Sect. 195Free Will of ChristFree Will of Christ
I. The Holiness which excludes all possibility of sinning, does not extinguish or prevent the exercise of Christ’s moral liberty. The power of sinning or of performing imperfect actions, is not essential to the notion of free will. The freedom of the will is the more perfect the more the will is inclined to and fixed upon what is morally good.
The exercise of Christ’s free will is, however, essentially distinct from that of creatures here on earth (in statu viæ). Creatures exercise their free will in order to acquire, by independent choice, that stability in holiness which is not granted to them by nature: a loving union with God is the fruit and the reward of their exertions. Christ, on the contrary, being by reason of His constitution united to God from the first, can only exercise His free will in order to manifest, ad extra, His perfect union with God. The fruit of His actions is the glorification of God and the Atonement for the sins of the world. Their reward consists partly in the final acquisition of the external glory and dominion which were suspended during His life here on earth, and partly in the reunion of mankind with God. Christ’s human will, then, is like His Divine will in this, that the moral perfection of neither depends on the exercise of freedom. The two wills are also alike in this, that their moral perfection, though not freely acquired, is their own, and is honourable to them, much more than freely acquired perfection is honourable to creatures. For the moral value of acts of the will is derived from the goodness of their object: an act performed with knowledge of and complacency in a good object, is a good act, whether it be free or not. In technical language, essential liberty gives moral value to acts of the will, even when the will lacks the power of choosing between acting and not acting. Christ possesses holiness by reason of His personal constitution, and therefore in a more perfect manner than creatures, who acquire it by exercising free will.
II. The essential difference between Christ’s free will and that of mere creatures does not interfere with His capacity for performing meritorious acts. The Council of Trent (sess. vi. ch. 7) lays down that Christ “merited” our justification. But the notion of merit essentially requires the meritorious action to originate in the agent’s free choice, and to be intended for the benefit of him who is to reward it. External compulsion and internal necessity are incompatible with merit. The fact of Christ’s freedom from compulsion or internal necessity as regards the work of Redemption, is clearly set forth in Scripture: “I lay down My life for My sheep.… Therefore doth the Father love Me because I lay down My life, that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of myself: and I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. This commandment I have received from My Father” (John 10:15–18; cf. Is. 53:7, and Heb. 12:2).
III. We have now to explain, as far as possible, how the freedom of will displayed in Christ’s meritorious actions is consistent with His Holiness. In consequence of the Beatific Vision, the Love of God is not free, but natural to Christ, whence it would seem that all His actions performed for the Love of God are likewise not free, but a natural and necessary consequence of His union with God. Again, His impeccability seems to imply an intrinsic necessity for carrying out at least all Divine commandments. Lastly, the perfect conformity of His human will with the Divine will seems to make it impossible for Him not to perform even such good actions as are not strictly commanded by God.
1. All theologians admit that Christ’s love of God is not free. How, then, can actions inspired by this necessary love be free and meritorious? Many authors of great weight suggest that, besides the act of love included in the Beatific Vision, other acts of love exist in Christ, regulated by infused science, and therefore free, like the acts of creatures here on earth. St. Thomas (De Verit., q. 29, a. 6, ad. 6) sees no difficulty in taking as principle of merit the same act by which Christ loves God necessarily. The act of Beatific Vision, according to the Saint, was at the same time, in Christ, an act of the wayfarer (viatoris), inasmuch as His Beatific Love moved Him to will and to accomplish freely and willingly, during His mission on earth, the things ordained by God, and thus to gather merit for Himself and others. In fact, it appears quite possible that Christ’s Love of God, although itself necessary, gives to the free acts of His humanity their highest moral perfection by investing them with its own moral excellence, which is independent of freedom.
2. Christ cannot sin: He cannot break the Divine commandments. How, then, does He keep them freely, and merit by so keeping them?
The precepts of the natural law, especially affirmative precepts, are vague and undetermined as to the time and circumstances: they leave a wide field for the exercise of free will, even if the will is irresistibly bent on keeping the whole law. Positive commandments—if we admit that any such were binding upon Christ—are more clearly defined than natural laws. Yet even here there is room for the use of free will. Christ could freely fulfil, e.g., the mandate of redeeming us by His death on the cross, by willing His death not as something commanded and inevitable, but by showing Himself ready to die simply because it was the Divine will and pleasure, or because of some other holy motive.
As regards the mandate of Redemption by death, the majority of modern theologians deny its strict obligatory character. The personal dignity and the perfect sanctity of Christ exclude the idea of a commandment so humiliating and so harsh. The Fathers give such a wide meaning to the mandate (ἐντολή), that they apply it even to Christ’s Divinity. Scripture uses the term to signify not only mandate, but sometimes not more than permission or leave to do something. St. Anselm (Med. xi. c. 5) sums up the question thus: “Human nature in this Man suffered nothing from any necessity, but solely from free choice … no obedience compelled Him; He was led by His wisdom and power. God did not compel Him to die, but He did freely and willingly (sponte) what He knew to be pleasing to the Father and profitable to man. And, as the Father gave Him this good will, although free, we can rightly say that He received it as a precept from the Father.” (Cf. St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, l. i. cc. 9, 10.)
3. The above solutions do not meet the difficulty arising from the fact that, because of His Holiness, Christ infallibly fulfilled all God’s wishes as well as orders, and that these Divine wishes and ordinances, which extended to every detail of His life, were known to Him. (Cf. Matt. 26:54.)
This very serious difficulty has no better solution than that proposed by the school of St. Thomas. If the will of Christ, independently of the wishes, ordinances, and foreknowledge of God, had the physical power to omit an action, then He retains this same power when under the influence of the said wishes and ordinances; for these do not alter Him intrinsically. It lies in the nature of Divine ordinances addressed to a free will to appeal to its freedom of action, just as the Divine prescience of free actions presupposes their freedom. The external circumstances under consideration cause the free decision to take place without fail. The result, however, is not due to a restriction of the natural power of the will. It is due to the fulness of its perfection which enables it to tend to whatever is good, without being liable to misdirect its choice; or to the readiness of Christ’s most holy will always to conform to the will of God. The certainty that a given choice will be made is not sufficient, by itself, to destroy the intrinsic liberty of the choice; to destroy liberty, the certainty of the choice must be caused by intrinsic impossibility to act otherwise. But does not Christ’s knowledge of God’s will and foreknowledge impose upon His will an antecedent moral necessity to conform to them? It does so, in fact; yet this moral necessity is not such as to impair the freedom required for meritorious actions: it is not an inner moral necessity, such as would lay the will under the irresistible influence of some good, and induce it to act without choice. The impossibility for Christ to act against God’s decrees known to Him must be put on a par with the impossibility for us to act against God’s decrees unknown to us: neither impossibility affects the choice of free will.
IV. Christ’s human will is the will of God-Man: its free operations are unlike those of mere human wills; they are “theandric” or divino-human operations reflecting the peculiarities of the Divine freedom. Holy Scripture at one time speaks of the Son Whom the Father has sent into the world, Who executes the Paternal mandate, and in all things does what pleases the Father; at another time it speaks of the Son equal to the Father, freely debasing Himself to the rank of servant and to a shameful death; again, it represents Him as the good Shepherd, who, having power over life and death, freely chooses to die for His flock. In all this we see the human will of Christ in organic union with the Divine will as in the Logos. The two wills aim at the same objects, and the human will is set forth as acting in union with the Father, and with the same dignity and power as the will of God the Son. An example of the harmonious and organic co-operation of the two wills is given in Phil. 2:6, 7: “Who (Christ) being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal to God, but debased Himself, taking the form of a servant,” etc. Here the act of the Logos taking the form of man is necessarily an act of His Divine will, whereas the subsequent humiliation unto death is primarily the act of His human will. The human will of Christ is as infallibly conformed to His Divine will as this is conformed to the will of the Father through identity of essence. The conformity in both cases results from inspiration and love, rather than from command; in the human will it is a kind of filial submission to the Divine. The obedience of Christ, upon which the Apostle insists, viz. His works in the form of servant were not, as in other creatures, a natural duty towards God, but only claimed by God as a free service of love: such burthens and sacrifices could not be due by Christ because of His innocence, nor could they be imposed on Him without impairing His dignity as Lord of all things. With us merit is acquired by giving to God either what He exacts or might exact from us by right; Christ merits by freely renouncing His rights for the love of God. We pay the lawful tribute of our servitude; Christ freely submits to a servitude not intended for Him (cf. Heb. 10:1 sqq.; 5:7 sqq.). For this reason the time for meriting ceased with the earthly life of Christ: in His glory He cannot offer the services of a servant. See St. Thomas. 3, q. 18; Franzelin, thes. xliv.
I. The Holiness which excludes all possibility of sinning, does not extinguish or prevent the exercise of Christ’s moral liberty. The power of sinning or of performing imperfect actions, is not essential to the notion of free will. The freedom of the will is the more perfect the more the will is inclined to and fixed upon what is morally good.
The exercise of Christ’s free will is, however, essentially distinct from that of creatures here on earth (in statu viæ). Creatures exercise their free will in order to acquire, by independent choice, that stability in holiness which is not granted to them by nature: a loving union with God is the fruit and the reward of their exertions. Christ, on the contrary, being by reason of His constitution united to God from the first, can only exercise His free will in order to manifest, ad extra, His perfect union with God. The fruit of His actions is the glorification of God and the Atonement for the sins of the world. Their reward consists partly in the final acquisition of the external glory and dominion which were suspended during His life here on earth, and partly in the reunion of mankind with God. Christ’s human will, then, is like His Divine will in this, that the moral perfection of neither depends on the exercise of freedom. The two wills are also alike in this, that their moral perfection, though not freely acquired, is their own, and is honourable to them, much more than freely acquired perfection is honourable to creatures. For the moral value of acts of the will is derived from the goodness of their object: an act performed with knowledge of and complacency in a good object, is a good act, whether it be free or not. In technical language, essential liberty gives moral value to acts of the will, even when the will lacks the power of choosing between acting and not acting. Christ possesses holiness by reason of His personal constitution, and therefore in a more perfect manner than creatures, who acquire it by exercising free will.
II. The essential difference between Christ’s free will and that of mere creatures does not interfere with His capacity for performing meritorious acts. The Council of Trent (sess. vi. ch. 7) lays down that Christ “merited” our justification. But the notion of merit essentially requires the meritorious action to originate in the agent’s free choice, and to be intended for the benefit of him who is to reward it. External compulsion and internal necessity are incompatible with merit. The fact of Christ’s freedom from compulsion or internal necessity as regards the work of Redemption, is clearly set forth in Scripture: “I lay down My life for My sheep.… Therefore doth the Father love Me because I lay down My life, that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of myself: and I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. This commandment I have received from My Father” (John 10:15–18; cf. Is. 53:7, and Heb. 12:2).
III. We have now to explain, as far as possible, how the freedom of will displayed in Christ’s meritorious actions is consistent with His Holiness. In consequence of the Beatific Vision, the Love of God is not free, but natural to Christ, whence it would seem that all His actions performed for the Love of God are likewise not free, but a natural and necessary consequence of His union with God. Again, His impeccability seems to imply an intrinsic necessity for carrying out at least all Divine commandments. Lastly, the perfect conformity of His human will with the Divine will seems to make it impossible for Him not to perform even such good actions as are not strictly commanded by God.
1. All theologians admit that Christ’s love of God is not free. How, then, can actions inspired by this necessary love be free and meritorious? Many authors of great weight suggest that, besides the act of love included in the Beatific Vision, other acts of love exist in Christ, regulated by infused science, and therefore free, like the acts of creatures here on earth. St. Thomas (De Verit., q. 29, a. 6, ad. 6) sees no difficulty in taking as principle of merit the same act by which Christ loves God necessarily. The act of Beatific Vision, according to the Saint, was at the same time, in Christ, an act of the wayfarer (viatoris), inasmuch as His Beatific Love moved Him to will and to accomplish freely and willingly, during His mission on earth, the things ordained by God, and thus to gather merit for Himself and others. In fact, it appears quite possible that Christ’s Love of God, although itself necessary, gives to the free acts of His humanity their highest moral perfection by investing them with its own moral excellence, which is independent of freedom.
2. Christ cannot sin: He cannot break the Divine commandments. How, then, does He keep them freely, and merit by so keeping them?
The precepts of the natural law, especially affirmative precepts, are vague and undetermined as to the time and circumstances: they leave a wide field for the exercise of free will, even if the will is irresistibly bent on keeping the whole law. Positive commandments—if we admit that any such were binding upon Christ—are more clearly defined than natural laws. Yet even here there is room for the use of free will. Christ could freely fulfil, e.g., the mandate of redeeming us by His death on the cross, by willing His death not as something commanded and inevitable, but by showing Himself ready to die simply because it was the Divine will and pleasure, or because of some other holy motive.
As regards the mandate of Redemption by death, the majority of modern theologians deny its strict obligatory character. The personal dignity and the perfect sanctity of Christ exclude the idea of a commandment so humiliating and so harsh. The Fathers give such a wide meaning to the mandate (ἐντολή), that they apply it even to Christ’s Divinity. Scripture uses the term to signify not only mandate, but sometimes not more than permission or leave to do something. St. Anselm (Med. xi. c. 5) sums up the question thus: “Human nature in this Man suffered nothing from any necessity, but solely from free choice … no obedience compelled Him; He was led by His wisdom and power. God did not compel Him to die, but He did freely and willingly (sponte) what He knew to be pleasing to the Father and profitable to man. And, as the Father gave Him this good will, although free, we can rightly say that He received it as a precept from the Father.” (Cf. St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, l. i. cc. 9, 10.)
3. The above solutions do not meet the difficulty arising from the fact that, because of His Holiness, Christ infallibly fulfilled all God’s wishes as well as orders, and that these Divine wishes and ordinances, which extended to every detail of His life, were known to Him. (Cf. Matt. 26:54.)
This very serious difficulty has no better solution than that proposed by the school of St. Thomas. If the will of Christ, independently of the wishes, ordinances, and foreknowledge of God, had the physical power to omit an action, then He retains this same power when under the influence of the said wishes and ordinances; for these do not alter Him intrinsically. It lies in the nature of Divine ordinances addressed to a free will to appeal to its freedom of action, just as the Divine prescience of free actions presupposes their freedom. The external circumstances under consideration cause the free decision to take place without fail. The result, however, is not due to a restriction of the natural power of the will. It is due to the fulness of its perfection which enables it to tend to whatever is good, without being liable to misdirect its choice; or to the readiness of Christ’s most holy will always to conform to the will of God. The certainty that a given choice will be made is not sufficient, by itself, to destroy the intrinsic liberty of the choice; to destroy liberty, the certainty of the choice must be caused by intrinsic impossibility to act otherwise. But does not Christ’s knowledge of God’s will and foreknowledge impose upon His will an antecedent moral necessity to conform to them? It does so, in fact; yet this moral necessity is not such as to impair the freedom required for meritorious actions: it is not an inner moral necessity, such as would lay the will under the irresistible influence of some good, and induce it to act without choice. The impossibility for Christ to act against God’s decrees known to Him must be put on a par with the impossibility for us to act against God’s decrees unknown to us: neither impossibility affects the choice of free will.
IV. Christ’s human will is the will of God-Man: its free operations are unlike those of mere human wills; they are “theandric” or divino-human operations reflecting the peculiarities of the Divine freedom. Holy Scripture at one time speaks of the Son Whom the Father has sent into the world, Who executes the Paternal mandate, and in all things does what pleases the Father; at another time it speaks of the Son equal to the Father, freely debasing Himself to the rank of servant and to a shameful death; again, it represents Him as the good Shepherd, who, having power over life and death, freely chooses to die for His flock. In all this we see the human will of Christ in organic union with the Divine will as in the Logos. The two wills aim at the same objects, and the human will is set forth as acting in union with the Father, and with the same dignity and power as the will of God the Son. An example of the harmonious and organic co-operation of the two wills is given in Phil. 2:6, 7: “Who (Christ) being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal to God, but debased Himself, taking the form of a servant,” etc. Here the act of the Logos taking the form of man is necessarily an act of His Divine will, whereas the subsequent humiliation unto death is primarily the act of His human will. The human will of Christ is as infallibly conformed to His Divine will as this is conformed to the will of the Father through identity of essence. The conformity in both cases results from inspiration and love, rather than from command; in the human will it is a kind of filial submission to the Divine. The obedience of Christ, upon which the Apostle insists, viz. His works in the form of servant were not, as in other creatures, a natural duty towards God, but only claimed by God as a free service of love: such burthens and sacrifices could not be due by Christ because of His innocence, nor could they be imposed on Him without impairing His dignity as Lord of all things. With us merit is acquired by giving to God either what He exacts or might exact from us by right; Christ merits by freely renouncing His rights for the love of God. We pay the lawful tribute of our servitude; Christ freely submits to a servitude not intended for Him (cf. Heb. 10:1 sqq.; 5:7 sqq.). For this reason the time for meriting ceased with the earthly life of Christ: in His glory He cannot offer the services of a servant. See St. Thomas. 3, q. 18; Franzelin, thes. xliv.
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