ABSTRACT
The vocabulary of the will was unified by Augustine, who also gave the will a preeminent position in the moral life, in the doctrine of grace, and in his description of human psychology. Bernard might be the first thinker to consider explicitly the question that will concern theologians of the late thirteenth century: the relation between will and reason. Reason is given for instruction but not in a way that would determine the will and suppress freedom: consent, which is the root of justice and injustice, is free in virtue of the will, but bears with it a judgment of reason in the agent. The controversy that occurred in the last third of the thirteenth century around the question of the will, its nature, its value, and its freedom, is one aspect of a larger controversy, prompted by the so-called “Latin Averroism.”.
