by John Calvin
Editor’s Introduction
In The Bondage and Liberation of the Will, John Calvin responds to the Roman Catholic theologian Albert Pighius, who had attacked Calvin’s teaching on the bondage of the human will. Calvin’s concern is to show that the necessity of sin does not mean that sinners are externally forced to sin against their will. To make that distinction clear, he identifies four ways the will may be described: free, enslaved, voluntary, or coerced.
The following is a fresh translation from Calvin’s original Latin:
But since Pighius continually confuses necessity with coercion, and since it is of the greatest importance for the present question that we understand and carefully retain the distinction between them, we must observe how these four things differ from one another: a will may be free, enslaved, voluntary, or coerced.
By a free will people ordinarily understand—and Pighius likewise defines it in this way—a will that has it within its power to choose either good or evil.
A coerced will, properly speaking, cannot exist, since the two ideas contradict one another. Nevertheless, for the sake of instruction we must explain what is meant, so that it may be understood what coercion is. We therefore call that will coerced which does not incline this way or that of its own accord, or by an inward movement of choice, but is violently driven by an external force.
We call a will voluntary when it moves of its own accord in the direction in which it is carried, and is neither seized by force nor dragged unwillingly.
Finally, an enslaved will is one which, because of its corruption, is held captive under the dominion of evil desires, so that it can choose nothing but evil, even though it does so willingly and gladly, without being driven by any external force.
According to these definitions, we grant that man possesses choice and that his choice is voluntary, so that if he does anything evil, it must be imputed to him and to his own voluntary choice. We exclude coercion and violence, because these are contrary to the nature of the will and cannot coexist with it.
But we deny that the will is free, because through man’s inborn wickedness it is necessarily carried toward evil and can desire nothing but evil.
From this it may be seen how great the difference is between necessity and coercion. For we do not say that man is dragged unwillingly into sinning, but that because his will is corrupt, he is held captive under the yoke of sin and therefore necessarily wills what is evil. For where there is slavery, there is necessity. Yet it makes a very great difference whether that slavery is voluntary or coerced.
We locate the necessity of sinning nowhere else than in the corruption of the will; from this it follows that the will itself acts voluntarily.
Thus it is clear that voluntariness and necessity can exist together at the same time, despite Pighius’s attempt to evade this by supposing that man is free only if he does neither good nor evil necessarily.
Source: John Calvin, Defensio sanae et orthodoxae doctrinae de servitute et liberatione humani arbitrii, adversus calumnias Alberti Pighii Campensis, in Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, vol. 6, Corpus Reformatorum 34 (Brunsvigae: C. A. Schwetschke et Filium, 1867), pp. 279–280, esp. p. 280.