Which Comes First, The Intellect Or The Will? (III)
Various Ways of Understanding the Relationship between the Intellect and Will
Before I endeavor to answer the question of whether Plantinga has properly understood Edwards, it might be helpful to consider various ways in which the intellect and will are understood to relate to one another in the literature on the subject.1 What I discuss here is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather it is suggestive only.
Putting the matter as simply as possible, there are two general ways to understand the relationship between the intellect & the will, along with some significant variation within these two broad perspectives. These two categories are intellectualism and voluntarism.
Intellectualism
The first way to understand the relationship between the intellect and will is “intellectualism.” One way to differentiate between differences within this perspective is to talk in terms of either an absolute or a functional intellectualism.
In absolute intellectualism the intellect or reason is the governing faculty or power of the human soul and the will is considered blind and is seen as a slave of sorts to the intellect.
Historically, this kind of thinking (i.e., where the intellect is given priority over the will) can be seen in what Norman Fiering has labeled “Thomistic-Intellectualism.”2 The Thomistic-Intellectualist school, which can be traced back to Aquinas, held that the will was blind and followed the last dictate or judgment of the “practical intellect.” 3
In other words, it is the intellect or judgment that shows the will what is to be accepted or rejected. According to this view, the will is “blind” and depends upon intellectual understanding to show it what is “good” to which it ought to aspire. As such, the will can never be guilty of moral error or corruption.4
“The will itself is never culpable in the case of moral error, since it only follows the judgment of the intellect. The will as the rational appetite is supposed to govern the lower sensitive appetites, although it may happen that unruly vehement appetites from below will obscure rational judgment and thus influence choice wrongly.” 5
Accordingly, without information from the intellect, “the will is not the will, but a confused appetite.” 6
To sumamrize the Thomistic-intellectualist tradition, we can say that with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will in the human soul, there is a primacy of the intellect in an absolute sense since the will is itself blind. The will, then, must be ruled, governed, or directed by the faculty of understanding. There is, then, a denigration of the will and other powers.
Another possibility within this tradition would be something like functional intellectualism. 7 While it is recognized that the will is dependent on the intellect to provide an object to which it is either attracted or repulsed, the will is neither blind nor enslaved to the intellect.
According to functional intellectualism, neither the intellect nor the will has an ontological priority or primacy over the other, but in operations, the intellect provides the idea or object to which the will responds.
In many ways the relation between the intellect and will8 reflects the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity. As Calvin so clearly pointed out, while the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are equally divine as to their being, the Son and Spirit are functionally subordinated or differentiated in the history of redemption. 9 Therefore, ontological equality and functional or economical subordination or differentiation are both true.
Applying these qualifications to the working of the human soul, one could say that the intellect and will (or intellect, will, and affections) are ontologically equal although each has different functions. Therefore, the priority of the intellect is one of functional order according to this scheme, and not primacy of importance.
Absolute intellectualism, on the other hand, sees the intellect as governing or ruling over the will, and therefore understands sin as affecting the will but not the intellect. In contrast, functional intellectualism, sees sin as affecting both the intellect and the will. And whereas absolute intellectualism sees regeneration as correcting the will, bringing the affections into line (whether seen as an aspect of the will or as a separate entity), functional intellectualism understands regeneration as correcting both the intellect and the will so that there is a proper functioning of both and that neither will end up governing the other.
Ultimately, absolute intellectualism denigrates the will while functional intellectualism recognizes a taxis to the unified powers of the dispositional complex, but not a superiority of one power over another.
Voluntarism
The other broad tradition regarding the relation of the will to the intellect is voluntarism. Norman Fiering, in his book Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and Its British Context, has divided voluntarism into two wings.
The first he labels Scholastic-Voluntarism. The Scholastic-Voluntarists held to a self-determining will, not even influenced by the faculty of understanding. We might say that in comparison to the Thomist-Intellectualist position, the Scholastic-voluntarist school advocated a primacy of the will.
The second form of voluntarism delineated for us by Fiering is labeled Augustinian-Voluntarism. For this school of thought, the will involved the tendency, trajectory or “orientation” of the whole human personality and not just the “mental faculty”10 in abstraction.
According to this scheme, the will is oriented either to God or to self.11 Here we find a primacy of orientation - in the case of the regenerate it is a primacy of grace whereas for the unregenerate it is a primacy of sin.
As I have indicated above, the preceding description of possible ways of understanding the relationship between the intellect and the will is not exhaustive. Hopefully, however, it will provide the reader with an introduction to some of the different ways in which this relation has been conceived.
Before we answer the questions I raised earlier in this series (i.e., whether Edwards can properly be understood as an intellectualist or if Plantinga has understood the affections correctly), it would be wise for us to examine the historical context in which Edwards discussed the relationship between the intellect and will – a subject to which we will turn in our following segment.
Endnotes
1. Norm Fiering illustrates the complexity of the problem by referring to a 1703 Athenian Oracle article entitled “How Does the Understanding Move the Will?” in which eight different variations are discussed. See his Jonathan Edwards’ Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991),p. 267. See also Alien Guelzo’s Edwards on the Will (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); John Smith’s introduction to Edwards’s “Religious Affections,” in the Yale edition of that work, pp. 1-83; Conrad Cherry, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Alan Heimert and Perry Miller’s The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967); Allyn Lee Rickett’s “The Primacy of Revelation in the Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards” (Ph. D. diss. Westminster Theological Seminary, 1995), and the two previously noted articles by Scott Oliphint.
2. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, pp. 264 -267.
3. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 264.
4. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 264.
5. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 264.
6. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 265.
7. I owe a debt to Cornelius Van Til for his formulation of this perspective in his Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1974), pp. 31-36. There he discusses the relationship of the intellect to the will in humans as an analogue to the relationship between the three persons of the Trinity. Interestingly, while Van Til does not mention Edwards at this point, they both agree in their assessment of the unified operations of the soul (i.e., the dispositional complex) reflecting Trinitarian analogues.
8. Or the intellect, will and affections. Van Til recognized that his Trinitarian insight was still legitimate whether one embraced a bipartite or tripartite division of the powers of the soul. See IST, p. 36.
9. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles and edited by John T. McNeill. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1961), 1.13.18. See the helpful discussion on this matter in Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1993), pp. 197-224. Sang Hyun Lee also addresses Edwards’ approval and expansion of Calvin’s views in his introduction to Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, Vol. 21 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 20f.
10. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 268.
11. Fiering, Edwards’ Moral Thought, p. 269.
