FREEDOM OF JESUS CHRIST
The free will (v. LIBERTY) is an essential property of an intellectual or rational nature.
### I. CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
It is a matter of faith (Vatican Council, sess. III, cap. 1: Denz-U, 1783) that God enjoys full freedom with regard to creation; evidently, He cannot but will Himself. As God, Jesus Christ realizes in Himself these two principles (v. GOD). But the question arises concerning the freedom of Jesus Christ as Man. In principle, there can be no doubt: since the Word assumed an integral and perfect human nature (v. INCARNATION; HYPOSTATIC UNION), He could not lack freedom or free will, which is an essential property of that nature. However, the problem becomes more complex due to the particular conditions in which Jesus Christ found Himself: He is the very Person of the Word, subsisting in both the divine and human natures. His will and His human activity belong to the Word and are directed by Him, and thus it is impossible for them to deviate in the slightest from the true and the good. Hence the impeccability of Christ, which is corroborated by two other sources: the fullness of sanctifying grace and the habitual beatific vision, which prevented in Him any moral imperfection, even the slightest deviation from God.
Under these conditions, how could Christ enjoy that active indifference toward the object which is the characteristic of a free will? The difficulty becomes more evident and acute when one considers the human will of Jesus in relation to the precepts of the natural law and, even more so, in relation to the positive precept of the Father, who willed the redemption of the world through the death of the God-Man on the Cross. That Jesus Christ was free even in the face of the Father’s precept is a truth of faith, as is deduced from the explicit doctrine of the Church regarding the merit of the Savior (Council of Trent, sess. VI, cap. 7 and canon 10: “His most holy Passion on the wood of the Cross merited justification for us”), taking into account the other truth, opposed to Jansenius, according to which merit requires internal freedom (libertas a necessitate), which is the true freedom (3rd proposition of Jansenius condemned by Innocent X; Denz-U, 1094).
Christ Himself attributes this perfect freedom to Himself in strong terms (John 10:17 ff.): “Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself, and I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” The Fathers, often commenting on the text of Isaiah 53:7, “He was offered because he wished it” (whose interpretation is debated today), unanimously affirm the freedom of Jesus Christ even in the face of death on the Cross. St. John Damascene echoed this (De fide orthodoxa, 3, 13), deducing from the two natures of Christ “two natural liberties of the will.” In these words resounds the principle defined by the Church against the Monothelites (v.) in the Third Council of Constantinople (680-81), namely, that in Christ there are two wills because there are two natures, each with its respective properties, without confusion or division (Denz-U, 292).
### II. THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSIONS
There can be no doubt regarding the human freedom of the Redeemer throughout His earthly life and especially in the bloody conclusion of Calvary. How this freedom is reconciled with the impossibility of Christ disobeying the Father is a problem that theologians continue to seek to resolve in various ways.
1. **Objective Approach.** – This is tied to the way of interpreting the word “precept” (evtl. 0.7), a Gospel term which, according to some theologians, should not be taken in its proper sense but rather metaphorically, meaning not a true command of the Father but His indeterminate good pleasure, which left to the human will of Christ the choice of the precise manner of dying, a choice ratified afterward by the Father with absolute will (Franzelin). Others (Billot) admit that the will of the Father as good pleasure was absolute before the choice made by Christ, but since it was not expressed in the form of a true and proper precept, it did not impede the freedom of Jesus Christ nor did it force the free will of the Jews who killed Him. Others (Vasquez) maintain that the precept of the Father concerned death but not the circumstances of place and time, which were therefore subject to free choice. Finally, others (De Lugo) believe they safeguard the freedom of Jesus Christ by saying that the precept to die was such that He could have asked the Father to be dispensed from II.
All these opinions, besides being artificial, are arbitrary and contradicted by the text and context of the Gospel, where evtl. 0.7 means “precept” in the proper sense, whose absolute value is confirmed by Jesus as the one sent by the Father (John 10:18; 14:31; 17:4). On the other hand, such opinions do not resolve the question of the freedom of Jesus Christ in relation to the precepts of the natural law, which are true and unalterable.
2. **Subjective Approach.** – The precept was the expression of the absolute divine will, which the soul of Jesus knew clearly through the beatific vision; nevertheless, in the face of it, as in the face of the natural law, Christ preserved intact His human freedom. This is a common opinion among Thomists and Molinists, who differ only in the way they resolve the fundamental difficulty, namely, the apparent contradiction between freedom and an ineluctable precept, a difficulty made more acute by the impeccability of Christ, deriving from the hypostatic union, the fullness of grace, and the beatific vision.
a) The impeccability in relation to the hypostatic union does not present great difficulty, because the union with the Word did not remove from the assumed humanity the physical possibility of sinning, but it absolutely required that there not be a moral possibility of sinning and even less a sinful act. This moral impossibility of sinning, a reflection of the impeccability of God Himself, did not diminish freedom and was already ensured by the hegemony of the Word over the activity of the assumed nature. St. Thomas, In III Sent., d. 12, q. 2, a. 1, states: “His soul and body were like organs of the Godhead... Hence sin could not reach His soul, just as God Himself cannot sin.” However, he does not insist on this point in the Summa Theologiae, 3, q. 15, where he discusses the impeccability of Christ. Among modern Thomists, cf. F. Diekamp, *Theologiae dogmaticae manuale*, II, Paris-Rome 1933, pp. 302 ff.; R. Garrigou-Lagrange, *De Christo Salvatore*, Turin 1945, pp. 324 ff.; L. Molina does not admit any operative influence of the Word on the assumed nature; F. Suárez and L. Lessius grant more and make the hypostatic union the root and remote, intrinsic cause of impeccability. Among modern Molinists, cf. Ch. Pesch, *De Verbo Incarnato*, Freiburg im Br. 1922, nn. 322 ff.
b) But the proximate cause of the impeccability of Christ as Man is the fullness of grace and supernatural gifts. Thomists and Molinists agree in affirming that God
It granted such great grace and such assistance to the soul of Jesus as to render sin morally impossible for it, but there is a question regarding the nature of the influence of efficacious grace. It is known that the Molinists explain the action of grace through simultaneous concurrence and middle knowledge, while the Thomists explain it through physical predetermination (v.); both, however, maintain that human freedom remains intact under the influence of even efficacious grace, and they adopt the same solution with regard to Christ. According to Molina and his followers, God, having decreed the death of Jesus for Redemption, explored His human will through middle knowledge and, in light of it, prepared those inspirations and impulses of grace to which the will of the Redeemer would certainly and freely correspond by obediently fulfilling the command to die on the cross. According to St. Thomas and his disciples, God influenced the human will of Christ with intrinsically efficacious grace so as to infallibly determine it to obey; yet under this determination, Christ’s will remained free, just as the will of every man moved by grace remains free. If one asks the Thomists how freedom is preserved—freedom being active indifference to many things—when the will is determined by God to one thing (in this case: to fulfill the command to die), they resort to the famous distinction between divided and composite sense: Christ, being impeccable, could not disobey, given the Father’s command and the efficacious grace to obey (in composite sense); but He could disobey, abstracting from the predetermining grace; freedom would be ensured by this power not to obey, which, however, could not be actualized, given the divine motion. In general, Thomists believe they preserve freedom even in those confirmed in grace, such as the Apostles after Pentecost, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, and indeed for an infinite number of the blessed, provided the object proposed to the free will is not God Himself, the Supreme Good, but some particular good. They cite St. Thomas, *Summa Theologiae*, III, q. 18, a. 4, ad 3: *«The will of Christ, although determined to the good, is not determined to this or that good; and therefore it pertains to Christ to choose through a free will confirmed in the good, just as it pertains to the blessed.»* But here the problem is resolved in a general way; the difficulty almost entirely returns when the will of Christ is confronted with the precise will of the Father (which He cannot contradict) and under the determining motion of grace. It is true that the command, as an intrinsic element, removes only moral freedom, inasmuch as it restricts the will to doing one thing by forbidding it to omit it or do the opposite; yet psychological freedom also seems compromised, both by the effect of the hypostatic union and, even more so, by the influence of intrinsically efficacious grace. St. Thomas once (In III Sent., d. 18, q. 1, a. 2), under the weight of this precise difficulty, wrote: *«Or it must be said that even if [the will] were determined to one thing numerically, as to loving God, which it cannot fail to do, nevertheless it does not thereby lose freedom or the reason for merit or praise, because it tends to that not by coercion but spontaneously, and thus it is master of its own act.»* These words have led some modern theologians (De Baets) to think that to resolve the problem of the freedom of Christ’s grace, one must limit the concept of freedom to the spontaneous and conscious movement of the will, which remains intact even under the action of efficacious grace, because in this case the will tends infallibly to the object without coercion, neither extrinsic nor intrinsic. Such an opinion must not be confused with the error of Jansenius, who thought to reconcile freedom with a psychological necessity equivalent to blind internal coercion.
c) But perhaps the greatest difficulty against the freedom of Christ’s grace comes from the beatific vision, which His soul habitually enjoyed. The blessed adhere to God with their will indissolubly, so much so that Thomists exclude freedom from this adherence and speak of necessity. Faced with a command of the Father, it is not understood how Christ, who was in the condition of the blessed, could have been free. Various attempts have been made to resolve this grave difficulty. Thomists distinguish in Christ two loves, one necessary, determined by the intuitive vision of the divine essence, the other free, according to the light of infused knowledge. Christ obeyed freely in the second manner (Ferreres, Soto, John of St. Thomas, and others). Some theologians, however, have thought it more fitting to explain the two loves according to their object, distinguishing in God, and therefore in Jesus Christ, the love of divine goodness as the motive for loving creatures: the first of these loves is necessary; the second is free (Salmanticenses).
But, as Billot observes, this theory does not serve the purpose, because the human will of Christ is a simple one, and thus if it is bound by the bond of necessary love, it cannot at the same time be said to be free on the grounds that it is not bound necessarily by the other love. It may also be added that the comparison between the love with which God loves Himself and creatures and the love with which the soul of Jesus adheres to Him and to them is out of place. In short, this solution, substantially accepted even by Molina (*Concordia*, q. 14, disp. 53) and his followers, fails to gain understanding. The dissenters start from the principle that the beatific vision does not of itself imply an intrinsically necessitating loving adherence; the blessed would adhere infallibly to God by extrinsic influence of Providence and thus would remain intrinsically free. This is a profound opinion that harks back to the one emphasized above regarding the concept of freedom reconciled with an infallible adherence to the object, whether by the effect of efficacious grace or of the beatific vision. Others (Cano) hold that during the Passion the beatific vision in Christ suffered a suspension or at least an attenuation, which rendered freedom possible. But this opinion borders on the absurd.
III. Conclusion
The multiplicity and diversity of attempts made to find a solution demonstrate that we are confronted with something mysterious, which transcends the capacity of the human mind. It is the mystery of the Hypostatic Union (v.), which is reflected in all aspects of the being and activity of the God-Man. Apart from theological systems, it must be said that the difficulty is not in one point rather than another, but lies in the totality of the elements that concur: the Hypostatic Union and the consequent impeccability, grace, and the beatific vision. Above all, the singular condition of Christ must be taken into account—He is both comprehensor and viator, and thus must not be equated with the blessed who are already in heaven. This duality of physical and psychological condition at least mitigates the difficulty raised against freedom by way of the beatific vision.S. Thomas states this openly (Sum. Theol., 3°, q. 19, a. 3, ad 1): «Yet He did not merit (Christ) by charity insofar as He was the comprehensor’s charity, but insofar as He was a wayfarer, for He was at once wayfarer and comprehensor» (ibid., q. 15, a. 18). One should also bear in mind that, according to the same Doctor (Sum. Theol., 3°, q. 18, a. 4, ad 3 cited above), every soul confirmed in good by grace, and even by the beatific vision, retains the exercise of its freedom with regard to particular goods, even though these are related to the Supreme Good: «And so it pertains to Christ to choose by a free will confirmed in good, just as it does to the blessed». Finally, however efficacious divine grace may be, it never violates human freedom; hence in the soul moved by grace freedom remains, not only as a pure potency (in the “divided” sense), but also as actual spontaneity and consciousness of movement, albeit under grace’s sweet impulse. Still less is this fundamental reason of freedom compromised by a precept, which, unlike grace, acts from without. The saint who entirely subjects his will to God’s law, under grace’s mysterious yet luminous action, obeys and knows that he obeys, following the inner impulse with full awareness.