Exploring Human Nature: Rationality and Volition

What makes us human? Is it our capacity to reason, our power to choose, or something deeper still – our ability to love? These are not idle questions. For centuries, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the definition of personhood, debating which faculty sits at the very core of human nature. The debate, rooted in medieval scholasticism and still alive in contemporary theology, pits intellect against will, and ultimately raises the question of whether love might transcend both. Understanding how this conversation developed – from St. Thomas Aquinas to St. Albert the Great and beyond – reveals not just the history of philosophy, but the evolving story of how we understand ourselves.

The scholastic starting point: intellect and will 🔗

Medieval scholastic thinkers approached the question of personhood with remarkable precision. For them, the human being was defined by two central faculties: the intellect and the will. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in every medieval account, important roles were assigned to both – the intellect for identifying goods to be pursued, and the will for tending toward those goods. The deeper question was always one of priority: which faculty is ultimately more essential to what it means to be a person?

This tension gave rise to two distinct philosophical schools – intellectualism, which placed the intellect above the will, and voluntarism, which reversed that order. As the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy explains, these terms classify theories of moral psychology according to whether primary importance is placed on the intellect or the will in human agency – and the debate was most philosophically heated between the late 1260s and early 1300s, a period of intense theological controversy in the Latin West.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the primacy of the intellect 🔗

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) stands as the foremost representative of intellectualism in the medieval tradition. For Aquinas, the intellect is the defining feature of the human person. To be human, in his view, is fundamentally to be a rational being – one capable of understanding, judging, and pursuing truth. His theological vision held that intellectual engagement was not merely a cognitive exercise but a path toward divine truth itself.

Yet Aquinas’s position was not one-dimensional. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that for Aquinas, the human mind is an ensemble of powers – agent and possible intellect working in conjunction with the will. The will, in his framework, is a rational appetite: it takes its inputs from the intellect’s practical judgments about what is to be done. In this sense, the will and intellect are deeply intertwined – the will moves, but it moves in response to what the intellect recognizes as good.

This dynamic relationship is captured well by a study published in New Blackfriars (Wiley Online Library), which argues that for Aquinas, human choices are always made by will and reason working together. The indetermination of reason – its inability to settle definitively among several rational options – is precisely what opens space for the will to affirm one course of action, making choice genuinely free. In this way, Aquinas avoids both an irrational voluntarism and a deterministic intellectualism. The direction of causality, however, always runs from reason to desire: the intellect identifies what is good, and the will follows.

St. Albert the Great and the primacy of the will 🔗

While Aquinas gave intellectual priority to reason, his teacher and fellow Dominican, St. Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus, c. 1200-1280), emphasized the will as the more fundamental faculty. For Albert, what distinguishes a person is not simply the capacity to reason but the freedom to choose – what philosophers call volition. This placed him closer to the tradition of voluntarism, which, as Britannica explains, assigns to the will a more predominant role than that attributed to the intellect.

Albert’s emphasis on the will was not arbitrary. It was grounded in a concern for moral agency and human dignity. Without genuine freedom of choice, a human being could not be held morally responsible. The will, for Albert, was not a passive faculty waiting for the intellect’s verdict – it was an active power through which persons shape their actions and, ultimately, their identity. This view aligns with what the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes as voluntarism’s core claim: that our actions are traced less to our intellects and natural inclinations than to simple will or free choice.

The contrast between Albert and Aquinas was not a clean break. Both acknowledged that intellect and will are interrelated. But they disagreed on which faculty ultimately grounds human freedom. The Lonergan Institute rightly cautions against treating intellectualism and voluntarism as a false dichotomy – in reality, human understanding grows through a constant interaction between intellect and will. Still, Albert’s prioritization of the will carried significant implications for how personhood, moral responsibility, and freedom were to be understood.

Why the debate matters: defining what a person is 🔗

The intellectualist-voluntarist debate was not merely academic. It shaped how thinkers understood human dignity, moral responsibility, and the relationship between humanity and God. New World Encyclopedia highlights a key implication of the voluntarist position: if the will is fundamental, then a person can knowingly reject what the intellect judges best – the will retains a kind of sovereignty over reason. This has profound consequences for ethics, because it means that goodness is not simply a matter of knowing what is right; one must also freely choose it.

For Aquinas, by contrast, the will is always motivated toward what the intellect recognizes as good. According to New World Encyclopedia, the practical intellect makes a judgment that some action should be done, and the will follows that judgment. This gives moral reasoning a kind of objective anchor – right action flows from correct understanding, not merely from an unconstrained act of will.

Both positions were responding, in part, to a deeper question about freedom. The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy observes that the fundamental issue was not whether human beings are free, but whether intellect or will is ultimately responsible for that freedom. This framing reveals just how much was at stake: the answer would shape medieval anthropology, ethics, and theology for generations.

The modern shift: love as the defining feature of personhood 🔗

As medieval scholasticism gave way to modern and contemporary philosophy, a significant shift occurred. Rather than debating whether intellect or will is primary, many modern thinkers began asking whether both might be subordinate to a third, more fundamental human capacity: the capacity to love.

This shift, particularly among Christian theologians, reflects a move away from the Greek philosophical tradition – with its emphasis on rationality as the mark of the human – toward a more biblical framework. In Christian theology, love is not merely one virtue among others. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, the command to love God and neighbor runs through both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as the supreme moral imperative. Love here takes the form of agape – a self-giving, unconditional love that is not simply an emotion or a rational calculation but a relational commitment.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that in the Christian tradition, agape is understood as the sort of love God has for persons, and by extension, the love persons owe one another. It is spontaneous rather than calculated, and rather than responding to the antecedent value of its object, it creates value in the beloved. This makes agape fundamentally different from both intellectualist and voluntarist accounts of personhood – it is not about knowing or choosing, but about relating.

The biblical view of personhood and why it challenges Greek philosophy 🔗

The move toward love as the foundation of personhood represents a deliberate departure from the Greek philosophical inheritance. Where Aristotle and, to a degree, Aquinas defined the human being as a rational animal (animal rationale), the biblical tradition offers a richer, more holistic portrait. According to Dallas Baptist University’s Dr. Philip Irving Mitchell, at the heart of a biblical notion of personhood is the imago Dei – the belief that human beings are made in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). This image is not located solely in the intellect or the will, but in the composite unity of the full person: intellect, emotion, volition, and embodiment together.

The biblical conception of the heart is instructive here. In both Hebrew (leb) and Greek (kardia), the heart implies the whole person – not merely cognition or decision-making, but the integrated self in relation to God and others. This framework resists the reductive tendency to locate personhood in one faculty alone. Humans, in the biblical view, are relational beings – created for mutuality, covenant, and community. As Mitchell notes, we are never conceived as existing alone or solely for ourselves.

This relational ontology aligns with the findings of a peer-reviewed theological study in Scientia Moralitas, which traces how major Christian thinkers – from Augustine to Bonhoeffer – have consistently placed agape at the center of Christian morality, understanding love not merely as an ethical imperative but as the very character of God made manifest in human relationships. Paul’s declaration in 1 Corinthians 13 that love surpasses even faith and knowledge, and John’s equation of God with love itself (1 John 4:8), establish love as the ultimate criterion for what it means to be human in the fullest sense.

Greek philosophy versus biblical anthropology: a lasting tension 🔗

The contrast between Greek and biblical models of personhood is not simply historical – it continues to shape contemporary discussions in ethics, theology, and the philosophy of mind. Greek philosophy, particularly as inherited through Aristotle, tended to define the human being upward from nature: the human is the rational animal, distinguished from other creatures by the capacity for logos. Personhood, in this view, is essentially a cognitive achievement.

The biblical model, by contrast, defines the human being relationally and theologically. Personhood is not something achieved through the exercise of reason or will alone; it is something given – in the act of creation, in the covenant relationship with God, and in the call to love. As Mitchell observes, conceptions of personhood shape how we treat others, how we craft laws, and the roles individuals assume in life. The difference between a purely rationalist account of personhood and a relational, love-centered one is not abstract – it has real consequences for how we treat the vulnerable, the cognitively impaired, and those who do not meet narrowly defined intellectual criteria.

Modern Christian thinkers have largely sided with the biblical model, arguing that personhood defined by the capacity for love offers a richer, more inclusive, and more accurate account of human nature than either the intellectualism of Aquinas or the voluntarism of his scholastic counterparts. Love, in this framework, does not replace reason or will – it integrates and transcends them, providing the relational context within which both intellect and volition find their proper purpose.

The evolving understanding of personhood 🔗

The journey from Aquinas’s intellectualism to Albert’s voluntarism to the modern emphasis on love as the ground of personhood is not simply a story of philosophical correction. It is a story of deepening. Each stage grasped something real: reason is genuinely central to human identity; freedom of will is genuinely essential to moral dignity; and love is genuinely the relational horizon within which both find meaning.

What makes this debate so enduring is precisely that it refuses easy resolution. The scholastic thinkers were right that intellect and will are both constitutive of persons. Modern thinkers are right that defining personhood through love – especially the unconditional agape of the Christian tradition – captures something that purely cognitive or volitional accounts miss. The question is not which of these is true, but how they fit together in a complete account of what it means to be human.

What do you think? If love is truly the defining feature of personhood, what does that mean for how we understand the moral status of those who cannot reason or choose freely? And is there a way to fully reconcile the Greek philosophical emphasis on rationality with the biblical vision of persons as beings made for love?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/prac-med/
2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-medieval-philosophy/intellectualism-and-voluntarism/6E5BA6133E31BF6086BF1F4DADD30FC6
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/
4. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2008.00235.x
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/voluntarism-philosophy
6. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/voluntarism/v-1
7. https://lonergan.org/2007/12/22/knowing-and-willing-in-aquinas/
8. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Voluntarism
9. https://iep.utm.edu/love/
10. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/
11. https://www.dbu.edu/mitchell/early-modern-resources/personho.html
12. https://www.scientiamoralitas.com/index.php/sm/article/download/289/191/766
13. https://www.dbu.edu/mitchell/worldview-literature/post-colonialism/biblical-personhood.html