Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

could have given them salvation. Furthermore, on this Augustinian picture humans in the state of sin turn out to lack meaningful free will. If we aren’t able to be good without God’s help, then any freedom we have seems to be useless, nothing more than the ability to decide which sins to commit. These were bullets that one ninth-century medieval thinker was ready and willing to bite. He was a monk named Gottschalk, and his signature doctrine was “double predestination.” The idea is a simple one: God has decided in His inscrutable wisdom which of us will be saved and which condemned. This decision was made already before any of us were born, and there is no court of appeal. It’s an uncompromising view, but one that looks pretty reasonable within the Augustinian framework I’ve just sketched. After all, if my salvation requires God’s intervention, and if He decides not to intervene, then He has effectively decided that I will be damned. From this point of view, Gottschalk was simply drawing the obvious conclusion of Augustine’s teaching. Indeed, he was able to quote from the works of Augustine in support of his own position.