Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-luen Kantzer Komline

Abstract

Reviewed by: Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account by Han-luen Kantzer Komline Christopher R. Mooney Han-luen Kantzer Komline Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 Pp. xv + 469. $150.00. What does Augustine mean by the notoriously elusive term “the will”? Hanluen Kantzer Komline’s Augustine on the Will argues that Augustine did not invent the will, nor did he simply recast a philosophical category, as others have claimed. Rather, Augustine develops an inescapably theological account of the will, meaning that any account of human willing must be differentiated by its location in the Christian narrative: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation (10–12). While there are common features, how Augustine describes created willing, fallen willing, justified willing, and heavenly willing are each unique and distinctively Christian. Before the fall, the will is like a hinge that turns the soul and is capable of sinning or not; for all humans after the fall, willing is now stuck due to their evil desires, imposing a certain necessity despite the existence of free choice; but in Christ, God’s grace through the Holy Spirit empowers the will—even drives it—to the good; finally, by a further grace the will of the saints in heaven is liberated even from the ability and desire for sin. The result is a well-researched, admirably balanced, and largely comprehensive illumination of human willing in Augustine’s thought. In certain places, especially on prayer and the will (Chapter Four), Christ’s exemplary human will and efficacious grace (Chapter Six), and the Holy Spirit’s role in illuminating the meaning of human and trinitarian willing (Chapter Seven), the book truly shines as a representation of Augustine’s thinking and aims. In addition to its judicious interventions for specialists, its individual chapters are well structured as introductions for advanced students, even if the book as a whole may be too long to serve as a student introduction. The book consists of eight chapters, which are grouped around the four stages of human willing. Chapter One concerns the created will in Augustine’s earliest works, Chapter Two deals with the fallen will up to Ad Simplicianum, Chapters Three to Four cover the fallen will and transition to redeemed willing, Chapters Five through Seven concern the redeemed will, and Chapter Eight concludes with the will eschatologically perfected in heaven. Kantzer Komline’s book also maps these four stages of human willing onto Augustine’s development over time, so that, as the bishop ages, his thinking grows [End Page 107] and his focus also shifts. She argues, for example, that his earliest accounts of the will (c. 387–95) are best seen not as a false, juvenile description but as largely right—insofar as they describe the created will. His later works do not so much reject the early account of created willing as adapt the account to other circumstances: how do we describe the will now that it is fallen, or when it is redeemed? Kantzer Komline highlights how Augustine’s four-dimensional approach to human willing uniquely grounds its goodness in the trinitarian God. This explains how Augustine really does elevate the will to a higher position in the human person than any thinker before him, though only because his account is so theological. Kantzer Komline’s theologically differentiated approach enhances our understanding of Augustine on the will, and the book is at its most persuasive in demonstrating the impossibility of distilling from Augustine a one-dimensional, atheological account of the will or simply reducing it to philosophical antecedents. In particular, Kantzer Komline shows that a theologically differentiated account of the will is necessary to account for Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism, his engagement with scripture, his theological development, his distinctly Christian, trinitarian approach to willing, and his reluctance to offer philosophically universal definitions of the will. Still, perhaps some expressions of theological differentiation go too far, such as where “four different accounts” are affirmed and contrasted with “‘an’ account of will” (418). But opposing “four accounts” to “an account” seems to risk losing any intelligibility regarding “the will.” “How the will functions varies” (10), yes, but we can still ask what...