Plantinga’s Own Assessment of the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Alvin Plantinga discusses the relationship between the intellect and will in chapters eight and nine of WCB where he deals with that relationship with regard to the occurrence of faith that he outlines in the extended A/C model. According to Plantinga, faith involves both cognitive and affective aspects.

What does this mean?

Plantinga is endeavoring to make the point that faith is more than strictly an intellectual entity (i.e., that faith is more than just knowledge that God exists and assent to that knowledge). If sin has both cognitive and affective elements, so, then, does faith.”¹

It is not necessary to reproduce Plantinga’s discussion of the relationship between the intellect and the will here except to note that he explores various “dependency relations” in which either the intellect or the will has priority and he concludes that he cannot determine which entity has priority.²

In light of this I would label Plantinga a “concurrentist” with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will. Neither intellect or will has priority.

Plantinga’s Assessment of Jonathan Edwards on the Intellect and Will

Plantinga’s extended discussion gives rise to an examination of Jonathan Edwards’ own consideration of the matter. Plantinga rightly sees that Edwards is in harmony with Calvin in his assessment that true religion is more than correct belief.³

Plantinga quite properly recognizes Edwards’ emphasis on the religious affections. As Edwards puts it, “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”⁴ But we must ask whether Plantinga recognizes that such a perspective does not rule out a cognitive element of true affections.⁵

Plantinga then examines how Edwards understood the relationship of the intellect to the will.⁶ Plantinga sets up the question in terms of which is prior, “which, if either, is primary?”⁷

Is it the case that someone first sees that God is altogether lovely, and then comes to love him afterwards? Or is it that a person loves the things of God and God himself and then comes to see that they are lovable?

Does the Holy Spirit reveal truth to our intellects and then conform our affections to the truth perceived? Or does our failure to love the gospel require correction before we can see the truth of it?

Or, as Plantinga notes, is it a matter of the Holy Spirit simultaneously correcting both the intellect and the will so that we come to see the loveliness of the “great things of the gospel” and God himself and love him all at once?

Plantinga rightly connects this question to the question of the nature of sin. “This question, of course, is connected with a correlative question…is sin primarily a matter of intellect, of blindness, of failing to see or believe the right things, thus leading to wrong affection and wrong action, or is it primarily a matter of the wrong affections, of loving and hating the wrong things?”⁸

Initially Plantinga reads Edwards as affirming the priority of the intellect in that the believer first perceives the beauty or amiableness of God and then the affections follow in natural order.

Edwards does say that “Knowledge is the key that first opens the hard heart and enlarges the affections, and so opens the way for men into the kingdom of heaven.”⁹

Edwards makes similar remarks to the effect that the affections arise “from the mind’s being enlightened.” But Plantinga finds this problematic in that this priority of the intellect doesn’t seem to mesh well with Edwards’ view that “what lies at the bottom of sin is hardness of heart.”¹⁰

Hardness of heart, as Plantinga understands it, is essentially having the wrong affections and failing to have the right ones. “It is less a failure to see something than to feel something.”¹¹

This suggests to Plantinga that the gift of faith and regeneration involves the redirection of the will and then the acquisition of knowledge, although he concedes that acquiring faith could still be seen as a kind of knowledge that is prior.

Plantinga goes on to unpack this thought by considering whether sin is indeed a malfunction or dysfunction of the will that requires a repair by being granted a kind of knowledge.

Sin is indeed and “fundamentally” a malfunction of the will but what comes “first” in regeneration is enlightenment. As Plantinga says, “Then revealing would be prior to sealing, with respect to faith, even though what needs repair is, at bottom, will rather than intellect.” ¹²

But Plantinga notes some diffidence in Edwards about this. While we have seen that Plantinga sees in Edwards some sort of priority of the intellect to the will in regeneration (even though at bottom, it is the will that needs correction), Plantinga sees Edwards as holding to the priority of neither the intellect or the will elsewhere.

Here Plantinga notes Edwards’ notion of the “sense of the heart” which Plantinga rightly realizes, I think, is not limited to the will since it involves understanding as well. Edwards notes that with the “sense of the heart” a clear demarcation cannot be made between understanding and the will “as acting distinctly and separately, in this matter.”¹³

Related to the above Plantinga discusses Edwards’ notion of the “new simple idea” and he understands this to be a form of cognition or perception.

The “new simple idea” spawns spiritual understanding which Plantinga sees as a form of experiential understanding. The analogy is often used of the difference between knowing that honey is sweet by learning about it and tasting the sweetness of honey and then understanding how or in what way it is sweet.

The first form of knowledge is second-hand whereas the second form, the tasting of honey, is first-hand knowledge. The “new simple idea” which gives way to the “sense of the heart” is a form of first-hand knowledge. Even though Jonathan Edwards is known as the master of the “interior life” as Plantinga tells us,¹⁴ he ultimately reads him as an intellectualist of sorts. Plantinga tells us,

…according to Edwards, which comes first, affection or intellection? Love for God or knowledge of God? I think Edwards’ answer is that it is knowledge. I think he thinks that one first perceives the beauty and loveliness of the Lord, first comes to this experiential knowledge, and then comes to develop the right loves and hates-what he means here, I think, is that this experiential knowledge of God and his qualities comes first; and then there is a consequent raising of the affections-his idea, I think, is that the regenerated person perceives the beauty and loveliness of the Lord and of the great things of the gospel and then, naturally enough, comes to love them. It is the perceiving that comes first; in this respect, therefore, intellect is prior to will.¹⁵

It would be good for us to ask whether Plantinga has completely and accurately understood Edwards here. Does Edwards hold to the priority of the intellect? And if he does, what does he mean by this? Or, is it, as the discussion of the sense of the heart seems to suggest, that Edwards affirms the priority of neither?

Plantinga seems to understand Edwards as an intellectualist because he misunderstands the nature of the affections. The affections cannot be reduced to emotions or passions.¹⁶ As John Smith tells us in his introduction to the Yale edition of Edwards’ Religious Affections,

There is a further preliminary distinction; and although it occupies but a paragraph, it is of pivotal importance. ‘The affections and passions,’ he says, ‘are frequently spoken of as the same,’ but there are grounds for distinguishing them. Passions he describes as those inclinations whose ‘effects on animal spirits are more violent’ and in them the mind is overpowered and ‘less in its command.’ The self becomes literally a ‘patient,’ seized by the object of passion. With the affections, however, the situation stands quite otherwise. These require instead a clear understanding and a sufficient control of the self to make choice possible. This distinction enabled him to criticize and reject a great many revival phenomena, especially those of a pathological sort, and to dissociate the heart religion he advocated from hysteria, the excesses of bodily effects and enthusiasm. His contemporaries paid insufficient attention to his distinctions. They thought he was defending revivalism in the sense of religious passions at the expense of the intellect, whereas he was developing a conception of affections accompanied by understanding.¹⁷

END NOTES
1. See chapter seven of WCB on sin and its cognitive effects.

2. Plantinga, WCB, 303.

3. Plantinga, WCB, 294.

4. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Vol. 2 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Edited by John F. Smith. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 95. Cited in Plantinga, WCB, 294.

5. I will return to this point below.

6. Plantinga devotes nine pages to his discussion of Edwards on the intellect and will. WCB, 295-304.

7. Plantinga, WCB, 295.

8. Plantinga, WCB, 295.

9. Edwards, Affections, 266 and cited in Plantinga, WCB, 296.

10. Plantinga, WCB, 296, emphasis his.

11. Plantinga, WCB, 297.

12. Plantinga, WCB, 297.

13. Edwards, Affections, 272, cited in Plantinga, WCB, 297.

14. Plantinga, WCB, 294.

15. Plantinga, WCB, 301. Plantinga may indicate his misreading of Edwards on the nature of the affections here. The affections ought not to be understood apart from intellection. The affections involve both the intellect and the will in tandem or simultaneously.

16. Plantinga may be setting up a false antithesis here. The question of which comes first, relates to the intellect and will. The affections are, as I understand them, by definition, the will either in response to or in concurrence with the intellect.

17 Smith, introduction, Affections, 14-15.