Christ’s Two Wills in Scholastic Thought: The Christology of Aquinas and Its Historical Contexts by Corey L. Barnes (review)

447 BOOK REVIEWS Christ’s Two Wills in Scholastic Thought: The Christology of Aquinas and Its Historical Contexts. By COREY L. BARNES. Toronto: PIMS, 2012. Pp. 357. $85.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-88844-178-2. This book is an important study on a topic utterly central to the Christian tradition. The doctrine that the incarnate Christ has two wills, a fully human will and a fully divine will, has been on the books as a norm of orthodoxy since Constantinople III (680/81). Far from closing debate, this formula has served as a baseline for later discussions of how the two wills are related and how the human will of Christ actually functioned. Within Latin theology up to circa 1300, Corey Barnes finds Thomas Aquinas’s account the most intellectually satisfying. While Barnes makes this preference clear, and devotes more of this book to Aquinas than to the other figures treated, he argues convincingly that Aquinas is best understood in context: in the context of his Christology and soteriology, and in the context of preceding Scholastic theories. Much to his credit, Barnes assesses earlier Scholastics as worthy of attention in their own right, and not as mere precursors to Aquinas. As a result, this book will be of great value not just to readers interested in the Angelic Doctor but also to those interested in a nonteleological understanding of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scholasticism. Barnes devotes the first of his six chapters to the Creeds and to patristic Christologies. Chapter 2 treats Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St. Victor, and the Summa sententiarum largely as prefaces to Peter Lombard (albeit, as Barnes notes, Hugh later receives independent citation), followed by William of Auxerre and the Summa fratris Alexandri. Barnes chooses the latter text over Alexander of Hales’s Glossa on the Sentences, presumably (though this is not explicitly claimed or defended) because he regards it as giving a more fully developed or more frequently cited version of the Alexandrine position. Chapter 3 treats Albert the Great and Bonaventure. In Chapters 4 and 5 Barnes turns to Aquinas on the two-wills doctrine and its setting in the larger scheme of the Summa Theologiae. The final chapter treats John Duns Scotus, prefaced by Giles of Rome and Peter Olivi as transitional figures between Aquinas and Scotus. Barnes ends with what he thinks Aquinas would have said in response to the Scotist alternative. 448 BOOK REVIEWS Barnes’s research yields a number of significant findings. All the Scholastics supported the two-wills doctrine and regarded it as an essential feature of Christ’s full humanity, but they varied in how they defended it, drawing on different sources. All were aware of the final decree of Constantinople III. Peter Lombard was the first to cite the Christology of John Damascene, but it was the authors of the Summa fratris Alexandri who first applied Damascene to the two-wills issue. Scholastic theologians sliced into this question from different angles. The Lombard stressed the obedience of Christ’s human will to his divine will. William of Auxerre and the authors of the Summa fratris Alexandri were more concerned with the capacity of Christ’s human will first to oppose and then to accept his divine will, as in his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. As they saw it, the problem was to explain the differing motivations within Christ’s human will, and how that will could fail to be in harmony with, yet not contrary to, his divine will. Later in the thirteenth century there was increasing interest in the issue of the conformity vis-à-vis the contrariety within Christ’s human will, and in the location of these operations within the Aristotelian faculties of the soul. Both Albert and Bonaventure focused on the conformity of the two wills rather than on the capacity of Christ’s human will to oppose his divine will. Barnes judges Albert’s view, involving a means-and-ends argument, as the most innovative to that date. More to the point, he relates the two-wills theories of these Scholastics to their other Christological concerns: their soteriology, their interest in Christ’s human knowledge or Christ...