Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth (De Veritate)

1. Whoever turns something whithersoever he wishes can force it. But, as is said in Proverbs (21:1), "The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord: whithersoever he will he shall turn it." God can therefore force the will.

2. Quoting Augustine on Romans (1:24): "Wherefore, God gave them up to the desires of their heart . . . ," the Gloss says: "It is evident that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills to whatever He wishes, whether to good, according to His mercy, or to evil, according to their deserts." God can accordingly force the will.

3. If a finite being acts finitely, an infinite being will act infinitely. But a finite creature attracts the will in a finite way, because, as Cicero says, the honorable is what attracts us by its own vigor and entices us by its own excellence. Therefore God, who has infinite efficacy in acting, can altogether force the will.

4. He is properly said to be forced to something who is unable not to do it whether he wants to or not. But the will is unable not to will what God by His will of good pleasure wants it to will; otherwise the will of God would be inefficacious in regard to our will. God can therefore force the will.

5. In any creature there is perfect obedience to the Creator. But the will is a creature. Hence there is in it a perfect obedience to the Creator. God can therefore force it to what He wills.

To the Contrary:

1'. To be free from force is natural to the will. But what is natural to anything cannot be removed from it. The will therefore cannot be forced by God.

2'. God cannot make opposites to be true at the same time. But what is voluntary and what is violent are opposites, because the violent is a species of the involuntary, as is made clear in the Ethics. God therefore cannot make the will do anything by force; and so He cannot force the will.

REPLY:

God can change the will with necessity but nevertheless cannot force it. For however much the will is moved toward something, it is not said to be forced to it. The reason for this is that to will something is to be inclined to it. But force or violence is contrary to the inclination of the thing forced. When God moves the will, then, He causes an inclination to succeed a previous inclination so that the first disappears and the second remains. Accordingly, that to which He induces the will is not contrary to an inclination still extant but merely to one that was previously there. This is not, then, violence or force.

The case is parallel to that of a stone, in which by reason of its heaviness there is an inclination downward. While this inclination remains, if the stone is thrown upward, violence is done it. But if God were to subtract from the stone the inclination of its heaviness and give it an inclination of lightness, then it would not be violent for the stone to be borne upward. Thus a change of motion can be had without violence.

It is in this way that God's changing of the will without forcing it is to be understood. God can change the will because He works within it just as He works in nature. Now, just as every natural action is from God, so too every action of the will, in so far as it is an action, not only is from the will as its immediate agent but also is from God as its first agent, who influences it more forcefully. Then, just as the will can change its act to something else, as is apparent from the explanation above, so too and much more can God.

God changes the will in two ways. (1) He does it merely by moving it. This occurs, for instance, when He moves the will to want something without introducing any form into the will. Thus He sometimes without the addition of any habit causes a man to want what he did not want before. (2) He does it by introducing some form into the will itself. By the very nature which God gave the will He inclines it to will something, as is clear from what has been said. Now in like fashion by something additional, such as grace or a virtue, the soul is inclined to will something to which it was not previously determined by a natural inclination.

This additional inclination is sometimes perfect, sometimes imperfect. When it is perfect it causes a necessary inclination to the thing to which it determines the will, in the same way as the will is inclined by nature necessarily to desire the end. This happens among the blessed, whom perfect charity sufficiently inclines to good not only as regards the last end but also as regards the means to this end. Sometimes, however, the additional form is not in all respects perfect, as among the wayfarers on earth. Then the will is indeed inclined by reason of the additional form, but not necessarily.

Answers to Difficulties:

From what has just been said the answers are clear. For the first set of arguments go to prove that God can change the will; the second, that He cannot force it. Both of these are true, as is evident from the explanation above.*

It should, however, be noted that, when it is said in the Gloss as cited that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills to evil, this is not to be understood (as the Gloss itself says in the same place) as if God bestowed wickedness, but in the sense that, just as He confers grace by which men's wills are inclined to good, He also withdraws it from some; and when it is thus withdrawn, their wills are bent to evil.