The Necessities of Perfect Freedom JESSE COUENHOVEN* Abstract: This article is a reflection on Augustine’s suggestion that Christians have significant theological reasons to accept that freedom need not be correlated with having choices. Following his lead, I explore questions about freedom and agency raised by the perfect freedom of the saints in heaven, Jesus’ sinless earthly life and the freedom with which the triune God is eternally blessed. My thesis is that those who worship the triune God and praise the sinless perfection of Christ and the heavenly saints have reason to accept a ‘normative’ conception of freedom, according to which certain kinds of necessity are not merely compatible with perfect freedom but intrinsic to it. My goal in this article is to offer a theological corrective to influential ‘libertarian’ traditions of speaking about freedom in our day, by reflecting on Augustine’s suggestion that core Christian beliefs (some of which we share with other theists) are best understood in the light of a different conception of freedom, one I call ‘normative’. If Augustine is right, those with more or less orthodox Christian faith have significant reasons to accept that necessity is far from inimical to a theologically central kind of freedom. 1 My argument also develops Ian McFarland’s challenge to the idea that choice is the basis of free agency. 2 With help from Maximus the Confessor, McFarland * Humanities and Augustinian Traditions, Villanova University, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085, USA. 1 That is not to say that freedom never should be associated with having options, though it is thought-provoking that even in the land of free, the limits of this conception of freedom seem to be attracting attention, and not only inside theological discourse: ‘What passes for freedom in America, Franzen [suggests in his novel Freedom], is a refusal to accept limits, to acknowledge and shoulder the burdens of one’s inheritance. Certainly everyone in the novel comes to rue freedom, their own and others’.’ Judith Shulevitz, ‘The Tolstoy of the Internet Era: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is an epic map of our imprisonment’, Slate Magazine, www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2010/08/the_tolstoy_of_the_internet_era. html (accessed 1 September 2010). 2 Ian McFarland, ‘Willing is Not Choosing: Some Anthropological Implications of Dyothelite Christology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (2007), pp. 3–23; Ian McFarland, ‘Fallen or Unfallen? Christ’s Human Nature and the Ontology of International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 14 Number 4 October 2012 doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2011.00622.x © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd