Free Will And The Descent Of The Protestant Reformation Into Narcissism

By Allen C. Guelzo

[Allen C. Guelzo is Senior Research Scholar for the Council of the Humanities and Director of the Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.]

Abstract

The Protestant Reformation marked a decisive break with the Catholic Church over three issues: the magisterium, justification, and determinism. The last of these breaks was less obvious initially than the first two, since the first wave of Protestant Reformers considered themselves firmly within the arc of Augustine’s teachings on free will and predestination. But free will soon became fully as much a point of Protestant departure as the first two. Protestants were dependent on secular princely authority for protection, and secular princes preferred notions of human willing which relocated sovereignty on a human plane. The Enlightenment struck a second blow in favor of free will by posing a universe governed by irresistible natural law, and from which only indeterminism (in the form of an unfettered human will) offered a meaningful key to personal identity. In the American environment, the republican experiment placed human willing at the center of identity, either directly (through secular market forces or through varieties of free will theology) or indirectly (through the subtler distinctions crafted by Edwards and nineteenth-century Calvinist moral philosophers). The principal casualty was any sense of community, which was sacrificed to benevolence, influence, or interest. Modern American opinion on determinism, whether philosophical or theological, is dominated by a free-willism which supports a rabid narcissism wholly at odds with Augustine and divine predestination.

I.

The Protestant Reformation is remembered best for three significant innovations in Christian theology. The first two are the most obvious: the challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church’s magisterium (and especially that of the Roman pontiff) and the relocation of salvation from the personal experience of the believer in sanctification to the legal category of justification. What is less obvious is the third innovation, and that concerns the problem of the human will. There was, at first, not very much in Reformation thinking on this subject that looked like an innovation. Martin Luther’s famous polemic against Erasmus on The Bondage of the Will, as well as John Calvin’s Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God (1552), the third book of Calvin’s Institutes (1559), and Ulrich Zwingli’s Commentary on True and False Religion (1524) all echo the underlying Augustinian outlook which had pervaded Catholic theology for almost a thousand years. Likewise, there would seem to be a natural intersection between Augustine’s teaching on liberty and freedom under divine sovereignty and the Protestant revolt against Church authority and the embrace of imputed justification—assigning sovereignty over human willing to God seemed to link hands with a protest against the authority claimed by any human institution, while redefining justification as a legal transaction between the persons of the Trinity also seemed to make salvation firmly a matter of divine initiative. But in real time, the Protestant embrace of Augustinian sovereignty was comparatively short-lived. As it began to crumble, along with it crumbled legal justification; and when that sagged, so did resistance to the measurement of salvation by personal experience. It remained only then for the authority of the institutional church to re-assert itself, not by exalting a divine magisterium, but by instituting the pursuit of therapy in its place. By this slow intellectual path was the Reformation led from Augustinianism to self-help, so that today theology itself has become premised on a triumph of the will that has no other ending-point than in the pathology of narcissism.[1] Let us see how this took place.

At some points, the pathway of this chart might have been visible almost from the beginning. Augustine understood that human beings possess a capacity for choosing—a will, or voluntas—and he knew this “as surely as I knew I had life within me. When I chose to do something or not to do it, I was quite certain that it was my own self, and not some other person, who made this act of will.” But he also discovered that he had surprisingly little power over this will, something which he learned equally from Medea’s paradox (in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where “video meliora proboque deteriora sequor”), St. Paul’s admission that “I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin” (Rom 7:25), and Augustine’s own frustrating experience. Understanding the will’s operations required meticulous deconstruction of his own acts, and in the end, he found that not even understanding sufficed to govern it. “I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains.” This meant that the will, narrowly conceived, possessed a certain freedom, but it was a malevolent freedom, skidding hideously out of control and addicted to sin—which did not, in the most ultimate sense, mean much in the way of liberty. “The mind gives an order to the body and is at once obeyed, but when it gives an order to itself it is resisted.” It can “make an act of will … yet it does not carry out its own command.” To the contrary, the will arbitrates what the mind can or cannot know.[2]

As a latter-day Augustinian, Luther shared Augustine’s fear of the “impotence of our corrupt will.” Without “the necessary foreknowledge of God and the necessity of events, Christian faith is utterly destroyed, and the promises of God and the whole Gospel, fall to the ground completely; for the Christian’s chief and only comfort in every adversity lies in knowing that God does not lie, but brings all things to pass immutably, and that his will cannot be resisted, altered, or impeded.” Only divine grace could tame and re-direct the corrupted human will to choose rightly.[3] Yet, even Luther recognized how many-faced the question of liberty could turn out to be, because as soon as he turned his attention from the authority of the will to the authority of the Church and the Papacy, it was liberty which Luther ennobled. “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none,” Luther announced in his last appeal for reconciliation to Pope Leo X. This triggered a struggle in Luther to justify his defiance of papal authority without at the same time letting the tiger of anarchy loose: the Christian may be “perfectly free,” but the Christian is also “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” Luther was aware that “these two theses seem to contradict each other.” But in practice, Luther intended for the Pope to embrace the latter and be the servant rather than the tyrant, while Luther would embrace the former and blow the trumpet of revolt against Roman authority. This balancing-act became a model for other balancings Luther would have to perform, especially in reconciling legal justification with the need to pursue sanctification, since the Christian should consider himself “free from all works” for justification, yet be willing to take upon himself the yoke of works for sanctification, in order to “empty himself … and to serve, help, and in every way deal with his neighbor as he sees that God through Christ has dealt and still deals with him.”[4]

What Luther strove to create was an environment in which human acting is diminished on the Augustinian scale, but only as a gesture of voluntary co-operation, while divine sovereignty is maximized to its full Augustinian dimensions. The tension between these two did not take long to erupt, in both the Lutheran and Calvinist folds. Post-Luther Lutheranism preferred to speak of God’s divine election as an environment rather than a mandate, in which individuals are chosen to love God rather than God unilaterally choosing them for salvation. No discussion of predestination appears in the major Lutheran confessional documents, and Philip Melancthon, in the Loci communes, rebuffed theories of divine sovereignty with the assurance that immo aliquot modo potes (you can in a manner) “sustain yourself with the voice of the Gospel.… It is necessary that we assent and not struggle against” God. Calvin’s predestination had been under attack even in Calvin’s lifetime, first from Jerome Bolsec, who argued that predestination necessarily made God the author of evil, and then from Michael Servetus.[5]

It was, however, the Dutch Calvinist Jacobus Arminius who offered the most famous challenge to Augustine—and to Calvin—by declaring that any act of God which “by his own decree ordained that sin should be committed” could not “excuse from blame” the God who decreed its commission. Politics, too, had an unpleasant way of adding a twist to this contradiction, as indeed it had since the days of Augustine and Pelagius, when Pelagianism pled for “the gentle individualism” of pagan classicism against the hierarchical world envisioned by Augustine. Arminianism, by contrast, offered a world in which human authorities exercised an authoritative (and not merely accidental) secondary agency of their own, a prospect which greatly flattered the absolutist ambitions of the Stuart monarchs. Calvin had shrewdly criticized the spiritual libertinism of the Quintinists as merely a short path to human dictatorship: overthrow divine authority, and human substitutes quickly step in to fill the vacuum. In the Calvinist church, rulers possessed power, but no longer superiority, and efforts to transform feudal order into constitutional position were not notably successful. “The nobility,” concluded the Huguenot Rule of Millau in 1573, “has understood that if there were no longer a king, each village would free itself from its gentleman.” But substitute free human wills for divine absolutism, and some of those human wills were certain to assert their own superiority. William Laud’s Arminianism would have clinched Calvin’s argument.[6]

But the decisive blow against divine sovereignty was struck from outside Protestant theology, by the Enlightenment. Newtonian physics shattered the ancient image of a universe governed by divine decree and substituted (to Newton’s personal dismay) a universe governed by mechanical law, or “necessity”—in effect, substituting for divine determinism a perfectly soulless “hard” determinism in which no one possessed any kind of meaningful free choice. What looked like the choices of intelligent souls were really only the responses of intelligent beasts; and if that were so, then the logical connection between the natural order and the political order was to impose order by simple force, in just the blandly horrific fashion recommended by Thomas Hobbes. The Enlightenment, in effect, offered two unappetizing paths down which European thinkers might choose to walk: a hard-edged mechanism, in which natural physical law accounted ruthlessly for all activity, or a wide-open volitionalism, an Epicurean “swerve” in which all solutions were to be arrived at by human willing.

Desperate to avoid the atheistic imputations of Hobbes’s mechanism, some eighteenth-century religious thinkers embraced the swerve, staging a massive flight from necessity to outright indeterminism (sometimes tagged as “Arminianism” but with little organic connection to Jacobus Arminius). And at once, the slippage into narcissism made its appearance. Even before Hobbes, the Arminianism that Laud introduced as the accepted companion to Stuart political supremacy showed a distinct predilection for self-presentation, and a chilliness toward Luther’s doctrine of imputed righteousness. Robert Shelford’s Five Pious and Learned Discourses (1627) not only attacked those who “soar into points of predestination,” but condemned the notion that salvation was a legal transaction in which sinners played no direct part. Charity and faith were required displays on the part of Christians: “ceremonies and civilities to men, when they are applied to God, change their nature, and become holiness.” But the emphasis on gesture emerged in the hands of no one more dramatically than John Wesley. Raised in the environment of the established church in England, Wesley had imbibed “Arminian” doctrines (and Non-Juror absolutism) long before his celebrated evangelical awakening in the Moravian “society” in Aldersgate Street in 1738. And at once, no part of that conversion experience was more striking than the primacy of the first-person singular: “In the evening I went unwillingly to a Society in Aldersgate street, where … I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”[7]

But what was even more unusual was how that primacy sustained itself in Wesley’s frank promulgation of “Free Grace” in 1741 and the abandonment of the Protestant foundation of imputed righteousness. If Augustine was right, Wesley insisted, God was wrong. Only this time, the argument was not predicated on what predestination made God out to be (as it had for Arminius), but on the violence it did to personal identity:

But if this be so, then is all preaching vain. It is needless to them that are elected; for they, whether with preaching or without, will infallibly be saved. Therefore the end of preaching, to save souls, is void with regard to them. And it is useless to them that are not elected, for they cannot possibly be saved. They, whether with preaching or without, will infallibly be damned.

Not only self-identity, but the personal experience of holiness is endangered, since “directly does this doctrine tend to destroy several particular branches of holiness” and “tends to destroy the comfort of religion, the happiness of Christianity.” Wesley could not even abide Luther’s notion of legally-imputed righteousness; salvation had to be the reward of the individual’s own personal quotient of sanctification. Wesley’s goal was personal “assurance,” and the path to it was built on a life of “entire sanctification,” not the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. “All inward, as well as all outward holiness” must be “necessarily previous to justification.”[8]

II.

It was in this context that the freedom of the human will became a problem for American Protestant thinkers—psychological, metaphysical, and ethical. Some American thinkers, whether Calvinist or not, joined the flight from necessity to embrace various forms of simple indeterminism. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was raised in the thick atmosphere of New England Calvinism, and traded it early in life for its secular Hobbesian mirror-image in a youthful tract on liberty and necessity. All human action, Franklin merrily announced, “is triggered by either pain or pleasure. This is the Machine set on work; this is Life.” But Franklin soon found that “the Doctrine here advanc’d, if it were publish’d, would meet with but an indifferent Reception,” and wrote it off as an “erratum.” He, too, would embrace the swerve of free will—and, as his most famous writing, the Autobiography, attests, become an American pioneer of self-help narcissism. Ralph Waldo Emerson was no less a critic of determinism. “I honour” the Calvinist “who can pray and act by so lofty a creed,” Emerson wrote in one of his early Unitarian sermons, but he was as disinclined as Franklin to “surrender our views of the highest elevation of man to any low or debasing ones.” Like Franklin, Emerson was convinced that nothing but freedom could form the substrate of morality.

Morals implies freedom and will. The will constitutes the man. He has his life in Nature, like a beast: but choice is born in him; here is he that chooses; here is the Declaration of Independence, the July Fourth of zoology and astronomy. He chooses,—as the rest of the creation does not.

And he was also no less an apostle of narcissism. “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other,” and in this “occult relation between man and the vegetable, I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.” Hence the first “lesson of power” is “the exercise of the Will,” in which anyone “can reduce under his will not only particular events but great classes, nay, the whole series of events…. Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.” Or even more, turn minds into rulers of the universe: “a virtuous will,” he wrote in a note in 1834, “is omnipotent.”[9]

Others, unwilling to serve either materialism or Unitarianism, found refuge in Wesley’s “Arminianism.” The premier American Methodist theologian, Daniel Denison Whedon, defined volition as “the power of the soul by which it is the conscious author of an intentional act … a decisive movement—a putting forth of energy … a conscious projection, from interior power, of action upon its object.” The attention, however, was on the experience of interiority: “there is what we call a sense of the free activity, by which we feel that not only the act goes forth by capability but is put forth from the central self-power.” This interiority, Whedon warned, was not susceptible of rational analysis. All questions about the logic or illogic of free will “must stop at the boundary line of experience and intuition.” Reason has no business contradicting the convictions of the self: “It must take laws and not attempt to throw anticipatory injunctions on the nature of things, nor try to project its inquiries beyond axioms and settled universal processes. So long as “our experience and intuition affirm a sphere of conditions in which one sufficient reason will account for either of several results,” then the mind should stop trying to connect this cause with that effect and “accept the laws and limitations which this experience and intuition impose.” Anything else is in league with atheism. “From Leucippus and Democritus, through Spinoza and Hume, down to d’Holbach and Comte, the whole mass, one and all, will agree … in maintaining the absolute universal necessitation of all events.” Whedon was neither a materialistic nor unreflective theologian, but not even his most polite efforts to describe the operation of the free will could quite escape a touch of the narcissistic. He understood that the Augustinian mind was concerned with “humbling human pride.” But Whedon deemed it “a foolish way, worthy of the narrowness of a bigot … to depreciate man’s intellect and make him a brute.” Whedon’s God was “a Ruler of free subjects,” not a “manipulator of mechanisms.”[10]

Whedon’s Methodist compeers were often less genteel in their assertion of a triumphant will. “I do not admit, nor do I see how any one can rationally assert, that just blame can be attached to a moral agent for not attaining what is ‘impracticable—impossible—prevented by the ordination and decree of God,’” trumpeted George Peck, a veteran circuit-rider, the editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review (and ironically, the grandfather of Stephen Crane). Like John Wesley, he was particularly irritated at any deterministic roadblock to “Christian perfection.” Not, he was swift to add, “legal perfection … the perfect performance of all that the law requires,” but the satisfaction derived from knowing that “loving God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength” is in fact “attainable.”[11] But Peck was joined with perfect unanimity by elite Victorian Episcopalians, especially of an Anglo-Catholic inclination, who (like Morgan Dix) deplored the “Calvinistic horrors” that described “men as automatons, driven into heaven or hurled into hell.” William Whittingham, the Anglo-Catholic bishop of Maryland, saw little purpose in “the untrustful and undutiful disposition to refuse God’s mercies on his own wise and loving terms.” In “the kingdom of the will,” Whittingham wrote, “neither force nor life is restricted by the limits of conscious receptivity or agency.” And in the gorgeous theater of sacramental observance, Dix added, “Christ comes … offering you salvation, which it is your part to accept or reject,” a “simple story” that “contradicts nothing, it disorders nothing” and “taxes not the logical faculty.” And through the “unearthly and supernatural character and quality” of Anglo-Catholic ritual, the communicant may “rise out of self and above the world.”[12]

American ethicists, or moral philosophers (who were usually college-based and who were often clergy) attempted to construct models of experiential necessity as their counter to mechanical necessity, which described a certain basic shape to all human moral character which, if it could be properly shaped, would ensure a society of greater moral well-being. Volition is not causeless, explained Yale’s Noah Porter. “The power to choose is not a power to choose without a motive.” Yet the motives operated more along the lines of predictability, rather than causation. “Moral distinctions are not originated by the arbitrary fiat or will of the Creator,” Porter concluded. They arise out of certain vague natural nudges with which humanity is surrounded. “Man is not merely a moral being … he is also social, and held to duties to his fellow-men, which again bring him under social responsibilities … which his conscience requires him to recognize and obey.”

That is, let the moral purpose of a man be so and so; let him be endowed with a given constitution in body, intellect, and sensibility; let him be surrounded by given circumstances of physical and social culture … he will necessarily choose in a given way.[13]

But even the moral philosophers could not resist the drift toward narcissism which resulted from so untethered a will. “The will,” wrote Mark Hopkins of Williams College, the premier of the moral philosophers in the post-Civil War decades, “is the highest product of our highest powers.” It produces “a person knowing his end … a Person, with no nature, or fate, or fitnesses of things back of him, or above him; who is himself, by his own free choice, the originator of everything that may properly be called nature, and of all fitnesses of things.” Laurens Perseus Hickok, the president of Union College (which had been founded by no one less than Jonathan Edwards the Younger) suggested that we “make no inquiry … for the genesis or validity of the notion of causality, but only examine our conscious convictions of it.” Those who did would find that “it places the moral agent in the highest point of all causality”—and the self as the center of all attention. In fact, in “the first act of attention … the mind found itself, and learned to discriminate itself from all things else.” The will thus becomes the self, “that in which is our moral and personal being…. It is not enough to say of such a will, it makes a man to become great; it is itself his greatness.”

Put away, then, at once the delusion that you can be only what nature has made you; the way is fairly open for you to be just what you will make yourself.… The truly strong will is that which can take its own object, and hold every power subservient to it, and go unflinchingly through suffering and death to gain it.[14]

And then, of course, there were political theorists who incorporated assumptions about freedom and necessity into the varieties of polity that combined monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in mutually-restraining amounts, so that necessity and freedom once again find themselves in new relationships. Sir William Blackstone believed that “one of the gifts of God to man at his creation” was “the faculty of free-will,” but that upon entering into civil society, a social being surrenders “part of his natural liberty, as the price of so valuable a purchase”—and cleared the path for Locke in the Two Treatises on Government to describe the surrender of political liberty which occurs whenever a society leaves “the state of nature,” and thus arm the American revolutionaries with their fundamental doctrine that societies are self-made and not handed down from heaven with authoritative rulers in charge.[15] Even within republicanism, constructions of the will continued to swirl in often-contradictory directions. No one in the early republic put more faith in the free operation of human decisions in the marketplace than Alexander Hamilton; yet Hamilton was also a friend of “energy in government” and suspected that human wills did little more than react to material incentives, so that “a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” Thomas Jefferson—a self-described “Epicurean”—was, on the other hand, convinced that liberty was an essential attribute of the will. “Freedom is the right to choose, the right to create for oneself the alternative of choice. Without the possibility of choice, and the exercise of creation, a man is not a man, but a member, an instrument, a thing.” Certainly, he rejected out of hand “the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin … that God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save.” Yet no one had less faith in Hamilton’s markets, or relied more exclusively on the labor of human slaves.[16]

Then, finally, there is Jonathan Edwards, the most important single writer on this subject in American history. If the theologian was determined to remain defiantly Calvinistic, a struggle would ensue to substitute rational or logical necessity for Hobbesian mechanical necessity, thereby preserving divine sovereignty while at the same time specifying ways human choice can still be described as free. This became the burden to be borne by Edwards and the formidable school of Edwardseans to which he gave birth—Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and the New Divinity. Despising both the mechanists and the Arminian half-hearts, Edwards daringly threaded the warp of Locke and Hobbes together with the woof of Calvinist predestination, and in his great treatise on Freedom of the Will (1754) produced a formula for understanding freedom of the will which went something like this:

• human choice is not a process of deliberation, but is simply the last act of deliberation; when choice occurs, it occurs as a response to motives;
• these motives are arranged by God before the perception of the human actor, and depending on the quality of the individual’s character, certain responses to those motives are unavoidable and the universe is safely determined;
• because “God has so made and established the human nature … that the soul preferring or choosing such an immediate exertion or alteration of the body, such an alteration instantaneously follows,” then “the will always is as the greatest apparent good is.”

Thus far, Edwards was indistinguishable from Hobbes, who also believed that human choice was, so to speak, a one-stage affair of responses to perceptions. But, Edwards then replied, the ability to respond to divine motives referred only to moral ability; everyone actually possessed a natural ability to respond to divinely appointed motives (in that nothing actually restrained them physically from obeying God’s commands) whether or not they also possessed a moral ability to do so. “In the strictest propriety of speech, a man has a thing in his power, if he has it in his choice…. It can’t be truly said, according to the ordinary use of language, that a malicious man, let him be never so malicious, can’t hold his hand from striking, or that he is not able to shew his neighbor kindness.”[17] And it was on the possession of this natural ability, and their failure to use it, that sinners could be judged, while the saints used the moral ability they possessed to obey God and enjoy him forever.

It is hard to read Edwards today and not suspect that a philosophical shell game was being played, but it was without question the most ingenious substitution of rational for mechanical determinism on offer in the early Republic. What is less easily noticed is how, at the end of the day, it did nothing to restrain the descent into narcissistic self-contemplation. Freedom of the Will in 1754 was an attempt to harmonize Calvinism with Edwards’s earlier and much more important project of defining the religious affections. In truth, Edwardseanism was fundamentally a description of the psychology of volition, harmonized more or less with Calvinist metaphysics—more or less, because Edwards’s followers (and to a certain degree, Edwards himself) felt constrained to withdraw, like Wesley, from legal concepts of justification to those which predicated justification on personal perfection. The purpose of the atonement of Christ, insisted Edwards’s foremost pupil, Joseph Bellamy, was not to effect a legal transfer of the merits of Christ to the sinner, but to “declare God’s righteousness, and secure the divine honour, and to open a way wherein God might be just, and yet justify the sinner who believes in Jesus.” The atonement, in other words, did not atone; it merely signaled that God was not being unreasonable in accepting the surrender of the sinner’s will.[18]

Even then, Edwards’s formula for rational necessity was inadequate to the demands made upon it by the new politics of the American republic, which were as fully focused on the rights of the individual as Wesley’s theology had been on the needs of the heart. Mixed modes of construing liberty—whether Edwards’s rational necessity or the English Whig celebration of the tripartite structure of King, Lords, and Commons—failed utterly to satisfy the fears and needs of the Americans, and so the American Revolution replaced it with a “liberal” or democratized republicanism which rejected the balancing of various social orders with the Madisonian competition of personal “interests and factions.”[19] Instead, theories of an unfettered psychology and theories of an unfettered politics were seen as inevitable allies on the American landscape. “The very institution of government implies, and would be an absurdity if it did not imply, a free will,” wrote Henry Philip Tappan, a Congregationalist parson and president of the University of Michigan in the 1850s. “Psychological freedom is the ground of all freedom” and “civil freedom is the organization of human forces for the protection & defense of spiritual & physical freedom.” Thus did narcissism become a political desideratum.[20]

III.

Still, the pursuit of the dazzling chimera of a free will inevitably required at its endpoint a total isolation from anything which looked overmuch like causation, and that included other people. No surprise, then, that each of these brands of American Protestant necessity—or, at least, each of these ways of escaping from the dreaded claws of determinism—struggled with the countervailing yearning for community, and each of them formulated a methodology for keeping narcissicism at arm’s length. For the sake of brevity, let me organize the proposed approaches in the following fashion.

(a) The Republic of Benevolence. Edwards and the Edwardseans saw in freedom of the will and the famous natural ability/moral ability dichotomy the basis for a republic of benevolence. By switching the operation of the will into a one-stage psychological response to divine motives which everyone was, at least naturally, able to obey, the Edwardseans believed that community could only be based upon the will itself. The natural attributes of community—birth, kinship, obligation—fell considerably short of the “disinterested benevolence” envisioned by Edwards in his last, posthumous treatise On the Nature of True Virtue, and what the Edwardseans looked for instead was a community of wills made perfect through the self-conscious reception of divine and supernatural light. The most dramatic example of the republic of benevolence was Charles Grandison Finney and the benevolent order he established in Oberlin, Ohio. Although the conventional view of Finney has been to classify him rather vaguely as an optimistic Jacksonian, no one would have objected to that definition more than Finney himself. Finney hotly denied any suggestion that he had compromised God’s prerogatives—and hefted Edwards’s famous natural ability/moral ability distinction to prove it. Even Finney’s famous predilection for perfectionism, as he explained in 1839, was far from an original creation. It “is the doctrine & long has been of New England divines certainly a well-known & universally conceded truth that they maintain its attainability on the ground of natural ability.” Finney’s perfection certainly had little if anything to do with the Arminian perfectionism of John Wesley. “If I rightly understand him he makes perfection to consist in Just what you do with the exception of freedom from mistake,” Finney wrote about Wesley and the Methodists. “I can by no means adopt his system & few Calvinistic Ministers I believe have had more collision with them than myself.” Yet, that did not restore any classical sense of Christian community; instead, benevolence replaced the Christian koinonia with an act of personal willing.[21]

(b) The Republic of Influence. The moral philosophers, who were comprised largely of moderate Calvinist and conservative Unitarian college instructors, turned their preference for experiential necessity and the “common sense” philosophy into a doctrine, not of ability and motives, but of “influence” in which, according to Nathaniel William Taylor, human choice was ruled by “certainty, with power to the contrary.” And if the explanatory power of this formula lacked much of the introspective rigor of the Edwardseans, it made up for that by appeals to “common sense” and “intuitive truths,” among which was (according to Archibald Alexander), that “Man is certain of liberty, and nothing can add to the certainty which he has that he is a free agent.”[22] The proper public correspondence to the persuasive force of “intuitive truths” was “influence.” Contrary to Edwards’s one-stage model of direct perception of motives, the moral philosophers—Francis Wayland of Brown University, Mark Hopkins, Francis Bowen of Harvard, James McCosh of Princeton, Noah Porter—broke perception down (as John Locke eventually did in his revisions of the Essay) into a two-stage process in which motives influenced the will indirectly through the intellect and/or the “sensibility.” This turned, in both the textbooks and the public policies of the moral philosophers, into campaigns to “influence” the Christian character of American republicanism, by presidential proclamations of divine dependence, by the abolition of Sunday mails, by “public acknowledgement” of Christianity, and by public favor for religious enterprises.[23]

The moral philosophers did not look for the perfectionism or the instantaneous conversion of the Edwardseans; but then, their mechanism for understanding the operation of freedom of the will was significantly different. What they did expect, however, was that wise and just rulers would be able to achieve through “influence” the same certain outcomes of wisdom and justice that divinely decreed monarchs were expected to dispense. The good ruler, said Edwards, would have such an “accurate, clear, and plain way of stating and committing causes,” and such “a marvellous ability to penetrate into the particular tempers and dispositions of such as he had to deal with,” that there would be no obstacle “so as most effectually to influence” the people “to any good and wise purpose.”[24]

(c) The Republic of Interest. Just how much these competing answers to the freedom of the will problem swayed American attempts to conceptualize the operation of their republic shows up even in the discourse of Americans who had little interest in religion in any formal sense of the word. Richard Hildreth was a closet atheist and a determinist, but his determinism led him (as it had led other republican religious skeptics) to a Madisonian celebration of self-interest and self-aggrandizement. “The phenomena of nature are governed by fixed and undeviating laws,” Hildreth announced, and among those laws were rules which reduced the will to little more than a response to pleasure or pain. “All those acts which have, at any time, been classified as moral duties, are, in fact, acts productive of pleasure … to some sensitive being or beings.” The idea that “there is an original, eternal, absolute difference … between Right and Wrong” is absurd, and so is the idea that “men have been supposed to be endowed with an innate faculty of perceiving that difference.”[25]

Confident that the invariable competition of faction would safeguard the republic, Hildreth allied himself with the Whigs (as did a number of Edwardseans), while the moral philosophers (and not the Finneyites) harkened to the Democratic republicanism of Andrew Jackson. Some of the most ardent defenders of Southern slavery before the Civil War turned out, ironically, to be Edwards-hating Methodists like Albert Taylor Bledsoe (a secessionist Democrat who wrote two books condemning Edwards, and one defending slavery) or Old School Presbyterian Calvinists like Robert Lewis Dabney (a secessionist Democrat who thought that Edwards had sold Calvinism down the river). Abraham Lincoln, the offspring of hard-shell Calvinist Baptists with only the faintest personal religion of his own, acknowledged his belief in both “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life” and “the Doctrine of necessity … that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.”[26] Despite the Edwardsean shape of these comments, Lincoln’s secular Whiggism saw natural ability more in the opportunity to enter (as he had done as a highly-successful railroad lawyer) more fully into the market revolution. Freedom-of-the-will thus became a republic of self-interest.

Each one of these republics was a compromise in varying ways between the mechanical determinism of Hobbes and an elitist free-willism, and, as Whedon and Tappan had both detected, freedom-of-the-will was intimately bound up with each of these formulas. But as with all compromises, none of them was guaranteed to last. Edwardseanism and rational necessity suffered particularly from the new models of human psychology built from the Kantian notions of intuition and sentimentality imported by James Marsh and Marsh’s highly-influential edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. Laurens Perseus Hickok, for instance, wrote a thoroughly Edwardsean handbook on Empirical Psychology in 1861 and then junked it all in 1882 to write a Kantianized edition of Empirical Psychology which re-introduced the division of the mind into “knowing, feeling, and willing” as separate faculties; the will was redefined as “the energy exerted to execute the feeling of any susceptibility” instead of the immediate perception of motives.[27]

Events also took their toll on the republics of influence and interest. “The black flower” of determinism which Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth had predicted would spring from America’s unruly moral anarchy hung around the edges of American literature, in places like Melville’s frightful Calvinist epic, Moby Dick, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Unitarian morality tale, Elsie Venner, and Theodore Dreiser’s horrifically deterministic Sister Carrie, but without doing very much to shape it. Mark Twain would sit up half the night with William Dean Howells, talking about free will and determinism. It was really Darwinism, whose impact was delayed by the Civil War, that held the promise of renewing the fury of hard determinism and winning new converts to mechanistic determinism. Chauncey Wright, for instance, the “father” of pragmatism, came early under Darwin’s spell and as soon as 1865 cheerfully dismissed free will and responsibility as evolutionary metaphors. “Under the pressure of scientific discovery,” complained Noah Porter, “the reign of law seems to threaten to take complete possession of the universe of matter and spirit, and to subject every event to a rigid necessity.”[28] Along with Darwin, the nineteenth century’s passion for reducing experience to scientific predictability meant that psychology ceased to be an introspective philosophical pursuit and was transformed into a laboratory science which threatened to drown both the concept of consciousness and all ethical responsibility in a sea of amoral mechanism.[29] We should not underrate, either, the impact of the Civil War in promoting deterministic mentalities. The war, as a social event, displaced nearly one million Americans, and drew another three million into a shattering experience of mass combat to which Americans, up until this point, had been immune. By the end of the century, wrote Henry Adams, “mind could gain nothing by flight or by fight; it must merge in its supersensual multiverse, or succumb to it.”[30]

Well, maybe. The pragmatists were highly resistant to determinism, beginning with Charles S. Pierce’s theory of “tychism,” which made thought itself an objective experience which can determine the shape of the world. It was William James’s aversion to determinism, however, which most clearly served a narcissistic impulse. “Metaphysical thought has always been haunted by the consciousness of the religious orthodoxy of the country,” James complained in 1876, “and either assiduously sought to harmonize itself therewith, or, if skeptical in character, it has been trammelled and paralyzed and made petty.” James proposed to redefine the terms of the free will problem entirely as a matter of personal utility. “Free-will thus has no meaning unless it be a doctrine of relief.” It mattered little to James whether anyone wished to be a Calvinist or an Arminian, a hard determinist or a soft one or an utter indeterminist. The purpose of any doctrine of the will—and it was its purpose which concerned James, not its truth or accuracy—was to satisfy the personal yearnings of the inquirer. “Other than this practical significance, the words God, free-will, design, etc. have none…. Design, free-will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world’s outcome.”[31]

But did pragmatism’s re-conditioning of free will relieve anything? George Herbert Palmer, James’s colleague in the Harvard philosophy department, believed that pragmatism had rendered “necessitarianism … a spectre of the past.” But when pressed, James agreed that “ought rationally implies can,” and therefore “to escape this moral discord in the absolute and total nature of things … I turned my back upon the One and All and postulated pluralism and indeterminism instead.”[32] James’s Harvard contemporary Josiah Royce wanted to believe as fervently as James that practical results were the true criterion of truth, but unlike James, he also believed in an Absolute that squeezed him into progressively more deterministic formulas of free will. “To be means simply to express, to embody the complete internal meaning of a certain absolute system of ideas,” Royce wrote in 1899; from that, “it is within a finite idea as it is with any form of will.” Just as “no finite idea is wholly out of correspondence to its object … no will is wholly false to itself.” Ultimately, Royce’s concern with the subordination of the individual to the idea of the Beloved Community pushed him away from both indeterminism and narcissism. “A moral individual … is not born,” Royce decided, “but is made. He is the product of a long process of social adjustment.” Anyone “given over to the glorification of Self as an element of consciousness should find as a result of their thinking nothing but this same Self again, exaggerated into a caricature.”[33]

Even latter-day pragmatists such as Morton White were not sure James had waved the problem away very successfully. “In the language of William James,” wrote White, “I hope to show that neither the truth of determinism nor the truth of anti-determinism can be logically forced down our throats.” White nevertheless admitted that “James’s view that all choices are free requires a considerable derangement of common sense,” and ended-up endorsing a variety of determinism which he preferred to James’s “anti-deterministic rival.” And Steven Cahn (City University of New York) asserts that one “must either deny God’s omniscience or deny man’s free will”; any attempt in pragmatic terms to regard the law of the excluded middle as “simply the most convenient method of organizing language” when “there is no reason to adopt the most convenient method of organizing language” are simply trying, like James, to “relativize ontology.”[34]

The situation has not changed significantly since the pragmatists passed off the scene. The brief flurry of interest in communitarian thinking which surfaced in American religion in the 1980s and 1990s in the hands of Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni has almost entirely passed from the scene; poststructuralism, like Hobbes, effaces knowledge with power, and interprets causality in terms of domination rather than freedom; and modern identity politics exalts, not community, but one’s personal experience of being part of a victimized minority. We have achieved the ultimate in self-determination by redefining even biology as self-making. Yet, it cannot be said that modern Americans feel freer, or richer in their connections with others, than before.[35]

IV.

In Luther’s and Calvin’s time, Augustine was a contemporary, or at least his words were treated as having the weight we would concede to contemporaries. Little of this sort can be said of Luther or Calvin or Augustine or even Edwards in our time. Indeed, the principal partisans of a determined human will are almost routinely non-theists, whether through reductive neuroscience or even-more reductive behaviorism. “Neuroscience,” wrote Ted Honderich (University College, London), “rules out what is fundamental to the Free Will theory, which is its free-floating self or originator.” Honderich was irritated that quantum theory supposedly opened up an arena of indeterminacy which would sanction some form of free will (a claim made in 1935 by the physicist Arthur H. Compton), and “it was supposed that Free Will was thereby automatically saved.” But that was only under the illusion “that chance events by themselves give us Free Will. But of course they don’t.” And that, for Galen Strawson, an analytic philosopher, might actually be the beginning of wisdom. “Long familiarity with the philosophical problem of free will may … slowly erode the basis of belief … that the philosophical problem of free will is a deep problem. And perhaps this will be a sign that their understanding of reality has become more profound.” For a “scientific realist” like Richard Double, free will cannot even be “logically coherent,” since the “standard question” (the “SQ,” as Double puts it)—Under what conditions would our choices be suitably connected to the psychological states that precede them so as to make us morally responsible for the actions those choices produce?—are almost always misdirected because “philosophers do not like to end up with pessimistic conclusions and will do sly things to avoid them.”[36]

This has left the direct heirs of the Augustinian tradition, and especially Roman Catholic philosophers, in the unusual position of affirming precisely the indeterminacy Augustine would have repudiated. Linda Trinkhaus Zagzebski, a past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, has little difficulty in suggesting that “free will presumably involves giving us certain powers with respect to which God is voluntarily passive.” Granted: “the fact that God is the ground of all truth creates tensions with human freedom.” Zagzebski nevertheless believes that a “strong” view of freedom “is compatible with a strong view of omniscience” because “God’s foreknowledge and my act are not related by strict equivalence.” Peter van Inwagen of the University of Notre Dame believes that “there are no good arguments for determinism and that there are some rather good arguments against it.” Van Inwagen is careful to avoid appeals to introspection, but he also believes that human behavior carries serious weight in determining belief or non-belief in free will. “Anyone who rejects free will adopts a general theory about human beings that he contradicts with every deliberate word and act.” And he is suspicious that determinists are really only closet Hobbesians. “I am convinced that in a large number of cases … the people who regard my central thesis as simply incredible are victims of scientism.”[37]

It is, however, among the families of the Protestant Reformation that the free-willism and narcissism have flowered hand-in-hand. William Hasker, the longtime editor of Faith and Philosophy, rejects “divine providence,” expressed as “simple foreknowledge,” as “entirely useless.” As much as Hasker has “a deep love and admiration for the Augustinian theology,” he does not find an unchangeable God with unchangeable decrees “preferable to change; a workable universe, it seems to me, needs both in full measure.” After all, Hasker argues, God’s ends in the universe are not abstract, but personalistic. “God’s end is not to produce reason, creativity, unconditional love, and the like … but to create particular persons who reason, create, love unconditionally, and so on.” (This produced an outburst from one respondent that Hasker “would have the Good Samaritan saying, ‘Thank you, God, for another opportunity for my moral development.’”) The late William Hatcher Davis believed that “freedom of the will is a concept intimately entangled with the human power to reason, so that if one of these powers goes, the other must go.” Given that “the human being is the most flexible creature of all,” we have but to examine ourselves introspectively to “know we really can take away any of the two or more alternatives before us.” Such an examination of the self yields two indubitable propositions, “that we feel free,” and “that our ignorance of the nature of the matter which makes up our brains is so complete that for all we know we may actually be free,” and this yields a “sense of liberation and exhilaration.”[38] Invariably, the pointer on the compass swings back to the centrality of the self. No wonder popular Protestant best-sellers resound so loudly of the therapeutic, and feature such self-absorbed titles as:

• Think Better, Live Better: A Victorious Life Begins in Your Mind
• Destined To Be: Nine Keys to Discover Your Purpose While Unlocking Your Potential
• Healing the Hurts of Your Past: A Guide to Overcoming the Pain of Shame.

And, of immediate relation to the subject at hand:

• You Can, You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner.

Part of this failure to connect between the Reformation and its offspring after half a millennium is related to the victory of the Darwinian trope as the predominant explanatory meme of modern culture: as all things are evolving in an undirected and non-ontological manner, nothing of what was said in the past can have anything but accidental value to the present or the future. The resulting mentality is what Christopher Lasch described with such devastating skill as that of “the new narcissist … haunted not by guilt but by anxiety … who extols co-operation and community but harbors profoundly anti-social impulses … who praises respect for tradition while operating under the assumption that none of it has actual power … who repudiates sexual taboos but who experiences no sexual satisfaction … who blames competition for destruction but is fiercely competitive for approval, acclamation and gratification … for whom the self becomes a semi-divine spirit that remakes God in its own image.”[39] But that is to lay the blame on intellectual discourses outside the boundaries of Protestantism; there is fully as much to blame for the triumph of narcissism within the matrix of the Reformation, and one of the primary culprits is the decay and decline of Protestantism’s Augustinian heritage and with it, the true nature of the will.

Notes

1. On the varieties of narcissism, see Fredrica R. Halligan, “Narcissism, Spiritual Pride, and Original Sin,” Journal of Religion and Health 36 (1997): 308–12; Louis Glick, “American Narcissism,” Three-Penny Review 72 (1978): 5–7; Scott O. Lilienfeld & Hal Arkowitz, “All About Me,” Scientific American 23 (2013): 64–65. “Narcissism” in the sense used here will not include the “grandiose” narcissism that characterizes “malignant leaders.”
2. “I’d act more sanely, if I only could, but this new power overwhelms my will; reason advises this, and passion, that; I see the better way, and I approve it, while I pursue the worse” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin [New York: Norton, 2004], 224); Augustine, Confessions, ed. R. S. Pyne-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 136, 164, 172; Jesse Couenhoven, “Augustine’s Rejection of the Free-Will Defence: An Overview of the Late Augustine’s Theodicy,” RelS 43 (2007): 282–86.
3. Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will: A New Translation of De Servo Arbitrio (1525), Martin Luther’s reply to Erasmus of Rotterdam, ed. J. I. Packer (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1957), 81.
4. Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. T. F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 393; Oswald Bayer, “Freedom? The Anthropological Concepts in Luther and Melanchthon Compared,” HTR 91 (1998): 376–82.
5. Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 131; Joel R. Beeke, Debated Issues in Sovereign Predestination: Early Lutheran Predestination, Calvinian Reprobation, and Variations in Genevan Lapsarianism (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 28–30; Kurt Aland, A History of Christianity, trans. J. L. Schaaf (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 2:191–95.
6. John Morris, The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 339; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 170–71; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965), 52, 73, 92.
7. Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 92; David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London: Macmillan, 1979), 63–64; Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (London: Epworth, 1989), 144.
8. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, 395–96; John Wesley, “Sermon 54—Free Grace,” in The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M., Sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford (New York: Carlton & Phillips, 1853), 1:483–84; Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (London: Epworth, 1976), 21.
9. Benjamin Franklin, “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, &c.” (1741), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. L.W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 1:64, 71; Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. J. L. Lemisch (New York: New American Library, 1961), 56; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Statutes of the Lord Are Right, Rejoicing the Heart” (August 2, 1829), in The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Teresa Toulouse and Andrew Delbanco (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 2:33; Emerson, “Character,” North American Review 102 (1866): 356; Emerson, “Nature,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 9, 10, 25; Emerson, notebook entry for January 21, 1834, in Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 120; Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35.
10. Daniel D. Whedon, The Freedom of the Will (1864; New York: Eaton & Mains, 1892), 14–16, 81–82, 103–4, 108–9, 323, 324; Maurice Mandelbaum, Purpose and Necessity in Social Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 46–47.
11. George Peck, The Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection Stated and Defended (New York: Carlton & Lanahan, 1842), 41, 65, 242, 244.
12. Morgan Dix, “Rashness and Irreverence in Modern Religion” and “The Image of God in Man,” in Sermons, Practical and Doctrinal (London: William Wells Gardner, 1879), 142, 144, 303, 309, 311; Whittingham Francis Brand, Letters to Rev’d William Brand (January 30, 1867) and Leonard Bacon (October 17, 1872), in Life of William Rollinson Whittingham, Fourth Bishop of Maryland (New York: E. & J. B. Young, 1883), 2:115, 200; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 199–200.
13. Noah Porter, The Elements of Moral Science Theoretical and Practical (New York: Charles Scribner, 1885), 80, 84–85, 101, 125, 126, 472, 473.
14. Mark Hopkins, Lectures on Moral Science delivered before the Lowell Institute (Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1872), 166, 186, 239; Laurens Perseus Hickok, “Course of Lectures Comprising a Body of Systematic Theology delivered to the Middle Class of Auburn Theological Seminary, 1850–51, ” “The Strong Will,” and “Control of the Power of Attention Essential to a Student” (July 1833), in Hickok Papers, Amherst College Special Collections, Amherst, MA; Andrew Preston Peabody, A Manual of Moral Philosophy (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1873), 30; D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 118–19.
15. Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 61.
16. Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 79” (June 18, 1788), in The Federalist Papers, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 398; Walter F. Murphy, Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 492; Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (June 26, 1822), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P. L. Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1899), 10:219; Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 228.
17. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 142, 162.
18. Joseph Bellamy, True Religion Delineated; Or, Experimental Religion, Distinguished from Formality (Edinburgh: M. Gray, 1788), 316; Mark Valeri, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 124.
19. James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 56–68.
20. Henry P. Tappan, “Importance of the Study of Int[ellectual] Philosophy,” lecture book in Henry P. Tappan Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
21. Charles Finney, Letter to J. P. Cowles, June 29, 1839, in Charles Grandison Finney Papers, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.
22. Sidney Earl Mead, Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786–1858: A Connecticut Liberal (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), 190; Archibald Alexander, Lectures on Moral Science (New York: Charles Scribner, 1860), 125–26.
23. Fred J. Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783–1837 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 27–47.
24. Jonathan Edwards, “God’s Awful Judgment in the Breaking and Withering of the Strong Rods of a Community” (June 26, 1748), in Sermons and Discourses, 1743–1758, ed. Wilson Kimnach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 324; R. C. De Prospo, Theism in the Discourse of Jonathan Edwards (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 131.
25. Richard Hildreth, Theory of Morals: An Inquiry Concerning the Law of Moral Distinctions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1844), 2, 3, 16, 18, 28–29, 248.
26. Abraham Lincoln, “Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity” (July 31, 1846) and “Message to Congress in Special Session” (July 4, 1861), in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. R. P. Basler et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:382, 4:438.
27. Laurens Perseus Hickok, Empirical Psychology; or, The Science of Mind from Experience (Boston: Ginn, Heath & Co., 1882), 59, 61.
28. Edward H. Madden, Chauncey Wright (New York: Washington Square Press, 1964), 42–43; Porter, Elements of Moral Science, 562.
29. John M. O’Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 1, 58, 62–63.
30. Paul F. Boller, Freedom and Fate in American Thought (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1978), 189; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 1931), 461.
31. William James, “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges,” Nation 23 (September 21, 1876): 178–79; James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking” (1906), in William James: Writings, 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America), 539–41; John E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy, rev. ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 30–35; James Hoopes, Consciousness in New England: From Puritanism and Ideas to Psychoanalysis and Semiotic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 284–86.
32. George Herbert Palmer, The Problem of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 46–47; William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 444.
33. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual: First Series (1899; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 36, 339; Royce, Pittsburgh lectures on the doctrine of loyalty (1908) and “Of the Will as the Principle in Philosophy,” Josiah Royce Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Vincent Buranelli, Josiah Royce (New York: Twayne, 1964), 111–16; Peter Fuss, The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 96, 98, 174; Douglas R. Anderson, “Who’s a Pragmatist: Royce and Peirce at the Turn of the Century,” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society 41 (2005): 468; J. A. K. Kegley, “Grace, the Moral Gap, and Royce’s Beloved Community,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (2004): 177–78.
34. Morton White, The Question of Free Will: A Holistic View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 30, 125, 135; Steven Cahn, Fate, Logic, and Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 80–82, 105, 136–37.
35. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 377–83.
36. Ted Honderich, How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 37, 59; Arthur Compton, The Freedom of Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), 22–24, 56–57; Markus E. Schlosser, “The Neuroscientific Study of Free Will: A Diagnosis of the Controversy,” Synthese 191 (2014): 245–62; Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 311; Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8; Double, “Misdirection in the Free Will Problem,” American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 357–66.
37. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11, 171; Zagzebski, “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free Will,” RelS 21 (1985): 294, 297–98; Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 158, 160; van Inwagen, “When Is the Will Free?” Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989): 421.
38. Nelson Pike ruthlessly contrasted Augustine with the free-willism of evangelical Protestant philosopher Alvin Platinga in “Plantinga on Free Will and Evil,” RelS 15 (1979), 472–73; on which see also Antony Flew, “Compatibilism, Free Will and God,” Philosophy 48 (1973): 244; William Hasker, God, Time and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 59, 120, 183–84; D. Z. Phillips, “William Hasker’s Avoidance of the Problems of Evil and God (Or: On Looking outside the Igloo),” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007): 37; William H. Davis, The Freewill Question (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), vii, 6, 7, 16.
39. Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 27; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), xvi; Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 41–42.