6. Natural Will And Natural Volition
The WiU and Its IncUnations only by reason of their acts, which are to love and to desire respectively, but also by reason of what receives these acts, namely, the will insofar as it has an affection both for justice and for what is advantageous.
6. NATURAL WILL AND NATURAL VOLITION
(Ordinatio III, dist. 17) I say that will can be understood either properly or in the general sense of an appetite. Taken in this broader meaning, there were at least three appetites present in Christ, namely, (I) an uncreated intellectual appetite, (2) a created rational appetite, and (J) an irrational or sense appetite. Properly speaking, however, the will is more than an appetite, because it is a free appetite coupled with reason. Strictly speaking, then, there were but two wills in Christ. But according to common usage, which equates will with appetite, in Christ, as in ourselves, there were as many appetites as there are distinct powers of apprehension in us. Just as perception by sight or taste is other than that grasping a thing by touch or smell, so too is the proper appetite associated with each distinct, as is also the pleasure consequent upon each sort of apprehension-even though we commonly lump them together and speak as if there were but one sensitive appetite.
But what about natural and free will? Are these two powers? I say that a natural appetite in anything is just a general name for a thing's natural inclination towards its proper perfection. A stone is naturally inclined to the center of the earth, for example. Now, if such an inclination in the stone were some absolute thing other than its heaviness, I might then believe that man's natural inclination qua man to his proper perfection was something other than his free will. But I believe the first to be false, namely, that the inclination of the stone towards the center is something absolute in addition to its heaviness and represents another power that functions with respect to the center, as some imagine. But it would have to be a transeunt sort of action with no end point. The center is what is sought, yet the operation neither destroys nor preserves it. No one has suggested a solution as to what sort of operation is involved save that it concerns, perhaps, conservation of one's proper place. But it may well be that its presence in the center is in a continual state of becoming, like light in the intervening space. But then the action is not directed into the center, because the whereabouts or ubiety is in the subject that is in place and not in the place where it is located, and it is the center which locates the body in it. Hence, besides the heaviness there is only the relation inclining a weight towards the center as its proper perfection.