FREEDOM. — In general it is the independence that man claims for his actions both with respect to the forces of nature (1. rational in the broad sense), and with respect to society (1. social and political), and with respect to God (1. theological or religious). In this sense the problem of freedom expresses the most original core of human consciousness and the most intimate reason for its spiritual development, and as such it has been denied only by atomistic and Enlightenment materialism and by scientific positivism, which do not admit an ontological superiority of man over nature: in so doing, these doctrines, such as Marxist dialectical materialism, must renounce philosophy itself, which is absorbed into the “science of nature” (Engels). Freedom is therefore at once revelatory and constitutive of the essence of philosophy and at the same time forms its most arduous task inasmuch as freedom posits and presupposes the triple orientation of human consciousness toward the being of the world, of man in himself, and with respect to God, and finally inasmuch as it presupposes a perspective or definitive decision of man’s being regarding his destiny.
The conviction of the existence of freedom is “attested” by the development of human institutions and civilizations in which man has diversely shaped his life; by the existence of social laws, which presuppose “individual responsibility” with the possibility of its realization in the face of what is presented as “duty”; and by the very consciousness of personal freedom that each person has in reflecting on his own acts. The freedom thus attested is “phenomenological freedom” and constitutes the starting point for theoretical foundation: this must take into account, in its progress, both the “subject” of freedom, which is man and more particularly the will, and the object of that same will. This metaphysical situation of freedom can be indicated in Thomistic elaboration according to a “double dialectic”: first in the tension between subject and object in general of freedom itself, and then in the tension on the part of the subject, as a secondary cause, with respect to the First Principle (human will—God); within the subject itself between intellect and will; and in the tension within the object itself (infinite Good—particular goods). It was only with Christianity, which definitively clarified the transcendence of God, the personality of the individual man, and the necessity of individual salvation and redemption to correspond to divine Grace, that the problem of freedom could be delimited in all its aspects. The Thomistic conception unifies the scattered elements in Greek thought and the attempts of the patristic age and early scholasticism. The metaphysical situation of freedom in the most mature doctrine of St. Thomas can be reduced to the following points:
a) Relations between intellect and will. — The will (v.) is the rational aspect or inclination, and therefore presupposes the act of the intellect that presents its object to it: thus it must be said that “quantum ad determinationem” (or specification) of the act which comes from the side of the object, the intellect moves the will, as presenting to it its object (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 9, a. 1). Aristotle had already specified this foundation of the intellect as the first principle (De anima: “For the will is formed by the reasoning part” (De anima, III, 9, 432 b 5). But the will is the faculty that realizes the whole man inasmuch as its object is the “end” (the good and happiness), which is the first principle of every action; therefore in turn the will moves the intellect itself: “The will moves the intellect with respect to the exercise of the act, because even the true which is the perfection of the intellect is contained under the universal good as a particular good” (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 9, a. 1 ad 3). There is therefore a dynamic transcendence of the will over the intellect that breaks the circle of the immaculate intellect, and its vitality is: “Every act of the will proceeds from some act of the intellect; yet some act of the will is prior to some act of the intellect; for the will tends toward the final act of the intellect, which is beatitude” (ibid., q. 4, a. 4 ad 2).
b) Relations between will and object. — As for entering into action and moving the other faculties (including the intellect), the will is always free, even if it concerns God or happiness itself: “With respect to the exercise of the act, the will is not necessarily moved by any object” (ibid., q. 10, a. 2). But once the object is presented and qualified, the will is free only with respect to particular goods, no longer with respect to the universal good, happiness (beatitude), which is the ultimate and specifying end of the will itself (will as “nature”). Man may not think directly of happiness, but if he does think of it he must necessarily love it: “The ultimate end necessarily moves the will because it is perfect good” (ibid., q. 10, a. 2). On the other hand, every other good not necessarily connected with happiness, presenting itself as a partial and relative good, is not necessarily willed (ibid.). It is true that the will will always and infallibly (and necessarily, say the Thomists) follow the ultimate practical judgment (practico-practicum) of the intellect, but which judgment or another is the ultimate one is the exclusive work of the will itself.
c) Relations between will and God. — The will in its order, as a faculty whose object is the end and happiness and which moves all other faculties and the intellect itself, moves itself: “Because the will is master of its own act and in it is to will or not to will; which would not be so if it did not have the power to move itself to willing” (ibid., q. 9, a. 3, sed contra). The will, as a finite principle passing from potency to act, must first of all be actualized in its tendency toward the end in order to be able to choose the means by itself; but it cannot actualize itself from itself, being in the first moment as a creature in potency to the end itself; therefore it must be said that in the first act the will is moved toward the end by God Himself: “Hence it is necessary to posit that in the first movement of the will, the will proceeds from the instinct of some higher mover, as Aristotle concludes” (ibid., q. 9, a. 9; cf. Aristotle, Eth. Eud., VII, 14, 1248 a 24 ff.; “It is clear that as in all things God, so also in us, the divine element moves us” [trans.]). In the subsequent exercise of its freedom, in which the will moves itself, the will as a secondary cause is always moved by God, the First Cause; both because the will belongs to the spiritual soul that is directly created by God and therefore must also be directly moved by God, and because the object of the will is the universal good or perfect happiness, which is God Himself (Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 9, a. 6).
It can therefore be concluded that the will is always free “quod exercitium actus,” even with respect to the universal good and God Himself, because on earth these are known (and thus present to consciousness) in an abstract or mediated way. The will is not free “quod specificatam obiecti” with respect to its formal object, the universal good, which defines it and enables it to act; and the same applies to the necessary means to an end, once the end has been chosen (ibid., q. 9, a. 2 ad 3). Freedom is therefore not the supreme and fundamental activity of spiritual life: in God, divine life is necessary, and only creation *ad extra* is free; the blessed who see the divine essence do not have the freedom not to see it, for otherwise they would no longer possess beatitude; in general, the will cannot help but love the good as it is presented. Thus, freedom has the task of actualizing the person toward its ultimate end.
On the metaphysical structure of freedom, Thomism rejects not only determinism (v.) but also absolute indeterminism, since in general God moves the will by applying it to the singular act (ibid., 1a, q. 105, a. 5), and once the will has chosen and the intellect has made its final practical judgment, it must follow that judgment and is no longer indifferent: it can change its choice only by altering that same judgment. Other Catholic schools, especially Molinism (v.) and its derivatives, do not accept this rigorous metaphysical framework and prefer the psychological and generic view of man’s independence in the act of choice.
Modern spiritualist-inspired psychology has defended a “consciousness of freedom” (N. Ach, J. Lindworski, T. V. Moore, J. Geyser), but it is not easy to say whether it has grasped freedom in its genuine metaphysical sense, and it seems that the psychological argument cannot stand alone (cf. *De malo*, q. 6, a. unic. ad 18: “The power of the will to relate to opposites is known to us not because opposite acts are simultaneous, but because they succeed one another in turn from the same principle”). It is therefore a complex experience that presupposes at least a process of comparing various acts.
The problem of freedom does not become clear all at once in Western thought, nor does it present itself definitively except in Christian philosophy as the individual’s responsibility before God for the choice of eternal life.
Greek thought has always admitted a core of individual responsibility and thus of freedom in ends, from the Homeric poems to Pindar’s lyric poetry, and especially with Sophocles, who is called the “poet of character” (cf. especially *Antigone*). Greek tragedy, even in Aeschylus, is not entirely fatalistic; otherwise, all ethical value would have been impossible, and Aristotle could not have developed his doctrine of *προαίρεσις*, which distinguishes the *ἑκούσιον* (the merely voluntary) as a property of human beings (*Eth. Nic.* III, 4–5, 111b 6 ff.). The Stoics, though accused of fatalism, did not entirely exclude *προαίρεσις*, which appears alongside the necessitating principles of the cosmos (ἀνάγκη, εἰμαρμένη, αὐτόματον, τύχη: cf. Plutarch, *Epit.* I, 29; H. Diels, *Dox. Gr.*, 2nd ed., Berlin 1929, p. 326a 7. For a defense of freedom among the Stoics: M. Pohlenz, *Die Stoa*, I, Göttingen 1948, pp. 104 ff.). Yet the fact remains that the treatise *Περὶ εἱμαρμένης* by Alexander of Aphrodisias (cf. ed. I. Bruns, in *Suppl. Arist.*, II, 11, Berlin 1892) is entirely a polemic against Stoic fatalism. It is true, however, that the Stoics preserve and develop the doctrine of “virtue, both intellectual and moral,” as Philo says (*Leg. All.* I, 17; ed. L. Cohn–P. Wendland, I, Berlin 1896, p. 75, 13 ff.). A demand for freedom appears even in Epicurus, who, by introducing the *clinamen* of atoms, sought to escape Democritus’s rigid determinism and affirmed that “it is better to believe in the gods than to be slaves to the fate of the natural philosophers” (*Ep. ad Menec.* 134; ed. C. Diano, *Epicuri Ethica*, Florence 1946, p. 10). These contradictions constitute the deepest unease of the Greek soul in its effort to clarify the essence of man.
Patristic and medieval philosophy gradually proceeded to the theoretical foundation of freedom, drawing on scattered elements from classical philosophy, and in this context the explicit term *liberum arbitrium* appears. Nemesius and St. John of Damascus, for example, follow Aristotle in grounding freedom in rationality, as St. Thomas would later do (cf. B. Switalski, *Die Psychologie des Nemesius*, Münster in W. 1900, pp. 138 ff.; for St. John of Damascus: *De fide orth.* II, 27; PG 94, 962). In the Augustinian current, beginning with St. Anselm, the definition inspired by St. Augustine circulated: “Freedom of choice is the power to sin or not to sin” (*Dialogus de libero arbitrio*: PL 158, 489, which depends on St. Augustine, *De corr. et gr.* I: PL 44, 917). A third definition that gained credence in the Middle Ages is that of Boethius, still of Aristotelian derivation: “Free choice is the free judgment of the will” (cf. *In lib. Arist. de interpr.* III, near the beginning: PL 64, 492).
The gravest philosophical error regarding freedom in medieval thought comes from Averroism (v.), inclined toward the determinism of the intellect over the will and the influence of the stars on individual passions; however, with regard to Siger of Brabant’s position, recent studies tend to align him with the Thomist view (Lottin, Van Steenberghen). In the Renaissance, the problem of freedom was central to the new conception of man, and in it one encounters the difficulties in which the Alexandrists and Averroists were embroiled, both in their exegesis of Aristotle’s text and in matters of faith. The most distinguished document is the work of P. Pomponazzi, *De fato, libero arbitrio et praedestinatione* (Basel ed. 1567, pp. 329 ff. The work was completed on November 5, 1520).
In modern philosophy, freedom expresses the very activity of consciousness in its opposition to the necessity of physical causality. For Kant, strict necessity governed by the principle of cause dominates the realm of phenomena, to which he opposes “transcendental freedom,” which underlies the noumenon of the sphere of spirit and thus constitutes the transcendental possibility of practical reason—a position developed further by Fichte. Hegel declares himself against “purely formal freedom” as well as against “freedom of arbitrariness” (*Willkür*), since the former keeps subjective and objective sides separate, and the latter is the freedom “to do what one wants” (*Rechtsphilosophie*, §15; Italian trans., Bari 1913, pp. 35 ff.). Kant’s formal freedom was taken up by the “philosophy of values,” while existentialism seeks to reclaim freedom in its only genuine sense as the activity of the individual person: “even in existentialism, freedom returns to subjective arbitrariness, which resolves into a ‘useless passion’” (J.-P. Sartre, *L’être et le néant*, Paris 1943, p. 708).
In the most recent physics of “quanta,” the possibility of authentic freedom in human action is left open—not as an imperfection of our cognitive faculties nor as a breach in causal determinism, but as resting on the fact that the will precedes the intellect “without being entirely influenced by it” (M. Planck, *Vom Wesen der Willensfreiheit*, in *Vorträge und Erinnerungen*, Stuttgart 1949, pp. 309 ff.; cf. also: id., *Kausalgesetz und Willensfreiheit*, ibid. 1923, pp. 139 ff.).
The originality of human freedom lies in its being a new principle in the world, the author of history, capable of modifying within certain limits even the course of nature itself, but above all constituting man’s true possibility of transcendence toward the Absolute and as an openness to faith and grace by which he is to be saved.
DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH. – Christian ethics is founded upon the responsibility that each person bears for his own actions and therefore presupposes individual free will: in a pantheist or Averroist conception of a single free will that ultimately coincides with the necessity of nature, “hic homo non erit dominus sui actus, nec aliquis eius actus erit laudabilis vel vituperabilis; quod est divellere principia moralis philosophiae” (St Thomas Aquinas, De unitate intellectus, § 81; ed. Keeler, Rome 1936, p. 51). The Church’s magisterium had to affirm the existence of free will especially when settling controversies over the problem of Grace. The Council of Quierzy (a. 853) declared against Gottschalk and the predestinarians: can. I. “Deus omnipotens [hominem] sine peccato rectum cum libero arbitrio condidit...” (Denz-U, n. 316). Among the errors of Baius we find the following propositions: 39. “Quod voluntarie fit, etiamsi necessario fiat, libere tamen fit.” – 40. “In omnibus suis actibus peccator servit dominanti cupiditati...” (ibid., nn. 1059-1060). Against A. Bonteffy it was declared that free will can be demonstrated by reason with full certainty (ibid., n. 1650).