God’s Will as the Foundation of Morality: A Medieval Historical Perspective

Theological voluntarism places the foundation of morality in the will of God. The formulation of such a thesis warrants further refinement. Different formulations of theological voluntarism were put forward in medieval philosophical theology involving the relation of God’s will to the divine intellect (reason) in determining ethical status. The fourteenth century Franciscan Andrew of Neufchateau maintained a purely voluntaristic theory in which it is God’s will alone (and not the divine intellect) that determines ethical status. Subsequently Pierre d’Ailly worked with a divine will which is identical with the divine intellect in a strong sense while still maintaining that it is properly assigned to the divine will to be an obligatory law. Later, Jean Gerson, a student of Pierre d’Ailly, spoke explicitly of God’s will and reason together as involved in God’s activity in the ethical realm. In this paper, we set out these three different formulations of theological voluntarism, tracing the evolution of medieval formulations of theological voluntarism. Although the paper is historical in nature, we conclude with some reflections on how contemporary philosophers and theologians interested in theological voluntarism might profit from study of this historical literature.

Could God Love Cruelty?

One of the foremost objections to theological voluntarism is the contingency objection. If God’s will fixes moral facts, then what if God willed that agents engage in cruelty? I argue that even unrestricted theological voluntarists should accept some logical constraints on possible moral systems—hence, some limits on ways that God could have willed morality to be—and these logical constraints are sufficient to blunt the force of the contingency objection. One constraint I defend is a very weak accessibility requirement, related to (but less problematic than) existence internalism in metaethics. The theological voluntarist can maintain: Godcouldn’t have loved cruelty, and even though he could have willed behaviors we find abhorrent, he could only have done so in a world of deeply alien moral agents. We cannot confidently declare such a world unacceptable.

Salvific Luck in Islamic Theology

One of the major arguments for theological voluntarism offered by the Ash’arites (e.g. al-Ghazali) involves the claim that that some of the factors upon which our salvation or condemnation depend are beyond our control. We will call this “the problem of salvific luck.” According to the Ash’arites, the fact that God does save and condemn human beings on the basis of factors beyond their control casts doubt on any non-voluntarist conception of divine justice. A common way to respond to this Ash’arite argument for voluntarism is to eliminate the role of luck in God’s judgments. But this is not the Mu’tazilite way of resisting the argument. The Mu’tazilite, who oppose theological voluntarism, choose a more daunting solution to the problem of salvific luck. They reject the claim that God’s Judgment concerning the eternal destiny of some persons would be unjust (relative to the objective common sensical standard of justice that could not have been different) if it depended upon factors beyond their control. The paper discusses this solution to the problem of salvific luck.

Key Texts: A Different kind of Reformation: Revisiting the Lynn White thesis

Summary This commentary revisits Lynn White’s article, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ (1967), and questions the assumption that there is a unified ‘Lynn White thesis’. Instead, it proposes a complex narrative in which four key elements can be identified: (1) the long history of human impact on the environment; (2) the claim that the human-environment interaction took on a new, destructive quality around 1850 through the ‘marriage’ of specifically Western science and technology; (3) an historical narrative of how Latin Christianity is responsible for the specific thrust of Western science and technology, in which White identifies Latin theological voluntarism as key trigger; and (4) a constructivist view of religion as malleable. It argues, further, that White’s narrative itself relies on a radical variant of the Latin theological voluntarism that he attacks, and it points towards Christian environmental virtue ethics as an underexplored way forward.

Universals in English Platonism

This chapter reconstructs the topic of universals in the English Platonists’ epistemologies and ontologies. More and Cudworth restrict universals to the mental realm, stating that whatsoever exists without the mind is singular. Despite this nominalistic principle, universal concepts are not inductive constructions, but primarily divine thoughts and secondarily a priori innate ideas in the human mind. The archetypal theory of creation and the connection of finite minds to God’s Mind ensure their objective validity, in antithesis to Hobbes’ phenomenalism and sensationalism. Norris shares the archetypal theory of creation, but refuses innatism, and his doctrine of universals is framed in terms of his theory of the ideal world inspired by Malebranche. Both the Cambridge Platonists and Norris, opposing theological voluntarism, discuss the status of ideas in God’s mind, which oscillate from being merely thoughts of the divine intellect to being its eternal objects.