Free will
| Latin | Liberum arbitrium |
|---|---|
| Treatise | Summa theologiae I, question 83 |
| Controlling authority | Catechism 1730–1748; Trent Session VI |
| Doctrinal standing | Human freedom and responsibility under grace are dogma; the exact analysis of free-will as a power is Thomistic |
| School | Thomism |
| Branch | Moral theology |
Free will, in Thomism, is the elective power of the rational appetite by which man chooses means to an end known by reason, a created liberty that grace heals and elevates without destroying.
Choice as a rational appetite
Summa theologiae I, question 83, asks whether man has free-will. Aquinas answers that man is rational, and that to be rational is to be master of one's acts by judging and choosing. Free-will is not a third power beside intellect and will. It is the will as electing, the act of choice among means once the end is willed. Animals are moved by instinct and particular apprehension. Man deliberates.[1]
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article on free will records the Catholic middle against two denials: that liberty is an illusion, and that liberty is independence from God. Thomism locates liberty in the will's following of an intellectual judgment that is not coerced. Necessity of the last end in general does not cancel choice among particular goods.[2]
Grace and defined freedom
The Council of Trent, Session VI, teaches that the will is not a merely passive thing in justification. Man is not moved as an inanimate thing. Prevenient grace comes first. Cooperation is real. First grace cannot be merited. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1730–1748, teaches that God created man a rational being who can initiate and control his own actions, and that freedom attains its perfection when directed toward God.[3][4]
Those defined and catechetical claims are the measure. They do not canonize a later Dominican or Jesuit technical system about how divine motion and created choice are ordered. They do forbid both a freedom that needs no grace and a grace that erases the human act.
School questions that remain open
Thomists of the Báñezian type explain infallible yet nonviolent divine motion of the free will. Molinists explain the same defined truths through middle knowledge of free conditionals. Paul V refused to define either system. Aquinas himself teaches that God is first cause of the will's act and that the will is not coerced. How those two sentences are technically composed is theology.
The Thomistic analysis of choice, counsel, and consent is a school synthesis under dogma. Physical premotion is not an eleventh commandment, nor is scientia media a heresy. Mutual accusations of Calvinism or Pelagianism are exactly what the Roman settlement forbade.
Moral and pastoral consequences
Because choice is real, counsel, precept, merit, sin, and repentance are real. Because the will follows reason, formation of conscience is not optional decoration. Because the sensitive appetite can resist, virtue is a long work of habituation and grace, not a single correct opinion. Human acts are those that proceed from deliberate will. Acts of a man, such as a startled cry, are not yet in that order.
The human person has power to choose and does not save himself. The Thomistic account holds both that the will truly acts and that no one acts unto salvation unless God first moves the will. That is the liberty of a creature, not the liberty of a god.
References
- Back to citation Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, question 83 — Primary question on free-will as a power of the rational appetite, distinct from the will as to the mode of acting by choice.
- Back to citation Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), Free Will — Public-domain treatment of human liberty, its theological history, and the Catholic rejection of both fatalism and Pelagian self-sufficiency.
- Back to citation Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1730–1748 — Authoritative teaching that God created man a rational being, able to initiate and control his own actions, and that human freedom is fulfilled in the choice of the good.
- Back to citation Council of Trent, Decree on Justification — Session VI on prevenient grace, free cooperation of the will, and the impossibility of meriting first grace.