What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement Read Online Free PDF Page B

activity, the next two centuries witnessed human beings changing their kings, their God, and Nature herself. Perhaps human beings, as individuals, could even change themselves. But for this to become plausible, the final crack in the firmament had to appear. It did, and in deceptively academic guise—in debate among theologians.
    Free will . In the 1480s, heretics were burned at the stake all over Europe. The infamous Malleus Maleficarum , a guide to detecting witches and torturing them into confessing, was published. With the stench of burning flesh in his nostrils, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a young Ferraran aristocrat, arrived in Rome and defied the dogma of human implasticity. In his Oration: On the Dignity of Man , Pico’s God tells Adam
Neither a determined dwelling place, nor a unique shape, nor a role that is peculiarly your own have we given you, O Adam, so that you may have and possess what habitation, shape, and roles you yourself may wish for according to your desire and as you decide. The nature of all the rest is defined and encompassed by laws prescribed by us; you, restrained by no limitations, of your own free will in whose hand I have placed you, shall appoint your own nature. 4
    Pico revels in the vision that man is free to choose. Man is endowed by his Creator with the potential of raising himself above all created beings, even above the angels.
    The pope condemned Pico and prohibited his writings. Pico wandered barefoot through the world and died of fever at age thirty-one.
    But within thirty years, the Protestant Reformation was in full swing. The Catholic church lost its monopoly on the spiritual life of Europe. The Reformation was decidedly not, however, a celebration of free will. Luther dismissed freedom of the will, viewing humanity as having been created vile and powerless: Everyone is fallen, all of us merit damnation. 5
    John Calvin then argued that everyone is damned or saved even before they are born. God predestines some of us to eternal life and the rest of us to eternal death. His elect are kept by God in faith and holiness through their lives. Worldly success can be an emblem of their election. No actions you undertake, no choices you make, will change your fate. Unaided, humans are incapable of choosing good, and human reason is incapable of knowing a single truth beyond the mere existence of God. Good works do not produce grace. Your destiny is sealed before you are born.
    If this is so, why should people bother to try to be good? How could people be held responsible for their actions? The theological battle for human agency was engaged. On the outcome of this monumental battle hinged the very fate of the idea that humans can change and advance themselves. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, liberal Dutch Protestants, led by Jacobus Arminius (the latinization of Jacob Harmensen), claimed that man has free will and participates in his election to grace. 6 To be saved we must meet God, if not halfway, some of the way. This was dubbed “the Arminian Heresy.”
    This debate continued for almost two hundred years, with inroads made by the Arminians in Holland immediately and in England one hundred years later during the Restoration purge of the Calvinists. This “heresy” then became popular through the evangelical preaching of John Wesley, the English cofounder of Methodism, who preached this doctrine of salvation widely. First, Wesley declared, humans have free will:
He was endowed with a will, exerting itself in various affections and passions; and, lastly, with liberty, or freedom of choice; without which all the rest would have been in vain . . . he would have been as incapable of vice or virtue as any part of inanimate creation. In these, in the power of self motion, understanding, will, and liberty, the natural image of God consisted. 7
    Wesley told the masses who turned out for his sermons that God offers salvation in general but that humans, using free will, actively