More Free When Led

An excerpt from my new book, Affective Knowledge in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Despite human agency under the direction of the Holy Spirit being likened to the instinctive behavior of animals, Aquinas affirms a critical difference, namely, that free will (liberum arbitrium) remains. Indeed, for Aquinas, man becomes more free when so “led.” This introduces a critical feature of Aquinas’ doctrine of the divinus instinctus that is absent in Aristotle. Such “moved freedom” is a heightened example of Aquinas’s fundamental conception regarding the non-competitive nature of grace and free will. Emery remarks, “Here, St. Thomas shows that the full recognition of human freedom does not undermine the absolute priority of God (the Holy Spirit) who acts as first and transcendent cause, and who is precisely the cause of the free mode of the holy actions accomplished by the children of God.” Precisely because God’s causality is not on the same plane as human causality (i.e., conditioned by time and space), they cannot be construed competitively. Grace—in this case the operation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit—far from slighting authentic human operation, allows for its fullness and flourishing. At the conclusion of his careful study on the instinctus Spiritus Sancti in Aquinas, J.H. Walgrave remarks:

The instinct (of the Holy Spirit) comes from the outside but works from the inside: it is exterior by its origin, but interior by its way of working within us. The more perfect its work, the more interiorized it becomes; and our will and the Holy Spirit work together as if they were forming a unique principle. The growth of the motion received by our spirit does not diminish the very motion of freedom. Indeed, under the New Law, the instinct of the Holy Spirit becomes in us our own instinct. The instinct of the Holy Spirit builds up the very movement of the free will.

The gifts do not diminish, but exalt human freedom. In this respect, Aquinas departs markedly from Aristotle. The divine instinct by which the gifts operate is not some exterior “unreasoning drive” (hormē) lying beyond the precincts of reason and opposed to free will. The gifts are not an alien force imposing itself from the outside like the computer hacker’s hostile takeover of an operating system. Rather, the gifts become a connatural principle of the creature’s new spiritual freedom. Although the gifts come from above—every good and perfect gift “comes from above”—they come to be possessed as interior principles of the human spirit, expressive of our own deepest identities—they become connatural to human faculties of loving and knowing.

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The Aristotelian notion of “divine instinct” as articulated in De Bona Fortuna provides Aquinas with a decisive and distinct way to affirm the primacy of the divine auxilium for all supernatural life. To take Aristotle straight, however, would have warped Aquinas’s theology of the gifts. It would render the divine motio violent, akin to the pagan sense of divine possession whereby one’s native rational faculties and free will are usurped. Instead, Aquinas substantially transforms Aristotle’s instinctus—Aquinas’s “divine instinct” does not override human freedom but enables human freedom.