GOD'S GOODNESS AND MAN'S RESPONSIBILITY
Medieval views on both divine goodness and the man’s free will are examined and shown that we cannot encompass them with our best understandings of goodness. As God’s creatures, He created us to worship him. This doesn’t mean we don’t have free will, but it certainly means the free will of finite created beings isn’t anything near absolute like the free will of Creator God. It means that the will, decree, and glory of God are the life-breath of the universe. Is our freewill determined by God or by our own faculties? Is there any relationship between our free will and God’s goodness? Does our being make us necessarily good? One of the age-old enigmas that have had theologians and laymen alike scratching their heads is this: If God is all-knowing and all powerful, how does he gibe with the notion of free will and existence of evil in the world? If God knows in advance what people will do and allows it to happen, then God allows evil to exist and people should not be held responsible for their actions, for those actions existed in the mind of God eons before they were born. This work piece is an appraisal of selected works of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility. By free will one shapes one's own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. Freedom makes man responsible for his acts to the extent that they are voluntary. Progress in virtue, knowledge of the good, and ascesis enhance the mastery of the will over its acts. The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to "the slavery of sin”. C.C.C. no. 1731-1736
Many Christian philosophers believe that it is a great good that human beings are free to choose between good and evil.-so good, indeed, that God is justified in putting up with a great many evil choices for the sake of it. But many of the same Christian philosophers also believe that God is essentially good- good in every possible world. According to Swineburne’s theodicy, God gives us moral freedom because he wants us to share in his creative activity- because he wants us to be able to make a real difference in the world, and to have a deep responsibility for the welfare of the other creatures. Swineburne (1979)
Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors. Every act directly willed is imputable to its author: Thus the Lord asked Eve after the sin in the garden: "What is this that you have done?" He asked Cain the same question. The prophet Nathan questioned David in the same way after he committed adultery with the wife of Uriah and had him murdered. An action can be indirectly voluntary when it results from negligence regarding something one should have known or done: for example, an accident arising from ignorance of traffic laws.
The exercise of freedom does not imply a right to say or do everything. It is false to maintain that man, "the subject of this freedom," is "an individual who is fully self-sufficient and whose finality is the satisfaction of his own interests in the enjoyment of earthly goods." Moreover, the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that are needed for a just exercise of freedom are too often disregarded or violated. Such situations of blindness and injustice injure the moral life and involve the strong as well as the weak in the temptation to sin against charity. By deviating from the moral law man violates his own freedom, becomes imprisoned within himself, disrupts neighborly fellowship, and rebels against divine truth. C.C.C no. 1735-1748
Medieval thinkers understand goodness qua greatness when they equate being with goodness (the most perfect being is the most real). Aquinas contends that ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are interchangeable; he writes that ‘good and being are interchangeable.’
Thomas Aquinas (1954). Truth, XXI.2.
Being and goodness, according to Aquinas, are transcendentals; they transcend the categories; they don’t serve as properties which categorize anything since they apply to everything. Everything has being and is good. God is good in this ontological sense. To exist is good; so, everything that exists is good. God is the most real existent. So God is the highest good. Aquinas established the connection between argued that Goodness and being, are they really the same? His argument may be put as follows:
1. To say that something is good is just to say that it is desirable.
2. Something is desirable to the extent that it is perfected.
3. Something is perfected to the extent that it is in being.
4. Hence something is good to the extent that is in being.
5. Hence goodness and being are the same. (Summa Theologica Ia.5.1)
The roots of the doctrine of the identity of being and goodness are clearly in the neoplatonist tradition as filtered through Augustine. The Platonizing tendencies of the tradition are conjoined with Augustine’s understanding of the doctrines of divine goodness and creation. According to Augustine’s principle of plenitude, reality is better the closer it is to divine reality. God is good in a more distinctly moral sense if he shares his reality. God is good by virtue of his creating a multitude of diverse beings which share in lesser and greater part in the divine existence. God shares existence and, therefore, goodness. We were created out of God’s goodness, which is the highest good. God is good both by existing and by allowing things to participate in his existence (i.e., goodness). Aquinas defends the view that God is good by virtue of imparting existence, ergo goodness, to a multitude of things:
...the communication of being and goodness arises from goodness...Now each thing acts in so far as it is in act, and in acting it diffuses being and goodness to other things. Hence, it is a sign of a being’s perfection that it can ‘produce its like’...That is why it is said that the good is diffusive of itself and of being. But this diffusion befits God because...being through Himself the necessary being; God is the cause of being for other things. God is, therefore, truly good. (Summa Contra Gentiles Bk. 1, ch. 40, art. 3)
Although free-will [Liberum arbitrium---i.e. free judgment] in its strict sense denotes an act, in the common manner of speaking we call free-will, that which is the principle of the act by which man judges freely. Now in us the principle of an act is both power and habit; for we say that we know something both by knowledge and by the intellectual power. Therefore free-will must be either a power or a habit, or a power with a habit. That it is neither a habit nor a power together with a habit can be clearly proved in two ways. First of all, because, if it is a habit, it must be a natural habit; for it is natural to man to have a free-will. But there is not natural habit in us with respect to those things which come under free-will: for we are naturally inclined to those things of which we have natural habits. Secondly, this is clear because habits are defined as that "by reason of which we are well or ill disposed with regard to actions and passions" (Ethic. ii, 5); for by temperance we are well-disposed as regards concupiscence, and by intemperance ill-disposed: and by knowledge we are well-disposed to the act of the intellect when we know the truth, and by the contrary ill-disposed. But the free-will is indifferent to good and evil choice: wherefore it is impossible for free-will to be a habit. Therefore it is a power.
Augustine suggests that time, as we measure it, is meaningless to God. God exists in an Eternal realm where linear time is no meaning. There is no past and no future. There is only an Eternal Present, the Big Now. In today’s hectic world, it is fashionable for the New Age sages to exhort us to “live in the moment”. People often tried in vain to stay in the now. Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is a mystery, the old adage tells us. According to Augustine, this is God’s natural state. Linear time is an illusion and a limitation that does not afflict God. God’s infinite wisdom and omniscience has no bearing on our free will. Personal responsibility still rules in the human condition. Yet God is there to guide us if we seek Him out. Hence, we can only take partial credit when we are good and assume all the blame when we are evil.
Another argument claims that the existence of an all-knowing God is incompatible with the fact of free will -- that humans do make choices. If God is omniscient, He must know beforehand exactly what a person will do in a given situation. In that case, a person is not in fact free to do the alternative to what God knows he or she will do, and free will must be an illusion. To take this one step further, if one chooses to commit a sin, how can it then be said that one sinned freely?
By way of conclusion, Freedom is man's badge of responsibility; it is a consecration to obligations rather than an exemption from all that demands courage and sweat and tears in its accomplishment. Freedom revolves entirely around the means to an end. Consequently the things that are not means, the things that lead a man away from his end rather than to it, have no place in the essential notion of liberty but in the description of its degradation and abuse. It is true that a man can commit murder, but that does not mean that he is free to murder; in committing his crime he is not exercising his liberty, he is abusing it. For free will, like every other faculty of man, was given him that he might attain his full stature, his full perfection; that is, that by it he might attain his end. A deliberate aversion from that end is as revolting a perversion as the Epicureans' resort to the vomitorium after a full meal. This faculty of will was not created to make a mockery of order but to make order's perfect accomplishment a personal achievement.
REFERENCE LIST
Aquinas, Thomas (1948). Summa Theologica, translated by the Fathers of the Dominican
Province. New York: Benziger.
(1954). Truth, vol. III, translated by Robert W. Schmidt Chicago, IL:
Henry Regnery. XXI.2.
Augustine of Hippo (1950). City of God, translated by Marcus Dods. New York: The Modern
Library. XII, 5
“Catechism of the Catholic Church”. Popular And Definitive Edition. Part III. Sec I. Art III.
Farrell, Walter (1938). A Companion to the Summa. vol 1. New York: Sheed & Ward
Swineburne, R. (1979). The Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pp 90-102
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