Consult your experience. What have the most excellent wits among the heathens thought of a future life, and of the resurrection?
Has it not been that the more they excelled in genius, the more ridiculous the resurrection and eternal life appeared to them? Unless you would say that those philosophers and other Greeks, those who called Paul a babbler, 286 and an assertor of new Gods when he taught these things at Athens, were not men of genius. In Acts 26.4 287 Porcius Festus calls Paul a madman for preaching eternal life. What does Pliny bark about these things in his seventh book? What does Lucian say, who was so great a wit? Were these men stupid? No, it is true of most men, even today, that the greater their genius and erudition, the more they laugh at this article, and consider it a fable; and they do that openly. For, as to the secret soul, unless he is sprinkled with the Holy Ghost, no man either positively knows, or believes in, or wishes for eternal salvation, even though he may frequently boast of it with his voice and his pen. I would to God that you and I, my Erasmus, were free from this same leaven, so rare is a believing mind as applied to this article! Have I hit the sense of your definition?
SECT. 4. Inferences from Erasmus’ definition.
So then, Freewill, according to Erasmus, is a power of the will, which is able, of itself, to will and not to will the word and work of God. By this word and work, it is led to those things which exceed both its sense and thought.
But if it is able to will and to refuse, it is also able to love and to hate. If it is able to love and to hate, then it is also able, in some small degree, to do the deeds of the Law, and to believe the Gospel. Because, if you will, or if you refuse a certain thing, it is impossible for you not to be able to work something towards it by means of that will, even though you are not able, through another’s hindering, to finish it. Now, since death, the cross, and all the evils of the world are numbered among those works of God which lead to salvation, the human will must be able to choose even death and the man’s own destruction. Indeed, it is able to will all things while it is able to will the word and work of God. For what can there be anywhere, that is below, above, within, or without, the word and work of God, except God himself? 288 And what is now left to grace, and the Holy Spirit? This is manifestly to attribute divinity to Freewill — since to will the Law and the Gospel, to reject sin, and to choose death, is the property of divine virtue exclusively, as Paul teaches in more places than one.
Hence it appears that no man since the Pelagians days, has written more correctly on Freewill, than Erasmus has. For I have said before, that Freewill is a term peculiar to God, and it expresses a divine perfection. However, up to now no man has attributed this divine power to it, except the Pelagians. For the Sophists, whatever they may think, certainly speak very differently about it. No, Erasmus far exceeds the Pelagians: for they attribute this divinity to the whole of the free will, and Erasmus attributes divinity to half of it. They have Freewill consist of two parts; a power of discerning, and a power of choosing. They pretend the one belongs to the understanding, and the other to the will, as the Sophists also do.
But Erasmus, making no mention of the power of discerning, confines his praises to the power of choosing, singly; and so he deifies a sort of crippled and half-begotten Freewill. What would he have done, do you think, if he had been set to describe the whole of this faculty?
Yet, not content with this, he even exceeds the heathen philosophers. For they have not yet determined ‘whether any substance can put itself into motion.’ And on this point, the Platonics and Peripatetics 289 differ from each other throughout the whole body of their philosophy. But according to Erasmus, Freewill not only moves itself, but it even applies itself, by its own power, to those things which are eternal and incomprehensible to itself. As a perfectly new and unheard-of definer of Freewill, he leaves heathen philosophers, Pelagians, Sophists, and all others, far behind him! Nor is this enough: he does not spare himself, but even disagrees and fights with himself more than with all the rest. He had said before that ‘the human will is altogether inefficacious without grace.’ Did he say this in jest? But now, when he defines it seriously, he tells us that the human will possesses that power by which it efficaciously applies itself to those things which belong to eternal salvation — that is, to those things which are incomparably above its power. Thus, in this place, Erasmus is superior even to himself. 290
SECT. 5. Erasmus’ definition.
Do you perceive, my Erasmus (without meaning it, I suppose) how you betray yourself by this definition, to be one who understands nothing at all about these things, or who writes them in sheer thoughtlessness and contempt, without proving what he says, or what he affirms?
As I have remarked before, you say less and claim more for Freewill, than all the rest of its advocates have done, because you do not even describe the whole of Freewill, and yet you assign everything to it. The Sophists (or at least their father, Peter Lombard 291) deliver what is far more tolerable to us when they affirm that Freewill is the faculty of first discerning good from evil, and then choosing good or evil, as grace is either present or lacking. 292 He agrees entirely with Augustine, that Freewill, by its own strength, cannot help but fall, and has no power save to commit sin.’ On this account, Augustine says it should be called Bondwill, rather than Freewill; in his second book against Julian.
But you represent the power of Freewill to be equal on both sides, insofar as it can, by its own strength and without grace, both apply itself to and turn itself away from good. You are not aware how much you attribute to it by this pronoun ‘itself,’ or ‘its own self,’ while you say, ‘it can apply itself!’ In fact, you exclude the Holy Spirit with all his power, as altogether superfluous and unnecessary. Your definition is therefore damnable, even in the judgment of the Sophists. If they were not so maddened against me by the blindings of envy, they would rave at your book rather than mine. But since you attack Luther, you say nothing but what is holy and catholic, 293 even though you contradict both yourself and them. So great is the patience of the saints. 294
I do not say this as approving the sentence of the Sophists on Freewill, but as thinking it is more tolerable than that of Erasmus; because they approach nearer to the truth. But neither do they affirm, as I do, that Freewill is a mere nothing. Still, inasmuch as they affirm (the Master of the Sentences 295 in particular) that it has no power of itself without grace, they are at war with Erasmus; indeed, they seem to be at war with themselves also, and to be torturing one another with disputes about a mere word — they are fonder of contention than of truth, as becomes Sophists. For, suppose a Sophist of no bad sort to come my way, with whom I was holding a familiar conversation and conference on these matters in a corner; and whose candid and free judgment I would ask in some way such as this:
‘If anyone were to say to you that something is free, which by its own power can only incline to one side (that is, to the bad side), having power, it is true, on the other side (that is, on the good side), but that other inclination is by a virtue that is not its own — indeed, it is simply by the help of another — could you refrain from laughing, my friend?’
For, upon this principle, I would easily make out that a stone or the trunk of a tree has Freewill. For it can incline both upwards and downwards; but by its own power, indeed, it can only downwards. Yet, by another’s help, and by that help only, it can incline upwards also. And thus, as I have said before, by an inverted 296 use of all languages and words, we will at length come to say, ‘No man is all men;’ ‘nothing is everything:’ by referring the one term to the thing itself, and the other term to some other thing, which is not part of it, but may possibly be present to it and befall it. 297
It is in this way that, after endless disputes, they make the free will to be free by an accident; viz. as being that which may be made free by another. But the question is about the freedom of the will, as it is in
