Weakness of the Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought by Risto Saarinen (review)

“I see and approve the better things but I follow the worse”: Ovid’s Medea is a figure that represents the weakness of will (akrasia in Greek, incontinentia in Latin), that is, acting against one’s better judgment—a topic that has become most popular in philosophical analysis since Davidson’s seminal article of 1970. In 1994 Saarinen authored the first comprehensive monograph on medieval formulations of the problem, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan, which has deservedly become a standard reference in medieval studies. Saarinen’s latest monograph takes up this problem once more and extends the investigation into the early modern period.

It does so in five clearly written and well-informed chapters. In the first chapter, the author recapitulates the ancient and medieval background and presents an update of recent scholarship, from 1994 to 2011. The ancient and medieval period, according to him, produced three paradigms of akrasia that have been elaborated in the subsequent age: the Platonic (characterized by reason vs. desire, without intermediate “approval” or “consent”); the Aristotelian (characterized by the employment of the “practical syllogism,” exemplified in Nicomachean Ethics 7); and the Stoic–Augustinian model (involving, to some extent, the notions of assent, consent, and therefore introducing new aspects of the concept of “will”). In comparison with his 1994 book, Saarinen here pays more attention to the biblical sources (e.g. the Pauline Letters and their medieval exegesis) than he did before: medieval incontinentia could mean either the Aristotelian insubordination of emotions or biblical “licentiousness”—in this respect, he could also have mentioned one of the often debated contributions available, namely Norman Kretzmann’s “Warring against the Law of My Mind: Aquinas on Romans 7” (in T. V. Morris, ed., Philosophy and the Christian Faith, Notre Dame, 1988).

The next three dense chapters are dedicated to the Renaissance (43–104), the Lutheran Reformation (105–63), and the Calvinist Reformation (164–209), respectively. The fifth and last chapter (210–29) presents a useful survey of the distinct models of weakness of the will “from 1360 to 1630” and includes a synthetic table displaying the aforementioned threefold inventory and its further articulation. An interpretation of William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and a brief treatment touching upon established modern thinkers—such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz—conclude this work in the form of epilogues.

The book aims to study the notion of incontinentia and its context over almost three centuries: from Buridan to Descartes. The author is aware of the difficulties in selecting a representative set of sources, “given the exponential growth of texts and literary genres in the Renaissance and the Reformation” (4). Despite this awareness, however, the weakness of the book might lie precisely in the one-sidedness of the textual inclusions and exclusions rather than in the analysis, always intelligent, of the actual selections. A qualification is required: in chapters 3 and 4, the canonical writings of the Reformers (Luther, Calvin, and some of their associates) guide the author in his choice. But chapter 2, concerning pre-Reformation philosophical and theological writings, is less convincing. There the selection does not always seem consistent with the “interpretation history of akrasia” (3) and the author may give the impression of relying more on secondary literature for his choices than on the direct acquaintance with the intellectual records.

A further remark might concern the focus of the inquiry: the author says already at the beginning that the Augustinian root of those later treatments of incontinence does not respect the boundaries of the Hellenistic distinction between reason and desire. As a matter of fact, cognate notions such as velleity, conditional will, incomplete will, and the like gained unprecedented importance in both medieval and Renaissance debates. Several scholars, including Simo Knuuttila (see S. Knuuttila and T. Holopainen, “Conditional Will and Conditional Norms in Medieval Thought,” Synthese 96 [1993]: 115–32), have already drawn attention to the latter concepts. Saarinen’s book does...