Freedom and responsibility Quote by John Marenbon

““The terms for the medieval debate on predestination were set by Augustine. He had tried throughout his life to reconcile two conflicting ideas: first, that humans must have freedom of choice in order to be moral agents; second, that God owes nothing to humans because, after the Fall, all humans stand to be damned unless God rescues them, something he would do not because they deserve it but because he graciously so chooses. Augustine’s later work stresses the second of these requirements, and in the mid-ninth century Gottschalk of Orbais brought out its full force by insisting that there is a dual predestination, either to salvation or to damnation. Worried by the social implications of a teaching that seemed to offer no scope to the individual’s efforts in gaining salvation, some of the leading Carolingian churchmen reacted by claiming that there is no predestination to hell but only to heaven – a position only superficially less deterministic than Gottschalk’s, since anyone not predestined to heaven would in fact be damned. John Scottus, asked to intervene, was led to a bold analysis of free will and law in his De praedestinatione. His position, radical in its insistence against the grain of Augustinian Christianity on real human freedom and responsibility, in its turn provoked some intelligent philosophical discussion from his opponents (see Chapter 29).12””

— John Marenbon