“The will of God together with
the will of man are the two most important preconditions for salvation.
Salvation requires the human will to be in tune with the will of God. In the
patristic tradition this concordance of wills is often called synergy, i.e. co-operation
between man and God. Already Origen affirmed this synergy of God and our own
effort as a prerequisite for progress in bodily and spiritual virtues in his
commentaries on the Psalms. This idea is picked up by many Fathers, including
St Basil (as in his Letter 227 and in the Dialogues on the Psalms) and by St
John Damascene (as in The Life of Valaam and Joasaph).
However, the patristic tradition
talks of the synergy of man, not only with God, but also with the forces of
evil. Whenever a man does evil, he is not acting in isolation, but the devil is
acting with him. That is, an evil act is always committed in synergy, as is a
good one, but this time the synergy is not with God, but with his opponent.
This idea we find enounced, in particular, in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata.
In this way the human will finds
itself between two wills – the divine and diabolic. The task of man is to bring
our will into harmony with the will of God, and in any event not allow it to
align with the will of evil forces. The direction of a person’s will depends on
that person himself. Man’s ability to direct his will towards good or evil is
referred to in contemporary language as freedom. In patristic theology, this
ability is referred to with Greek terms such as proairesis (disposition) and
autexousion (self-determination)…(Salvation) requires as much human will and
desire as it does the co-operation (synergeia) of God – if one is absent, the
other will also be slow in coming…”[1]
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