Autonomy and the Bonds of Love

Autonomy and the Bonds of Love offers a new account of the Spirit. Augustinian pneumatologies view the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son. Critics of this pneumatological tradition wonder how, if the Spirit is a relationship between persons, the Spirit can also be a person, full stop. One answer, I suggest, is that the Spirit is a plural person, a special kind of real and irreducible group agent supervening on close friends. The goal of this pneumatology is less to defend the truth of claims about the status of the Spirit in the eternal life of God and more to create a model that remedies gaps in theological anthropologies as well as in analytic philosophies of group agency. The former frequently make the Spirit responsible for human freedom without explaining how the Spirit empowers human beings to act freely; the latter largely overlook the role of caring and the emotions in human social life. On one level, then, my model of the Spirit moves the discipline of theological anthropology forward by showing how the Spirit's indwelling a human believer could enhance rather than undermine their autonomy. On another level, the dissertation tells a non-confessional story about what friendship is, why autonomy requires vulnerability, and how different types of collective agency work.