Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy

This is an excellent book on an extraordinarily interesting topic: the flourishing of philosophical thought concerning free will during the golden century of medieval philosophy that begins around the middle of the thirteenth century.Over the last several decades, leading scholars in the field have produced careful studies of how one or another of the great figures of the era understands free will, but there is a remarkable amount of disagreement about even the most basic questions of interpretation. This suggests that we may not yet have a clear understanding of the basic contours of the medieval debate. Instead, there is reason to fear, we may be imposing competing modern intuitions about free will onto these old texts. Hoffmann’s book is in this regard an important step forward. Instead of looking with microscopic detail at any one author, it aims for a comprehensive grasp of the broader debate, covering not just the great figures but also many lesser ones, and attempting a continuous narrative of how the issues evolve.This is a book that can be judged on three different levels: as an encyclopedic guide, as an intellectual history, and as a philosophical analysis. As a guide, it is a unqualified success. Hoffmann collects with exemplary diligence the relevant texts, offering expert information about chronology as he goes, and providing comprehensive references to the large and multilingual secondary literature. No one should think of starting their research on this subject anywhere but here.The second level, intellectual history, is where Hoffmann’s true center of gravity as a scholar lies. He does the sort of work that, fifty years ago, would have been conducted from within a history department, before the historians decided they had spent enough time talking about the cultural elites. Here the task is not just to inventory sources, but to produce a broad and meaningful narrative about how ideas develop over time.It’s in this spirit that Hoffmann sets himself the task of working through three tightly connected topics: free will, the source of evil, and angelic sin. The book is accordingly divided into three parts, with the first part, on free will, taking up well over half of the whole book. The title’s talk of “rebel angels” signals just how important the case of Satan’s fall is to medieval reflections on free will, and philosophical readers will expect the angels to serve as a familiar sort of thought experiment in counterfactual possibilities. But that sort of thing is not Hoffmann’s style: he explores these discussions of Satan’s fall not as a means to understanding free will, but for the sheer value of understanding what medieval authors thought about the fallen angels. Hence, the book culminates with a discussion of the rebel angels, well after Hoffmann has set out his understanding of their thinking about free will.Chapter by chapter, Hoffmann provides the best narrative of these issues that’s currently available, going back as needed to discuss figures like Augustine, Anselm, and Bernard of Clairvaux, but focusing on the period from Bonaventure and Aquinas to Peter Auriol and William of Ockham. There’s no disputing the broad contours of his story: that the debate over free will takes on a special richness beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, and that discussions of the origin of sin shed a particular light on essential aspects of the debate. On every page, there’s much to be learned from the fine-grained details of his narrative, and when Hoffmann turns to synthesis, as on page 93, he does it with crystalline clarity.Still, precisely because he attempts to synthesize a large and complex debate, I sometimes found myself in sharp disagreement with his narrative. For instance, even though it’s hard to go wrong in referring to Aristotle as a “game changer” (22) for thirteenth-century Latin philosophy, free will is one topic where that is wrong. The medieval debate over free will happened not because of Aristotle but despite him. As Hoffmann himself acknowledges, “the concept of will is foreign to Aristotle” (150), and the same might be said of the concept of freedom as it applies here. As with any debate during this period, much of the surrounding framework is Aristotelian, and Hoffmann stresses Aristotle’s transformative contribution to medieval conceptions of deliberation and voluntary action (22). Still, with respect to free will, it’s hard to think of any major philosophical topic during this time that has less to do with what the Philosopher himself thought.I also find it quite unhelpful to describe these later-thirteenth-century debates as arising as the result of a “psychological turn” (1). What Hoffmann means by this is that the debate comes to revolve around the competing roles of intellect and will. Whether that’s distinctive of this period is itself doubtful, but even if it’s so, it hardly warrants talk of a psychological turn. As far as that goes, there’s no medieval author who can compete with Augustine for psychological acuity. And I would have thought that Anselm’s discussion of these issues is also notably rich in this dimension, even though on Hoffmann’s telling Anselm’s discussion proceeds “without entering deeply into moral psychology” (18). To my mind, what’s distinctive about the later medieval debate over free will is not its focus on psychology but the rigor of its metaphysics. And what spurs those inquiries, I would say, is not Aristotle’s psychology but instead Ibn Sīnā’s deterministic physics and metaphysics, which is what ultimately drives the later medieval Latin crisis over free will.Anyone engaging with this territory has to make a decision about whether to endorse the familiar but questionable labels ‘intellectualist’ and ‘voluntarist’. Hoffmann flags the oversimplifications that this risks (5), but he uses the labels anyway. Perhaps there’s no good alternative, but I think his own discussion points toward one respect in which the dichotomy is particularly problematic. Although it’s clear enough that there’s a definite voluntarist camp that emerges in the 1270s, it’s tendentious to describe their rivals as intellectualists. (It should be said that neither of these labels was used at the time.) Even if Aristotle himself counts as an intellectualist, none of the medieval figures that Hoffmann discusses seeks to privilege the intellect over the will in a thoroughgoing way. This has often been pointed out with regard to Aquinas, whom Hoffmann characterizes as a moderate intellectualist, but it’s true even for the most prominent member of the “strict intellectualist” camp, Godfrey of Fontaines. For, as Hoffmann carefully describes, Godfrey argues that both will and intellect meet the essential requirements for being free (112), and one of the main points of Godfrey’s account is to stress the way that will and intellect work in conjunction so that human beings count as free and morally responsible agents.A notable feature of Hoffmann’s discussion is the weight he puts on Henry of Ghent as the critical figure in the voluntarist movement. This is not exactly a revelation, but the extreme tedium of Henry’s prose has led most scholars to focus on the more exciting work of Peter John Olivi, John Duns Scotus, and Ockham. Hoffmann puts quite boldly the case for Henry’s importance, writing that “by 1289, the principal positions in the free will debate ... had already been theorized and publicly defended.” That leaves Scotus and Ockham as offering mere “refinements and radicalizations” (119). This is a provocative claim, given that scholars have traditionally thought of Scotus and Ockham as the principal figures in the voluntarist movement. I’m still inclined to follow tradition, since it’s only with Scotus and then Ockham that the voluntarists begin to reject eudaimonism, which I take to lie at the very core of the “intellectualist” position. But that judgment depends on a clearer, broader account of what voluntarism amounts to than we currently have. It will be interesting to see how our understanding of these issues grows in the light of Hoffmann’s research.Finally, let me turn to the third of the levels I mentioned earlier, philosophical analysis. Here I will be brief, because Hoffmann’s admirably careful historical method does not lend itself to the aggressive interpretive methods favored by the more analytic of philosophical historians. Still, I would have liked to have a much clearer understanding of some of the key conceptual tools that Hoffmann inevitably must deploy. When he writes, for instance, that “we have now seen how Aquinas explains that the will’s acts are not necessitated” (52), exactly what is the force of ‘necessitated’, and how does that relate to other conceptions of necessity? And when he writes, over and over, that an author secures the “sourcehood” that guarantees freedom, what exactly does that amount to? Sometimes it seems to refer to an indeterminacy intrinsic to the agent, but elsewhere it seems to require only that the agent be the cause of its acts. Above all, I would like to understand better the problem Hoffmann sees as lying at the heart of the entire later medieval debate: where to locate the “locus of control” that would secure freedom and moral responsibility. He repeatedly expresses disappointment that an account works its way to a certain point and then gives up on solving the problem. Ultimately he sees this lack of control as a difficulty that plagues both houses (158–59). But what exactly is the problem, and what would a solution even look like? If the problem is one for which there’s no conceivable solution, then might we be better off concluding that there was never a problem in the first place? Would that be to take a side in the medieval debate, or to call into question the debate itself? Or is it Hoffmann who forces this problem on these texts? It depends, no doubt, on exactly what the problem is understood to be.Let me close with some words of praise for the high production standards achieved by the author and the press. The cover, from a fifteenth-century book of hours, is gorgeous, and makes vivid just how disastrous the fall of the angels was: half the choir stalls are empty! And though I looked assiduously, I was unable to find a single typo or stylistic infelicity in the whole book. In all, this is a book that has been made to the very highest standards. Except—I cannot resist closing with just the smallest of notes for the Cambridge University Press design team: if you’re going to crop a work of religious art, do not cut off the top half of the Lord God

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