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How does the Church define "free will"?

two meanings

It is the  ability to choose between good and evil and between one thing and another. In every choice  there is the risk of sin, unless we call upon the Grace of God to aid« us.

our choices always involve  the power to choose between good and evil.

flattery knowing, or rather guessing their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the likeness of some one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she simulates, and having no regard for men's highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them.

the physician would be starved to death.

s the natural difference between the rhetorician and the sophist, but by reason of their near connection, they are apt to be jumbled up together; neither do they know what to make of themselves, nor do other men know what to make of them

Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods; and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life, and of happiness after death.

Phaedrus

encouragement which all the world gives to the lover;

Such is the entire liberty which gods and men have allowed the lover, according to the custom which prevails in our part of the world.

Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting

Pausanias

Eryximachus

rightly distinguished two kinds of love

harmony is composed of differing notes

harmonious love of one another and blend in temperance and harmony,

Aristophanes

Mankind; he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love

original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous

sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;

will restore us to our original state, and heal us and make us happy and blessed.

Agathon

ut I would rather praise the god first, and then speak of his gifts; this is always the right way of praising everything.

flexibility and symmetry of form

beauty of the god

virtue I have now to speak: his greatest glory is that he can neither do nor suffer wrong to or from any god or any man

ll men in all things serve him of their own free will, and where there is voluntary agreement

courage and justice and temperance I have spoken, but I have yet to speak of his wisdom-

for I do not praise in that way; no, indeed, I cannot. But if you like to here the truth about love, I am ready to speak in my own manner, though I will not make myself ridiculous by entering into any rivalry with you. Say then, Phaedrus, whether you would like, to have the truth about love, spoken in any words and in any order which may happen to come into my mind at the time. Will that be agreeable to you?

Socrates then proceeded as follows:-

Is Love of something or of nothing?

The inference that he who desires something is in want of something, and that he who desires nothing is in want of nothing, is in my judgment,

nd yet, added Socrates, if a man being strong desired to be strong, or being swift desired to be swift, or being healthy desired to be healthy, in that case he might be thought to desire something which he already has or is. I give the example in order that we may avoid misconception. For the possessors of these qualities, Agathon, must be supposed to have their respective advantages at the time, whether they choose or not; and who can desire that which he has? Therefore when a person says, I am well and wish to be well, or I am rich and wish to be rich, and I desire simply to have what I have-to him we shall reply: "You, my friend, having wealth and health and strength, want to have the continuance of them; for at this moment, whether you choose or no, you have them. And when you say, I desire that which I have and nothing else, is not your meaning that you want to have what you now have in the future?

Then he and every one who desires, desires that which he has not already, and which is future and not present, and which he has not, and is not, and of which he is in want;

First, is not love of something, and of something too which is wanting to a man

Love is the love of beauty and not of deformity

Then Love wants and has not beauty?

Is not the good also the beautiful?

Then in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good?

nature of Love first