Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

But that’s no problem, because no one else is responsible for giving God this single motivation, as He would have been responsible for giving such a motivation to the angels. Since God’s goodness comes entirely from within, there is no hint of coercion in His choice, and He remains fully self-determined and free. With all due respect to Eriugena, I have to say that this is an unprecedentedly sophisticated and clear-minded attempt to make sense of Augustine’s position on freedom. With a deft series of distinctions and definitions, Anselm has secured everything an Augustinian might want. There is the needed asymmetry between acting rightly and wrongly, in that we are unable to be good without grace but able to be evil through our own power. Yet we also remain free with respect to these choices. We can also see exactly how God remains perfectly free even without being able to do certain things that even His creatures can do (like sin, for example). These victories do not come without costs, though. In particular, we might balk at defining an apparently basic idea like freedom with the rather complicated formula “power to preserve rectitude for its own sake.” But Anselm was a master at deriving powerful conclusions from such verbal formulas, as we’re about to see with the case of the formula “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”