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4.5
Gaine's work is essentially a survey of the later Augustinian tradition on the question of how to reconcile freedom and impeccability. He therefore concentrates the vast majority of his material on Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez and Ockham. His treatments of them are fine as far as they go but his essentially Thomistic proposal ultimately fails to answer the question. Moreover, Gaine simply ignores the area of history where the most intense discussion of this question took place, namely in the later Origenistic controversies in the 6th-7th centuries.The Thomistic solution is to scale down freedom from a libertarian conception where an agent is the source of their own actions and have alternative possibilities open to them, to that of a more compatibilist notion where the agent is free if they are able to execute their desires without obstruction or external limitation. So essentially the saints in heaven are "free" for Gaine because they now always want to do the good, even though they cannot choose any alternatives.There are a number of problems that I think render this proposal useless. First, either libertarian freedom is essential to human nature or it is not. If it is not, why did God bother to give it to them in the first place? Why not make them impeccable and skip all of the evil in the world? If it is essential then humans will cease to be human upon becoming beatified. Furthermore, Gaine's answer leaves him with no plausible explanation and hence defense for why God permits evil in the first place. And given that the problem of evil is the most serious objection to belief in God, Gaine's book fails to provide a feasible answer to the question.So if you are looking for an overview of the Latin Scholastic tradition on the question, this book is fine. But if you are looking for a solution on how to reconcile free will with moral impeccability, then this book won't provide the answers. The book that will, but is out of print is Joseph Farrell's Free Choice in St. Maximus the Confessor.
