l a sense of how to use that free will so the individual can keep that will aligned with the will of God and with His plan for goodness, uprightness, justice, and so on. For free will to be truly free, man must have the liberty to exercise it separate from God's control. At the same time, if God gives this free will as a gift to man, as Anselm says He has done, and also gives him no internal guidance with respect to how to use this free will, God would be giving a lost child a compass and no directions on how to use it to find his way home. Free will, then, is only partially free. On the other hand, without this internal guidance, this sense of right and wrong, free will would merely result in complete chaos in the world of human beings. Free will is therefore a relative liberty, shaped and defined by the guidance that God provides.
Anselm argue that although man is able to use his free will in order to sin, in order to disalign his will from the will of God, man is not able to cut himself off entirely from the knowledge that he is sinning. He therefore has to make the evil choice, to choose that he is suffering, and to choose that he is separate from the will of God, and so on. for Anselm, this is a necessary quality of the free will, for it the sinner were able forevermore to cut himself off from the will of God by completely immersing himself in sin, then he would no longer have free will: Though they were able to serve sin, sin was not able to master them."
Anselm returns to reexamine the essence of the definition of free will again and again. This essence is based on his belief that free will an the freedom of choice which is the exercise of free will are rooted in "uprightness":
If freedom-of-choice had not been given to rational nature in order for it to keep uprightness-of-will for the same of this uprightness itself, then freedom would not have been conducive to justice, since it is evident that justice is upr...