During the 1992 US presidential election, the winning Clinton campaign had a famous, informal slogan within its camp: ‘It's the economy, stupid!’ Though her writing is never so rude, Han-luen Kantzer Komline essentially offers a similar refrain in her new study of Augustine's theology of the will: ‘It's about God, stupid!’ In Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account, Kantzer Komline provides a thorough (maybe too thorough?) reading of Augustine's developing understanding of the will, grounding it in biblical interpretation and the Christian life, rather than in the debates of philosophical schools. The result is a convincing portrayal of Augustine as a theologian who changes his mind while remaining consistently oriented toward the priority of God.

Chapter 1, ‘The Created Will’, traces the development of Augustine's early idea of the will from the Soliloquies to On the Free Choice of the Will. There Kantzer Komline finds a generally positive view of the will as necessarily free and the source of moral responsibility. The will is a divine gift; indeed, it allows for analogous reasoning about human and divine willing that results in an anti-Manichaean assertion of divine power and an anthropology that emphasises the effective power of the will. Toward the end of the chapter, the author turns to Augustine's burgeoning uncertainty about this vision of the will: perhaps it is too positive to reflect the actual experience of fallen humanity.

Chapter 2, ‘The Fallen Will’, picks up at this point of uncertainty and walks the reader through Augustine's growing pessimism regarding the will's postlapsarian bondage. Advancing her chronology bit by bit, Kantzer Komline leads us from the anti-Manichaean On Two Souls through to Confessions 8. But, unsurprisingly, her most sustained and important analysis focuses on To Simplicianus, where Augustine's reading of Paul leads him from a view of the fallen will as merely thwarted in its ability to act to an understanding of the will as itself unable to will the good without the grace of God. Challenging Peter Brown's famous argument that this shift represents Augustine's ‘lost future’, a flattening of his previously dynamic Platonism, the author proposes that Augustine's new theological landscape ‘has added dimensions: habit, delight, original sin, unmerited election’ (p. 119).

Chapter 3, ‘What is in our Power’, jumps ahead by a decade and a half to the most famous context for Augustine's working out of the will: the Pelagian controversy. While there are changes in Augustine's understanding of what is in our power – both between To Simplicianus and this period, as well as within the different moments of the controversy – Kantzer Komline argues that these are not radical leaps but rather natural developments and shifts of emphasis. For instance, Augustine always thinks that grace is necessary for right willing, but he comes to see God's agency as primary, not just assisting (p. 165).

Chapter 4, ‘God's Gardening’, takes up the same period and general themes as the previous chapter. This time, however, Kantzer Komline approaches the question of grace in the Pelagian controversy from the perspective of how God works upon the human will. If the prior chapter showed the contraction of what is in our power, this one shows the expansion of what God does for, with and to the human will (p. 222). Here we encounter one of the minor critiques I have of the study: given the complementarity of chapters 3 and 4, and given the length of the book as a whole, why not combine these two chapters into a single, briefer analysis? This critique notwithstanding, the author uses the space well, offering thoughtfully drawn out readings and explanations of the texts at hand.

Chapter 5, ‘The Redeemed Will’, considers what a ‘good will’ looks like in the earthly life of a Christian. Kantzer Komline plays on Augustine's metaphors for the will at different points of human existence: ‘If … the created will was a hinge, and the fallen will a link in the chain of sin, the good will is a root of love growing in and toward the light from its maker’ (p. 272). The author posits that this ‘theological differentiation’ separates Augustine's theology of the will from that of his Pelagian opponents, as well as from the larger philosophical discourse on the topic.

Chapters 6 and 7 engage these same anti-Pelagian texts and themes through explicitly christological and pneumatological lenses, respectively. In ‘Christ and the Will’, Kantzer Komline argues that Augustine presents the incarnation as a theological drama in which Christ takes on a human will in addition to his divine will. It is through this human will that Christ demonstrates the effects of grace. While Christ also works to convert our will by grace, this must be joined to the work of the Holy Spirit. Hence the next chapter, in which the author brings the human will into relationship not only with the Spirit but with the whole triune God. While the Spirit enables the reformation of our will, our graced wills come to reveal something about who the Spirit is within the Godhead. This last piece allows Kantzer Komline to provide a nuanced reading of the relationship between the human will and the Spirit as divine will in On the Trinity, especially regarding the nature of love.

The final chapter, ‘The Eschatological Will’, treats the perfected will of the future life. As is to be expected, this will experiences true freedom at last, free from the burden of choice, free finally in its inability to sin. This ideal Christian will is possessed in common by all the saints, but, the author emphasises, each will bears its own history of grace in order to rejoice eternally in its salvation.

Only in her conclusion does Kantzer Komline put Augustine into his intellectual context beyond his own immediate circumstances and polemics. Though this final reflection allows her to highlight what is unique in Augustine – namely, ‘theological differentiation, theocentrism, and the connection to love’ (p. 430) – this reader would have liked to see more such intellectual contextualising throughout the argument. Indeed, in a book that surpasses four hundred pages, such analysis of philosophical and theological precedents surely could have found a place.

And yet, let these quibbles not distract from the immense service Kantzer Komline has done to scholarship on the trickiest of Augustinian themes. This work should be mandatory reading for any serious student of Augustine, and even the non-specialist who has to teach a class session on the bishop of Hippo will be aided by the lucid interpretations that the author provides. Kantzer Komline's Augustine on the Will deserves to be read and referenced as authoritative for quite a long while.