Despite worldwide disagreements over the ages, nearly everyone has agreed on one thing: our most fundamental life desire is happiness which itself depends on freedom. But whether man is truly free or not– collectively and/or individually -- has been one of history’s most contentious questions. In the West, the debate has evolved in four stages: the ancient and biblical, the theological medieval, the philosophical humanist, and the modern existential and neurological.

The Greeks were divided on the subject. The first determinists were materialists such as Heraclitus and Democritus, Stoics such as Zeno and Epictetus, and fatalists such as the tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles.  The first free-willers were Plato and Aristotle. The metaphysicians argued that while the actions of the passion-driven common man were predetermined, the rare “great souled,” reason-driven soul was as free as the gods who had bestowed this higher power -- an argument rejecting the myth of Prometheus, chained and tortured for giving humanity the fire of reason.

Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, the Hebrew Old Testament authors -- slaves at the time -- also seemed divided, if not ambivalent, about freedom. The creative days before the Fall were animated by the Almighty’s Let there be’s but, after climaxing with homo sapiens, there was no Let there be free will. Instead, exegetics have argued that Genesis authors implied it as a birthright: God warns Adam and Eve not to eat the knowledge apple, implying that they had a choice despite “forbidding” such disobedience (Genesis 3:17) But if there was a choice, it was a Hobson’s Choice: Submit to temptation but, if you do, you die and, in the meantime, reap a lifetime of thorns and thistles.

The same goes for the Ten Commandments. None are suggestions. Each is a Thou shalt not with a death sentence for disobedience. 613 additional inflexible laws were attached. The obedient Abraham became the model of unshakeable obedience for agreeing to sacrifice his son; but, had the patriarch not agreed, mightn’t he have feared the wrathful God would have killed Isaac and him too? Indeed, the Almighty almost executed His next prophet, Moses, for not circumcising his own son (Exodus 4:24–26).  He went on to command the Israelites to annihilate and claim the land of the Canaanites, violating His own Commandments (3 – no Sabbath work; 5 – no killing; 7 and 10 – no stealing or coveting others’ possessions). When King Saul spared some Amalekites and their stock, his head – and those of his three sons – were spiked to a Philistine city wall. As the prophet Jeremiah later declared, “A curse on him who withholds his sword from bloodshed!" The wise Solomon revealed the moral of the story in Proverbs: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

So, the question which a Judeo-Christian theist might believe impious, but a skeptic practical: Can man’s will really be free if he gets killed for using it? 

Approaching the original question from another angle: If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Adam and Eve’s will was free, then an omniscient creator would already know they would disobey. He’d also already know this original disobedience would infect all future generations, causing Him to “regret” making “loathsome” mankind (Genesis 6:6-13). The pragmatist wonders why, before things got out of hand, God didn’t nip things in the bud. Instead, He let unholy will metasticize, then drowned everybody except one family. He gave the rainbow sign to Noah, promising no further holocausts, but He knew He would soon be plaguing His own people for infidelities during their forty-year purgatory in the Sinai wilderness.

As the Lord told Moses, “The Israelites belong to me as servants… whom I brought out of Egypt” (Leviticus 25:55). He might have ordered the Exodus with another Let it be but, instead, suspended Pharaoh’s free will by “hardening his heart” during the twelve plagues, including the death of all Egyptian first-born. 

The Apostle Peter preached that divine bondage and liberation were not opposed, but complementary. “Live as free people… live as God’s slaves,” he wrote (1 Peter 2:16). St. Paul, who felt “sold into bondage to flesh and sin,” revealed the reward for such a sacrifice: “Now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness and eternal life” (Romans 6:22). Deo Volente submission, then, became transactional for founding Christians: since the exercise of mortal free will was sin, and death the “desert” of that sin, enslavement to God was a downpayment for a free immortal life. A win-win for both parties.

Teaching his followers to pray “Thy will be done” in the Lord’s prayer, Jesus was indispensable for the win. Was his expiating martyrdom, then, freely chosen or predetermined? Theologians who claim the former seem to ignore his words: “I am here to fulfill the Torah and the Prophets,” (Matthew 5:1), while making similar unequivocal statements throughout his ministry. In the Gospel of John, he says, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father do.” So, his final words on the cross were: “It is accomplished” -- “It” indicating the Old Testament prophesies of his martyrdom in Daniel and Isaiah. The theologians who claim, nevertheless, that Jesus was free, or at least thought so, might quote his very different last words in Matthew and Mark -- “'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – among the most troubling Gospel passages for Christians.

St. Augustine wrote that any attempt to know God’s will was vain if not damnable since He, the unmoved Cause of Causes, was “unknowable” and only He was free. But the former libertine’s belief had an unthinkable implication: if everything from the Fall through the crucifixion was divinely preplanned, God is a puppeteer, and a person either knows he’s on strings or deludes himself that he’s not. Lacking intent and, hence, true selfhood, man, then, is relieved of responsibility for his actions and no longer a moral agent: he is an unconscionable, appetitive animal. Furthermore, determinism renders the very concepts of human good and evil absurd, effectively invalidating all sinocentric religions.

Avoiding the nihilism of such absolute predestination, St Thomas Aquinas later appealed to pragmatism if not logic: “Man has free choice, otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.” So, the Doctor of the Church introduced an objective/subjective reconciliation called Compatibilism: though man is divinely predetermined, God nevertheless makes him think he isn’t. The dualist position came in two forms, depending on personal preference: sacrifice-based or reason-based.

Committed to sacrifice, medieval monks followed Peter’s slavery-to-God injunction with Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience vows. St. Ignatius, the Jesuit founder, composed the will-emptying Spiritual Exercises (1524) while praying: “Take, Lord, all my liberty.” St. John of the Cross and other cloistered mystics devoted themselves to “self-emptying” through self-mortification. Echoing St. Paul, Meister Eckhardt revealed the paradoxical benefit: “God does not constrain the will. Rather he sets it free, so that it may choose Him, that is to say freedom.”

Influenced by the Greek metaphysicians, St. Thomas was the leading spokesman for the reason-based Compatibilists. “A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational,” the dogmatist wrote. Many later humanist “freethinkers” went on to support reason-as-a-divine-gift, ignoring the Eden allegory: God forbids eating the fruit of knowledge, while Satan gives it, transforming man from a dependent homo servus to a free homo sapiens. But even if reason were a divine gift, wouldn’t man -- having no alternative to it -- be fated to always agree with the creator? Indeed, reason-based Compatibilists never adequately addressed the peskiest problem about man’s supposed God-given reasonable will: why wasn’t it as good, pure, and everlasting as His own? In short, where did sin come from? The devout Gottfried Leibniz ventured an answer: while man’s will was originally flawless, it became “faulty” after the Fall. The philosopher never explained how a perfect deity could create an imperfect product. Moreover, how and why would such a deity create a being with a will separate, and potentially antagonistic, to His own?

Again, the Christian party-line pretending to be an answer: God works in mysterious ways. Meaning? Since He is indeed “unknowable,” man can only have faith in Him. Some theist philosophers have even espoused the idea that the faithful should abandon causal (creator-based) intellect because it invites a dispiriting question: how can an all-good, all-powerful God permit evil in the world?  In the end, then, Compatibilists embraced faith and theodicy, betraying their rationalist platform. “Men must believe before they can reason,” concluded St. Thomas. Indeed, during his own time and for over a millennium, freely reasoning was more apt to get an intellectual burned than beatified. Even during the Age of Reason, its first I-think-therefore-I-am “freethinker,” Descartes, suspected of being a heretic, fled to Sweden to save his valuable head. A century later, the revolutionary lapsed Catholic, Denis Diderot, was jailed for declaring: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

The ex-priest, Martin Luther, was the fiercest anti-rationalist theist. The sixteen-century father of the Protestantism preached that reason should be abandoned since it rendered faith “impossible, absurd, and false.” Though a determinist awed by God’s omnipotence and omniscience, he slipped Compatibilism into his “The Bondage of Will,” arguing that man had choice regarding “goods and possessions,” but the Almighty already had man’s salvation or damnation decided in eternity. So, he urged his followers: “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly!” The Reformation founder didn’t bother to explain how boldness was necessary for accepting preplanned salvation or hellfire. An evangelist for prayer, he also neglected to explain how praying might move an immovable creator.

Luther’s young contemporary, John Calvin, was equally committed to the idea of “unmerited divine favor” or disfavor. But the father of Calvinism had no illusions about his position. "The decree is dreadful indeed,” he confessed, insisting, nevertheless and without explanation, that predestination did not relieve mortals of moral responsibility. In fact, he and Luther held their critics responsible for rejecting their God-given beliefs by torturing, staking, or decapitating them with self-righteous zeal.

One would expect true determinism to lead to stoic resignation, if not surrender. But both Luther and Calvin were passionate fighters against the corrupt, Indulgence-ridden Church (“Synagogue of Satan,” as they called it), the Jews (“Christ killers,” “envenomed worms”), and even critical fellow Protestants (“pigs,” “asses,” “stinking beasts”). Inquisitionists in their own right, the two were responsible for the torture and execution of a quarter million -- ironic since Luther called violence the “devil’s work,” while at the same time boasting, “I have been born to war, and fight with devils!” Curious words for a man who believed infidels were made by God, not self-made through free will. Curious too that he and Calvin railed against any personal set-back. Weren’t their trials and excommunications, too, willed by the Almighty? As Calvin said: “Everything God wills must be held to be righteous by the mere fact of His willing it.” Moreover, the two firebrandsfound it necessary to outlaw all free-spirited drinking, dancing, feasting, singing, playing cards, etc., overruling God’s apparent permissive preplan, not to mention Solomon’s carpe diem “eat, drink, and be merry.” 

Avoiding Christian mixed messages on divine will, the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher, Spinoza, called the creator a “disinterested architect” (Deus Otiosus). Rejecting God’s intervention in human affairs throughout the Old Testament and His son’s activism in the New, the Jewish lens grinder believed creation was on autopilot, operating according to prescribed mechanical laws. Against anthropocentrism, he argued that the Almighty transcended personality and even will itself. Viewing God and Nature as one, he was branded a pantheist and expelled from the temple. But a native of the comparatively permissive Netherlands, Spinoza managed to avoid the stake, unlike his free-thinking Italian predecessor, Giordano Bruno, the pantheist friar. Still, the dogmatists may have caught up with the lens grinder had he not died at age 44 from inhaling glass dust.

Among the first self-proclaimed atheists, Arthur Schopenhauer, argued in his The World as Will and Representation (1818) that “perverse” will motivated most humans. Naturally, he didn't apply the term to the first and most basic will, survival (food and shelter), but to the two superseding wills: Prosperity when it entailed the exploitation or poverty of another, and Domination when it entailed the subjugation or enslavement of others.

But, as a Compatibilist, Schopenhauer argued that self-will was not absolute: “Man can do what he wills,” he explained, “but he cannot will what he wills" – a secular spin-off of the Augustinian idea that God made man to mistakenly think he was free. Schopenhauer shared the Buddhist antinomous belief that men were predetermined by life’s cyclical recurring nature, while also free to improve personal karmic destiny for ultimate enlightenment and liberation.  Proposing a personal form of Compatibilism, Buddha told his monks, “No one outside ourselves can rule us inwardly. When we know this, we become free.”

Schopenhauer’s successor, Frederick Nietzsche, had famously declared God dead. Presumably he meant the authoritative Judeo-Christian God, not Spinoza’s pantheist creator.  In Beyond Good and Evil, he argued that the Christian morality of the meek enslaved the superior. So, the Superman, God’s replacement, was obliged to chart his own lonely, defiant course. Calling himself “Dynamite” and boasting “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger!’ Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power, “The higher man is distinguished by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.” But, instead of being a free will champion like his 20th century existentialist successors, the rebel philosopher went on to embrace the Dharmic determinist idea of Eternal Return and Amor Fati. As the diehard Christian, Dostoyevsky, warned while Nietzsche was dancing with Dionysus in the madhouse, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” But, opposing the nihilism of unchecked immoral behavior, the novelist -- opposing rational egotism and embracing the altruistic Law of Love -- struggled to follow in the footsteps of Christ whom he said he would never abandon “even if it were proven to me that the truth lay outside Christ.”

Dostoyevsky’s fear of atheist moral anarchy foreshadowed the last stage of the freedom debate dominated by phenomenologists and empirical scientists. These post-humanist thinkers removed deity and theology from consideration, turning their attention to the freedom vessel or the predetermined entity: the solitary, existential self.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the Existentialist spokesmen, famously declared that we are “condemned to be free,” therefore, “Man is only what he makes of himself.” He believed that God didn’t make man, but man God, to justify his own ungodly will. So, to the French philosopher and his atheist colleagues, the individual is not a dependent “Causa Dei, but an independent Causa Sui. The claim came with a heavy moral responsibility, thus the odd idea of being “condemned” to freedom.

By the time the Existentialists produced their manifestos, Albert Einstein had already revolutionized science with his Theories of Relativity in which no deity played a part. When pressed, the physicist who rejected the wrathful Old Testament Almighty said he believed in Spinoza’s transcendent, noninterventionist creator. So, at odds with Sartre, he concluded: “Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control.” Adopting energy neo-pantheism, he might, then, have said God = Cosmic Will = Force (gravity, electromagnetic, nuclear, plus whatever dark energies might be discovered).

Delving deeper, Einstein confided to his assistant, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation.” If not, then God Himself is predetermined, begging the question Who or What determined Him? Avoiding the quicksand of infinite regress, the father of relativity adopted a mystical point of view: “The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”

In his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will,” Ludwig Wittgenstein – called “God” by his students – argued that free will v. determinism was a “pseudo-problem” because the terms were ill-defined and depended on a given individual’s “psychological disposition.” Implicitly, then, he too shifted the focus to the free will subject or the determinism object: the self. So, before we can resolve the free will v. determinism question, we must first answer What is “self”?

On the most basic level, self is filtered consciousness in personalized time: an individual’s past, present, and future will. Eastern thinkers – Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist -- have argued that self and time are illusions, therefore the idea of free will is too. Ironically, many of today’s materialist scientists agree, but not from an ontological perspective. In his book, Free Will, leading determinist, Sam Harris, writes: “Neuroscience reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.”

Granted, for the individual, DNA is nothing if not determinative. Except for the suicidal, no one wills disease or death. Addicts, psychotics, obsessives, compulsives, cultists, the brainwashed are anything but free. While self-control is a rare virtue, many still claim they have it. Collectively, citizens in today’s democracies may enjoy relative freedom of religion, thought, speech, education, assembly, etc.; meanwhile, though, the individual may become a willing pawn to a corrupt creed, cult, or cause. Or, personally, he or she can be owned by his or her own ambitions, possessions, fame. Even if not, most are yoked to social convention, creating a society of conformists aghast at the idea of slavery.

Who, then, is the truly independent individual, the one free of dependence on anything or anyone? Adam and Eve before the Fall? The noble savage? The hermit mystic? What about the old pantheist argument that God is everything and only He is free? If the Almighty is everything, “He” has no self: so, who is the “I am” (Exodus 3:7) whose will is absolute?

Today, the worldwide conflict of wills, both political and personal, has become more intense than ever. Politically, oppressive tyrannies are rising, free democracies ebbing. Personally, pessimism from powerlessness is rising and faith in true self-determination ebbing. But, in trying times, the compatibilist prayer of the Metal of Freedom honoree, Reinhold Niebuhr, still inspires: like the Stoics and medieval mystics, the theologian advocates serenity and, like the Neoplatonists and Enlightenment humanists, fearlessness and reason. The independent-minded may prefer to omit his first word – God – and pray to and for their higher selves:

My I find the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
the courage to change the things I can, 
and the wisdom to know the difference.

David Comfort is the author The Insider’s Guide to Publishing (Writers Digest). His other nonfiction titles are from Simon & Schuster and Kensington. His literary essays appear in Pleiades, The Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, and Johns Hopkins' Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, and The Philosopher (UK). His short fiction appears in The Evergreen Review, Cortland Review, The Morning News, 3:AM among other journals. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and finalist for Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, Narrative, and Glimmer Train Awards.

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