Can the Saints Sin?
Theological Letters
The following letter was written to “Margot,” who wrote to me with a question about free will. My podcast series on the problem of evil raised for her a question: If freedom is essential to rational creatures, like man, and this power is what opens the door to evil, then what are the ramifications for the life to come? If sin ceases, does free will cease as well? The following is my reply, which highlights the Eastern patristic answer to this question.
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Dear “Margot,”
Your question about free will is a good one, and the answer is not at all obvious.1 The Eastern fathers are attuned to the issue you raise and answer it rather directly, but many philosophers of religion today do not notice the issue.
I published an article on this topic some time back, noting this as a rather significant blind spot in the modern free will defense: The defense often defines free will in a manner that requires the possibility of evil, but it never contemplates the fact that, according to Christian tradition, God is free but is not susceptible to evil. Any adequate free will defense, then, must account for why freedom entails the possibility of evil in creatures but not in God.2
Be warned, the article is a scholarly one, so it might be more technical than you’d like. If, however, you’re feeling ambitious, here’s a link: “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: The Significance of Hylomorphic Creationism to the Free Will Defense.”
That article aside, allow me to offer a brief summary of the answer.
Let’s begin with free will. It would be a mistake to define free will as the power to do good or evil, even though this is often how people define the term. Free will in the Eastern fathers (and other ancients) is the power of self-determination — literally, self authority or power (αὐτεξουσία).3 Unlike a plant or irrational animal that inevitably develops and operates in a manner reflective of its nature, a free creature has the strange capacity to choose how to express its nature. Whatever choices one makes are anything but inevitable.
Now, this brings us to the second thing to keep in mind, namely, that self-determination paired with creatureliness is what opens the door to evil. The reason is that a creature is inherently developmental, moving from incomplete to complete, or from imperfection to perfection,4 or from non-being into being.
This definition of creatureliness becomes apparent in the Arian dispute,5 and you can here it echo in the divine liturgy and other Eastern rites: God calls all things from non-being into being. Non-being, in this context, refers to potential — specifically the potential of matter to be any number of things. Every creature is a being who once did not exist but whose existence was possible, and God called that possible being into existence. When God creates, a possible being moves from non-being (or bare possibility) into being (concrete reality).
For this reason, every creature is transitional. Plants move from seedling to sapling. Animals move from fetus to infant to adult. With moral and spiritual beings, this development necessarily involves acts of will, since moral properties are only possible for beings who know what they ought to do and have the ability to do or not do. (The point is evident in the fact that every moral defense makes the appeal that I didn’t know or I couldn’t help it: If both knowing and ability apply, then moral properties adhere.) So, while a body might develop without choice, simply unfolding in accord with its nature, in order for a moral and spiritual being to develop, it must freely act in accord with its good.
This, incidentally, is critical to the image-likeness distinction in the Eastern fathers. They notice that, in Genesis, God sets out to make man in his own image and according to his likeness, but he then makes man in his own image — likeness is not repeated (cf. Gen 1:26-7). And what follows is a command and a moral test. The image of God, according to these fathers, is the rational spirit, which makes man capable of imitating God and partaking of his nature, but the likeness is his active imitation and participation in the divine nature — something that can only come about by choice. In a word, the likeness of God requires that man cooperate.6
Now, add to this that man is a creature. What this means is that he begins both incomplete and susceptible to development and change, this being the very nature of creatureliness.7 Such changeability means that man’s self-determination directs his formation: He can either direct his development in accord with his good (toward proper formation) or contrary to it (producing a malformity). In other words, self-determination (or free will) is not what opens the door to evil but self-determination paired with the pliability of creatureliness is what opens this door.
This is why God, who is not developmental, who does not come into being, but has always been perfectly what he is, can be free or self-determining without the possibility of evil. Divine self-determination does not facilitate God becoming something else, attaining or achieving some perfection he lacks. Rather, being perfect and fully what he is, God’s self-determination is only ever a free expression of his nature, of what he is already. His freedom expresses his already realized Goodness, Justice, Love, and so on.
Make no mistake, there is freedom in the expression. There are countless ways to show love, for example. So God’s demonstrations of his love are not inevitable but free. That God’s deeds always express is love is inevitable, but the particulars are not.
Now, this point helps clarify why freedom does not necessitate evil. But it still leaves unanswered how a creature might hope to attain sinlessness. For the real problem — one to which the Eastern fathers are attuned and which we have already touched on above — is that creatures are inherently susceptible to change. The Greek word is alloiótēs (ἀλλοιότης), which means to become something else. The very fact that we move into being and are material in nature means, according to the Eastern fathers, that we are innately susceptible to becoming different than we are presently.8 How, then, can we hope to reach a point of stasis, where we not only attain virtue but attain it in a manner such that we are no longer susceptible to falling?
I suppose we could split the question and first ask whether the Eastern fathers do, in fact, believe the Saints are immune to falling in the age to come. The answer is yes. The Origenists entertained the idea of the world falling, returning to God, and falling again, and the view was deemed heretical.9
So, if the Saints cannot fall in the age to come, what is the basis for such hope?
You asked whether the answer might be the removal of free will. Thankfully, the answer is no. In fact, the Eastern fathers would deem the suggestion impossible in two regards. The first is that it is essential to the nature of man that we have free will, this being innate to our rational nature. Hence, any talk of removing free will while still having a human lands in contradiction on par with removing one side of a square while still having a square.
The second regard concerns providence itself. The Eastern fathers understand God’s providential goodness to mean that he moves all things toward their good. Hence, even when permitting or sending an evil, these are only ever instrumental means of directing the creation toward its proper formation. Such is the nature of divine Goodness — God can do none other. For this reason, to remove the will of man would be to violate the order of nature, operating contrary to man’s natural good — akin to removing sight from an eye. But this is contrary to the very nature of God, making the suggestion impossible. Hence, the restoration of man in the age to come must preserve free will, not violate it.
What, then, is the solution? The answer, in a word, is deification.
I’m sure, as an Orthodox convert, you’ve heard of this doctrine — that the Eastern fathers believe that we can partake of the divine nature and “become God.” Shocking though the phrase may be, they do not mean, of course, that man can become a fourth member of the Trinity. A creature can never become God in that sense, a point that is painfully obvious in the Arian dispute.10 Instead, the Eastern fathers see it as analogous to iron becoming enflamed through communion with fire.
Imagine iron being placed in fire to the point that it glows and burns, even when removed from the flames. The iron remains iron, but it now bears within its person, as it were, something from the pyrotic — its operative powers or energies of heating and lighting. So it is with our communion with God.11
The hope of the gospel is that we can partake of the divine nature, and through that partaking, we can be healed — healed of death, healed of corruption, and made holy. Notice, however, that the New Testament is very clear that the things offered to us in the gospel are uniquely divine. We’re offered immortality, but Paul is clear that God alone is immortal (1 Tim 6:16). In other words, the eternal life offered to us in the gospel is God’s own life. This is also clear in the gospel of John, where Christ says the Father has life in himself and he has given it to the Son to have life in himself (Jn 5:26), but he chastises his hearers who won’t come to him to have life (Jn 5:40) — the life of the Father being the life that is in Christ which he offers to us. Similarly, when we read Paul’s discourse about resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, we find that it is more than reanimation; it is a metamorphosis, putting off death for immortality (which we have already noted to be divine in nature) and a putting off of corruption for incorruption.12 And Peter tells us plainly how such incorruption is possible: We escape the corruption that has come upon the world by partaking of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4).
Now, keep in mind that corruption means any malformity, any twisting of a nature — like blindness to the eye. In the case of free creatures, sin and wickedness is a corruption, a misuse of self-determination that moves us away from our good. So, here, in the words of Peter, we find the remedy: We can escape the corruption of our misuse of freedom by partaking of the divine nature.
To put this in the terms of the Eastern Church fathers, the question you’re asking is how we can hope to become atreptos (ἄτρεπτος) — which means unturnable in goodness? Their answer is that we become unturnable by partaking of the only unturnable nature, namely, God’s own. God is unturnably Good, and we can only attain such untrunability by partaking of his nature. In other words, just as we attain immortality by partaking of God’s immortality, so we attain moral and spiritual unturnability by partaking of God’s unturnable Goodness.13
In sum, the healing offered to us in the gospel is meant to do its work until both our body and soul is fully healed and energized by God. And in that healing and energizing, our soul finally reaches a state of holiness and perfection in which we attain incorruption, no longer susceptible to change for ill. We retain our freedom, but like God’s own freedom, such self-determination, in this sanctified state, is only ever the free expression of our perfected nature, freely determining how to love God and neighbor, no longer susceptible to malformation and corruption.
I hope that helps!
Sincerely,
Dr. Jacobs
P.S. For a further exploration of some of these points, you may want to check out my trio of letters on anthropology and deification, along with my letter on resurrection and deification.14
Don’t forget to pre-order the East West series at the lowest possible price. I sincerely appreciate the support in this effort.
Margot expressed her question with some apology, fearing that the answer to the problem was “obvious” to those more trained in philosophy.
For extensive citations on the material discussed in this letter, see my article, here referred to: “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: The Significance of Hylomorphic Creationism to the Free Will Defense.”
Such is the Greek term used for free will. The term “free will” is a evolution of Latin verbiage. The Latin term is liberum arbitrium, or “free choice.” Within the Latin scholastics, will is the faculty that exercises choice. So the question was not whether the will is free but whether the will has the power of contrary choice. Yet, “free will” has become common parlance in contemporary Anglophone literature.
By “imperfection,” I do not mean sin or evil, as if creatures are necessarily evil. Rather, I use the term to indicate that the creature is not yet fully formed, or perfect.
In the interest of not overwhelming Margot, I forgo a summary of the Arian dispute. But I’ll include a brief explanation here. The heresy of Arius of Alexandria was his claim that the Son of God was created. The telltale sign of Arianism was the phrase, “there was when he was not” — that is, there was a time when the Son of God did not exist and then God created him. The dispute makes clear how the pro-Nicene opponents of Arius understand the nature of creatureliness. They understand a creature to be a being that did not exist and then, at the will of God, moved from non-being into being. “Non-being” in this context refers to matter — or what Aristotle terms “prime matter” — which is a substratum of potential. We might think of it like a shapeless bit of fabric, which has the potential to take on any number of shapes. When draped around a ball, for example, the fabric’s potential for sphericality moves from mere potential to concrete reality. So, in the same way, a creature comes into being when material potential takes on concrete properties. For this reason, the pro-Nicenes are clear that every creature is changeable because his existence begins with change, namely, the transition from non-being into being. For more on this point, see my article, “Are Created Spirits Composed of Matter and Form? A Defense of Pneumatic Hylomorphism.”
For more on this topic, see my letters, “Anthropology, Deification, and Asceticism (1 of 3)” and “Anthropology, Deification, and Asceticism (2 of 3).”
See note 5 above.
For a brief summary of the rationale offered in the Arian dispute, see note 5 above. For a more thorough explanation of how the changeability of creatures gives way to the danger of perpetual corruptibility, see my article “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: The Significance of Hylomorphic Creationism to the Free Will Defense.”
These cosmic cycles were the basis for the infamous doctrine of apokatastasis, which was condemned at Constantinople II. Today, the term is regrettably treated as a synonym for universal salvation. For my assessment of the difference between universal salvation and apokatastasis, along with the question of whether universal salvation is a heresy, see my letter: “On Apokatastasis and Universal Salvation.”
As explained in note 5 above, Arius’ heresy was claiming that the Son of God was created. Were it possible for a creature to be a member of the Holy Trinity, Arius’ claim would not be problematic. But the unbridgeable gulf between the nature of God and the nature of a creature was the very heart of the Arian dispute.
This explanation, of course, goes to the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies, and specifically to the claim that the energies of God are communicable to creatures, while his essence is not. For a brief summary of the doctrine, see my letter “Anthropology, Deification, and Asceticism (2 of 3).”
For more on the doctrine of resurrection and its relationship to deification, or our partaking of the divine nature, see my letter, “Why Resurrection is Incoherent without Deification.”
Again, for a full exploration of this claim in the Eastern fathers, see my article: “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: The Significance of Hylomorphic Creationism to the Free Will Defense.”