the interest was soteriological. Vital for Luther was it, in throwing all weight upon trust in divine grace, to emphasize the impotence of the natural will. Salvation depends wholly upon the will of God. Although this pronouncement of the death of free will prevailed even until the adoption of the Formula of Concord (q.v.), yet the open problem revived from time to time, and in reaction against the hyper-Lutherans, Matthias Flacius and Nikolaus von Amsdorf (qq.v.), the orthodox Lutherans put forth the doctrine of the “foreknowledge of faith,’’ mediating between the demands of faith and the moral consciousness, which if not proof against logical metaphysical objections was yet psychologically true. God predestinated for salvation those whose faith he foresaw. All salvation is of God, but faith conditions its appropriation, and in faith the submission of the willis more essential than the knowledge of grace and of being passively apprehended by it. The Socinians (see Socrnus, Faus- Tus, SocInIANs) presented such a combination of omniscience and human freedom, that God seemed like a wise pedagogue not willing to scrutinize free human activity too closely. According to Calvin, omnipotence is absolute. Adam had to succumb to the ‘‘hidden decree”’; he was free only from external constraint. Also in evil men God effects to will and to do according to his pleasure, and it is inherent in this universal purpose that the large majority should perish to glorify his justice. In order not to make God the author of evil, the Augsburg Confession (q.v.) removed the cause of sins into the “will of evil men, which, if God will not aid, turns from God.” The question, why God, by not aiding the will, permits the victory of the evil propensities, remained unanswered. A certain freedom to do good was, however, submitted by postulating ‘civil justice” over against ‘‘spiritual justice.’ The synergistic controversy gave rise to the opinion that the will might contribute a minimum to salvation. In the later editions of his Loci Melanchthon had declared that three causes cooperate in conversion; the Word, the Holy Spirit, and human will, in so far as it does not resist, but assent. The Formula of Concord concluded with a mediating position, that will has a certain “locomotive power” such as going to church to hear the Gospel, but in the reception of grace it is absolutely inactive, since in consequence of universal sinfulness there is left “‘not even a spark of spiritual powers,” so that man from himself and by himself can not even take the offered grace. The only thing that he can do is reject grace.
René Descartes (q.v.) declared that nothing is so evident as the certainty that human thought and action rest upon free will, and that freedom belongs to the nature of the will, since will is nothing else but freedom of choice. This freedom means the non-determination by external [secondary] causes; from the view-point of God, everything must be de-