The Wise Person Rules the Stars: The Impact of Islamic Debates About Free Will on the Work of Albert the Great

In the modern world, free will as it is understood in Christian traditions is a complicated and contested topic. These debates are often reflective of those Islamic scholars had in the early centuries of the faith. In ninth-century Baghdad, these discussions were intimately connected to debates about celestial influence and predictive astrology, which had an indirect impact on the Latin West; when it came time for Christian scholars to recover the learning of Antiquity through contact with their Islamic neighbors, they were immediately drawn to astrology—which meant they had to contend with the rejection of the discipline by Patristic writers such as Origen and Augustine on the grounds that it conflicted with free will. Therefore, scholars such as Albert the Great turned to Islamic writers such as Abu Ma’shar, Al Kindi, and Ibn Sina to construct a defense of a discipline seen as too valuable to give up. This defense proved effective, safeguarding the study—and practice—of astrology for centuries to come in the West, down to the time of the Scientific Revolution.