The Second Adam in Gethsemane: Augustine on the Human Will of Christ

Abstract

In a number of his expositions of the Psalms, as well as in his late Anti-Arian writings, Augustine refers to a distinctly human will of Christ made manifest in his agony in Gethsemane. How he describes this human will evolves over time. In a first phase of his teaching on the subject, Augustine tends to associate Christ’s human will with other human wills that are in tension with God’s will; he explicitly connects Christ’s human will with his wish to let the cup pass, though not with the fiat that follows in Christ’s prayer. Later in his career, in contrast, Augustine tends to underline the distinctiveness of Christ’s human will as compared to Adam’s sinful will, and explicitly connects Christ’s human will with his obedient submission to the will of the Father in Gethsemane. Thus, despite differences in terminology, Augustine’s mature view of Christ’s human will shows parallels with that of Maximus the Confessor, and the development of Augustine’s thinking on this issue shows some similarities to a development in the history of doctrine often assumed to have happened only over the course of centuries.