[In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1979, Armstrong examines Plotinus's ideas concerning freedom and free will.]

The treatise “On the Voluntary and the Will of the One” (Enneads VI 8 [39]) is the profoundest discussion of the metaphysic of will and freedom in ancient Western philosophical literature. A careful study of it, especially of … ch. 7, 11-12 and Plotinus' exasperated but thorough and serious reply to it, seems to me to bring out an important difference in ways of looking at freedom, human and divine, which (though not always consciously perceived) is apparent in Greek philosophical discussions from Aristotle onwards, and has had a considerable influence on, and at times produced considerable tensions in, Christian thought about the freedom of God.

The tension or difference of emphasis which I detect here may be expressed as follows. On one side the essence of freedom is perceived as being free to be oneself, which means, in the strongly teleological forms of thought which predominate in Greek thought from Plato onwards, to be oneself at one's best, to energize according to one's full and complete energeia, to realise which is one's good and goal; and to be so without external limitation, constraint or impediment—external, that is, to one's true nature or selfhood. On the other, the essence of freedom is seen as consisting in an absolutely undetermined power of choice between alternatives, a liberty of opinion not restricted or determined even by one's own nature. The two are not as a rule stated in Hellenic or in patristic or in mediaeval Christian thought as absolutely mutually exclusive. Those who prefer the first will generally admit that, at a certain level, freedom must express itself in choice between opposites: those who prefer the second will often admit that when one reaches the highest and most perfect possible self-realization one has passed beyond choice—the blessed in heaven, for most Christian theologians, cannot choose to be other than they are or do other than they do, and are no less free for that.

Plotinus begins VI 8 with an analysis of our concept of human freedom and ascends from there, with considerable trepidation but admitting that he has no better starting point, to consider the freedom of the Good or One. It will therefore be necessary, if we are to understand his thought in its proper context, to glance briefly at earlier Greek thought about the freedom of man. His starting-point in the first chapters of VI 8 seems to be Aristotle's most influential discussion of the subject in the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics.¹ Aristotle is of course treating the subject from the point of view of moral responsibility and in the down-to-earth, practical, approximate way appropriate to moral philosophy as he understands it. In spite of his careful and useful distinctions he leaves a good deal unclear, and can be quoted on both sides in the difference about the nature of freedom with which we are dealing. Joachim explains and illustrates this lack of clarity excellently in his Commentary.² The problem is to see exactly what Aristotle thought about … (‘purpose’). Joachim sums up the two possible interpretations, between which the evidence from Aristotle's writings does not permit us to decide, as follows: ‘according to the first interpretation, the [purpose] is the all-important factor in determining the issue, but the [purpose] itself is nothing mysterious or miraculous. On the contrary, it is the expression of man's nature—the nature, that is, of a reasoning and deliberating, as well as a desiring, being. According to the second, our good and bad actions express a ‘deliberate decision’ which appears to emerge without intelligible development, and without intelligible connexion with the rest of man's nature and the environment in which he lives. Aristotle himself, as far as I can judge, wavers in such a way that passages can be quoted in support of both of the above lines of interpretation’.³

The Epicureans are not relevant to this discussion as part of the background of the thought of Plotinus or most Christian thinkers. But they are worth mentioning here as the Hellenic philosophers who passionately championed the view that the power of absolutely undertermined choice is the essence of human freedom. For them indeterminacy is built into our nature by the famous (though not too clearly attested) doctrine of the atomic ‘swerve’.⁴ The Stoics are very relevant indeed, and much in VI 8 derives from Stoic thought. Here the problem of human freedom and responsibility appears in its most acute form because it is considered in a setting of determinism and cosmic optimism. Stoic determinism is theoretically absolute⁵: and this applies in the sphere of human will and freedom. Freedom for Chrysippus means acting from our own inner resources, our own nature moving itself by its own forces in response to external circumstances. But our nature, and so our response, seem to be determined.⁶ Yet the Stoics, as austere moralists, need to assert, and do assert continually, that at least ‘assent’ is properly attributable to us, that we can genuinely accept our destiny as our destination and be blamed if we do not. There are immense problems here for the Stoics, which they never really solved. But perhaps no one else did either. The Middle Platonists certainly failed to deal with the question satisfactorily. Their distinction between lower ‘fate’ … and higher ‘providence’ … is not helpful here.⁷ But it does carry with it the Platonic belief that our selves transcend this world at their highest and have their true home in the intelligible, and therefore, in their true nature, are free from the causal nexus, the fate or necessity of the physical world. This is an important part of the thought of Plotinus. But neither the Middle Platonists nor, I think, anyone else in antiquity refuted the ‘soft’ determinism of Chrysippus, according to which our experience of freedom is our experience of the spontaneity, the genuine self-expression, of our determinate natures. As Dillon says⁸, ‘This [countering with dogmatic assertions] I fear, we will find to be the case generally with Middle Platonic efforts to deal with Fate and Free Will. Only Plotinus in Enneads III 2-3 comes seriously to grips with the problem, and he only succeeds ultimately in demonstrating its insolubility’.

One can see from this summary and unoriginal account why a Greek philosopher of the time of Plotinus would be inclined to think of freedom as freedom to be one's true self rather than freedom of undetermined choice, though the latter concept was by no means unfamiliar to Hellenic philosophers. But before we examine how Plotinus deals with his Platonic-Aristotelian-Stoic inheritance, since the main discussion in VI 8 is about the freedom of God, we should glance at the Greek philosophical background of this side of the discussion. There is not very much of it. It was not, perhaps, till the time of Plotinus, or shortly before, that, probably due to Jewish and Christian contacts, questions about God's freedom became serious and important. Plato uses will-language of God or the gods, especially in the deliberately mythical and anthropomorphic story of the Craftsman in the Timaeus, notably the speech to the created gods (41 A-D), which had great later influence, and in the somewhat ‘popular’ theodicy of Laws X (903-7). But he does not discuss the question of God's freedom: and Aristotle and the Stoics are even less interested in it. This does not of course mean that they deny it. Perhaps it would be fair to say that for both it is inconceivable that the divine should be other than it is or do other than it does, but this does not mean that it is bound or compelled by any sort of necessity. The Stoic God, so far from being compelled by necessity, is the very substance of necessity or fate. He is anything but a blind compelled compulsion. Marcus Aurelius says, quoting Euripides: ‘The earth is in love with the rain and the majestic sky is in love. The universe also is in love with making what is to be. So I say to the universe “I am in love along with you”’. … That is not the language of a man who feels himself the puppet of a force of nature. The Middle Platonists do not have much to add on God's freedom. Atticus, in the second century a.d. stresses Plato's teaching on divine will in his ‘fundamentalist’ interpretation of the Timaeus⁹: and this may have influenced some third-century Platonists. … The emphasis is a natural one in a polemic against Aristotle's denial of Providence: and, as Dillon has pointed out¹⁰, we cannot be sure how far the teaching of Atticus is adequately or accurately represented by this contribution to inter-school squabbling which attracted Eusebius for his own apologetic purposes.

Let us now turn to Plotinus. Before considering the free will of the One in VI 8 we should look closely at the model of human freedom with which he is working. As Dillon in the quotation above remarks, his fullest and most serious treatment of the question is in the great work “On Providence” (III 2-3 [47-48]). And, as Dillon also observes, this, by the very seriousness and clarity with which it presents the problems, demonstrates their untimate insolubility. No solution which Plotinus suggests seems to him perfectly satisfactory. In the end the problems of why there is wickedness in a divinely ordered world, and how the moral responsibility on which he insists can be reconciled with universal providence, remain unsolved. But one thing which is important for our purposes does seem clear. Plotinus does not appear to feel any need to assert a principle of free action in man which is totally undetermined. Our free actions, for which we are held responsible and must take the consequences, are indeed our own, but they are according to our natures, higher and lower, which are part of the organic structured unity of the intelligible or the disjunct harmony-in-conflict of the sense-world.¹¹ Man for Plotinus is a very complex being and can act according to various parts of his nature, and be himself on a number of different levels, with varying consequences. In his arguments against Stoic or Stoicizing Platonist and astrological determinism¹², what Plotinus is really concerned to maintain is that soul at its best transcends the realm of physical necessity and is a real cause of action higher than the [fate] of the sense-world, to which we are subject at our lower levels. Our thoughts and actions are not determined by the World-Soul or the stars. We are in that sense absolutely free, if we rise to the level at which freedom is possible. Plotinus is not interested in asserting a pure and absolute contingency of will, a total freedom of man to determine once and for all his own nature and destiny. His model of freedom is that of freedom to be oneself.

In the first chapters of VI 8 which are concerned with human freedom the position is even clearer, because the question is not as in “On Providence” ‘Who is to be blamed for wickedness here below? Is it just to hold God or man responsible?’ but ‘Where and when are we truly free? At what level and in what activity of our selves do we attain true freedom?’ In VI 8, where we are not looking for someone to blame, the wicked who act by lower passions and impulses have not even will let alone the power of self-disposal and self-command.¹³ True freedom, true autonomy and independence, is only attained when we are on the hous level, when nature and activity and thought and will are one, when we are not enslaved to or struggling with passions or dependent on external circumstances to attain our purposes: when we are in, and all our activity is directed towards, the Good. This is true freedom, the unhindered activity of our true self at its best.

In chapter 7 of VI 8 Plotinus begins by wondering whether it is right to carry his discussion of freedom beyond Noûs up to the Good. ‘How can one bring the very lord and master of all things of value after it which sits in the first seat, to which all things else want to ascend and depend on it and have their powers from it, so as to be able to have something attributable to themselves—how can one bring it [down] to what is attributable to you and me? To a point where Noûs also was only dragged with difficulty, though it was violently dragged’. Then he introduces … the ‘rash statement sent in from elsewhere’ (line 11), which says ‘Since [the nature of the Good] happens to be as it is, and has not the mastery of what it is, and is what it is not from itself, it would not have freedom, and its doing or not doing what it is necessitated to do or not to do is not attributable to itself’.

This has been interpreted in various ways. Bréhier¹⁴ and Cilento¹⁵ wanted to take it as a statement of Gnostic doctrine. Their parallels are not very convincing, though with our present vastly increased knowledge of Gnostic literature it might be possible to find better ones. But both the wording and the place of the [logos] in the treatise suggest an objection rather than a positive counter-statement of a doctrine different from that of Plotinus. …

There are two directions in which we can look to find a kind of Christian teaching which could have inspired such a criticism. One is to the kind of Christian Platonism, represented in the third century by Methodius of Olympus, which G. C. Stead detected in the background of the Arian controversy¹⁶, which laid much emphasis on creation by an act of divine will. (While perfectly prepared to believe that people of this way of thinking existed, I would not myself wish to think of them as forming any sort of ‘school’, or to locate then too precisely at Alexandria or elsewhere, or, for reasons already given, to attach too much importance to the influence of Atticus on their thought.) Methodius is certainly an extreme advocate of the indeterminacy view of human freedom.¹⁷ On divine freedom, however, his position is rather less extreme, and he has, perhaps, more than he would have liked to think in common with Origen, who has a good deal in common with Plotinus. Origen in the Contra Celsum¹⁸ is very indignant with Celsus for alleging that Christians get out of difficulties by saying ‘anything is possible to God’. He has already stated clearly and emphatically that God's omnipotence is limited by his divinity, goodness and wisdom¹⁹, and he replies to the allegation of Celsus by saying that Christians believe as firmly as philosophers that God cannot do anything ugly … or contrary to nature in the sense of either sinful or irreconcilable with reason. And in the De Principiis, in the great chapter of the first book on the Son²⁰, he shows all things eternally created in the Son whom it is inconceivable and impious to suppose that the Father would not eternally beget, create or radiate (good New Testament terms which Origen regards as all meaning the same thing). Origen seems completely uninterested in asserting any sovereign indeterminateness of God's will. This contrasts strongly with his account of the wills of created beings. It is of course central to his whole theodicy and account of divine creation and education that these are and remain absolutely and permanently indeterminate.²¹ Methodius certainly criticizes Origen's doctrine of eternal creation.²² But he does so, not on the ground that it limits or inhibits the freedom of God's will but that it makes God dependent on creation, makes him need creation in order to be God. Plotinus would have agreed with him that this cannot be so: he insists continually that the One does not need what springs from him. And in the De Autexousio²³, after a pious remark on the inscrutability of God's will, Methodius thinks it necessary to show that there are excellent reasons why God should create, namely i) that he did not think it right that his skill … should remain unexercised and undisplayed and ii) that he could not really be good without anyone to benefit by his goodness. Plotinus would have found the first reason ridiculous²⁴, but might not have objected too much to the second. Perhaps we might say that Plotinus, Origen and Methodius all start from a simple Platonist, thoroughly Greek, conception of God's omnipotence, in which the primary truth about God is that he is good and wise, and it is impious and insane even to frame the hypothesis that he could be other than he is or do other than he does. But nevertheless Methodius does say in the De Creatis²⁵ that the Father made all things instantaneously from non-existents by a bare act of will … and he shows himself as passionately opposed to the eternity of the world in De Creatis II-VII as he is to pre-existing matter in the De Autexousio. It is therefore perfectly possible that a Christian influenced by Methodius or some closely related theologian, who was looking for a stigma to beat a pagan dogma, should have produced the objection in Chapter 7.

There is, however, another possible Christian source of influence which is nearer to the circle of Plotinus at Rome. This is the teaching of Hippolytus. Hippolytus is inclined to use extreme indeterminacy-voluntarist language about God's freedom, insisting that God does just what he likes in creating.²⁶ In one passage²⁷ he carries this so far as to say, addressing mankind in general, that (I paraphrase) ‘God knew perfectly well what he was doing when he made you a man: if he had wanted to he could have made you a God, as he did the Logos’. Surely no Christian theologian has ever carried this kind of voluntarism further. And a Christian influenced by Hippolytus (who died about 236) might quite probably have been a casual auditor of the lectures of Plotinus in the middle 260's—we know from the case of Thaumasius²⁸ that such people sometimes made remarks.

The reply of Plotinus to the objection occupies the rest of the treatise (chapters 7-21). It is impossible to paraphrase this close-packed argument which, as always, is both based on and an exhortation to seek an awareness of that transcendent Good in union with whom we are ‘more than free and more than independent’.²⁹ What is important for our purposes is to note the way in which the language of will and freedom is used throughout, and especially clearly and forcibly in the last chapter (21). Plotinus, in order to combat the objection, is prepared to use this language, as he uses other positive ways of speaking of the One in this treatise, with continual warnings of their utter inadequacy. Substance, Act …, Love, Wakefulness or Super-Knowledge are all used as ‘divine names’, and the Good is spoken of as creating himself. And though every term is negated, its use implies also the negation of its contrary. This is always true in Plotinus, but is more explicit in this treatise than elsewhere.

As with the other terms, he warns continually against using ‘will’ in any way which would imply duality. The ‘will’ of the Good is not to be thought of for a moment as other than his ‘self’ or ‘substance’. ‘He is all will,’ Plotinus says, ‘and there is nothing in him which does not will, therefore not that which is before the will. He is, then first himself his will’. And he remains true to the concept of freedom with which he began the treatise by absolutely excluding any possibility of choice between alternatives from the freedom of the Good in willing both himself and his products (it seems self-evident to Plotinus that the Good in ‘willing’ himself ‘wills’ his self-diffusion). He remarks ‘to be capable of the opposites belongs to incapacity to remain with the best’. All other beings are freest when they are so perfectly conformed to the Good they seek as to be incapable of choosing the bad. And it would seem to Plotinus a blasphemous absurdity even to imagine for a moment the Good ‘willing’ anything other than himself. This implies no constraint on his freedom: his freedom is just being himself. …³⁰ And in so far as we are united to him his selfhood is perfect freedom, for us as for him. In so far as we live on any lower level he is also our ‘necessity and law’³¹ in that he produces the law in producing that level and gives us our destiny to return to him. But at the highest he is our freedom as he is his own. He is free to be the Good, and we are free to be good.

One would have thought that later Christians might have welcomed this great portrayal of a God who, in our inadequate human way of speaking, is himself the self-diffusive Good which he freely wills and the free will with which he wills it, without even the possibility of distinguishing God, good, and will which this language inevitably suggests. But of course they did not, at any rate in the context of creation. The hold of the view of freedom as essentially undetermined choice on Christian minds, especially in the West, has been so strong that room has had to be made for it at the top. There has also been a technical theological reason for rejecting the doctrine of Plotinus, the need to make a very sharp distinction between eternal generation and creation, which was strongly felt after Nicaea and the Arian controversy, though by no means always before, as the passages which I have referred to from Origen and Hippolytus show. …

Notes

1. III 1109b30-1114b25: cp. Eudemian Ethics 1225a9ff.

2. Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics. A Commentary by the late H.H. Joachim edited by D.A. Rees (Oxford 1951) pp. 107-111.

3. op. cit., p. 110.

4. Lucretius II 251-293: Cicero Nat. D. I 69.

5. See for example: S.V.F. II 944, 945, 959, 967.

6. S.V.F. 974 (=Cicero De Fato 39-44), 979, 1000.

7. Very useful and well-documented discussions of the thought of various Middle Platonists about fate, providence and free will can be found in J. Dillon The Middle Platonists (London 1977) by reference to the Table of Contents.

8. The Middle Platonists, p. 211.

9. Eusebius P.E. XV 801bff.

10. The Middle Platonists, pp. 248-251.

11. III 2, 10, 11-79: III 3, 2-5.

12. III 1 [3] and II 3 [52].

13. ch. 3, 17-26.

14. In his Notice to VI 8 in vol. VI 2 of the Budé edition (Paris 1938).

15. Paideia Antignostica (Florence 1971) pp. 25-26 cp. p. 225.

16. G.C. Stead ‘The Platonism of Arius’ in J.T.S. N.S. XVI 1 (April 1964) pp. 16-31.

17. De Autexousio and Symposium Logos 8 and the final dialogue 292-302.

18. IV 14.

19. III 70.

20. I 2, especially 2, 29-30 and 10.

21. De Principiis I 5.3, 7.2, 8.3: II 1-3, 9.1.

22. De Creatis II-VII pp. 494-498 Bonwetsch.

23. XXII 2-11, pp. 202-6 Bonwetsch.

24. cp. II 9 [33] 4, 13-15. But IV 8 [6] 5, 29-32 should be taken into account in assessing the distance between Plotinus and Methodius here. What Plotinus would have objected to in this passage might perhaps have been not so much the reasons given for creation as the idea that God has to advert to them and decide to create at a particular time.

25. IX p. 498 Bonwetsch.

26. Contra Noetum (Hippolyte Contre les Hérésies: Fragment ed. P. Nautin, Paris 1949) 8 (p. 249,25 Nautin), 10 (251, 11-253, 8. N).

27. Philosophoumena 10. 32-33. (P.G. 16.3.3450A).

28. Life 13.12.

29. ch. 15,21.

30. ch. 14,42.

31. ch. 10,44. As has already been remarked (p. 398) in considering the Stoic God, to be necessity is something very different from being bound by necessity.