Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account
/Kantzer Komline, Han-Luen. Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account. New York: Oxford University Press. $125.00 + 492 pp.
Reviewed by Corey J. Stephan
Han-Luen Kantzer Komline loves the Doctor of Grace not only as her theological guide but also as her personal companion, and that makes Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account a joy to read. Indeed, Kantzer Komline writes as though she traveled alongside St. Augustine from his conversion in Milan to his death in Hippo. Her prose is sophisticated with a familial lilt, a soulfulness that is rare in academic writing. Better still, she allows Augustine to speak for himself before she paraphrases or synthesizes; he was schooled as a rhetorician, after all. Rather than feigning originality, she allows Augustine to be Augustine without projecting any twenty-first century vogue onto him. Thus, Kantzer Komline presents a true theology, reaching the heart of what affiliates of the Sacra Doctrina Project cherish as “both scientia and sapientia.”
For Kantzer Komline, Augustine is a methodical biblical exegete with a focus on the Pauline epistles. Kantzer Komline closes the volume with a nod toward the role of the preceding patristic tradition in Augustine’s corpus, particularly describing the guidance of Sts. Cyprian and Ambrose for Augustine’s thought on the will. However, that nod comes across as an afterthought rather than an integral part of the study. Kantzer Komline’s treatments of other aspects of Augustine’s milieu are equally terse. She only gently suggests that Augustine’s lived experience as a priest and bishop altered his understanding of the human will. She rarely considers Augustine’s thought on the will in relationship to other classical philosophy. She never discusses the influence that the sacraments and liturgy might have had on his theories. However, Kantzer Komline’s goal is not to consider any of those matters. Rather, the volume’s subtitle, “A Theological Account,” means (in this case) ‘a biblical account.’
According to Kantzer Komline, Augustine’s “concept of the will” was “assumed in the Bible but never articulated in ancient Greek philosophy or earlier Christian theology.” Augustine learned about the will almost exclusively through Scripture. Augustine on the Will, then, blends biblical and historical theology to such a degree that it is almost as much an exploration of Scripture as it is a study of Augustine himself.
Kantzer Komline implicitly employs the Confessions and the Retractions as the backbone to her project, moving from one stage in her late antique friend’s Christian life to the next. She allows Augustine’s thought on the human will to unfold as he developed it, i.e. with time. Per Kantzer Komline’s depiction, Augustine did not change his opinions en bloc from controversy to controversy. Rather, he gradually changed his opinions as he tried in vain to satisfy his insatiable appetite for the Word of God.
The Manichees, as well as members of the Greco-Roman pagan religion, viewed (in different ways) humans as subject to the whims of the forces that control the universe. As a fresh convert to orthodox Christianity from Manichaeism, Augustine countered that a will is unlimitedly free to choose good or evil. However, after his ordination, Augustine quickly lost that optimism. First, as Augustine studied Scripture, especially St. Paul’s epistles, he found the common theme of bondage to sin. Second, he witnessed the day-to-day struggle of Christians with that bondage. The Pelagian Controversy pushed Augustine to the point of defining any good human will as driven by divine grace. “Human ills stem from human wills,” Kantzer Komline writes, “while evil is alien to the will of God; for this reason, though God is the auctor responsible for bringing human beings into existence, they alone are the auctores responsible for their own evil acts.” Yet Augustine “never abandons his earliest dynamic definition of human will, from his days as a presbyter: it is a ‘movement of the soul (motus mentis) with nothing forcing it.’” God drives the human will (hard, even irresistibly), but He does not force it (in an absolute sense).
As recognizable as much of that probably will be for readers of Thomistica, Augustine on the Will is not banal. Kantzer Komline’s genius is that she runs her reconstructed narrative of Augustine’s path of discovery vis-à-vis the human will parallel with her reconstructed narrative of his path of discovery of the state of the human in each epoch of salvation history—to the point that the two narratives are (convincingly) inseparable.
As a new convert, Augustine found true freedom to be the condition in which human beings were created by God. All that has being is good, and evil does not have an existence of its own. However, as Augustine discovered by biblical study and pastoral care, because humans abused that true freedom, they lost it. Free will was behind the Fall, and it remains behind every subsequent sin. The Son of God had to assume a human will in order to save the human will, liberating it from sin, but He had to have a divine will in order to have the power to save. Thus, “Augustine’s explanation of how Jesus was able to resist doing his ‘own will’ but nonetheless attain perfect human obedience functions to corroborate Augustine’s case that Jesus was non tantum homo, verum etiam deus.” Augustine, for Kantzer Komline (and this might surprise), was a dyothelite. After Christ’s Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, whom Augustine describes as God’s will (flowing from the Father and the Son), moves human wills to fulfill God’s will. Finally, at the Eschaton, humans who are saved will be unable to sin, “a reward graciously granted to saints … on the basis of the good willing God has enabled in this one.” In sum, Kantzer Komline outlines four epochs in which the human will differs: Creation, Fall, Restoration, and Eschaton. She does not use the phrase felix culpa, but it fits with how she condenses the blessedness to be found in salvation history: “The help Christ offers the human will, then, not only makes possible eternal life and participation in God’s kingdom but even improves upon the condition of the human will in Adam.”
Detecting an evolution in the human will in each epoch of salvation history, for Kantzer Komline, is Augustine’s defining contribution to the Christian understanding of the human will. His most “radical claim was that no good will, no choice of the will that leads to righteousness, exists apart from Christ.” Kantzer Komline does not actually prove whether or not that specific claim was “radical.” However, she does demonstrate that Augustine added something—and something substantial at that. According to Kantzer Komline, like all of Augustine’s “original and profound contributions to the history of philosophy, to the Christian tradition, and to the intellectual heritage of the West,” his unique claims about the will come “not from philosophical finesse but from reconsidering all of life from the ground up in light of the biblical narrative.” Thus, Kantzer Komline writes, as Augustine “tells us so memorably in the Retractiones, he wanted free will to win out, and he struggled mightily to preserve it;” however, as “he recounts, he had to adjust his views to comport with what he was hearing from scripture.”
With Scripture leading the way to the will, Augustine tends to use narrative over deduction and metaphor over definition. Kantzer Komline equates Augustine’s evidence for the reality of a human will with Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum: “Just as one knows one is alive, knows one’s life (uita) by living, so one knows one’s will (uoluntas) by willing.” When opponents challenge Augustine to prove that the human will exists, Augustine retorts that its existence is self-evident. Denying the will’s existence is a fool’s thought experiment, for one must will to believe the non-existence of the will.
Kantzer Komline seems to have eschewed modernity’s debates that her work quietly addresses by nature of its subject matter. ‘Inviolable free will,’ ‘universal election,’ ‘double predestination,’ ‘determinism’ and most other loaded terms of the kind are nowhere to be found. Augustine on the Will is not a work from or about the sixteenth century. Its author’s aim is to look behind modern visions of the fifth-century bishop of Hippo to the man as the man.
Perhaps Kantzer Komline sidesteps modern questions in order to allow Augustine himself to chastise today’s Christians. For Augustine, the human will is originally and eternally (unchangingly) free, but after the Fall it has become bonded to sin and, therefore, wholly dependent on divine grace for goodness. Augustine, through Kantzer Komline, reminds the reader that hard determinism, neo-Pelagianism, and other such black-and-white positions that have become popular in recent generations are not faithful to Scripture, much less to the Christian tradition as a whole. With subtlety as her hallmark, Kantzer Komline permits Augustine to be the Doctor that he is.
Corey Stephan is a Ph.D. candidate in historical theology in the Department of Theology at Marquette University. He studies patristics and the theology of the Latin Middle Ages and Byzantium.