The Pursuit of Linguistic Integrity
Language Straining Toward God the Lord' 'who is' God three and one."265 "Let me progress in knowledge of you here, and there let it be made full; let me grow in love for you, and there let it be full; so that here my joy may be in great hope, and there in full reality. . . . Meanwhile, let my mind meditate and let my tongue speak therefrom."266 Anselm ends in the uncertainties of the subjunctive, in the contrasts between "here" and "there," and stuck in the "meanwhile
[interim]," praying for the union that, even given the notion from which the Proslogion began, has not yet occurred.267 The strong sense he conveys is of the distance between where he wants to be and where he is.
The point is not that nothing has been achieved in the Proslogion.
Surely it has. Anselm has moved from God as "the being than which none greater can be conceived" to God as a being "greater than can be conceived," from God as possessor of a list of attributes to that being in whom these multiple attributes are (somehow) one, and from the only being who is wholly who he is to God as three in one. His progress in grasping God's being has quickened his desire and added joy to his longing by giving more reality to its object. However, the progress is in a sense paradoxical; he progresses to a sense of God as beyond his grasp and concludes not in the satiation of desire but in its increase.
The Pursuit of Linguistic Integrity These two philosophical meditations end with a sense that while there is an intense desire and impetus toward the end; they also end in an acute sense of the way in which the journey they initiate is almost as long as at the end as when they began. Toward the end of the Monologion, Anselm writes, "it appears that nothing prohibits our discussion [disputatio] of the supreme nature thus far from being true, and yet this nature itself remains nonetheless ineffable."268 His inquiry concludes in this riddle because theological language is the language of riddles (aenigmata).269 "We do not express with precision [things] as they are; but by another expression we indicate what we are unwilling or unable to express with precision." Anselm concludes, "we express and do not express, see and yet do not see, one and the same object" because we do not see the thing itself but see it through another.270 So while from one perspective Anselm has
265. Pros. 26, S I, 121, 24–122, 2.
266. Pros. 26, S I, 121, 16–18, 22–23. My emphases. Cf. Augustine, Sermo 21, 1.
267. Cf. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 105–6. Stolz puts the emphasis on the joy that it achieved (rather than simply hoped for) within the work and uses it to support his view of the Proslogion as a piece of mystical theology. See Stolz, "Anselm's Theology," 190–91.
268. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 19–21.
269. Mono. 65, S I, 77, 1–3.
270. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 11–17.
Language Straining Toward God constructed a link between the mind and the thing through language and images, he is intensely aware that the thing itself has not been delivered, that the omnipresent God is still inaccessible and absent.
Anselm's Proslogion and Monologion do not just claim that language and experience allow the conclusion that God exists; they claim that neither language nor experience make sense without God. However, Anselm holds with just as much fervor and excess that neither language nor experience can make any satisfying sense of God. This dyad of views is common to any number of medieval thinkers, but Anselm pushes both of these principles to such extremes that together they become two halves of the paradox, that the nature of God is both obvious and inaccessible.
His heroic efforts bring to mind (anachronistically) the way in which St. Ignatius exhorted believers to pray as if everything depended on God and act as if everything depended on themselves. Anselm is claiming something analogous, reasoning as if reason can understand God, the most supremely intelligible object, and praying as if reason is completely unequal to the task of grasping anything about God even in the most incomplete sense. Thus Anselm concludes his discussion of God's nature in the Monologion by recognizing both these truths at once, that his account can be true even though their subject is itself ineffable.271
There is a tendency to read only half of this diptych in Anselm, either the half claiming to have found necessary and indubitable arguments, or those expressing pious incapacity to understand God. Historians of philosophy tend to do the first, those of religion and spirituality, the second.272 Marilyn Adams, recognizing both motives in Anselm, creates a distinction to dissolve the apparent contradiction, contrasting what it is to understand God, at least to some extent (the project of the treatises), with what it is to see or experience God (something that cannot be achieved in this life).273 While this is clearly a distinction Anselm implicitly makes and would recognize, it can domesticate the problem, take the anguish out of it in a way that is not consonant with Anselm's aspirations.
271. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 19–21.
272. See Stolz, "Anselm's Theology," 185–86. For an even stronger reading of Anselm as mystical theologian see Evdokimov, "L'aspect apophatique," 233–58. More philosophically oriented commentators like Adams, Hopkins and Richardson, Henry, and others ultimately agree or would agree with Adams that even if Anselm has mystical or religious aspirations, his project is an intellectual and ultimately philosophical one, both in terms of its means and ends.
273. Marilyn Adams, "Praying the Proslogion: Anselm's Theological Method," in The Rationality of Belief (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 17–18. Marcia Colish seems to recognize the same duality in Anselm. She writes, "With the proper attitude and technique, then, words about God can be true and thus necessary. At the same time, Anselm stresses, no statement about God can be totally accurate or totally convincing." Colish, Mirror of Language, 93.
Language Straining Toward God For, according to Anselm, the purpose for which the human mind is created is not, as Kant thought, to recognize the moral law, but to know and love the supreme good.274 The rational power, Anselm maintains, is the power to distinguish "the good from the not-good, the greater good from the lesser." This power will be useless unless its distinctions are true and unless it then love the greater good over the lesser, and, ultimately, the supreme good above all others.275 The supreme being demands that it be loved. The creature that loves and desires it will be satisfied by nothing else than the possession and enjoyment of the supreme being.276
Since, then, what matters to Anselm passionately is direct and immediate access to God and since this is the passion that motivates his rational explorations, the impossibility of reaching the former with the latter creates excruciating tension for Anselm. Anselm is not naïve or in any way surprised by failure of human language and reason to lead him to the divine. He simply makes the decision to act out in dramatic terms the attempt and its failure, not simply accepting it in advance of making the effort or scaling back his aspirations in order to be able to meet them.
Adams's implicit separation of the spiritual and intellectual projects is foreign to Anselm and seems to anticipate something like Aquinas's distinction between the two different ways theology can be wisdom. In one sense, Aquinas argues, the wise man is like the virtuous man who judges correctly about virtue from his own virtuous nature; in another sense, the wise man is the one who has knowledge of virtue but not virtue itself.277 Ermanno Bencivenga attempts to face this contradiction head on, exploring a variety of analogies for how to understand Anselm's apparently impossible project.278 This issue is central to Anselm's thought; it is an impasse he reaches again and again, and attempts to overcome again and again. Anselm seeks to establish (and sees himself as successful in establishing) with necessary reasons what he holds at the same time is paradoxical, completely inaccessible to human reason.
Kant pointed out that there is a tension between proving necessary conclusions and reaching interesting ones, ones that end in a truly different place from which they begin, and, thus, produce genuinely new knowledge. For Kant, analytic arguments achieve the former and synthetic arguments the latter. Like Kant, Anselm wants to achieve both
274. Mono. 68, S I, 79, 1–5.
275. Mono. 69, S I, 79, 12–18.
276. Mono. 70, S I, 80, 25–26.
277. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 3.
278. Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense. The different chapters of his book propose different ways to understand Anselm's project for reason as friend or foe of faith and as falling short of its object.
Language Straining Toward God certain and genuinely new conclusions with one and the same argument.
What Anselm strives for, most famously but by no means exclusively in the Proslogion, are arguments that seem to start with nothing but end with everything, arguments whose conclusions are so thoroughly necessary that they are indubitable, but also so unexpected that they are astounding. What first-time reader has not blinked twice on coming to the end of the ontological argument, wondering how such seemingly unproblematic premises end in such a stunning conclusion?
We also see the reflection of Anselm's desire for necessary conclusions in his methods: the use of valid deductive argument forms and pure introspection, unmixed with references to authority. In his arguments,
Anselm aim is to form a set of unbreakable links between premise and conclusion such that even if there are, to use a musical metaphor, multiple beats to the bar, the reader should "feel it in one," as conductors say, that is, as one beat to the bar, as a integral whole. Anselm makes this explicit in his stated preference for the Proslogion's "single argument" over the Monologion's multiple arguments. Here Anselm wants the reader to experience the entire piece of music as one, one beat to its single bar, if you will. The lack of explicit citations from authorities or scripture only compounds that sense of a single line of thought traversed in one motion.
Objections are considered but they are the product of and not an intrusion on the single line of thought Anselm pursues relentlessly. Unlike a later scholastic disputed question, in which the sources are explicitly cited, Anselm so completely absorbs the tradition that the beams and bricks from which his arguments are constructed merge completely into his structure, making his voice the only audible one, and modulating his view such that it is that of reason itself.
But Anselm is not only interested in outlining the necessity of the conclusions he works toward but also in displaying their paradoxical character. In the Monologion and Proslogion, the paradoxes are those that follow from perfection, perfect being, and perfect language. Anselm makes language the metaphor for the Incarnation as the Word made flesh, and the Incarnation becomes the model according to which to understand the shortcomings of human language. But the perfect Word of God can hardly be a word in the ordinary sense because the Word, second person of the Trinity, is identical with God, so identical that it does not merely point to but is its speaker and its referent. And the Word as exemplar for creation is more really the thing than the thing itself. Both the Monologion and Proslogion consider the existence and attributes of God as following from a consideration of God's nature with ineluctable necessity at the same time as they understand that nature to be absolutely impenetrable.
Language Straining Toward God In an important sense, Anselm does not arrive at different conclusions than Augustine or Boethius, but the way in which he arrives at those truths and the status of those truths for the human mind are different. More usual is to find a middle way, neither beginning from nothing nor ending with everything, whereas Anselm strives both to assume nothing and yet to arrive not just at a philosophical notion of God, but, as the Proslogion concludes, with the biblical name of God, God as "He Who Is." If others downplay the paradoxical, emphasizing the ways in which reason can work its way to some understanding of God, Anselm emphasizes both the paradox and necessity; his project is to retrieve the God who is so clearly implied in every experience but is equally clearly beyond any possible thought.
Louis Mackey argued that proofs for God's existence repeat the pattern of the parable of the prodigal son. The son, having come to live in a world where it at least seems possible that there is no father nor indeed any need for one, comes to possess "the imagination to see alienation as such—a contingent departure from originary reality—and the resolution to transgress it toward the Father."279 In the same way, Anselm creates the utter alienation between his words and God, placing himself in that "far country" in which he, like the prodigal son, can realize his lack of self-sufficiency, can realize that even the possibility of his alienation implies its overcoming. Cur Deus homo, we know, explicitly proceeds remoto Christo, as if there were no Christ, but the Monologion and Proslogion in their own way proceed remoto Deo.280 This is true in two senses. First,
Anselm begins far from God, from the fool's denial in the Proslogion, and from the one who has never thought about or has rejected God in the Monologion. But, second, God, Anselm notes, is also remote from man, inasmuch as the God who is sought "dwells in unapproachable light." The metaphysical and emotional distance to be covered is vast and Anselm, as in his prayers, works to make that distance as explicit as possible. He forces his reader into the experience of the absence of God.
It is, we might say, Anselm's version of the fort-da game described by Freud.281 Interpretations of the game played by a small child, repeatedly throwing away and then retrieving his toy, abound, but the one which is analogue for Anselm's task in these works is the notion that in enacting the drama of abandoning and the retrieving the object, the child is attempting to retain a sense of the reality and presence of the mother even when she
279. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 126.
280. Cf. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 197.
281. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, standard ed., translated and edited by J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 14–15; S. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity (Albany: SUNY Press,
1987).
Language Straining Toward God is temporarily absent. In this way the child achieves what psychologists call "internalization of the object," a sense of the mother's continued reality and love even when not physically present. The completion of the psychological task also allows the object autonomy, as the child begins to see it whole and as a separate other as the child internalizes a sense of the presence and care of the mother. Anselm is, we can now see, creating as much as responding to a sense of the absent God. From that absence, he attempts to find God again such that he cannot be taken away, acting out the trauma of abandonment and joy of reunion over and over again. Anselm seeks again and again, in other words, to find the words and arguments that can assure him that the God that he desires is really there. But—and here, perhaps, is the analogue to the second part of what is being worked out in the fort-da game—Anselm is also working through what it is to think that being he seeks, finding and recognizing not just its presence but also its otherness and transcendence. If Anselm (like all those in via) is the prodigal son, he is only on his way home, not quite arrived, not yet having successfully internalized the object which transcends him.
The Trilogy of Dialogues Exploring Division and Unity In the preface to this set of three dialogues (De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli), Anselm asks that they be published together in this order. They belong together, first, because all three pertain to sacred scripture and, second, because they are united by subject matter and similarity of discussion.1 Anselm must specify this because unauthorized copies of the texts have been made and they have circulated in another order than he wished.2 Anselm makes similar complaints in the preface to Cur Deus homo3 and gives similar directives that the work should appear complete and in the shape Anselm wished, along with his preface and a list of chapter headings.4 Anselm seems to be both surprised and dismayed by the ways in which the dissemination of his work has gone against his wishes, and he tries to reassert control. He had perhaps gotten some criticism of these works by those whose objections or misunderstandings were caused, he thinks, by incomplete or wrongly ordered texts. Clearly he thinks of them as books, as units complete in themselves and tied to him as their author whose intentions are an intrinsic part of their meaning. This is an interesting historical development in the notions of authorship and publication, but it is also important for understanding Anselm's sense of his project and audience.
In this middle period, after the intimate meditations of the Monologion and Proslogion (which were also, as we saw, disseminated and interpreted in ways Anselm seems not quite to have anticipated), Anselm still does not seem to have reconciled himself to the way in which written texts are published, literally made public, and, hence, available to audiences with 1. DV Praef., S I, 173, 2–6.
2. DV Praef., S I, 174, 5–7.
3. CDH Prol., S II, 42, 2–5.
4. CDH Prol., S II, 43, 4–7.
Exploring Division and Unity different habits of thinking and reading. These readers need to be told what would have been clear in the context of practices in Anselm's community at Bec. Anselm and those of his community engaged in conversation with him saw the kind of rational, dialectical examination of the things of faith in the dialogues as part of monastic meditation and reflection. These texts are for them and for Anselm a natural outgrowth of conversations undertaken together by those sharing the same goals and form of life, but as Anselm's works circulate outside of community and control, he needs to specify and explain their intention and proper use.
Though it is not a set of connections contemporary philosophers or theologians would make, the relationship between the dialogues' subject matters is clear enough once one goes through the arguments. Anselm's consideration of truth is not a narrow discussion of the rules of predication. Rather the truths of signification and thought are placed within a consideration of them as parts of the Supreme Truth and placed alongside the truths of will and action. For Anselm, doing the truth is the same as doing good, and truth is identical with justice as a kind of rightness. The truth of the will is justice or uprightness, which means willing what one ought to will and willing it for the right reason. The concluding chapter of De veritate argues that truth is one in all true things, and that all the different forms of truth, from the truth of signification to that of thought and the will, derive their truth from the Supreme Truth.5 The problem and its connection to the discussion of free choice is, of course, that freedom seems to mean the ability to choose other than rightly, and so we move to the second dialogue, De libertate arbitrii. The dialogue on free choice, Anselm explains in his preface, shows "only the natural fortitude of the will for keeping the uprightness it has received," without showing the need for grace to keep its uprightness.6 Thus the third dialogue, De casu diaboli discusses God's grace as necessary for persevering in the good.
Anselm offers no further elaboration of his other claim, that the dialogues are linked to each other because all linked to scripture, and both the assertion and the lack of elaboration are significant. He states it for those among his contemporaries who are ready to take his works out of context, but they need, apparently, no more explanation. However, the connection between the dialogues and scripture, which Anselm assumes would have been obvious to his confreres, is almost completely opaque to contemporary readers. The gap between the statement that the dialogues
5. DV 13, S I, 196–99.
6. DV Praef., S I, 173, 13–15. My emphasis.
Exploring Division and Unity are concerned with scripture and their actual content led one scholar to argue that there must have been another dialogue meant to precede De libertate which was wholly grounded in scripture and other works which were meant to follow, also more closely aligned with scripture, the latter of which he identified with the three books of De concordia.7 The standard view is that "despite the title given to the last, the three works approach subjects which we can believe separate from any properly theological preoccupation;" on this view, the scripture texts which are cited have
"very little relationship to the subjects being treated."8
It is easy to agree. First, Anselm uses none of the most well-known medieval forms of writing on scripture. The dialogues do not comment on long passages from scripture, nor do they concentrate on conflict between different scripture passages. Nor are they attempts at allegorical or spiritual interpretation of scripture.9
Second, though there are scripture passages mentioned in all three, there are not many. De veritate begins with a paraphrase of the Gospel of John's claim that God is truth (John 14:6) and is an echo of Pilate's question to Jesus, "What is truth?" (John 18:38). De veritate discusses several other passages from John: "he who does evil hates the light" and "he who does the truth comes to the light" (John 3:20, 21) along with "the devil did not stand in the truth" (John 8:44). De libertate arbitrii turns in an early chapter and at the end to another Johannine passage: "He who sins is the servant of sin" (John 8:34). De casu diaboli begins with a discussion of "What do you have that you have not received?" (1 Cor 4:7) and returns to "the devil did not stand in the truth" (John 8:44).10
One way some take seriously the claim that the dialogues, or at least De veritate, is concerned with scripture is to take the connection to be general and indirect, arguing that the philosophical reflection of De veritate is reason's participation in the relationship to God, which is the relationship adumbrated by scripture.11 On this view, "Sacred Scripture in7. Simone Tonini, "La Scrittura nelle opere sistematiche di S. Anselmo," Analecta anselmiana
2 (1970): 57–116, esp. 71–72. Tonini's conclusions on a very general level concur with mine, that the description not just of these three dialogues but of Anselm's corpus as a whole as "concerned with sacred scripture" is correct.
8. Jean Châtillon, "Sainte Anselm et l'écriture," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Raymonde Foreville, Spicilegium Beccense II (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1984), 436. Cf. Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 6.
9. Cf. Châtillon, "Sainte Anselm et l'écriture," 433. Châtillon makes a comparable list of the ways of interacting with scripture Anselm does not try.
10. For a list of the scriptural passages cited in these dialogues, see Tonini, "La Scrittura," 65.
11. Helen S. Lang, "Anselm's Use of Scripture and His Theory of Signs," in Les Mutations socioculturelles, edited by Foreville, 443–56.
Exploring Division and Unity forms and completes every moment of study concerning these signs and their rectitudo."12 Others occupy similar ground, arguing that "in reducing our every day language to its true structure, thus laying the foundation for the presence of intrinsic truth, Anselm simultaneously reads
Scripture."13
Jean-Robert Pouchet takes Anselm's claim about the relationship of these dialogues to scripture more substantively and suggests that the dialogues could be read as a reflection on the Gospel of John, especially on chapter 8, from which some of the most important scripture passages referred to in the text.14 In this passage in John's Gospel, Jesus is defending his divinity using the language of truth and falsehood to contrast himself as the Truth with the devil as "not standing in the truth." The passage, as is common in John's Gospel, sets "the Jews" up as the antagonists of Jesus, accused by Jesus of plotting his death and rejecting Jesus' claims to be the truth that will free them from their slavery to sin. The passage, Pouchet observes, is "dominated by what we could call the dialectic of truth and error, truthfulness and lying, liberty and slavery, the themes taken up in the dialogues.15
Pouchet's claim that Anselm is commenting on John 8 is not as much of a stretch as it might seem at first, for the student's question as De libertate opens, how can we be free and yet need grace (i.e., be servants of sin), is, in effect, the question John presents the Jews as asking of Jesus:
We are free, the sons of Abraham, slaves to no one: why would we need you, Jesus, to reconcile us to God? The themes of truth and falsity, light and dark, to which Anselm alludes repeatedly right from the start of De veritate is, of course, a major theme of John's Gospel. And as Jesus shows himself to be the Truth in John's Gospel, Anselm works to identify God and Truth in De veritate.
Anselm clearly does not compose these dialogues as a way of participating or commenting on any polemic against Jews or debate with Jewish objectors, even in the distant and reworked sense in which Cur Deus homo is, but he would, of course, have been aware of the context from which 12. Lang concludes, "Philosophy for Anselm, as exemplified in the De veritate pertains to the study of Sacred Scripture because philosophy itself is an activity through which reason, by presupposing the will's affirmation of the God relation, can participate in that relation." Lang, "Anselm's
Use of Scripture," 453.
13. M. Burcht Pranger, "Reading Anselm," in Saint Anselm, Bishop and Thinker, edited by Roman Majeran and Edward Iwo Zielinski (Lublin: The University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin. 1999), 165.
14. See Jean-Robert Pouchet, OSB, "Saint Anselme lecteur de Saint Jean," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Foreville, 457–68, 461–62.
15. Pouchet, "Saint Anselme lecteur," 462.
Exploring Division and Unity the key passages discussed in the dialogues are taken. What is noteworthy is that Anselm has chosen to recast the debate about truth and freedom into a different kind of dialogue, one abstracted from any specific time, place, or personalities of its origin. In doing so, he also removes the rancor present in John's account of Jesus' discussions with the Jews.
Anselm leaves out of his dialogues exactly what gives not just Jesus' encounters with his enemies but also Plato's dialogues their dramatic interest. Unlike Jesus' opponents or characters such as Anytos or Callicles in the Meno and Gorgias, Anselm's student in these dialogues, like Boso in Cur Deus homo, is never angry or threatened by the teacher's refutation but asks the questions a carefully constructed "anyone" would ask. He allows questions to surface but is not interested in using the problems they present as a bludgeon to defeat the teacher.
There is in this a kind of blanching, a kind of spiritualization and depersonalization of reasoning. Teacher and student are not particular individuals with particular concerns, prejudices or temperaments. In this transformation of actual opponents into idealized objectors, mouthpieces for rational arguments, an important point to plot in the line of development of the notion of a pure, neutral reason in western thought. The dialogues are in this sense a continuation of the program of the Monologion and Proslogion which created the rational but neutral persona considering the existence and nature of God.
In these dialogues, as in the earlier works, Anselm's contribution to the invention of the much maligned "man of reason" derives from his methodological principle of "faith seeking understanding." "Faith seeking understanding" means questioning but being ready to understand rather than being actively disposed to reject; it is neither a perspectiveless perspective nor a holding back on questions and objections. As we shall see also happens in Cur Deus homo, Anselm transforms objectors—
Jesus' enemies in John's Gospel, like the "fool" of the Psalms—into those seeking understanding. In other words, he does not make objectors into an irrational other but someone he can find in himself through their shared reason and shared openness to understanding. Second, as we shall see, though Anselm's "student" is not individuated, he is not disembodied. That is, he is forced by the teacher to connect the implications of his arguments to his own condition as finite and human.
But the transformation goes further than form. Anselm thinks so deeply about the questions raised by Jesus' opponents in the Gospel of John he not only transforms them into questions he can find in himself, but the notions discussed in these passages become seeds of a metaphysics of creaturehood and a philosophical or theological anthropology. These
Exploring Division and Unity passages and their questions lead Anselm to reflect on the nature of truth and freedom, giving and receiving, created vs. creative natures. This explains the significance of the Pauline passage highlighted in De casu diaboli, "What do you have that you have not received?" (1 Cor 4:7) and its connection to John, chapter 8, and the topics of the dialogues. This same passage from Corinthians was given prominence in Augustine's antiPelagian writings to point out the necessity of grace for salvation.16 In an important sense, the answer to Paul's rhetorical question, that there is nothing you have not received, constitutes the answer to the question posed in chapter 8 of John's Gospel, why do you need Jesus, why do you need grace, for salvation? Because you cannot do it for yourselves, because everything you have is received is grace, Paul answers. Anselm's interest in the fall of the devil is not in it as an event discussed in scripture but in the problem it poses for all fallen creatures, including, of course, human beings. If everything creatures have is received, then what they lack
(righteousness) was not given, it seems, making God the cause of nothaving and, thus, evil. How, then, can creatures be held responsible for what they have not been given? Or, alternatively, if they were given righteousness and have nothing else which was not given, including the will or power to lose it, how did they abandon righteousness? Thus the problem is not specifically the good and bad angels but them as a case of the universal principle that everything is received. This characteristic, Anselm notes,
"belongs no less to angels than to human beings."17
The larger anthropology which Anselm is working out is one in which human beings are both responsible for their fall (because free) and unable to redeem themselves (hence in need of grace). And in that sense, the problem of the devil's fall is simply a cleaner version (because abstracted from the complication of temporality) than that of human beings. Anselm's invocation of Paul's question from Corinthians, given its association with Augustine's anti-Pelagian emphasis on grace, in the context of the topics of freedom and sin is a signal of Anselm's interest in revisiting a broader set of questions. His concern is not just the need for 16. See, for example, Augustine, Retractationes II, 1, [27/28], CCL 57, 89–90, and De praedestinatione sanctorum, 3, (7)–7 (12). In De praedestinatione Augustine writes that the passage brought him to reject the notion that faith is from oneself for the view that faith itself is grace. In the Retractationes he attributes his view that grace precedes rather than is a response to faith to his reflection on this passage. See also Gerald Bonner, Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 82. For further discussion of this passage and Anselm's use and interpretation of it, see 211–13. On the relationship between Anselm and Augustine and free choice paired with the necessity of grace, see chapter 7, section b.
17. DCD 1, S I, 235, 14–15.
Exploring Division and Unity grace but the reality of freedom and responsibility for sin. These scripture passages, then, are not afterthoughts or proof texts but that which gives rise to Anselm's extended reflection.18
We can now better understand what moved Anselm to add his prologue: the delinking of these dialogues from one another disrupts the connection they have in his own thought to the themes of John's Gospel.
These reflections are for him all of a piece and he wants his reader to follow that path with him. But, of course, Anselm has realized that these questions and his three dialogues can be separated from one another, as well as from scripture, similar to the ways faith and understanding can be separated. Anselm asserts here as strongly as in the Monologion and Proslogion that the projects of faith meditating on scripture and reason asking questions are for him the same project. It is, then, to the question of how this can be so that Anselm turns first in De veritate: How can the many truths both be separated from and united to the One Truth?
De veritate: Many Truths and the One Truth The student opens the dialogue with the question that echoes the Johannine identification of God with truth as well as Pilate's skeptical "What is truth?" "Since we believe that God is truth and we say that truth is in many other things, I would like to know whether in whatever things truth is said to be we ought to believe it to be God," the student asks.19 Lang argues that the question articulates an apparent conflict between faith (that God is truth) and reason (that many things are true).20 The conflict could also be characterized as a conflict between common sense notions and deeper spiritual vision expressed in scripture but also found by rational reflection, a conflict between surface and depth, rather than two separate realms of reason and faith. For Anselm, reason is not associated with a kind of empiricism that leaves to faith matters beyond sense—that is a modern way of setting up their relationship. Reason, that which he employs to bring him toward the understanding of faith, is, as it is for Augustine, that which leads to the truths expressed in the prologue to John's Gos18. Cf. Michel Corbin, "Se tenir dans la vérité: Lecture du chapitre 12 de saint Anselme sur la vérité," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Foreville, 649–65. Corbin does not ground his reading of De veritate and its connection to the other dialogues and scripture in the particular passages Anselm uses and the problematic they outline as I have done here following Pouchet, but he makes compelling case on different grounds for the important relationship of these works to scripture.
19. DV 1, S I, 176, 4–6.
20. Lang, "Anselm's Theory of Signs," 446. Lang maintains that the particular claim, that we say that many things are true, is specifically Neoplatonic in origin.
Exploring Division and Unity pel, to God and God as truth. True reason and scripture are on the same side and, ultimately, make the same claim, according to the dialogue.21
Thus the existence of many truths, while not false, is understood finally as only true in a sense and as radically dependent on the truth of the supreme truth.
The student's question can be reformulated in two ways: How are all truths one? And how are many things true without being God?22 The dialogue approaches both sides of the Parmenidean paradox, how we predicate things like truth of Being (God), and how things which are shot through with nonbeing can nonetheless be truly said to be what they are and to be true. The latter is parallel to Boethius's question about the good in De hebdomadibus: how things can be good in their being without being identical to the first good.23 Anselm concedes that truth (like goodness for Boethius) is different for creatures than for God, but he argues that if we begin from the truth of finite things, we will come to see that the condition for the possibility of their truth is their connection to the single, supreme truth. The path of Boethius's De hebdomadibus is from the goodness of ordinary objects of experience composed of matter and form, to their necessary connection to the supreme good.24 Similarly, the path of De veritate is from the "ordinary" ways of speaking about truth, in which there are many and different truths, to an insight far from ordinary experience, into the One Truth in and by which all those distinct truths are one.
Thus, it is not just in grounding the truth of language and, thereby, the language of scripture, that De veritate is concerned with scripture.
De veritate is concerned with the thinkability of creation, and of a Cre21. Cf. Pranger, "Reading Anselm," 165–66.
22. The latter is Colish's characterization of the dialogue. See Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed.(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1983), 79.
23. Boethius, De hebdomadibus, in The Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 38–51. The comparison to Boethius's treatise is for illustration and understanding of Anselm's project in De veritate rather than to claim direct influence of Boethius's work on Anselm. Though it is clear that Anselm had copies of Boethius's logical treatises at his disposal, it is not clear whether he knew Boethius's theological treatises. On Anselm's sources, see Southern, Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought 1059–c. 1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 17–18. As Southern points out, "the wide range of his
[Anselm's] knowledge of Augustine and Boethius would not have been possible except in a carefully stocked library." See also Giles E. M. Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and his Theological Inheritance
(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004). On the connection to Parmenides and the problem of the being of that which is not the One, see chapter 3.
24. Boethius, De hebdomadibus, 42–43. The work has two parts, the axioms with which the work begins (after a short introduction) articulate higher and more abstract metaphysical principles concerning the nature of complex and simple being, and then an argumentative portion which begins from the notion of finite and complex being. See 40–43.
Exploring Division and Unity ator, who is Being and Truth, coexisting alongside creatures whose being is not merely illusory but is true in some sense. When Jesus says that he came to "testify to the truth," and Pilate answers, "What is truth?" Pilate is asking an epistemological question: How can we know what is true given the evanescent landscape of shadows dancing across the screen in the dim light of our understanding? How can any of this be true? John's
Gospel's answer is in Jesus' assertion that he is "the way, the truth, and the life," (John 14:6). This is a metaphysical answer about what is real and true: Jesus is the Truth, the context in which particular true things can be and be seen.
Anselm begins working out his reply to Pilate's question by distinguishing between the kind of truth a statement has "because it signifies what it has received the capability of signifying [quod accepit significare]" and the truth it has "because it signifies what it is made to signify
[ad quod significandum facta est]."25 The distinction is between the kind of truth a statement has when it succeeds in signifying, for example, that today is Tuesday, whether it is Tuesday or not, on the one hand, and, on the other, when what a statement signifies is in fact the case, for example, it signifies that it is Tuesday when it really is Tuesday. What Anselm seems to have in mind by the former is the truth or correctness of statements like "today is Tuesday" on whatever day it is uttered as opposed to something like "the green is either."26 It is an important distinction and brings out an important precondition for signifying what is the case: that things have to be signs first, that is, capable of signifying, in order to be able to signify what is the case.
Anselm makes, then, two claims about these two kinds of truth: first, the truth a statement has when it signifies what it was made to signify
(that what is is) is a higher kind of truth or rectitude than merely managing to signify rather than being nonsense (that is, having grammatical, logical intelligibility).27 Second, however, Anselm insists that the other notion of truth, "the truth of signification," is really a kind of truth even though not what we normally mean by truth. Moreover, it is in one sense a condition of the possibility of true statements. For Anselm writes, "Indeed [a statement] receives [its ability] to signify a thing to be when it is not and not to be when it is, only because it cannot be given to it only to signify [that something] is when it is and [that something] is not when it
25. DV 2, S I, 179, 2–4.
26. Boethius, Commentarium in librum Peri hermeneias, vol. 1, edited by K. Meiser (Leipzig:
Tuebner, 1880; reprint, New York-London, 1987), I. 1. 5. 14–15.
27. Anselm writes, "Plus enim debet propter quod accepit significationem, quam propter quod non accepit " (DV 2, S I, 179, 7–8).
Exploring Division and Unity is not."28 It is the kind of truth that, if a statement has it, it has it always, the teacher points out. "It is day" always signifies it is day whether it is day or not, but it only signifies what it was made to signify when uttered when it actually is day. Thus, in order for language to signify truly in the ordinary sense, it must have the truth of signification, correct logical, grammatical form. To put it another way, language cannot signify what is actually the case without being able to signify what is not the case. Anselm's notion of the truth of signification is of a piece with his notion that things and the senses, etc., have a kind of truth. Things are true when they are doing what they ought. Language which has the truth of signification fulfills its function as language: signifying; it has, in Anselm's words, "a natural truth" which it retains at all times, whether or not what it signifies is actually the case.29 While language fulfills its function to a greater degree when it not only signifies but signifies what is the case, it still must signify in order to signify truly. Thus there is a kind of priority for the mere truth of signification, not as the aim and fulfillment of the nature of language but as the condition of the possibility of language as true.
What we ordinarily think of as truth, a characteristic of statements when they signify what is actually the case, is only one sense of truth.
Anselm's first move, then, is to complicate the ordinary notion of truth.
There is a comfortable and manageable multiplicity of truths the way we ordinarily think about truth. But from the perspective Anselm now opens for his student, there are as many truths as there are statements that succeed in signifying. The notion of a "truth of signification" gives the student the same uncomfortable feeling that discourse about nonexistent things does in the Fragments, and for the same reasons. Both dispel a naive view about truth as simple correspondence between words and things. While we think we are always talking about things to which we can point to justify our statements, we are made to realize that we talk a great deal (and talk truly in a sense) about things which do not exist. In De veritate, the teacher points out that we also talk in ways that truly signify but say things that are not true. It is a bit dizzying to come to realize that propositions which merely signify according to the rules have a kind of truth, creating a kind of parallel world of possible but not actual
28. DV 2, S I, 179, 8–10. The Latin is: Non enim accepit significare esse rem cum non est, vel non esse cum est, nisi quia non potuit illi dari tunc solummodo significare esse quando est, vel non esse quando non est. Though this is my own translation, it gives the same sense of the passage as Hopkins and Richardson's. See Anselm of Canterbury, 4 vols., edited and translated by Jasper Hopkins and Herbert
Richardson (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press), vol. 2, 80. See p. 186 for my discussion of Ralph
McInerny's quite different translation of this passage.
29. DV 5, S I, 183, 1. My emphasis.
Exploring Division and Unity truths. Anselm is here recognizing an important point about language, the same one Umberto Eco made by noting that a sign is whatever can be used to tell a lie.30
Like the direction of complications explored in De grammatico, Anselm seems to be moving away from ordinary language and common sense. This brings us back to the theme so important in Desmond Henry's interpretation of Anselm. Henry finds Anselm willing to say things which are from the perspective of ordinary language nonsense in order to work toward the development of a more perspicacious logical, technical language. But Henry makes this the end point, the goal of Anselm's task, and thereby finds its relevance and connection to modern, analytic philosophy. But De veritate carefully pairs another movement toward a theological language and perspective with this movement toward a more logical, technical language, a perspective which more thoroughly topples the hegemony of common sense and ordinary language.
What is interesting is that even at this level, before we reach the next and more seismic displacement of common sense and usage, some of Anselm's commentators seem to muffle even this first move away from the ordinary perspective. Like the student, some commentators seem to shy away from the consequences of a truth of signification, almost to the point of erasing the notion. Visser and Williams follow the text through Anselm's claim that the truth of signification (what "it is day" always has) is its "natural" rectitude, but then they introduce into the discussion the type-token distinction. "It is day" is the type and then it is used (or is a token) at particular times and circumstances when someone says, "it is day," in which case it is either true or false. Only tokens are true or false, while statement types are the only ones that have "purposes," that is the purpose of signifying that what is is.31 Though helpful as far as it goes, the type-token distinction misses something important. Anselm wants to retain the word "truth" for both what Visser and Williams describe as types and tokens. This is because of the close connection between these two kinds of truth for Anselm: the ability to signify undergirds the ability to signify that what is is, and signifying that what is is is the purpose of language. This is its truth, and the standard against which it is judged as doing the truth or not. When Visser and Williams claim that statement-types have purposes but not truth ("it is day" as a type has a 30. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976), 7.
31. Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams, "Anselm on Truth," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207. Cf. the same account in Visser and Williams, Anselm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 42–47.
Exploring Division and Unity purpose, which is to be uttered when it is actually day, expressing what is is) and that statement-tokens have truth or falsity but no purposes (a given instance of the uttering of "it is day" is true if it is day but has no purpose of its own as an instance), they are disconnecting the very thing
Anselm's dialogue aims to connect: truth and purpose. A thing is true when it does what it was made to do, when it fulfills its purpose.
Anselm's account of truth makes, then, two important points. First, in the notion of the truth of signification, Anselm notes in effect the independence of language as a system of signification from things. For Anselm words cannot signify what is without also being able to signify what is not; thus, the possibility of falsehood is written into the nature of signification. McInerny's translation of Anselm's description of the truth of signification inserts the notion of the truth of signification as "parasitic" on the truth of signifying (saying what is is), obscuring Anselm's point. McInerny's translation reads, "Indeed, its ability to signify that a thing is when it is not is parasitic on its standardly signifying that what is is and what is not is not."32 However, the teacher's point is not that the truth of signifying (which brings with it the possibility of signifying that what is not is and vice versa) is parasitic on the truth of signifying what it was made to signify (signifying truly what is and is not) but that the truth of signifying makes telling the truth in the ordinary sense possible.
For McInerny's Anselm, the relationship of dependence between falsehood and truth is all one way: truth can exist without falsehood but not falsehood without truth, but what Anselm actually says here, that signs cannot be restricted to saying only that what is is and what is not is not, means that the possibility of truth in a way requires the possibility of falsehood. Anselm, in other words, agrees with Eco's definition of a sign cited above: to be a sign is to be able to be used to tell a lie.33
Second, however, Anselm insists that signs (like all things) have a higher and more complete kind of truth when they do what they were made to do; in the case of signs that means when they signify that what is is and what is not is not. Hence, Anselm rejects the modern view that truth and falsity are "equal-ranking alternatives" for the set of all significant propositions.34 Anselm is clear that truth in the second sense, truth as saying how things really are, is the aim of language.35 There is an "in32. This is Ralph McInerny's translation in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited by Brian
Davies and Gillian R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154. For the Latin, see n. 28.
33. See n. 30.
34. Richard Campbell, "Anselm's Background Metaphysics," Scottish Journal of Theology 33, no. 4 (1975): 321–22.
35. Campbell, "Anselm's Background Metaphysics," 322.
Exploring Division and Unity troduction of the dimension of purpose . . . into the discussion of propositional truth"—what is crucial for Anselm is that "a statement's truth is viewed within the horizon of rectitudo—of proper directedness towards its end."36
Anselm can recognize the importance of the truth of signification, yet encompass that within a larger perspective which recognizes what all beginning students find missing in formal logic, "a prejudice in favor of truth."37 Thus, while Anselm does recognize in the truth of signification the character of a sign, he nonetheless does attempt to subordinate, without making it parasitic on, the purpose of signs: to signify that what is is.
This is all rooted in what Campbell calls Anselm's "Christianized teleology," the notion from Aristotle that things act to achieve ends which are given in their natures, to which is added the notion that those natures are created and thus were made for purposes by their creator. Hence, reaching that end is a creature's purpose; its performance of it is doing what it ought, and, finally, doing what it ought is "at the core of truth."38
The same link between truth and purpose are present in Anselm's discussion of action; just as signification turned out to be linked to purpose, so action turns out to have a kind of signification and, hence, truth.
For "since nothing should be done except that which should be done, by the very fact that someone does something, he says and signifies that it ought to be done. Thus if he does what he ought, he speaks the truth; if he does what he ought not, he lies."39 Simply doing something is signifying that we think it ought to be done. With Augustine, Anselm recognizes that actions, like words, can be signs and, thus, can be used to tell a lie.40
Anselm does not just recognize the semiotic characteristics of things, but also the thingly character of words, that they, like actions, are true when they do what they ought, when, ultimately, they find their place in the supreme truth.41
36. Donald F. Duclow, "Structure and Meaning in Anselm's De veritate," American Benedictine
Review 26 (1975): 408.
37. Campbell, "Anselm's Background Metaphysics," 322.
38. Richard Campbell, "The Conceptual Roots of Anselm's Soteriology," in Anselm, Aosta, Bec and Canterbury, edited by Luscombe and Evans (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 261–62.
39. DV 9, S I, 189, 4–7.
40. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 2, 23, 25; 3, 12, 18–20.
41. Visser and Williams argue that this view of language commits Anselm to the view that "God makes natural-language statement-types" and confers on them their "purpose of signifying" that what is is. See Visser and Williams, "Anselm on Truth," 208. Cf. Visser and Williams, Anselm,
45–46. They further claim that it is not open to Anselm to claim that human beings make natural language after having been given the ability by God for the purpose of saying what is, since Anselm, they claim, cannot allow creatures to create natures and give them purposes (209). They do note that Anselm never makes either of these claims explicitly. However, he need not hold either
Exploring Division and Unity The discussion of the truths of natural action, of the senses, and of the being of things brings Anselm to the same conclusion as Alexander
Pope: "whatever IS, is RIGHT."42 But how is it that fire burning is doing the truth? How does a false statement contain a kind of truth? And when the senses report straight sticks as bent in water and mere reflections of faces as real faces, how are they doing what they ought and, thus, what is right and true?43 According to the dialogue, false statements, natural actions, and whatever the senses report are true. All are doing what they ought according to the nature they have been given.
In the discussion of each of these examples, the student poses the questions according to the common way of speaking, showing the conflict between ordinary usage and the teacher's. This discussion culminates in the most difficult instance of the universal rightness of things to understand: evil deeds. The student asks, "How according to the truth can we say that whatever is ought to be, when there are many evil deeds which certainly ought not to be?"44 When the teacher tries to explain that "God permits some people to do the evil which they will," the student exclaims for us all, "Would that he permitted it less often!"45 The irony of the statement is a result of the combination of the philosophical language the dialogue builds toward with the ordinary language from which it begins. Ordinary language and experience recoil from the redefinition of evil as good.
The teacher tries to make his view more palatable to the student by conceding that, as problematic as it seems for both logic and common sense, in some cases "the same thing both ought and ought not to be."
He continues, "[an evil deed] ought to be since it is permitted wisely and of them. Augustine and Boethius both hold that languages are conventional, human products, and surely human beings can give purposes to artifacts. Now, a sign's function, its doing what it ought, signifying what is the case, is given in the nature of sign-hood and is not merely conventional in the same way that Anselm would think 2+2=4 is not conventional (though the particular symbols for numbers, addition, etc. are conventional), and if this is all Visser and Williams mean, then I agree. See Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 2, 24, 37, and Boethius, In librum Peri hermeneias I, 1,
32–34.
42. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, edited by Maynard Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1950), l. 289; cf. DV 7, S I, 185,15: "whatever is is true, insofar as it is what it is there [in the supreme truth]."
43. DV 6, 183–84.
44. DV 8, S I, 186, 7–9.
45. DV 8, S I, 186, 27–28. The passage calls to mind a passage in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, in The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart,
E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1973), IV, m. 4, ll. 16–18, 338–40. Lady Philosophy attempts to show her student that it is the impotence and misfortune of the evil to do evil. Like Anselm's student, Boethius exclaims, "I very strongly wish they might swiftly lose that misfortune by being deprived of the ability to commit evil."
Exploring Division and Unity well by him without whose permission it could not have happened. And it ought not to be with respect to him by whose evil will it is conceived."46
As he has done before, the teacher attempts to elucidate his point by looking at the grammatical form of the statements that assume this distinction. The same act can be described from the different points of view of agent and patient. While it might be the case that something ought not be done by the agent, it might be right that it be undergone by the patient. This is the case with the suffering of Jesus.47 "Doing the truth," Anselm brings his student to see, includes willing what one ought, passively undergoing persecution for the sake of justice, or simply being what one ought. Ordinary language does not match grammatical form with reality. We call things "suffering" that are not really suffering and call other things "doing" that are not really doing.48
The listing of the modes of "doing the truth" recalls the similar discussion of the modes of doing and causing in the Fragments,49 now put to use in the discussion of a substantial problem: the problem of evil. Here the grammatical and theological converge, for the warning not to be fooled by grammatical form (a passive or active verb), to look deeper and be prepared for an asymmetry between grammar and reality, is expanded. First, it is expanded into the ethical realm: doing the truth, doing the right thing, encompasses more than what counts as doing in a grammatical or in a physical sense. Just as passive forms sometimes name active realities and vice versa, so passivity in a physical sense, refraining from some action or simply being as opposed to doing, is sometimes doing the truth. Second, it has theological implications. Looking more deeply at the physical or natural and moral realities of action and passion also brings out another complication that eludes ordinary examination. For when Anselm notes the possibility that the same thing in some cases both ought and ought not be, that it might be and not be "doing the truth," he refers to the example of Christ, who is doing the truth in passively undergoing suffering, and his persecutors, who are not doing the truth in their action upon him.
While Anselm likely did not know it, his discussion parallels in some ways Plato's discussion of punishment in the Gorgias, in which Plato argues that there must be symmetry between giving and undergoing punishment—if one is just, then so must the other be.50 Plato's point is twofold, first that what the agent does and what the patient suffers are
46. DV 8, S I, 186, 29–31.
47. DV 8, S I, 186, 32–187, 2.
48. DV 5, S I, 182, 18–21.
49. LF 28, 13–34, 27.
50. Plato, Gorgias 476d–477a.
Exploring Division and Unity symmetrical—if the cutter cuts deeply, the patient is deeply cut—and second, that the agent governs those features, that, in effect, that the agent is really agent acting on the patient. Thus far Anselm concurs, noting that giving a beating and getting a beating cannot occur separately.
However, Anselm's analysis parts company with Plato's, for he argues that, depending on the character of the agent and patient, the action as activity and passivity might be judged differently, one good and the other not. When the one giving and the one getting the beating give and receive the action rightly, both the action and passion are judged to be right; when a just man is beaten by an unjust man, neither the beating nor the being beaten is right; when, however, a sinner is beaten by someone who is not authorized to administer punishment, the activity of the doer is not right but the passivity of the receiver is right—the action both ought and ought not to be. The suffering of Jesus, is another case of that which both ought and ought not be, an asymmetry that comes as result of combining the moral perspective with that of "supernal wisdom," from which perspective Jesus' suffering is providentially ordered.51 The teacher pushes the student's discomfort even further on this point, noting that from a physical point of view the nails ought to penetrate Jesus'
"frail flesh," which flesh ought to have felt pain.52
Anselm, then, embraces the contradiction that something both ought and ought not be. He does not claim, as Plato does, that there is no evil that can befall the just man (since the only evil is injustice). Nor does
Anselm make a distinction between evil and injustice and goodness and justice, as Boethius does. Recall the last lines of Boethius's De hebdomadibus: "some things are just, some things are otherwise, but all things are good."53 Anselm's claim is rather that evil does occur—these things ought not be done by the doers—but that sometimes what the evildoers do to others ought to be suffered by them, as is the case with the suffering of Christ. Even though Anselm makes reference only to Christ's suffering, he implicitly embraces the notion of universal providence in which all things which are suffered, even if done unjustly, ought to be suffered, that is, they are part of God's providential plan.
Anselm handles the problem of evil in slightly different terms in De casu diaboli. Even as he embraces the Augustinian principle that evil is nonbeing, he adds that there is an evil which is something: the evil of disadvantage (incommoditas), like sadness and pain. These evils follow evils of privation or absence but nonetheless are something that we are
51. DV 8, S I, 186–87.
52. DV 8, S I, 187, 33–35.
53. Boethius, De hebdomadibus, 50, ll. 173–74.
Exploring Division and Unity justified in regarding with aversion.54 In both De veritate and De casu diaboli, Anselm lets stand claims important to ordinary language and understanding. First, in De veritate it is that even given providence and the invulnerability of the just man, there is an important sense in which injustice ought not to be. Second, in De casu diaboli it is that, even given that evil is nonbeing or privation, there is an important sense in which some evils are something, are realities in the lives of those who suffer them.
While Anselm often rejects and refines ordinary language, embracing apparent contradictions which common sense rejects, in these two cases, he embraces apparent contradictions: the same thing both ought and ought not be, evil is both nothing and something. At the same time, however, more than Plato, Augustine, or Boethius, Anselm saves our ordinary intuitions that evil is not nothing and that some things ought not to be. This comes at a price, for in order to accommodate ordinary intuition, Anselm must embrace a kind of perspectivalism, that there is, as Visser and Williams put it, no "context independent" way of assessing whether something ought or ought not to be.55
The notion that some things both ought and ought not to be is a striking moment of disunity in the march toward the unity of all truths in the one truth, which is the dialogue's conclusion. In this way, Anselm's makes clear that the unity of all truths in one (and all perspectives in one) is worked out only in principle (until ultimately worked out in God) but not in fact for us. The transcendence of perspective is, in other words, only prospective. The thrust of reason, the tool for seeking understanding, is to break down unities, to see and work on problems and conflicts. The remaining difficulties are made clear by the drama of the dialogue. Anselm leaves this loose string untied (that some things both ought and ought not to be), and goes on to have his student enjoy the unity of truth and rightness. But then, in the same way paradoxes emerge from successful arguments in the Proslogion and Monologion, a new problem emerges from the very solution which the discussion has crafted. If truth is rightness and rightness is the same as justice, "it seems to be both just and right for fire to be hot and for people to love one another."56 This outcome triggers the student to ask: "And then what? Will we call a stone just when it falls from higher to lower because it does what it ought in the same way we call a human being just when he does what
54. DCD 26, S I, 274, 2–3.
55. Visser and Williams, "Anselm on Truth," 213; cf. Visser and Williams, Anselm, 50, where they call this "contextualism."
56. DV 12, S I, 191, 31–192, 1.
Exploring Division and Unity he ought?"57 In a dramatic portrayal of perspectivalism, the student finds the problem with his own solution, but only after the teacher repeats his claim back to him.
It does not take the student long to solve this problem, but he does so by dividing, by introducing a distinction between different kinds of rightness. Human beings act freely (sponte) but stones do not.58 The important part of the discussion as it continues is its series of distinctions, which link De veritate with the next dialogue, De libertate arbitrii. The distinctions between rightness and justice, between justice and just acts, between acting knowingly and unknowingly, between what and why we will, between willing "because of its very justice (propter ipsam rectitudinem)" and willing because of something else all play important roles in the discussion of free choice to follow.59 These distinctions recognize the ways in which rightness, justice, and being can be divided from each other, the ways in which one can fail to be just even when doing the right thing, either by willing without knowing or without willing in the right way. This fragmentation is emblematic of finite being and finite will; it is a property of created and fallen being. Yet Anselm asserts with equal emphasis the ultimate identity of truth, rightness and justice. Willing in the right way (knowingly and for the sake of justice) is the necessary and sufficient condition for justice.
Moreover, receiving, willing, and keeping rightness because of its rightness are all the same and, hence, are all accomplished simultaneously. To receive is to have, to will, and to keep rightness (rectitudo), which is, then, truth, doing what one ought. Here Anselm anticipates his arguments in De libertate and De casu, and holds in advance of Abelard (and Kant) an ethics of intention, that the whole of the ethical character of the act is in the interior act of willing.60 On the one hand, this view leaves open the possibility
57. DV 12, S I, 192, 11–13.
58. DV 12, S I, 192, 19.
59. DV 12, S I, 194, 24.
60. See Abelard, Ethica: Scito teipsum, in Peter Abelard's Ethics, edited by David E. Luscombe,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 4, 29–31. On Abelard, see Eileen Sweeney, Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 115–16. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, edited by Roberto J. Busa, SJ, I–II, 20, 2,
Leonine edition, 1888, Corpus Thomisticum, available at www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth0000. html, where Aquinas argues that while the right intention is necessary for the goodness of the act, a fully good act requires that the act itself be really good rather than just sincerely chosen as good.
Cf. J. Vuillemin, "Justice Anselmienne et bonne volunté Kantienne: Essai de comparaison," in Anselm, Aosta, Bec and Canterbury, edited by Luscombe and Evans (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1996), 361–75. Vuillemin also notes the similarity between Anselm's notion of justice and Kant's notion of a good will but goes on to argue that they part company in their views of injustice and bad will, with Kant articulating the religion of pure reason, a kind of Pelagianism, while Anselm follows Augustine. See also Mechthild Dreyer, "Veritas—Rectitudo—Iustitia. Grundbegriffe ethischer
Reflexion bei Anselm von Canterbury," Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales/ Forschungen zur Theologie und Philosophie des Mittelalters 64, no. 1 (1997): 67–85. Dreyer tries to make sense of
Exploring Division and Unity of radical difference between exterior act and internal reality—the aspect of this position explored so effectively by Abelard. On the other hand, as Anselm emphasizes, his account points toward the unity of having, willing, and doing since if one wills justice, one receives, has, and does it simultaneously. Anselm even defends the unity of the integrated finite will against an objection the teacher articulates, which attempts to break down the unity between justice and rectitude of the will. To the objection that justice, as rectitude kept for its own sake, is not had the moment one has rectitude of will, the teacher replies that we have rectitude by willing it and will it only by having it, such that "as long as we will it we keep it, and while we keep it we will it."61
The emphasis on intentionality as at the core of justice, keeping justice for its own sake, also allows Anselm to unite human and divine justice under one definition. These seem to be different because for human beings justice and rightness are a matter of debitum, doing what one ought, paying what one owes, but God's righteousness is not in paying what is owed to another or in any way being judged by a standard outside himself. When justice is understood as keeping uprightness for its own sake, it not only can be said of God but it is more appropriately said of God that he keeps righteousness for its own sake (propter se servari) because, as the teacher explains, God's righteousness keeps itself through nothing other than itself.62 While human beings keep righteousness for its own sake as something other than their own sake, God keeps righteousness for its own sake, which is identical to keeping it for his own sake.
Having distinguished but connected truth, righteousness, and justice, as well as human and divine justice, the dialogue returns to its opening question: whether there are many truths or one truth. If there are many truths, as many as there are kinds of things, the teacher argues, then truth will exist when what is signified is the case and will not exist when it is not, just as color depends on (and disappears with) the material object of which it is a quality. Such a view would imply that truth depends for its existence on the multiplicity of things generated and corrupted, the student protests, while the truth of signification still would exist even if there were no true signification nor any signification at all.63 the path from truth to justice and its place in the history of philosophical ethics, placing Anselm in dialogue with Aquinas, Scotus, and Kant. Rogers rejects what she calls the "Kantian interpretation" of Anselm. See Katherin Rogers, Anselm on Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
66–67, and see pp. 226–28 for a discussion of the relationship between Kant's notion of duty and Anselm's notion of keeping righteousness for its own sake.
61. DV 12, S I, 195, 7–13.
62. DV 12, S I, 196, 4–8.
63. DV 13, S I, 197.
Exploring Division and Unity To avoid this unacceptable conclusion, they conclude, the truth informing all those particular truths must be independent of those things and is the One Truth by which they are true. Anselm then completes what
Corbin calls his "admirable reversal"64 of the standard relationship between truth and beings: "It is to speak improperly to say 'this or that thing is' is true, since truth is not in those things or from those things or through those things in which it is said to be."65 Rather, things are true by and in the One Truth. In this way, Anselm links truths with the One
Truth. But he de-links truth from the many things which might be true.
They are not themselves, strictly speaking, true, though they can be said to be true in a secondary sense, when they are what they ought to be, that is, are in accordance with the source of their being, with the Truth.
Led by Henry, most readers have noted the ways in which the dialogue displaces ordinary language as the standard for truth, but they have not paid as much attention to the parallel displacement of logical standards of truth by the notion of God as Truth. Signification, for Anselm, depends as a condition for its possibility on the existence of a Supreme Truth, in and by whom all truths are true, and a Supreme Good, toward whom all choices are directed. This conclusion conflicts radically with common opinion, language, and experience. Thus, Anselm's reflection on truth has led him away from common experience and language in two directions: there are both more kinds of truth (two, not just one truth of signification) and a greater union of all truths in the one truth than ordinary ways of speaking and thinking recognize.
We cannot take Anselm's definition of truth as "rectitude as perceived by the mind" but leave aside the rest of the dialogue as "chaff." To do so is to miss how Anselm understands truth "both as being and as value."66 Such a reading also leaves out two-thirds of the dialogue. In the dialogue as a whole, truth as found in true statements (already itself complicated by the distinction of this notion of truth from the truth of signification) is placed in context of the truth of things doing and being what they ought. Further, all those truths are understood as dependent not on those particular things and statements but on the One Truth, in and through which they are true. Anselm is unwilling to let go of any of these notions of truth, either the mundane truth of ordinary language, logical notions of truth in the truth of signification, or the grand notion of the One Truth.
64. Corbin, "Se Tenir dans la Vérité," 659. This is a reversal not only of the relationship between truth and beings but also reason and truth, as Cattin points out: "ratio is not capable of truth except because it is 'in' the truth, it is possessed by the truth and not vice versa." Yves Cattin, "Prologion et De veritate: Ratio, Fides, Veritas," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, 606.
65. DV 13, S I, 199, 17–19.
66. Duclow, "Structure and Meaning," 417.
Exploring Division and Unity The grand notion of the One Truth is where Anselm is headed, but the prosaic notions are the beginning of the journey toward that goal.
For Anselm, grammatical and logical analyses serve as the first step in making the transition between common usage and the higher and more proper vision of truth. Anselm has grammar and logic serve that function because that is the function they served in the larger system of education and reasoning in which he takes part. Further, for Anselm grammar and logic serve as springboards because of what sophisticated literacy brings about: a realization of the ways in which things are or signify more or something different from what they seem or what is said about them. Thus grammar and logic destabilize confidence in ordinary ways of speaking and thinking. These trivium disciplines show that language has a truth of its own apart from the things it names, and, thus lays the groundwork for the more important and radical claim that there are not irreducibly many truths but One Truth in and by which particular things are true. Logical and grammatical sophistication destroys comfort with one end of the spectrum—the way language applies to ordinary things; theological insight does the same with the other end—how language applies to God. What Anselm enacts within De veritate and in the linking of the three dialogues is the connection between the first steps of grammar and the meaning of the things revealed in scripture, the coexistence of many truths and the One Truth.
With this conclusion, we return to the issue that opens the Fragments which is an important thematic link between Anselm's writings on language and theology. For De veritate is Anselm's answer to the Parmenidean question, how finite things and God can be said to be or to be something. Like Parmenides, Anselm concludes that there is only one being and one truth; the being and truth of other things is derivative and, thus, improperly said to belong to them. As Anselm takes a step toward Parmenides he also takes an important step away from Plato, shifting from the notion of "eternal and underived" essences to essences whose "natures and proper functions are derived from him who is per se and a se."67
For Anselm, the reality of all material things is directly found in God, not in an intermediate realm of forms. Anselm also moves away from Parmenides in wanting to save the truth of ordinary things and ordinary language. He rejects the monism of Parmenides by arguing that creatures have a kind of truth of their own by fulfilling their function.
In this way, Anselm derives his teleology from his metaphysics: the truth of things is in their being in and according to the Supreme Truth;
67. Campbell, "Anselm's Background Metaphysics," 343.
Exploring Division and Unity hence, "doing the truth" is orienting oneself toward the One Truth, acting toward it. The notion that the truth of things is their being and doing what they ought is, essentially, a rephrasing from a creaturely perspective of Jesus' claim to be "the way," and, of course, of the claim ruminated on at some length in De veritate, that "he who does the truth comes to the light."68 Doing what one ought, having truth and, hence, righteousness, is, in the language of De veritate, being according to supreme truth.69 But while De veritate defines truth and righteousness, what is taken up in the following dialogues is how creatures can achieve (and fail to achieve) righteousness.
De libertate arbitrii: Striving to Maintain Unity There are, much of the secondary literature argues, two philosophically significant claims Anselm makes about the will in his two dialogues, De libertate arbitrii and De casu diaboli. The first is that free choice does not consist in the existence of alternate real possibilities for choice, namely to choose rightly or wrongly. Anselm makes this clear when he insists that freedom does not consist in the ability to sin (or not). Explaining and defending this claim is the main subject of De libertate. The second is that in human beings (and in the angels before they fell) there are two wills or inclinations, one to justice and one to happiness. Laying out this view is the main subject of De casu diaboli. In his account of the first,
Anselm insists on the autonomy of the will that can neither be compelled by internal nor external forces. This has been called the "radical voluntarism" at the core of Anselm's theory of the will.70 In his account of the second, Anselm insists that the human will could not be free if it had only one will or inclination, either for justice or happiness, and that only the choice of justice for its own sake (not for the sake of happiness) can be counted as a morally worthy choice. Commentators have credited Anselm with "breaking new ground" by rejecting eudaimonism in this way.71 An68. John 3:21; see DV 5, S I, 181–83.
69. DV 13, S I, 199, 28–29.
70. Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams, "Anselm's Account of Freedom," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 198.
71. Bonnie Kent, "The Moral Life," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, edited by A. S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 236–37. Jeffrey Brower, "Anselm on Ethics," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow, 222–56, esp.
222–24. John Hare argues for the connection between Anselm to Scotus in the development of a non-Aristotelian, duty-based ethics, but sees less of a break than others between Augustine and Anselm. John Hare, God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands, and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001). Daniel Rakus makes the connection between Anselm and Kierkegaard's
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing rather than Kant, though the main thrust of his argument is in
Exploring Division and Unity selm sounds even more Kantian when we add his notion that to be a rational being with a will is to have "the ability to keep uprightness of will for the sake of this uprightness itself."72 For most philosophical commentators, Anselm's views can be summed up as incompatibilist but not requiring, at least not for freedom per se (only for the finite received wills of human and angels), the existence of alternate possible choices, and as deontological in his theory of moral obligation.
However, Anselm is not simply taking positions on the will; he is reflecting on points in Christian salvation history from creation to the fall. Understanding the fall sets the stage for the only possible resolution of the human condition in the Incarnation. In other words, there is a substantive and specific connection between the second and third dialogues of the trilogy and scripture just as there is for the first. This does not reduce the philosophical value or originality of Anselm's thinking on the topics of free choice and ethics. Rather to see them in their context, as coming out of reflection on scripture's account of the human condition and as fitting back into that context, is to see even more clearly their philosophical genius. For Anselm these are not abstract arguments on a topic but part of larger ethical and existential question about what it means to be human, what it is human beings can and should do with their lives. This context deepens and complicates Anselm's "positions" on the will and ethical action.
Anselm is engaged with scripture and working out Christian anthropology in the broad sense very much against the backdrop of Augustine's work on these topics. Freedom and responsibility, sin and grace, are, of course, central to so much of Augustine's work, and their importance is only outweighed by the differences of opinion among scholars about what his view is, whether it changed over time, whether free choice is radically transformed after the fall.73 Augustine is not a systematic answer to a more Kantian sounding question, how one can know one's moral debitum, arguing that Anselm holds that moral knowledge is innate. Daniel T. Rakus, "Alter Augustinus and the Question of Moral Knowledge: Answering Philosophically as an Anselmian," Revue des Études Augustiniennes
43 (1997): 313–37. For other views on Anselm's relationship to Kant see n. 60, and my discussion of justice for Anselm and its relationship to Kant, 226–28 For less anachronistic accounts of Anselm and his relationship to ancient eudiamonism, see Jean-Robert Pouchet, OSB, La Rectitudo chez Saint
Anselme: Un Itinéraire Augustinien de l'Ame à Dieu (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1964), 89–90, 195–
97. See also the similar remarks by Philippe Delhaye, "Quelques aspects de la morale de saint Anselme," in Congrès international du IXe centenaire de l'arrivée d'Anselme au Bec, Spicilegium Beccense I (Paris: J. Vrin, 1959), 241; and Jean Rohmer, La finalité morale chez les théologiens de saint Augustin à
Duns Scot (Paris: J. Vrin, 1939), 156.
72. DLA 4, S I, 214, 4–7.
73. On the diverse interpretations of Augustine see John Rist, "Augustine on Free Will and Predestination," in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by R. A. Markus (New York:
Exploring Division and Unity thinker and wrote in different ways and at different times against different opponents on these topics. Anselm's reflections clearly aim at coming up with a consistent account of freedom and responsibility in created beings that does justice to Augustine's intuitions in opposing both Manicheanism and Pelagianism.74 For on the one hand, Augustine insists on individual responsibility for sin (as opposed to Manichean determinism), and, on the other hand, is completely committed to the notion that human beings cannot, through their own actions and agency, merit salvation (as opposed to Pelagian libertarianism).75 Augustine also stakes out a number of other claims that Anselm is determined to honor. Augustine maintains that one is more free when unable to sin than able to sin.76 In these contexts, Augustine opposes the ability not to sin with not being able to sin (contrasting the condition of Adam with that of beatitude) and characterizes both as kinds of freedom. Augustine also argues that if freedom is defined as the ability to sin or not, then neither God nor the angels can be said to have free will.77 But Augustine also insists that Adam was and had to be able to sin or not, and that unless his choice was free, punishment would be unjust.78
Besides endorsing these claims, Anselm also seems to be engaged with Augustine on this topic by taking up objections that were raised against Augustine in his own time, most pointedly by the Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum. Julian objects, among many other things, that free choice must inAnchor Books, 1972), 218 (reprint, Journal of Theological Studies, 20 [1969]: 420). See also Eleanore Stump, "Augustine on Free Will," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, edited by Eleanore
Stump and Norman Kretzman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124. For other discussions of the wide range of views attributed to Augustine, see Stump, "Augustine on Free Will,"
143, nn. 1–2.
74. Cf. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 30–31. Rogers argues that Augustine's views are compatibilist and that Anselm comes to a very different libertarian view. For the full argument on Augustine's compatibilism, see 31–52. Though there are objections to be made to her reading of Augustine and to the brute application of contemporary philosophical categories to Augustine, for whom they are even more problematic than Anselm, her analysis of both Anselm and Augustine on this issue is extremely helpful and she is right that Anselm, while likely thinking of himself as "working through some of Augustine's unfinished business," develops a very different view. However, it is one that is truer than Rogers allows to Augustine's basic intuitions about the will.
75. Cf. Stump, "Augustine on Free Will," 137. Though like Rogers, Stump uses without qualification or question contemporary categories to understand Augustine, she is true to the sense and spirit of Augustine's writings, early and late, when she writes that he holds both that "the will of faith is a gift of God in the sense that God alone is the cause of it" and that "human beings have free will and are solely responsible for their sins." To her credit, Stump tries very hard to do justice to both of these claims in Augustine, despite the difficulties posed by Augustine himself. For discussion of the issue of grace and free will in Augustine, see chapter 7.
76. Augustine, Enchiridion 105; De civitate Dei XXII, 30, 3; De correptione et gratia, 11, 32; 12, 33.
77. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 38; VI, 10.
78. Augustine, De libero arbitrio II, 1.
Exploring Division and Unity clude the ability to do otherwise and that if it does not, then God is responsible for sin.79 Articulating a strong libertarianism, Julian also accuses Augustine of falling into Manicheanism. Anselm crafts his account in sympathy with Augustine on several levels: he shares with Augustine the basic position maintaining both human agency and dependency, along with a notion of true freedom as freedom to choose the good, and takes up the challenges left unmet in Augustine's unfinished reply to Julian.
Anselm's solution is to redefine free choice itself not as the neutral choice between options but as keeping righteousness for its own sake.
At the same time, he takes seriously Julian's objection that if everything, including the choice to keep righteousness, is given by God, then that action is necessary rather than free. In this way, Anselm avoids a definition of freedom which would exclude God, and also avoids the criticism of libertarianism, that it leaves only the liberty of indifference.80 Anselm's argument for rejecting the view that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise (to sin), is like the one Plato makes in the Gorgias about power, an argument Boethius also makes in the Consolation.81 True power is the ability to do what is advantageous, thus he is more powerful who knows and does only what is truly beneficial. So, Anselm argues, someone who cannot be turned from righteousness to sin, is more free because able to avoid sin, which is both disgraceful (dedecens) and harmful (noxium).82
The assumption Anselm makes is that freedom is an advantage, a perfection, such that its possession should make one more rather than less powerful. As Visser and Williams remark, Anselm is "emphasizing the teleological nature of freedom; full-fledged freedom of choice is the power for self-initiated action for some good end."83
Scholars have attempted to explain this notion of freedom as the ability to refrain from sin, rather than as the ability to sin or not in a number of helpful ways. Rogers tries to elucidate Anselm's notion of free choice using Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first and second order volitions. A second order volition is "a choice about what desires one wishes to have and to embrace." Thus, freedom for Frankfurt is "being able to act upon the desires which one endorses."84 Campbell reminds us that arbi79. Julian makes this claim about the will a number of times; see, for example, Augustine,
Contra Julian opus imperfectum I, 78, 82. On Augustine's Manicheanism, see II, 113; V, 32.
80. Augustine makes the argument against Julian, who defends a strong libertarianism. See
Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 41, 56. Cf. Rogers, Anselm in Freedom, 36.
81. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy II, pr. 6, 208–12; III, pr. 2, 232–37; IV, pr. 2, 318–28.
82. DLA 1, S I, 208, 18–24.
83. Visser and Williams, "Anselm's Account of Freedom," 183–84 (the authors' emphasis); cf.
Visser and Williams, Anselm, 174.
84. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 61–62.
Exploring Division and Unity trium in liberum arbitrium means rational or informed judgment. It is that which a judge makes in a case before him, not a merely neutral choice of one alternative over another. The judge's sentence, his arbitrium, is fitting, and human liberum arbitrium is willing what is fitting, what one ought.85 If free choice is a perfection, it is the freedom to do something that is fitting and right. Thus, the ability to sin is not part of freedom, just as the ability to fall is not part of the ability to walk, and musical ability is the ability to play an instrument well, not well or badly. Of course, one who can play well can also play badly, but that is not part of their musical ability.86 Perhaps more helpful is Campbell's distinction between the ability to keep the law and that to commit a crime, which are not the same, as analogous to Anselm's distinction between the ability not to sin and the ability to sin.87 Though there are limits to these analogies, they do give a sense of how we might think about freedom not as the ability to choose between alternatives but to choose positively what one ought.
Nonetheless, there is a tighter link between freedom and sinning than there is between musical ability and bad playing. Anselm maintains that even though the ability to sin is not part of freedom, human beings and angel sinned "by the ability to sin and by free choice," and that, as he titles chapter two, "although they were able to serve sin, sin was not able to master them."88 As Anselm does in many places in this dialogue and De casu, this chapter heading states what he will argue for in near paradoxical terms: how can one serve sin without being mastered by it? How can one sin by free choice without the ability to sin being part of freedom? The solutions to these conundrums, as is often the case in Anselm, are found in the making of fine distinctions. Anselm argues that human beings and angels sinned "by their own choice [per arbitrium suum] which was free [liberum]" but not "by that from which their choice was free [per hoc unde liberum erat]." Freedom is the ability not to sin; humans and angels sinned by the ability [potestatem] they had to sin.89 Because human beings and angels are "able to serve sin" not by being externally compelled but by their own power or choice, then sin cannot be said to "master" them.
The distinction that is difficult to grasp is that between the ability not to sin and the ability to sin. The former is what freedom consists in, An85. Richard Campbell, "Freedom as Keeping the Truth: The Anselmian Tradition," Anselm
Studies 2 (1988): 297–318.
86. Campbell, "Freedom as Keeping the Truth," 303–5.
87. Campbell, "Freedom as Keeping the Truth," 305.
88. DLA 2, S I, 209, 8–10.
89. DLA 2, S I, 210, 6–10.
Exploring Division and Unity selm argues, but what about the latter? A number of commentators have had problems understanding and supporting the distinction, defaulting to the view that, at least in creatures, freedom requires the ability to sin even though Anselm claims clearly that the ability to sin is not part of freedom, freedom that human beings, angels, and God share.90 Campbell makes the distinction clearly: "in creatures choice and thus the possibility of sinning provides the condition for self-determination and thus the condition in which creatures can exercise their freedom: it does not follow that human freedom is essentially a matter of having choices."91
Why choice is not part of but a condition for the creaturely exercise of freedom is the topic of De casu. In De libertate Anselm only tries to maintain the distinction between free choice and the ability to sin in order to maintain both human freedom and responsibility for sin.
To this end the bulk of the dialogue is a sustained attempt to retain the autonomy of the will in the face of series of pointed objections by the student. The discussion of the limits and weakness of the will of creatures is a secondary theme. Maintaining free choice means showing how it exists both before and after the fall, in the face of threats, temptation, and even divine power, arguing that there is freedom even in the midst of servitude. The student objects again and again that it seems that the will can be forced to fall while the teacher maintains its inviolability. In each case, the student's objections look unanswerable and the teacher's positions appear indefensible. But the teacher always manages to reply with arguments that have a kind of tautological necessity, making the contrary view, the one originally expressed by the student, selfcontradictory. This is, of course, the pattern of argument laid down in the Monologion, here carried forward beyond the topic of the divine nature to that of created natures.
The teacher sets out to defend the notion that not only is the will free before it freely makes itself the "servant of sin" but that it is still free even after making the choice to subjugate itself. This problem is made more rather than less intractable by the definition of free choice as the ability to keep righteousness of will for the sake of righteousness itself. To 90. See Campbell, "Freedom as Keeping the Truth," 303–8, who argues that both Jasper Hopkins and Stanley Kane have difficulty making sense of Anselm's view because they are not able to keep from projecting the modern notion of freedom as the choice between alternatives on to Anselm. See Hopkins, A Companion, 144–45, and G. Stanley Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom and the Will (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981), 128–29, 170. Hopkins and Kane do attempt to maintain Anselm's definition but do not, for Campbell, do so adequately. Visser and Williams make this difficulty—reconciling Anselm's claims that imply that freedom requires alternate possibilities and those that do not—the thesis of their chapter in Anselm, 172–91.
91. Campbell, "Freedom as Keeping the Truth," 307.
Exploring Division and Unity this the student poses the very understandable question: given the loss of righteousness, how can the will be free, that is, how can it will to keep a righteousness it no longer has? This is the title of chapter three and the student's first question.92 The teacher's puzzling reply is that we have no ability which suffices to accomplish anything. What else is an ability if not the ability to accomplish something? The teacher's response dissolves the apparent contradiction by distinguishing between different kinds of ability. We say someone can see, that there is an ability, but in order for seeing to take place, not only must there be capability in the one who sees, sightedness, but also something to see, light in which to see it, and, lastly, no obstructions to vision. Hence, just as we have the ability to see when we are sighted but cannot see when there is no object, no light, or an obstruction, so we can have the ability to keep righteousness when we have the reason to recognize righteousness and the will by which to hold on to it even though we lack the actual righteousness we have the ability to hold on to.93
In clear contrast to Augustine's account of the fallen will, at least in the Contra Julianum, Anselm maintains the continued presence of free choice unchanged even after falling into sin. Augustine insists that the will itself is damaged by the fall, taunting Julian with passages from St. Paul describing the inability of the will to function. How, he asks, can we be free if we say with Paul, "I do not do what I will, but I do what I hate" (Rom. 7:15)?94
Anselm can, of course, agree with Paul but understand the inability not to be the loss of free will itself but a loss of the condition that makes it operative: the loss of the gift of righteousness. It is a fine distinction and Anselm draws attention to it by stating it in a deliberately provocative way (we have no ability which makes us able to do anything), making the problem look insoluble. If this does not quite create difficulty, at least it makes it clear that it will not be skirted. It is noteworthy that Anselm's chapter heading preceding this conclusion, "how [the devil and Adam] have the ability to keep righteousness, which they do not have," is a similarly discomfiting formulation.95 This is yet another example of Anselm's penchant for pursuing paradox. This particular apparent paradox makes an important point about Anselm's notion of free choice in human being and angels, that the freedom they possess is that of a finite will; it is a created, received freedom. This formulation, that our abilities are not by themselves sufficient to actually do anything, is another consequence of finitude, and the stu-
92. DLA 3, S I, 210, 23–24.
93. DLA 3, S I, 213, 9–13.
94. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum VI, 11; cf. VI, 12.
95. DLA 4, S I, 213, 27.
Exploring Division and Unity dent's bafflement both here and throughout the dialogue is the dramatization of incompleteness and dependence of human understanding. The account of received freedom, is, as noted above, the topic of De casu, but just as De veritate's exploration of truth led to the truth of the will as the will's free keeping of righteousness, linking De veritate to De libertate arbitrii, so the discussion of human and angelic freedom and responsibility leads to a discussion of the limits of creaturely freedom, linking De libertate arbitrii and De casu.
The ground for turning back all the objections to the will's freedom is the nearly tautological claim that everyone who wills wills that he will.
Hence, Anselm concludes, though we can be killed, tortured, etc., against our wills, we cannot will against our will and so cannot will to desert uprightness unwillingly.96 Anselm does go on to nuance this claim, admitting that there is a sense in which we might be said to will something against our will, though he need not for the purpose of maintaining his view.
Anselm does not mention it in this context, but he must have in mind at some level the scripture passage Augustine quoted back to Julian to render his assertions that the will is free to choose absurd, Paul's "I do not do what I will, but I do what I hate" (Rom. 7:15). Anselm, of course, does not want to deny the conflict Paul describes but wants to interpret it in some other way than as willing against one's will. He couches his reinterpretation not directly in regard to Paul but as a response to the commonplace claims (as opposed to his logically unassailable but sophisticated claim about willing to will) that we cannot carry through on what we will, that we are somehow forced to choose what is against our will. Here is the familiar Anselmian strategy of undermining ordinary, common usage and replacing it with clearer but often more difficult, even paradoxical sounding claims. In this vein, he maintains that, for example, the man who lies to save his life lies both willingly and unwillingly. Anselm explains the apparent contradiction by arguing that he lies against his will in the sense that he does not will lying for its own sake and in the sense that it is against his will that he be placed in this dilemma of either lying or being killed. But he lies willingly in the sense that he wills to lie for the sake of his life and, hence, deserts uprightness willingly. What is noteworthy is that Anselm, though he has accommodated the ordinary language claim in explaining the limited sense in which it is true, still concludes his explanation in a paradoxical sounding conclusion: "although against his will he either lies or is killed, it does not follow that he lies against his will
96. DLA 5, S I, 214, 18–23. Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei V, 10, 1. Augustine makes the same point, that one cannot will against one's will.
Exploring Division and Unity or that he is killed against his will."97 This is not a contradiction but you have to read it slowly to realize it.
When they turn to the problem of the will seeming to be overcome by temptation, Anselm continues to play with the language, both in the student's objections and his replies. The student is clearly provoking the teacher when he precedes his next objection to the will's freedom—that we experience the will as powerless, overcome by irresistible temptation—with the remark, "Though you subdue all assaults on our will and do not permit any temptation to master it so that I am not able to resist your claims in any way."98 It is a wonderfully ironic statement describing the situation he feels himself to be in: the teacher's argument concluding that no temptation is irresistible is itself so irresistible that the student's will, which the teacher has proved autonomous, is compelled by the force of the teacher's arguments. But the additional irony is that though the student says his will is compelled by the teacher's argument, it is not quite. He still objects, on the grounds of what he experiences, and so he challenges the teacher to reconcile the "power of the will" he has "proved" with the "powerlessness of the will we feel."99
The student could, of course, have made his point without irony and in any number of less paradoxical sounding ways. He could have claimed that to say that one is "unable to resist" a conclusion is something of an exaggeration in the same way in which, as the teacher goes on to explain, we often say resisting temptation is impossible when in fact it is only difficult. Or the teacher may intend to leave room for the conclusion that not to be compelled by truth is a kind of lack rather that possession of freedom. The point is that Anselm exaggerates the problem to the point of paradox, accentuating a kind of tension between the content of the argument—the will is never coerced—and the way that argument affects the student—his assent is compelled. Such an obvious and self-conscious shaping of the dramatic aspect of the dialogue should show, in case we needed more proof, that the rhetoric of the arguments and exchanges is intended and demands interpretation.
Both before and after this interjection from the student, the teacher gives a logical, linguistic argument: to say that temptation forces the will is to say that something forces the will to will, which is clearly nonsensical. If the will wills, then its choice is willed, not compelled.100 After the student's interjection, based on his experience, which seems to run coun-
97. DLA 5, S I, 215, 18–20.
98. DLA 6, S I, 217, 10–12.
99. DLA 6, S I, 217, 14–16.
100. DLA 5, S I, 216, 29–217, 3; 6, S I, 217, 10–27.
Exploring Division and Unity ter to the logic of the situation, the teacher makes two additional points.
First, he explains and corrects ordinary language: we say we are powerless against temptation, necessarily overcome by it, only because it is difficult to resist. The student is still not entirely convinced. The teacher replies with a much stronger claim about the general unintelligibility of any claim that the will can be overcome and attempts convince the student emotionally as well as logically. "If a man wills to lie in order to avoid death and to save his life for a while," the teacher counters, "who will say that it is impossible for him to will not to lie in order to avoid eternal death and to live endlessly?"101 Who indeed could make such a preposterous claim? Anselm's point is not, as we shall see in De casu, that the will only wills what brings greater pleasure or happiness; rather he seeks to reframe the dilemma of choosing lying or death in order to see beyond the apparent necessity of being forced to lie to escape death by seeing the possibility of freely choosing not to lie to receive life without end.102 The reframing depicts an emotionally convincing scenario to complement the logical argument. It is consonant with our experience and feelings to imagine the will resisting pleasures and enduring suffering for the sake of a transcendent good. The point is to shift what seems necessary and indubitable away from the will's being compelled to the will's freedom.
However, having claimed the high ground of indubitability, the teacher concludes by rephrasing this clear truth in a problematic way, retaining the language of powerlessness. Thus Anselm writes, "powerlessness [impotentia] does not remove from the will the ability to persevere in righteousness," even as he glosses this with the claim that we call the will powerless because it can keep uprightness only with difficulty.103
This way of expressing it has a point. The teacher wants the student to see that the will cannot be overpowered while also recognizing the truth of our ordinary expressions (and experiences) of being overcome, of being unable to resist: "In this way, therefore, I think you are able to see how the power of the will which true reasoning asserts is consistent with [conveniat] the powerlessness which our humanity feels."104 Though he
101. DLA 6, S I, 217, 32–218, 1.
102. Whether and to what degree Anselm rejects "eudaimonism" is controversial. On the one hand, Anselm insists that justice is keeping righteousness for its own sake, yet here he seems to imply that choosing rightly means seeing one's true good in a large enough context—seeing eternal life as the greater good which is a consequence of not lying rather than seeing escape from physical torture as greater good which is the consequence of lying. It is De casu which addresses this question more directly. See n. 71 for some of those rejecting this conclusion; Rogers argues that Anselm is eudaimonistic. See pp. 226–28 for my discussion of this issue.
103. DLA 6, S I, 218, 10–13.
104. DLA 6, S I, 218, 8–10.
Exploring Division and Unity could quite easily, Anselm again refrains from resolving the two different perspectives, "the powerlessness" humanity feels and the ability or power to persevere.
There is, moreover, a connection, in the form of a kind of tension, between the content of their conclusions and what it means that they can argue for them. The student shows his power in being able to formulate these strong objections; the teacher wants to defeat the student's objections at the same time that he wants to retain the objections, which are asserting the weakness of the human will, to the degree that they have a kind of truth to them. The main message of De libertate is the unassailability, the inviolability of the will's free choice, but its sub-text is the weakness and the possibility, now reality, of its fall. The will is both strong enough to resist any temptation and weak enough to be overwhelmed by next to nothing. Anselm resists resolving this tension longer, arguably, than he needs to, letting the student dwell in it long enough not just to understand it but to experience it in himself.
The teacher makes another, more deeply puzzling claim: that the will is stronger than temptation even when overcome by temptation.105 This time the student uses the kind of definition-based argument the teacher used, appealing to the notion of what it means to be stronger than something else. If the will (specifically the will to keep righteousness) were stronger than temptation, then the will would resist and, hence, could not be overcome by temptation.106 The teacher's reply is the kind of finegrained distinction we have come to expect: there is will in the sense of instrument for willing (like the instrument for seeing) and there is will in the sense of the activity of willing (like actually seeing) which uses the instrument for willing. Hence, just as the man who can restrain a bull but fails to restrain a ram would be rightly said to be equally strong in each task (though having failed to use enough of his strength on the ram), so the will is stronger than temptation even when it does not use all its strength to overcome it, the teacher argues.107
The obvious question is what, then, accounts for what the will wills more strongly? What makes it will whatever it wills more strongly? What is the cause of its sometimes using and sometimes not using adequate strength to defeat temptation? Anselm does not ask this here, though he takes it up in De casu. His point here that the will has a strength that it can always use—if it wills—to resist the forces of temptation. The will itself chooses to will whatever it wills and when it wills two things, it
105. DLA 7, S I, 218, 15. 26–220, 5.
106. DLA 7, S I, 218, 17–19.
107. DLA 7, S I, 218, 26–220, 5.
Exploring Division and Unity chooses whatever it wills with greater force. The will always triumphs; its strength is, Anselm claims, inseparable (inseparabilem); it cannot be deterred from whatever it wills more strongly.108
The will's strength is such that even God cannot remove its righteousness, the teacher adds. Anselm constructs this argument as a fairly simply reductio. Since God wills that the will will uprightness for its own sake, if God were to remove that uprightness, then "God would not will
[man] to will what He wills him to will."109 Hence, nothing, including God, Anselm concludes, can overpower a righteous will. As if to underscore this point and further discredit the commonplace claim that the will can be "compelled to abandon truth from fear of death or torment,"
Anselm restates the choice between lying and death in such a way that makes the will's power to choose clearer: "For if it were to see directly the eternal glory which it would immediately gain after keeping the truth and the torments of hell to which it would be handed over without delay after telling a lie, it is then far from doubt that it would be seen right away to have sufficient strength to serve the truth."110 This inelegant but literal translation brings out that Anselm uses multiple expressions about time and distance here. To put it more precisely, he uses expressions signifying the lack of a time delay and distance in the dilemma and the decision—praesentem, statim, sine mora, procul dubio, mox. His point seems to be to neutralize time as a factor in our choices—the distorting effect of a distant benefit weighed against a present disadvantage—in order to get a clearer look at what the will is capable of. For the same reason Anselm chooses the fall of the devil rather than human beings as a way of exploring how evil can be chosen freely by an undamaged will; it takes away the confusion caused by temporality.
But just after Anselm has established a strength on the will's part that is stronger than God (the heading for chapter nine is "nothing is more free than an upright will"), he shifts to describe the utter weakness, unfreedom of the will to recover that uprightness once lost. It would be easier, the teacher asserts, for God to raise the dead than to restore righteousness.111 Though it sounds a bit shocking, this conclusion follows straightforwardly from what has preceded: since the will cannot be forced
108. DLA 7, S I, 219, 32–33.
109. DLA 8, S I, 221, 24–25. Corbin argues that this argument about what God can and cannot do reveals Anselm's connection to and reliance on the scriptural rather than a merely metaphysical or ontological notion of God and his power. See Michel Corbin, "De l'Impossible en Dieu: Lecture du 8e chapitre du dialogue de Saint Anselme sur la liberté," Revue des Sciences philosophique et théologique 66 (1982): 523–50.
110. DLA 9, S I, 221, 26–29.
111. DLA 10, S I, 222, 13–14.
Exploring Division and Unity away from righteousness by anything else, when it deserts it, the fault is utterly its own. And, as Anselm puts it, unlike the body, which dies but does not sin and so as a consequence does not become unable to receive life again, the will deserts by its own power and hence "deserves always to lack righteousness."112 As an argument about what God can or cannot
(or in this case can do more vs. less easily), the argument is strikingly rationalistic. That something is "harder for God" means that it strains cosmic logic more completely, that it contradicts the given nature of things.
However, Anselm's point is not really about God's power but about what it means for the soul to be given again the righteousness it has lost.
The student puts together both the power to keep righteousness, which no one, including God, can take away, and the utter impossibility of regaining righteousness once lost. He sees a tension in this twosided picture of human beings, as utterly free yet incapable of selfrestoration. We are either free or in servitude, not both, he objects, so which is it?113 The teacher's reply is a series of "on the one hand . . . on the other hands," which keep the reader turning from one perspective to another as if watching a tennis match or a seesaw: Because unable to return from sin, he is servant; because unable to be forced from righteousness, free. He can be turned from sin only by someone else and turned from righteousness only by himself.114 Nonetheless, and here Anselm returns inexorably to his main point, from his freedom, a human being cannot be turned either by himself or another. Anselm adds by way of gloss a paradoxical formulation of this point: human beings are always naturally free to serve (ad servandum) righteousness, whether they have righteousness to serve or not.115
The student's penultimate question turns on which characterization of human being is more correct, servant or free, given that here as elsewhere, the teacher has used careful distinctions in order to maintain that both halves of the apparent contradiction are true. The student poses this question in an especially complicated way. He does not ask a question about human being per se as free or servant, perhaps to foreclose the teacher making a simple distinction based on the distinction between human being preand postlapse, free before the fall and servant after. Rather he asks, why is it better to call human beings free when they do not have righteousness than it is to call them servants when they do have righteousness?116 Both are capacities and, hence, we might think,
112. DLA 10, S I, 222, 14–16.
113. DLA 11, S I, 222, 29–223, 2.
114. DLA 11, S I, 223, 3–11.
115. DLA 11, S I, 223, 10–11.
116. DLA 12, S I, 223, 18–21.
Exploring Division and Unity equally attributable to human beings. The reply Anselm crafts for the teacher shows him to be the thorough-going philosopher, that is, utterly uninterested in the facts: "The power of keeping righteousness he always has, both when he has righteousness and when he dos not, and thus he is always free."117 The fact that we do not have righteousness, that we are the servants of sin, that (even worse) we have always already lost the righteousness we have or had the capacity to keep, makes no difference, the teacher argues. A capacity we always have, even though as a matter of fact it cannot be exercised, is a greater truth about us than that a fact that need not be or need not have been true: that we have become servants of sin, Anselm insists.118 This way of thinking about the condition of fallen human beings as still free also allows Anselm to hold that human beings are both truly free and wholly in need of grace in a way that is more persuasive than Augustine's attempt to do the same in his anti-Pelagian writings. For Augustine, though he claims to preserve both free will and the necessity of grace, ends up emphasizing the inability not to sin in fallen beings, while Anselm, though completely in agreement, nonetheless finds a way to define fallen human beings in terms of their given capacity for freedom rather than their inability to exercise it.119
The student's reply to this argument alludes to his own condition in relation to the teacher's argument as mirroring the condition of fallen human being. For the student realizes, now too late, that he had the capacity to answer his own question in the four-fold distinction of capacity the teacher had made earlier. Here's how the student puts it: "If I had thought carefully about what was said earlier. . . . I would not have had this doubt. Therefore, I admit that the fault for this doubt was my own."120 He had been given tools he did not make adequate use of, a failure which caused his doubts, and for which he himself is utterly responsible. The teacher lets him off but only on the condition that the student
117. DLA 12, S I, 224, 3–5.
118. As Campbell points out, this claim only makes sense given Anselm's notion of freedom as the capacity to choose righteousness for its own sake; it makes no sense "if freedom in created beings requires the capacity for choice between alternatives, since we cannot choose something for which the conditions are lost." Campbell, "Freedom as Keeping the Truth," 316.
119. To see whether there is a real difference and not just that between seeing the same glass half full or half empty requires a look at Anselm's De concordia. See chapter 7. See Kane, Anselm's
Doctrine of Freedom, 182–85. On the inability not to sin in Augustine see De civitate Dei, 22, 30; De corresptione et gratia, 12, 33. Anselm characterizes the inability to avoid sin of fallen human being as the inability to return to or recover righteousness on one's own, not as the utter determination of the will to continue in sin (DLA 12, S I, 224). Cf. Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom, 183–84. Hopkins disagrees and finds that as soon as Anselm concedes Augustine's non potest non peccare, the "illusion" of his being less anti-Pelagian than Augustine is stripped away.
120. DLA 12, S I, 224, 23–25
Exploring Division and Unity do what he has not done heretofore: keep all they discuss present to his mind. This is exactly what the student worries in advance he will not be able to do: "But do not be surprised if those things which I am not accustomed to thinking are not after only one hearing all always present in my mind."121 This exchange at the metalevel about what the student has done/can do mirrors the situation they have just worked out in the dialogue. The teacher can ask this of the student and it is, like the ability to keep righteousness, in some real sense a capacity the student possesses. But the student is under no illusions that he will somehow manage to do what he has not yet, and will always at some level fail to do. Yet, at the same time, the teacher's exhortation of him to do it is meaningful in the sense that he can be held responsible for not doing it.
De libertate has established two points: first, having been given righteousness and the ability to choose to uphold it (free choice), nothing, not even God, can undermine that ability; second, having lost righteousness by that choice, one is utterly incapable of recovering it. Anselm is clearly engaged in much more than an assertion of the will's free choice in this dialogue or even in carving out a better way of saving both free choice and the need for grace than Augustine. He is engaged in exploring and, further, deriving the full human moral and existential predicament from the notion of free choice. The student enacts the human desire to forego responsibility as he proposes possibility after possibility of ways in which the will might be compelled. He also enacts the desire for freedom in his hopes that the teacher will defeat his objections. Going through the sequence of arguments feels like attempting to hang on to the purity and unity of the unfallen will under repeated assaults attempting to loosen one's grip on it and, conversely, like trying to escape the responsibility freedom brings only to have it returned to one's hands.
Then, in the next movement, after having retained freedom, the argument forces the student to admit the opposite irretrievability of righteousness of the will once it has been lost. The student is, rhetorically at least, either in heaven or in hell, with a will whose integrity is inviolable
(except by itself), or a will whose fallenness is without natural recourse.
The will cannot be aught else in its choice but free, an ability it cannot lose, and cannot be aught else once having deserted its integrity than fallen, stuck in a way it cannot remedy. It retains complete power in the first instance and is utterly bereft of it in the second. As we see here and will be explored further in De casu, both of these conditions are products of the givenness, of the received character of free choice. It is so utterly
121. DLA 12, S I, 224, 28–30.
Exploring Division and Unity given it cannot be taken away, and so utterly given that one cannot win it for oneself.
The student not only understands but experiences this dual condition from a sense of his own freedom and power to the sense of his lack thereof.
He struggles to hold on to a sense of the will's unity and power even as those conclusions fly in the face of his own experience of his will as both divided and weak. As he did in De veritate, maintaining both that God is truth and that there are many truths, in De libertate, Anselm works to keep two truths in view. In important ways, the path of both De veritate and De libertate is from what is apparently true—the ordinary, commonsense view—to a view that is both more complicated, because it requires looking beyond and beneath doxa, and simpler, because grounded on necessary reasons and clear concepts. But, also in both cases, Anselm does not utterly wipe out the common sense view of division and plurality—of many truths, of the weak and divided will—but places it within a larger unity—the unity of the truth in one truth, and the freedom and, hence, unity of the will which cannot be divided against its will, which is only prospective.
De casu diaboli: Explaining Division De casu diaboli takes up the question of how the will could go wrong. In exploring this issue, it uses an even more marked version of the strategy of alternating paradox and necessity than in De libertate, provoked by the deepening exploration of finite being. The student is still worried that the will is necessitated, but this time the concern is that the will is necessitated by God rather than temptation or difficulty. The dialogue opens, as was noted above, with a question occasioned by St. Paul's question, "What do you have that you have not received?" (1 Cor 4:7). Only God has from himself whatever he has, the teacher replies; all creatures (including angels) have everything they have from God; from themselves they have nothing.
The student immediately takes this assertion one step further: if creatures have everything they possess from God, then what they lack is also from God: "If there is not anything except because God caused it, it is necessary that what is not, is not because he did not make it."122
The Pauline question, "what do you have that you have not received?" is central to the topic at hand. Anselm's use of it echoes Augustine's usage of it in his anti-Pelagian writings, where it is cited to support the notion that salvation requires grace and cannot be merited.123 Alluding to Au-
122. DCD 1, S I, 234, 2–3.
123. On Augustine's use of this passage see n. 16.
Exploring Division and Unity gustine's rejection of Pelagianism with this passage might seem more appropriate in Cur Deus homo than in De casu. De casu's main task is to establish how sin rather than salvation comes about, and how those who fall are themselves responsible, not God. However, since God would be required to save those he caused to fall, the logic of salvation requires both that it cannot be merited but also that those who fall fall of their own weight. It requires, in other words, freedom. This link is clear in Augustine's antiPelagian work, in which one of the main topics of debate is the nature of freedom. Augustine must respond to Julian, who, as we noted above, objects that Augustine cannot on his view maintain meaningful freedom and, thus, either lapses into dualism or making God responsible for sin.
However, the connection of Paul's question to Anselm's topic is yet stronger and deeper. By taking the question quite literally to be about receiving everything by creatures, Anselm signals that he is concerned not just with freedom but the metaphysics of creaturehood. It is not just that creatures receive rather than earn salvation, but that they receive whatever they have from God, and have from themselves only nothing. However, free choice for Anselm, as we shall see, only exists when it is something of one's own. Thus, the problem Anselm is working out is how the creature, who receives everything, can have something of its own.
Anselm is, then, clearly placing the discussion of the fall of the devil and Paul's notion that creatures have nothing they have not received in a very broad context, much broader in fact than Augustine himself. In De praedestinatione sanctorum, Augustine argues that Paul is not alluding to the gifts of nature, things that come with being human, for example, reason, will, etc., as what is received, but rather is referring to predestination, the faith given as a gift to some and not to others.124 Anselm, however, takes the passage to be about everything being received and about the condition of receiving itself. The teacher looks into the logic of receiving to find in it the logic of being and causality; the student descends more deeply into that same logic to draw the opposite conclusion, that not only what is but also what is not is due to God. The discussion brings to mind one of the paradoxes of the Lambeth Fragments, in which the student argues that since nonbeing has no ability, it has neither the ability to exist nor not exist.125 Both the passage in the Fragments and the student's reprise of it here articulate a kind of pure, Parmenidean, allor-nothing perspective. The student takes the logic of being to the point of paradox in the Fragments in an abstract way, but in De casu the student
124. Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum 5, 9–6, 11.
125. LF, 23, 13–16.
Exploring Division and Unity brings the logic of causality to bear on the problems of freedom and responsibility for God and creatures. The teacher's task in De casu, then, is to make room in the logic of causality for something less than perfect being and perfect agency. Only then can he explain how angels (and human beings) can go from good to evil, from freedom to servitude, and how
God can both be and not be the cause of that movement. What Anselm shows is that these large, recognizable philosophical questions are intimately tied up with the nature of giving and receiving, which defines the relationship between creator and creature.
The teacher's opening argument sets the tone for the dialogue as a whole, solving difficulties by distinction and qualification. He argues that can God be said to cause nonbeing only in a certain sense, in the sense of not preventing what he could prevent. In this sense, God "leads into temptation" because he does not keep someone from temptation, though able to do so.126 To be sure, the teacher concludes by reasserting this notion of qualified agency on God's part within the context of the pure and transcendent character of divine being and causality: "from the supreme being there comes nothing but being and every being is from the supreme being. . . . And so nothing and not being are not from him, from whom there is only good and being."127 But in the bulk of the dialogue, complication and distinction are the order of the day. And though Anselm finds his way back to the unity of will in the good angels (able to will no good in which they do not delight) and the opposite in the fallen (able to will no good of which they are not deprived), he gets there by making a series of mind-bending distinctions. 128
Anselm makes clear before he begins this disorienting journey that he is going to have to shift, one could even say twist, ordinary language and reinterpret scriptural language to make his case. In response to an unstated worry that he is contradicting scripture in making such claims, the teacher explains that he is not criticizing scripture or "denying that on account of which it is said" in scripture that God causes nonbeing or evil. "But," he continues, "we ought not cling to (inhaerere) the impropriety of words covering the truth but rather desire (inhiare) the propriety of truth hidden in the many kinds of expressions."129 Anselm uses here one of his favorite rhetorical devices, a parallelism between words that sound similar but are set up as opposites, to underline his point. The contrast between the meaning and the commonalities of sound in "clinging to (inhaerere)" words in a literal sense and "desiring (inhiare)" the truth
126. DCD 1, S I, 234, 12–17.
127. DCD I, S I, 234, 30–235, 4.
128. DCD 6, S I, 243–44; 25, S I, 273.
129. DCD 1, S I, 235, 10–12.
Exploring Division and Unity hidden beneath emphasizes the connection between the two acts he is advising the student to undertake, letting go to pursue truth (rather than clinging to the letter). The student is exhorted to give up false security for the search for hidden truth, to let go of the piece of driftwood on which he trying to stay afloat for a swim across open waters toward a more secure life raft. Notice that Anselm does not promise immediate rescue, does not claim to be able to deliver that deeper truth; the student must be willing to let go of a false certainty without having a new certainty ready to hand in order to embark on the search for deeper understanding. In this way Anselm hints at the insecurity they will experience on the dizzying verbal odyssey they are beginning, in which the most basic certainties, even the very principle of noncontradiction itself, will sometimes seem to be compromised. The grueling course of verbal gymnastics will assert the existence of abilities that are inabilities, doings that are not doing, possibilities that are impossible, and evil that both is and is not something.
Giving and Receiving In order to connect the receiving of the will and its goodness to the larger question of causing or making, the teacher makes use of the distinction from the Fragments in which Anselm argues that a thing is said to cause or do (facere) something even when, though able, it does not intervene to change or restrain an outcome. In this improper sense, then,
God can be said to make things not to be—because he does not make them exist, though he is able. The teacher argues that when things return to nonbeing, God does not cause it, because they return to what they have from themselves—nonbeing, God having reclaimed what he gave—being.
This principle is both the solution to all the problems in the dialogue and that which brings about its difficulties.
The student immediately sees some of the difficulty in the logic of giving as a kind of causality. If everything is from God, only nonbeing is what the creature has of itself; if he has perseverance, then it is because he received it, and he received it because God gave it. If he does not have it, it is because he did not receive it and if he did not receive it, it is because God did not give it.130 The student attempts to pose his objections in the form of tight logical arguments: if giving is the cause of receiving, then not giving is the cause of not receiving.131 However, the student is hoisted on his own logical petard, for he has committed the fallacy of de-
130. DCD 2, S I, 235, 19–25.
131. DCD 2, S I, 236, 1–3.
Exploring Division and Unity nying the antecedent.132 The student's claim that if the bad angel did not receive, then God did not give is, however, more plausible than its fallacious form implies. The claim they began from is that everything the creature has is received; everything is given by God. The logic of God's giving and creature receiving seems to be that of a biconditional—since the creature has nothing from himself, whatever he has or does not have seems to depend on what God has or has not given.
The teacher argues in response that giving requires both that the giver offers and that the receiver receives or accepts (Anselm uses one verb, accipere, for both notions) the offer.133 That means that giving, though active, and receiving, though passive, are not wholly so. The giver can offer without successfully giving, and the receiver can be offered something without accepting. Of course, the activity of the receiver is limited to a negative act—he has the power only of refusing what is offered, and the passivity of the giver is also limited—without the offer the receiver cannot accept or reject. Anselm chooses to make this point by engaging in a dense set of distinctions and inferences that requires very slow and careful reading. One of those is reminiscent of the distinction from De grammatico between logical and causal relationships. So, the teacher explains, following logically is not the same as being caused by something: burning is not the cause of fire (rather vice versa), but from the logical supposition or the observation of burning, we can infer fire, and burning is the cause of the truth of the inference to fire. In the same way, receiving is not the cause of giving (rather vice versa), but from the supposition of receiving, we can infer giving (but we cannot infer from not receiving not having been given, though we can infer from not having been given, not having been received).134 The use of necessary inferences gives strength to their argument—they are using the strongest tools at their
132. Anselm of course does not use this name for the student's mistake but does point out that even if giving is the cause of receiving, it does not follow that not giving is the cause of not receiving. DCD 3, S I, 236.
133. Augustine makes a similar claim in De spiritu et littera but, as Stump notes, does not make use of it to maintain a free act not determined by grace as Anselm does. See Augustine, De spiritu et littera, 34, 60, and Stump, "Augustine on Free Will," 137–38. For more discussion of this issue and this passage in Augustine, see chapter 7. Pranger argues that Anselm's analysis of the gift brings out an aspect not explored by Jean-Luc Marion, the possibility of refusal, which makes the gift not only unreceived but ungiven. M. Burcht Pranger, "Anselm, Marion, and the Refusal of the Gift," in Anselm and Abelard: Investigations and Juxtapositions, edited by G. E. M. Gaspar and H. Kohlenberger (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006), 54–55. Marion, however, makes a somewhat different argument about refusal, that it fails to annul the gift but in the very refusal acknowledges it. See Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 271.
134. DCD 3, S I, 236, 24–237, 6.
Exploring Division and Unity disposal to explore the issue. But, as he did in De grammatico, Anselm also takes care to note the limits of this method; logical connections are not the same as causal connections and the ontological and epistemic orders though connected are distinct.
The student, a quick study, pulls the same distinction out to use against his teacher, noting that all the teacher has proved is that it does not follow from the good angel receiving because God gave that the bad angel did not receive because God did not give. That is, the teacher has shown that a certain logical inference does not follow but has not shown what the cause is of the bad angel's not having or receiving. If God did not give because the devil did not receive, the student asks in frustration, why did the devil not receive? Because he could not or would not receive
(or accept)? The ability and will to receive seem also to be given by God, and not having them seems to be caused by God not giving them. The teacher's answer, in other words, the student complains, seems only to have kicked the problem down the road without solving it.
The teacher's response seems to lead the student further into a thicket of Alice in Wonderland-like nonsense:
Teacher: God did give him the ability and the will to receive perseverance.
Student: Then he received what God gave, and he had what he received.
T: Yes, he received it and had it.
S: Therefore, he received and had perseverance.
T: No, he did not receive it and so did not have it.135
In this exchange, the teacher seems purposely to mislead the student.
Like the student, the reader is baffled at the teacher's apparent embrace of contradictories: that God both gave and did not give perseverance.
Only after drawing the student into this confusion does the teacher make the distinction needed to avoid the contradiction: God gave only the ability and will to receive perseverance, the teacher explains, not "the receiving of perseverance."136
Again, however, the problem seems only to have been put off rather than resolved, something the teacher takes a turn in pointing out. Using the student's own experience as example, the teacher asks whether the student has ever had the will and the ability to do something but failed to complete it. To the affirmative answer, the teacher asks, why did you not persevere in willing? Because I did not will to persevere in willing, the student answers. This is the start of the regress the student is tempted to
135. DCD 3, S I, 237, 20–24.
136. DCD 3, S I, 237, 27–28.
Exploring Division and Unity embark on, answering the obvious next question (why he did not will to persevere in willing): "I would respond again that I willed to persevere but that I did not persevere in this willing, except I see that it would go on to infinity, with you asking me the same thing and me giving the same response."137 The teacher's answer, when it finally comes, is really rather simple: that there is a difference between willing something and willing it completely, and that what the devil failed to do is will completely (pervelle).138 The notion, though simple enough, does require Anselm to coin his own word, pervelle, to capture it. It shows in yet another way Anselm's sense that the toolbox of ordinary language is not adequate to explain the realities he is dealing with.
Of course, the student sees right away that the teacher's answer is not much better than his, that it only—again—pushes the problem further down the line. Why did the angel who fell not will it completely? Mustn't it be because God did not give him this will? Again the teacher makes an apparently absurd rejoinder: because the devil deserted this will, he did not receive it. That the devil's deserting (deseruit) and deserting freely (sponte) is the reason for lacking the will to keep perseverance (rather than God's not giving that will) makes no sense to the student. One first gives up the will to keep something, and then wills to desert it, he argues.139
Not so, the teacher replies, explaining that the relationship is reversed when you have something you do not will to keep on account of something else. Just as the miser wills to spend his money on account of the bread he wants before he gives up his will to keep the money, so the devil, because he wants something more than the will to keep perseverance, wills to desert it before he loses the will to keep it.140
The distinction between willing to desert and not willing to keep is psychologically subtle. In the case of the hot coal (Anselm's example of something you do not will to keep for its own sake which you then subsequently, will to desert), we can feel the difference between "I do not want this" (does not will to keep) and the feeling, "I want to get rid of it," (wills to desert) which follows. It is not clear that the case of the miser and his bread is a temporal reversal of the case of the hot coal, willing to desert money before (in a strictly temporal sense) not willing to keep it, but it does make sense to think of the two acts of will as different and as being differently related for the miser. In the latter case, the experience of the strong desire for bread makes one prepared to give up the money for it
(willing to desert) but requires a second act of will to reconcile oneself to 137. DCD 3, S I, 238m 10–12.
138. DCD 3, S I, 238, 32–34.
139. DCD 3, S I, 239,1–20
140. DCD 3, S I, 239, 23–240, 2.
Exploring Division and Unity giving up the money. While, of course, one cannot pay for the bread without giving up the money, willing both does not always happen. Frequently we wish, as the saying goes, "to have our cake and eat it too." What the miser wills in willing to pay for the bread but not willing to be deprived of his money is not rational but that does not mean that is not what he wants. Many of our battles with ourselves and certainly our children take place at exactly this juncture—we know we cannot have both the bread and the money, cannot gain the reward without the work, eat the sundae without the weight gain, but we want to. Rogers, using Frankfurt, describes the conflict as about reconciling a primary desire—to have the bread—with a secondary desire—who do we want to be? Someone with or without the money?141 The miser's primary desire overtakes him and he gives up the money for the bread, but he is not necessarily reconciled to the broader consequences of his loss: being someone who has less money than before. The distinction Anselm will ultimately make between the will for commoditas and for justice creates a similar kind of conflict.
This detailed analysis of these exchanges shows how deep the discussion has to go to unravel the complexity of willing. Though Anselm ultimately wants to bring to an end the regressive explanations, that we will
X because of Y and Y because of Z and so on, because such a chain does not leave room for freedom, he does not want to jump prematurely to a willing that is not caused. The pattern of their discussion—problematic claims made, then, after much work, understood to be true but nonetheless unsatisfactory as complete explanations, in turn begetting the next problematic claim—reflects the difficulty of the problem. The teacher repeatedly states his view in the most provocative, counterintuitive way possible and in contrast to the student's (apparently) common sense view. The teacher is trying to confound the student, to create aporia. The student's bafflement is completely understandable given the teacher's claims: that not receiving is the cause of not giving; that God gave the ability and will to receive perseverance but the devil did not receive it; that because the devil deserted the will, he did not receive it; that the devil willed first to desert righteousness and then willed not to keep it.
At least two things are accomplished by these tactics. First, Anselm is exposing the limits of common sense and appearances. They look unassailable and indubitable, but closer examination shows that instead they enshrine a partial truth as the whole truth. Second, the student does not just hear about but falls prey to his own oversimplifications and he learns by his mistakes how uncritical, how thoughtless his acceptance of 141. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 61–62.
Exploring Division and Unity the ordinary modes of thinking and talking are. These lessons are meant to prepare the student for the difficulties which are to come.
Even after all this work, the student's real question has not been answered. What, the student persists, did the devil not have which he wanted more that his good will? He willed inordinately to be like God, the teacher answers. Anselm derives this answer thusly: if God punishes justly, then the devil must have sinned; sinning can only be willing what one ought not; hence, they conclude, it "cannot be otherwise" than that the devil "sinned by willing something beneficial (commodum) which he did not have and was not supposed to will then."142 The failure is both in what the devil willed and in how he willed it: he willed to be God or be something more or other than God willed for him, and willed by his own will (propria voluntate) as not subject to God's will.
This might seem like a kind of arbitrary limit on the angelic will, a version of the arbitrary limit not to eat of one tree in the Garden of Eden.143 Thus it has been argued that "the just act of the good angels turns out to be nothing more than obedience to the arbitrary ruling of a God jealously guarding his own honor."144 But this analysis does not go deep enough either about Eden or the case of the fallen angels. Willing to be God and willing by one's "own will" is willing not to have a received will. One wills that the will not be given, that it be utterly one's own, that one be self-made. The fallen angel's sin, then, is acting in a way that denies that he is what he is, a being who, as St. Paul put it, has nothing which he has not received, that he is, to gloss it once again, a creature.145
The choice before the angels was whether to receive. Receiving is harder than it seems. To receive is not only to get something but to accept it, which means acknowledging that you did not have it, earn it, or get it for yourself. This is what Satan was unwilling to acknowledge.
Nonsense about Nothing and Evil The discussion next turns to an examination of the disordered will which caused Satan's fall. Is the will itself good or evil, something or nothing? the student asks. If the evil will is something, then it is given
142. DCD 4, S I, 241, 19–20.
143. Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom, 94–95.
144. Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom, 95.
145. Deme is confusing two different issues when he argues that Anselm does not quite explain what it is that Satan wills. First, it is clear that Satan wills to be God though he is not. Willing to be God per se, the teacher notes, is not necessarily unjust else the Son would be guilty of a sin. What the teacher does not know is not what Satan willed but rather what benefit the good angels won by not willing unjustly and the bad angels lost by willing unjustly (DCD 6, S I, 243–44). See Daniel
Deme, "The 'Origin' of Evil According to Anselm of Canterbury," Heythrop Journal 43 (2002): 175.
Exploring Division and Unity by God. Thus God gives something evil. But if it is not God given, then the creature has something that is not received. In the lengthy excursus on evil as nothing or privation that follows, both student and teacher seem to alternate between banal tautology and outrageous contradiction before arriving at the explanation of the source of the devil's willing to abandon justice.
What is striking is the degree to which Anselm is willing to explore the paradoxes of "nothing." Augustine lets "nothing" go much more quickly in De magistro, where the teacher quips that they must move on "lest 'nothing' detain" them.146 Augustine was, however, detained for much longer in his debate with the Pelagian Julian on the subject of nothing.147 The issue is not posed or discussed in linguistic terms in the Contra Julianum opus imperfectum but in terms of metaphysics and theodicy. Julian uses Augustine's own words against him, misquoting him as claiming that evil originated from nothing.148 Julian argues that in making nothing a cause and describing nothing as a kind of darkness that Augustine is falling into a kind of Manicheanism, reifying nothing into an opposing force to God.149
On the one hand, Anselm, like Augustine in De magistro, takes a linguistic perspective on "nothing" formulating the problem of "nothing" as a problem about its meaning. On the other hand, in the space he devotes to "nothing" as well as the question he takes up—how nothing can be a cause in the context of understanding how the will can choose evil,
Anselm is taking up the challenge posed by Julian to Augustine's account of the will and free choice.
In De casu, the teacher notes that the will is something; thus, an evil will cannot be that in terms of which someone is called evil; it cannot be, in other words, evil itself, because that would make the will itself nothing.150 Injustice is the evil that makes us evil, and injustice is nothing but the loss of original righteousness, the teacher argues.151 The student responds that it seems more plausible to think of good as the privation of evil rather than evil as the privation of good. Thinking of evil as nothing
146. Augustine, De magistro, 3.
147. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 31–44.
148. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V. 31, 38; cf. Augustine, De nuptiis et concupiscentia II, 48. Augustine argued that an evil will must originate from good since there is no alternative, but he adds that it "could not originate from good, because good was made by the good God, but because it was made out of nothing, not out of God."
149. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 32, Cf. De civitate Dei XII, 7, where Augustine argues that there is no efficient cause only a deficiency. To try to find such causes, he writes, is like trying to see darkness or hear silence.
150. DCD 8, S I, 245, 21–246, 7.
151. DCD 9, S I, 246, 30–247, 1.
Exploring Division and Unity simply does not make sense of our basic intuitions. It means denying the horror we feel at the mention of the name, the student objects. Justice, not injustice, feels like a cessation, a kind of tranquility and peace, a respite from the afflictions of evil, while the departure of justice means the very real descent into conflict, passion, and shame. "Mirum est [amazing]," the student concludes, "if one could show that nothing does all these things."152 The student also has difficulty making linguistic sense of the claim that evil is nothing. If the name "evil" is significative, it must signify something: "how can evil be nothing if that which the name signifies is something?" he asks.153
Before resolving the apparent conundrum the teacher seems to wade into it more deeply, asserting that "signifying something and signifying nothing are not opposed." When the student objects that this leads to one of two logically repugnant results (that the word "evil" signifies nothing and something, or that there is some thing which is both nothing and something), the teacher suggests that both might be the case.
"Nothing," like "not-something" and "not-man," signifies the removal of something, and the only way to do that is to signify the very thing whose removal is signified.154 Before really making concrete sense of this, the teacher engages in a kind of virtuosic riff on it:
The name "nothing," which destroys (perimit) everything that is something, in demolishing (destruendo) signifies something rather than nothing and in establishing (constituendo) signifies nothing rather than something. Therefore, it is not necessary that nothing be something because its name in some way signifies something, but rather it is necessary that nothing be nothing because its name signifies something in this way.155
Again Anselm uses parallel clauses of opposites and even accentuates the effect of his favorite technique by making each clause something of a paradox on its own (in demolishing, signifying something; in establishing, signifying nothing). The point seems to be to emphasize rather than downplay the proximity between his claims and contradiction. It is the kind of verbal play we might expect of Lewis Carroll, who, like Anselm, is quite happy to make logical truth sound like nonsense. Carroll flirts with nonsense, displaying valid logical forms with nonsense content, in order to distinguish between validity and soundness. Anselm is doing almost the opposite here, bringing the logical and real world together. Language and logic should mirror being, but instead are nearly
152. DCD 10, S I, 247, 6–28.
153. DCD 10, S I, 247, 20–21.
154. DCD 11, S I, 249, 20–250, 1.
155. DCD 11, S I, 249–50.
Exploring Division and Unity derailed in the attempt. The case of "nothing" is the limit case, the biggest gap between language and reality in the sense in which something is truly signified but it corresponds to nothing in reality. Anselm is taking the logician's need to be precise to the point of inversion, making his distinctions so careful and nuanced they seem to flip into paradoxes.
The student is no happier to be taken on this verbal odyssey than Alice and insists that the name "nothing" stands for something. What, he asks, is it? Only now does the student get an explanation that seems to satisfy. The explanation lays out the distinction the teacher has up to this point been playing with rather than explaining: the distinction between the form and the substance of what is said, the distinction, in other words, between the realms of words and things. Blindness is something according to its verbal form, a quality or attribute, but is nothing in fact; the verb timere is active in form but passive in terms of the thing signified.156
The discussion is important for the topic at hand, for they need to be able to use words like "evil" and "nothing" in a coherent way. As Augustine's debate with Julian reveals, without these kinds of careful distinctions, Julian asserts (and the student can be misled by) sophistical arguments that make "nothing" into something and turn Augustine's rejection of dualism into dualism. What Augustine struggles to make clear against Julian is the notion of what it is to be made "from nothing." Being from nothing is what it is to be creature; it is being from God in a different way in which God is from God in the Trinity.157 This is what Anselm is also working to make clear, first, by making linguistic distinctions and, second, by drawing attention to language and the gap between language and being. Thus, Anselm structures his discussion of "nothing" to reveal the gap between what we say and what is, the gap that Augustine alludes to but does not linger over in De magistro. The student must get used to the ways in which the gap between words and things can lead to claims that sound outrageous but are in fact true. The student is going to need, in other words, the ability to grasp the distinction between the orders of words and things, as well as the ability to tolerate and explore apparent paradox for deeper truth. This was also a main focus of the Proslogion and Monologion but in relation to God; here it is, as we have seen, in relation to creatures. Making sense of what it is to be a creature capable of free choice only exacerbates the problems and leads to more difficulties even more directly related to the problem at hand: How can a creature, who
156. DCD 11, S I, 250, 21-251, 2.
157. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 42.
Exploring Division and Unity has by definition received whatever he has, nonetheless, have from himself the will to choose righteousness?
Reversing Ab esse ad posse When the discussion moves to the distinction between having been given the ability to have a will and actually willing something, it is not just the teacher's claim but his question to the student which precedes it which is mind bending. The teacher's question, "whether that angel who is able (aptus) to will but has not yet willed anything is able to will something by himself (per se)?" is so verbally subtle that the student doe does not quite know what he is being asked 158 The student relies on the notion that if something has happened, it must be possible that it happen
(ab esse ad posse). Thus he answers that if one ever does will, then one can will. The student's answer only seems to follow quite reasonably, the teacher insists. Before the world came into existence, it was nothing with no ability. But if it is unable to be, the student reasons, then it is impossible that it ever be.159 The student at this point is willing to take this view to its apparent logical conclusion, that the existence of the world is impossible. Like the student in De grammatico, he finds logic (or apparent logic) leading him toward absurdity. The teacher rejects the factually absurd conclusion that world does not exist, but only by making a claim that seems logically absurd: before the world existed it was both possible and impossible for it to be. Even given his explanation of the claim—that it is possible for God to create the world but impossible for the world to make itself, the student balks. "I cannot contradict your reasoning but common sense (usus loquendi) does not assent."160 I translate "usus loquendi" as "common sense" not to leave out the ground of the student's objection in ordinary language, which is paramount, but to make the connection between ordinary language and common sense. Ordinary language is a kind of bed rock of obvious, unassailable truth, and the student is voicing the reaction of the ordinary person here, objecting to and strongly contrasting that common wisdom with the sophisticated arguments and distinctions of dialecticians. The teacher reminds the student that they are looking for the "core (medullam) of truth" beyond and beneath the "disturbing" impropriety of language on the surface.161 This is a re-
158. DCD 12, S I, 252, 18–19.
159. DCD 12, S I, 253, 7–12. Cf. the discussion of this claim that before the world existed it was impossible that it exist by Robert A. Herrera, "The 'Proslogion Argument' Viewed from the Perspective of De casu diaboli, in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Foreville, 626–28.
160. DCD 12, S I, 253, 13–18.
161. DCD 12, S I, 253, 19–21.
Exploring Division and Unity prise of the teacher's opening remarks not to "cling to the impropriety of words" but find "the propriety of truth hidden" beneath them.162
The teacher's explanation (the world is possible for God to create but impossible in that it cannot make itself), compared to his initial shocking formulation (the world is possible and impossible), is almost pedestrian. The paradox becomes, with explanation, almost as sensible as the apparently common sense objection. This is even truer when the teacher returns to the initial problem, whether the angel, having a will but not yet willing, is able to will anything by himself. Being said to be able is sometimes a matter not of one's own ability but another's. When I say, for example, that "a book is able to be written by me," it is not the book's ability which is in question but mine as the potential author. Though the teacher does not spell it out, clearly there is a kind of analogy being drawn between what the world is able to be before creation on its own (nothing), what the book is able to be before being written by its author (nothing), and what the will is able to do on its own simply qua received will (nothing). To whatever degree the finite will is like a book, then it is not an agent merely requiring conditions for action (like sight needs light) but really has no agency and is merely the expression of the agency of its author. The analogy brings to mind De libertate arbitrii's claim that we have no abilities that suffice to make us capable of doing anything. Though Anselm seems to bury it in the linguistic distinction between what we say and what we really mean, he is making a substantive point, also made in De libertate: creaturely existence is marked by radical finitude and dependence. We cannot just slough off the analogy between the will and a book.
The discussion started out not with books but creation itself as impossible, and the finite will as created is just as passive as the book, just as much a mere conduit for its author's power. Anselm keeps reminding the reader of the difficulty of the problem; it is not just freedom but finite, created freedom, an apparent oxymoron, they are working on.
Anselm, however, only lightly touches on this larger context and concerns himself with the issue more narrowly as a point about the will. The will needs a telos or end for it to will anything at all. Unless one wills what is beneficial for oneself, there would be no reason to will to avoid or seek anything.163 Aristotle makes a similar point in the Ethics claiming that choice and deliberation are about means not ends, and function only given the end of happiness.164 Anselm's argument could be described as quasi-transcendental as he is in effect asking what the conditions of the
162. DCD 1, S I, 235, 10–12.
163. DCD 12, S I, 254, 23–26.
164. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III, 2, 1111b25–30; 3, 1112b12–16.
Exploring Division and Unity possibility of free choice with a received will are. A less anachronistic way of describing Anselm's argument is as an analysis of the concept of a finite being willing and choosing freely. His analysis shows that besides having the will, the will must have something to will, that is, some end in relation to which to will anything at all. The problem, of course, is that if that end of happiness is given, then the will is limited to seeking that end and is not free to reject it. Its willing of happiness and other things toward that end are not its own, but like the book's abilities, those of its author. As Rogers puts it, "if all real causal efficacy belongs to God, and the rational creature is simply a secondary agent, then the creature does not really have the requisite power and is not free."165 This is an objection also raised by Julian against Augustine; whatever is given as part of nature, he argues, is necessary, and what happens of necessity accrues to the creator not the creature who acts by necessity.166 Anselm is still in search of the conditions for that willing to be free, to be per se, that is, really something belonging to the creature and, hence, for which he can be rewarded or punished.
The Divided Will: Happiness vs. Justice In order to make his case for the finite but free will, Anselm makes a distinction between two goods, advantage and justice, and two wills for those goods, the will for happiness (voluntas beatitudinis) and that for justice.167 If the devil had only the will for happiness, his willing could not be unjust (because then he could and would will only that which is commodum, which cannot be unjust any more than an animal's will can be unjust).168 The will for happiness is, in the language of De veritate, doing what it ought when it wills whatever is beneficial; hence, it cannot be unjust. If the devil had only the will for justice, the teacher continues, then too his will could not be just, because the will for justice only wills what is just and would will justice by necessity.169 The issue here is not only being able to will justice—God can only will justice—but rather only being able to will justice when that will is received. If someone else gives justice to me (along with everything else I have), I simply enact their will. The giver is the one who is just, not me. Anselm is here conceding to some de165. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 86.
166. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 46, 47.
167. Anselm explains that one who wills only happiness (beatitudinem) wills only things which are beneficial (commoda). DCD 13, S I, 257, 16–20. Augustine seems to describe a precursor to Anselm's notion of two wills when he argues that there is a freedom of the will which cannot be lost, that for happiness, and one that can be lost, that by which one can act rightly. See Augustine, Contra
Julianum opus imperfectum VI, 12, 26.
168. DCD 13, S I, 257, 19–31.
169. DCD 14, S I, 258, 8–16.
Exploring Division and Unity gree Julian's objection that free choice requires, if not something outright uncaused, at least some indetermination both by outside causes and from internal causes which always produce their effects.170 In response Anselm proposes not no cause but two causes, two internal wills that can conflict, though they need not. In this way, the choice for one over the other can truly belong to the creature. One could choose benefit over justice, willing to desert justice to get some benefit one desires more, or, the contrary, forego benefit for justice.
Anselm's notion of the choice between benefit and justice is not quite a conflict between two mutually exclusive desires, in the way Kant contrasts acting from inclination and duty. To capture Anselm's notion,
Rogers opts for a description of the desire for justice as "a second order desire" toward which "one's first order desires for benefits should be properly ordered, should be as they ought to be."171 The justice of the good angels is not in their "will[ing] rightness as somehow opposed to benefit" but rather in "will[ing] only those benefits already bestowed on them by God, benefits they were supposed to will."172
Rogers, however, goes on to argue that for Anselm we will justice as beneficial. Thus she concludes that Anselm's ethics is ultimately eudaimonistic. Whatever we will, she argues, we will as something beneficial, so that "the ultimate end of justice is happiness."173 Her conclusion is based on Anselm's claim that "not only do all rational natures but all that can sense will advantage and avoid disadvantage. For no one wills anything unless he thinks it is beneficial to himself in some way."174 Rogers takes Anselm to mean that human beings will whatever they will (even justice) as beneficial.
Even if this passage can be understood as Rogers does, such a reading seems to evaporate the distinction between the two wills, making justice a form of benefit. Let us return first to the passage and its context. Anselm claims that the will for benefit is universal. Everyone wills what is beneficial, even animals and unjust human beings, whereas, as he goes on to note, only some will justice.175 He does mean, as well, that no one ever loses the will for benefit, even when some benefit one might will conflicts with justice.176 Thus, that we always will benefit means that even when there is conflict between justice and benefit and one wills justice over benefit, the will for benefit remains, that is, one still wants what
170. Cf. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum V, 41 and V, 46.
171. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 67.
172. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 67.
173. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 67.
174. DCD 12, S I, 255, 9–13.
175. DCD 12, S I, 255, 8–9.
176. Cf. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum VI, 26.
Exploring Division and Unity was not chosen. Further, Anselm might mean that having a will, whether the kind a rational being or non-rational animal has, means having selfmotion or determination for one's benefit (whatever else one might will), a will which remains if one is to will anything. Still in the passage used by Rogers, Anselm seems to say something more: that we never will anything without willing some benefit. It seems to me that he need not mean that the will for justice wills justice as benefit, turning Anselm's position into eudaimonism. Anselm describes the will for benefit as willing all and any benefits, low and high, appropriate and inappropriate.177 The issue is not whether one always wills some benefit of some kind but which benefits one wills. One always wills benefit, but when one wills justice, then one only wills benefits that are just or appropriate. That does not mean one wills something that is not beneficial but rather that one declines to will benefits that are unjust.
Anselm does not claim, as Plato and Aristotle do, that only virtuous action brings true benefit or advantage, nor (a crucial final step) that one should seek virtue because it is ultimately beneficial. This argument is not only absent from Anselm but he seems to hold the opposite, that choosing what would be virtuous for some benefit deprives the act of its moral value. Anselm argues that if the good angels had chosen to keep justice because they would thereby avoid punishment, this would have deprived their action of justice. In this case, Anselm argues, they would necessarily have rejected injustice because the will for happiness would necessarily avoid punishment out of fear; they would not, then, have willed justice for its own sake.178
To choose justice, then, seems clearly to be a response to a fittingness and rightness outside of and beyond the self for Anselm. It is not necessarily in conflict with self-interest, but in the face of justice we could say that self-interest is mute, irrelevant. Thus justice is not chosen based on reasoning about what might be good for me (or even my kith or kin in however broad, even universal a sense of benefit).179 Whatever
177. DCD 13, S I, 257, 22–25.
178. DCD 23, S I, 270, 12. Of course Plato and Aristotle would agree that acting virtuously only to avoid punishment is not true virtue. However, they do claim that virtue is what is truly beneficial, what brings happiness, while Anselm only refers to the requirement to will justice for its own sake. Kane points out rightly that Anselm is arguing against determinism (that if they knew the punishment, they could not have chosen freely) not so much that one must have the right motive.
Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom, 103–4.
179. Rogers argues that if we think of benefit as including not just my narrow, individual selfinterest but as broad enough to include the good of others, even all human kind, then we will not see the claim that justice is willed as beneficial, understood as she does, as self-centered. Rogers,
Anselm on Freedom, 68. Anselm does muddy the water somewhat in De libertate when he describes
Exploring Division and Unity link to Kantian formalism Anselm's notion of willing justice for its own sake has, it has because, as Corbin explains, "it is impossible to think of this love [of God and neighbor commanded in scripture], to approach this pure obedience, obedient because God is God, without excluding any recompense external to the act itself of love and obedience;" it is a love which "has no other design but to love, despite the fact that the human being, finite and needy, necessarily desires happiness."180 "Love of the divine perfection for its own sake" is the "final end of the moral will" for Anselm, Rohmer notes; "charity, consummated in the vision of God," and finds its completion in "an objective and disinterested will."181
Kant's characterization of acting from duty as acting out of respect is something like this, but compared to Anselm's, Kant's is a fairly bloodless response to an abstraction. The will and its acts are upright for Anselm, Rakus writes, "not because they follow from the objective dictates of a categorical imperative . . . but because they proceed from the depths of a rational and emotional being who is acutely aware of his indebtedness to God; who is loved by God and loves God as the ultimate enjoyment of his life."182
We get a better sense of Anselm's view comparing him not to Kant but to Cicero and Augustine. The contrast and conflict between the will for justice and that for advantage seems to find its closest analogue in Cicero's De officiis and its contrast between that which is honestum and utile.
De officiis discusses these as conflicting goods when considering them in a more ordinary frame of reference, but argues that they do not conflict in a true and ultimate sense. However, Cicero resolves the conflict by redefining expediency as what is honestum, making the noble or just the only true good, the only thing worth seeking.183 For Cicero one could not say, as one might for Aristotle, that virtue is good because it brings happiness. the rejection of lying to avoid death as not lying to gain eternal life. DLA 6, S I, 217–18. See pp. 205,
207 for a discussion of this passage as making a different point in context.
180. Corbin, "Se tenir dans la vérité," 655–57. Corbin notes both how Anselm's formalism is different than Kant's and how Kant's formalism is itself tied to questions derived from Christian faith. Both Kant and Anselm ask, he notes, "how is a finite liberty possible?"
181. Rohmer, La finalité morale, 156. Cf. Vernon J. Bourke, "Human Tendencies, Will and Freedom," in L'Homme et son destin d'après les penseurs du Moyen Âge; actes du Premier Congrès international de philosophie médiévale. Louvain-Bruxelles, 28 août–4 septembre 1958 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1960), 79.
182. Daniel T. Rakus, "The Dynamics of Love in Anselmian Ethics," The Downside Review 120, no. 421 (2002): 248.
183. Cicero, De officiis, translated by Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (New York: Macmillan, 1921), III, iii, 12–viii, 36. Cf. Ambrose, De officiis, edited and translated by Ivor J. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), book III. Ambrose uses the same distinction, reaches a similar conclusion, which is that they do not conflict. This is because the only expedient thing is virtue, which he understands as seeking the good for the many not for oneself.
Exploring Division and Unity For Cicero, it is rather that virtue (or honestas, rectitude or justice) is itself the only desirable thing and thus, in seeking that goal, expediency as distinct from that good simply falls away. For both Cicero and Anselm, willing the just or the honestum is not an act of self-abnegation; there is a way in which these, as goods for their own sake, attract the will but they are not chosen because of any payoff they give to the individual will.
Anselm's distinction also owes something to Augustine's distinction between uti and frui: Only God is to be enjoyed, all else to be merely used.
In the same way, for Anselm justice is to be loved and chosen for its own sake, while that which is beneficial is in the service of the self. The common thread is a good greater than the self to which one would sacrifice the self, but not with the sense that one is losing the self but rather gaining that greater good. Anselm has taken to heart Augustine's critique of pagan virtue as self-centered and unsatisfying and embraced his redefinition of all the virtues as love of God. For Augustine justice is "love serving alone that which is loved and thus ruling rightly."184 Even given the Stoic overtones, Anselm's ultimate and deep source here is scriptural, in line with the Psalms' praise of the "upright man."185
What is unusual about Anselm's account of the possible conflict between justice and benefit is that he does not make any move to dissolve it.
For Aristotle, Plato, the Stoics, and Cicero real conflict between virtue or justice, on the one hand, and happiness or benefit, on the other dissolves on correct understanding. For them, one's benefit and moral good are the same, and the moral task is to come to see them that way. For Anselm, while the good angels manage to align happiness and justice when they choose rightly, it is not because justice and happiness simply are the same when rightly understood, nor because they receive perfect happiness as reward for keeping justice, but rather because they choose to bring their desire for happiness into line with the demands of justice, rejecting happiness that includes injustice. For Anselm there is a real and not merely
184. Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 1, 15, 25. For the critique of classical virtue, see for example, Augustine, De civitate Dei XIX, 25, Sermon 150, 9–10. I am grateful for these references and the translation to Paul Kolbet.
185. Pouchet, La rectitude chez saint Anselme, 196–97. Cf. Pouchet's collection of the scriptural sources for Anselm's notion of rectitudo, 29–34. In De veritate Anselm supports his definition of justice as "rectitude of the will kept for its own sake" with two passages from Psalms: "Glory, all who are upright of heart (recti corde)" and "the upright (recti) shall see and rejoice." DV 12, S I, 196. See also Thomas A. Losconcy, "Will in St. Anselm: An Examination of His Biblical and Augustinian
Origins," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Foreville, 701–8, who makes a similar argument. Losconcy makes this case more in regard to De concordia than the three dialogues, following Hopkins's view that Anselm's later works become more involved with scripture than the three dialogues. See Hopkins, A Companion, 6. For my discussion of scripture in relationship to the three dialogues, see this chapter, pp. 176–81, 240–41.
Exploring Division and Unity perspectival conflict which makes free choice for creatures possible. Anselm is clear that the angel weighs a lesser benefit that is just and a greater benefit that is unjust. Anselm tells us that Satan willed more than he ought, that he wills according to the will for happiness the greatest possible happiness, which is to be like God.186 Also, Anselm is quite consistent in his claim that justice is refraining from willing some benefit which is more than one ought to have and has to be willed for its own sake.187
Anselm's view, then, is that a finite free will is possible if there are two wills, both given to creatures by God. This makes an act free and per se because the choice between which to will genuinely belongs to the creature. From one perspective, the scope for freedom seems quite narrow.
The creature makes the justice they have been given their own by a negative act: by not acting to desert it. The creature who does nothing, who does not desert the justice he has been given, causes or makes his own justice by being able but not actually causing justice not to be. Anselm sums this situation up tersely, "For if they were not able to remove it from themselves, they would in no way be able to give it to themselves."188 Clearly Anselm enjoys highlighting the odd-sounding relationship between being able to remove and being able to give, but he is also making a point. Being able to give and able to remove are opposite actions but can, of course, coexist.
The surprise is that here it is the ability to remove from oneself that is the source of the ability to give to oneself rather than vice versa. The negative act causes the positive one. That is the key: the per se act of the good angels is negative, not deserting justice; it is not giving something up. Thus,
Anselm can argue for another odd sounding claim: justice is both received from God and achieved by the creature himself: "Therefore, in this way he who gave himself justice received from God that he give justice to himself."189 The language of giving and receiving allows him to note the dependence of creatures on God for their independence.
Anselm's notion of freedom, then, does not fall prey to one kind of absurdity critics of libertarianism make, that freedom is self-contradictory, requiring that we act "from a standpoint completely outside ourselves, choosing everything about ourselves, including all our principles of choice—creating ourselves from nothing, so to speak."190 An-
186. DCD 4, S I, 241, 22–30; 13, S I, 257, 19–21.
187. DCD 14, S I, 258, 27–28; DCD 23, S I, 270, 12.
188. My emphasis. DCD 18, S I, 263, 14–15. This distinction is also made in the Fragments. See
LF 29, 20–30.
189. DCD 18, S I, 263, 15–16.
190. Thomas Nagel, "The Problem of Autonomy," in Agents, Causes and Events, edited by Timothy O'Connor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 40. (Excerpted from Nagel's The View from Nowhere, chapter 7, and cited in Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 106).
Exploring Division and Unity selm's scheme is designed to define freedom for a being which is not self caused, but created, and, hence, it receives its principles of choice, receives that out of which it makes itself.
However, the Scylla of complete self-creation having been avoided, Anselm must also avoid Charybdis of meaningless choice. Why is a choice in such a narrow range significant, especially when we have been set up to make a choice in a way we did not ask for? And, moreover, why is such a choice so significant in its consequences, eternal salvation or damnation? Anselm's emphasis on giving and receiving allows him to give an account of free choice as both finite without being insignificant and self-caused without being sui generis. As Anselm describes it, what
Satan did was will "by his own will (propria voluntate) not subject to anyone."191 Thus, Satan's act is like Napoleon's act of crowning himself. What
Napoleon and Satan cannot tolerate is for their rule (of empire or self, respectively) to be conferred by another; they cannot find their autonomy in acceptance but only in the myth of their own self-making. Both will to be self creators. What the good angel wills, by contrast, is to accept what is given as given, not as self generated. The language of giving, even selfgiving, is a reminder of the received possibility for self rule; creatures cannot pull themselves up by their own boot straps. The choice, then, is neither contrived nor trivial. The choice is to accept or reject creaturehood. Crowning oneself, crediting oneself with pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps is wrong because it is a lie. It is, to return to the language of De veritate, not doing the truth. It is the biggest, most basic lie of which a creature is capable: denying its being as a creature. In this way, Anselm maintains the link to the Pauline notion of everything being received even as he argues for the act of keeping (or failing to keep) justice as the angels' own.
What gives Anselm's account extra tension is that he will not express the angel's act as its own without also noting the completely received character of that possibility. He maintains this tension when he talks about thanking God for what the angels gave (or failed to give) to themselves:
191. DCD 4, S I, 242, 4–5. Cf. Anselm's discussion of propria voluntate as equivalent to disobedience and pride, and which is then described as having three forms, delectatio, exaltatio, and curiositas in the work edited by Southern as De humanis moribus per similitudines. These three types of self will are the sources from which Anselm derives an elaborate account of the all the vices as deriving from propria voluntate. See Mem., 39–57. On the origins and possible authenticity of the work see Mem., 4–18. Southern argues that the strongest probability is that the work was Anselm's own, not written by a reporter of his casual talk (as are the Dicta of Anselm, also collected in this volume) but perhaps an early draft or the product of a scribe or amanuensis (Mem. 7–8). It does seem that the work is Anselmian in some nontrivial sense. If so, it supports to some degree the weight I want to place on this notion of propria voluntate as the key to understanding the fall since Anselm makes it the source of all vice in De moribus.
Exploring Division and Unity "The evil angel always ought to thank God for the happiness which he removed from himself, just as the good [angel always ought to thank God] for the happiness which he gave to himself."192 Anselm continues to adopt this kind of formulation when thinking about the event from God's point of view: "What do we say against truth if we say that when the devil willed what he ought not to, this [willing] he both received from God because God permitted it and did not receive [from God] because [God] did not consent to it?"193
Desire and Suffering The copresence of the will for advantage and for justice sets up a condition in which the good angel wills not happiness but justice, but thereby gets the very advantage he willed to forsake for justice. Conversely,
Satan chooses advantage, forsaking justice, thereby losing the very happiness for which he forsook justice.194 There is something perverse about this set of rewards and punishments, some have argued: "the reward that God gives is precisely the good thing which he initially forbade the angels to will. God deliberately withheld this from them so that they could prove themselves by obeying him in refusing to will it."195 The good angels, it seems, get what they want by not wanting or willing it, and the bad angels lose all possibility of getting what they want by wanting or willing it. Apart from what looks like the arbitrariness of God's law, this also seems to be an indictment of desire. The right thing is not to want; you do not get what you want unless (paradoxically) you do not want it. This is a standard and often maligned version of Christian virtue, as a negation of desire, and is also a traditional view of the only acceptable form of female desire. In this kind of account, the roles of lover and beloved, desiring, and desired are sharply divided. One, usually designated as the female, is passive (needing to be) desired but not desiring; the other, usually the male, is active, desiring but not (needing to be) desired. Somewhat paradoxically this traditional picture of desire minimizes the relation of the two parties. The female is supposed to show no desire for her suitor, and
192. DCD 18, S I, 263, 19–21.
193. DCD 20, S I, 265, 17–19.
194. DCD 6, S I, 243, 19–26; DCD 25, S I, 273, 28–30. Here is the passage from chapter 6: "Thus, the angels who willed more the justice which they possessed to the something more which they did not possess received as a recompense for justice the good which they lost as if on account of justice. . . . But those angels who preferred the something more which God did not yet will to give them, and who preferred it to standing in the justice in which they had been created: by the judgment of justice by no means did they did obtain that good because of which they despised justice, and they lost the good which they already had." DCD 6, S I, 243, 17–20; 23–26.
195. Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom, 94.
Exploring Division and Unity the suitor is supposed to get what he wants simply by his own strength, without anyone, including himself, noting his dependence on the person he seeks to persuade and without his having to recognize his vulnerability to rejection. The male is then able to avoid the passivity, the passion in the etymological sense, of desire, by splitting it off, in the psychological sense, onto the female. This, in turn, requires the female to suppress her desire for the male; thus, in inverse fashion, she too avoids passion by transforming herself into the object of desire.
However, there is another way to understand Anselm's account of what the good angels refrain from willing and the bad angels do not than as a rejection of willing or wanting. It is connected to the notion of accepting one's will as a finite will. To see this connection, we have to go back to Anselm's analysis of giving and receiving at the outset of De casu.
Anselm argued for the mixture of passivity and receptivity in both giving and receiving. The giver might be rejected and the receiver must decide to accept. Analogously, the roles of desiring and desired are also, for Anselm, mixtures rather than cleanly divided into activity and passivity.
Ancient accounts fled the passivity of desire, projecting it onto female as opposed to male desire, and modern depictions of desire have focused on it as active and on its successful outcome. But desire is not just the drive toward acquisition; desiring is wanting but also not having and not being able to fulfill one's desires by oneself. Anselm recognizes the uncomfortable part of desire—the passivity in the activity of desiring, in desire as longing but unable to satisfy itself. For Anselm, what characterizes the good angels is not the absence of desire (that they only get what they want by not wanting it); rather, they accept their not having and not being able to get for themselves what they want. That is what it means to be creature, not creator. Hence, when the good angel wills justice, they will to be what they are, creature, not creator. They will to accept from the creator rather than attempt to take for themselves. That is the limiting or, to use Anselm's word, the "moderating" of the will for benefit by the will for justice.196 This moderating is a limit on desire, on the will for benefit, but it is a limit on what is willed because it is a limit in willing how happiness or benefit will come about. It will be received rather than seized or achieved; it will be the happiness of creature not creator.
This view of the creature as creature of desire leads Anselm to claim that there can be a positive role for suffering in human life. While it would be unfitting for the angels to suffer by foreknowing the fall of others, for human beings this kind of suffering is laudable, even graced,
196. DCD 14, S I, 258, 28–29.
Exploring Division and Unity Anselm claims. Moreover, the more just someone is, the more he suffers in sympathy for another's downfall and often the greater his unjust persecution, the dialogue maintains.197 Vulnerability to suffering is a consequence of sin for Anselm. Though he does not say precisely why, we can see the reason without having to go too far afield. If the first sin (whether for human beings or angels) is the attempt to reject one's creaturehood, then vulnerability is a fitting consequence; suffering and vulnerability are ways of living out the truth of not being self-sufficient, self-made.
In the case of human beings, living out that vulnerability over time becomes a possible path toward its opposite, toward "incorruptibility," the teacher argues.198 The good angels decisively choose their created nature and in that act are relieved of its burden in the sense that they no longer will to escape it.
There is in this view a decisive difference from the Greek perspective.
If there is some sense in which for the Greeks the human attempt to become divine, to overcome the limitations of human being, though flawed and fated to fail, provokes not just pity and fear but admiration, it is clear that the same attempt undertaken by Satan has, for Anselm, nothing to recommend it. What provokes admiration from him is the human who unjustly suffers that vulnerability, a figure who for the Greeks is seen as worthy of pity but surely not admiration.
The Being and Nonbeing of Evil and Becoming Anselm precedes his comments on the devil both receiving and not receiving the willing of injustice from God with an account of the complications in the language of giving and receiving. Both conceding willingly (sponte) and merely permitting are said to be giving, the teacher explains, and one who both presumes to take from an unwilling giver and receives from a willing giver are said to be receiving.199 The teacher is both defending and clarifying ordinary language here. We can ordinarily and without verbal scandal say that both conceding and permitting are giving and that both taking and being given are receiving. What they now see is that these claims are acceptable in common usage because of what they have uncovered about giving and receiving. Since "there is no giving without receiving," there is a mixture of passivity and activity in both.200 The passivity of receiving is qualified by the activity of accepting and the activity of giving is qualified by the passivity of being accepted.
As noted above, Anselm also returns to ordinary language about
197. DCD 14, S I, 258, 15–24.
198. DCD 21, S I, 268, 23.
199. DCD 20, S I, 265, 7–15.
200. DCD 20, S I, 12.
Exploring Division and Unity evil, taking up the topic already broached in De veritate. Late in De casu, the teacher takes up, at the student's request, part of his original objection to evil as nothing—the dread we feel about and the suffering caused by evil. The teacher concedes that there is a sense in which evil is something. While injustice and things like blindness are nothing, the evils of incommoditas (disadvantage) are something and follow from (sequatur) those evils of injustice and blindness. Evils which are nothing only cause evils that are something in the sense that if the corresponding good had been present, then that evil outcome would not have occurred.201
Unlike Boethius and Augustine, Anselm is willing to admit that evil, in at least some of its forms, is something and that our sense of it as something to be feared is a response to reality rather than an illusion.
Augustine follows a more orthodox Neoplatonism insisting that evil is nothing and that apparent evil is taken up without remainder into the good. Boethius takes the same position as a matter of metaphysics in De hebdomadibus but also as matter of ethics in the Consolatio. Like Socrates,
Lady Philosophy argues that "no evil can befall a good man." She outrages the prisoner by arguing that the evil men who seem to do him harm do not even exist and that all fortune is good.202 That evil is in some sense something for Anselm does not mean he rejects the basic notion that evil is nothing; clearly he does not and he has just spent a number of chapters of De casu arguing for just this position. But he is willing to contextualize that claim, to concede that there is a sense in which evil is, in some instances, something. The evils of incommoditas are the sufferings that follow from the evils which are privations, like blindness and injustice. These evils—like the things Boethius has suffered at the hands of unjust vicious men—are exactly those Lady Philosophy tried to convince the prisoner to come to see as nothing, arguing further that suffering is not evil but good. When the prisoner continues to balk, Lady Philosophy concedes some ground to the prisoner's ongoing difficulty with letting go of his common sense notions that some fortunes are bad and that those who do evil seem, alas for their victims, both to exist and to be able to do something in a positive sense.203 Anselm's letters wrap these kinds of evils back up into good, transforming the sorrow of suffering into an instrument of spiritual progress and even the occasion for joy. But this is not necessarily inconsistent with failing to define such evils out of existence. Lady Philosophy's metaphysical Neoplatonism when transferred
201. DCD 26, S I, 274, 7–15.
202. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy IV, pr. 2, 326; pr. 6, 366–68.
203. See Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy IV, pr. 7, 376, where Lady Philosophy consents to return to discuss these matters in ordinary language. Cf. Sweeney, Logic, Theology, and Poetry, 49–53.
Exploring Division and Unity to the moral, existential realm reflects a kind of Stoicism not found in Anselm. In the Stoic view, the instability of worldly goods and, hence, our insecure possession of them is why we should be unmoved by them.
In Boethius, suffering the loss of wealth, position, physical well-being, and life itself becomes part of good fortune in teaching us to withdraw our attachment from these ephemeral goods.
The emphasis in Anselm's account of evil is a bit different. In Anselm's letters, the fire of desire has not been turned off but has been turned toward something else, not primarily away from things but toward God, whose overwhelming desirability does not just cancel desire for other things but reverses their value, transforming suffering into an instrument for hastening the return to God. If there is a sense in which Stoicism is an attempt to escape vulnerability, Anselm's ethics is a move toward embracing it. Embracing it means embracing one's dependence on and need for God. This is why Anselm can conclude that suffering is a path toward its opposite, toward incorruptibility.
Moreover, Anselm's admission that there is a way in which at least some evils are something is of a piece with the logic of created being, of the world of becoming as both being and nonbeing (and in that sense, like his recognition of different senses of giving and receiving) he is exploring in these dialogues. We can again contrast Anselm with Boethius here. Lady Philosophy rhetorically concedes to the prisoner the need to return to ordinary language of human beings in which there is bad fortune and evil not merely the illusion of it, but Anselm's refusal to resolve these different perspectives into one is not merely tactical but substantive. Those who concede Anselm's perspectivalism imply that, at least in principle, it would be better to avoid it if possible.204 However, I don't think that for Anselm perspectivalism is regrettable; it is central to the three dialogues. The subject of the dialogues, created being, has to be made sense of in these perspectival terms because of the nature of finite things, of the world of becoming. It is both being and not being. Their nonbeing is crucial to understanding them. There is a sense in which this is a rejection of the Platonic notion that we make sense of material things by understanding their immaterial forms. Anselm's view is that understanding their materiality, their finitude, their nonbeing is central to understanding them. Plato and Heraclitus were not wrong about the impossibility of knowing change qua change, but the intelligible object
Plato seeks to know, the eternal forms, do not adequately represent finite being. The problematic, paradoxical language is a taking up of the task
204. Visser and Williams, "Anselm on Truth," 213.
Exploring Division and Unity and a recognition of the difficulty of the task of making sense of incomplete, finite being as incomplete and finite rather than stable and eternal.
Returning to Unity and Stability What comes to an end in an instant for angels is the mixed or transitional state of being able to will but not necessarily willing what one ought not. Two clear and distinct classes of angels arise at the instant of choice, divided into states of absolute satisfaction and absolute frustration. The good angels are "those adhering to justice [who] can will no good in which they do not rejoice," and the bad angels are "those deserting [justice] able to will nothing which they do not lack."205 What the angels, both good and bad, escape in this instant is the normal state for human beings in via: the condition of not having but wanting and, perhaps but not necessarily, getting what one wants. The conclusion of this story, the state of perfect fulfillment of the will for the good angels and perfect frustration of the will for the fallen, marks the return, to both teacher and student's great relief, to a perfect correspondence between what the angels want and what they can and should receive. The good angels, the teacher explains, have "advanced" to a place in which "they secure whatever they are able to will and no longer see something more that they can will."206 Having refrained from willing what he ought not (though able to) will, the good angel merits never being able to will what he ought not will. Thus there is a perfect coincidence between what he can and ought to will, and, thereby he merits the happiness of having everything he does will.207 What Satan earns, by contrast, is not just unhappiness, but the perfect frustration of his will, never being able to will anything he can, should, or actually will have. Anselm gestured toward this unified will, the complete congruence between desire and satisfaction in the good angels (and their complete noncongruence in the bad angels) in chapters 6 and 14 and returns to it as he concludes the dialogue. While the bad angel is "unable to recover what he deserted," the good angel is
"unable to desert what he kept," and so no longer "sees what more he could will" than what he does and should will.208 With this assertion of unity we come full circle back to the unity of De veritate, the unity of all
205. DCD 6, S I, 243, 26–28.
206. DCD 6, S I, 243, 20–22.
207. DCD 14, S I, 258, 18–30. Rogers writes that "the good angels now cannot be motivated to will anything but what they have received, since they have received the maximum benefits." But this implies that they cannot will anything inappropriate because they already have every possible thing they could want, but it is also that they can no longer will benefits that are inappropriate. See
Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 68.
208. DCD 25, S I, 272, 25–27.
Exploring Division and Unity truths in the one truth, mirrored in the unity of the good angel's will for justice and happiness De casu. The angels do the truth, and thus, have rejoined what they are and what they ought to be, the unity striven for but not yet achieved by human beings.
Anselm ends, however, not in the truth and unity in the good angels, but in the opacity of the moment of choice of evil for the bad angels. To the student's question—Where did that evil come from in the angel who was created just?—the teacher first carefully instructs the student that he must rephrase his question more precisely. First it becomes, "Why did justice depart?" and then, "Why did the angel desert justice?" and lastly,
"Why did he will what he ought not to have willed?"209 But even to this multiply reformed question, teacher gives what still feels like a nonanswer. Why did he will it? For no other reason than that he willed it, the teacher replies. "For this willing had no other cause by which it was impelled or by which it was attracted, but was itself its own efficient cause and, if it can be said, its effect."210
Anselm is struggling for a language in which to express two aspects of the Satan's act which are resistant to explanation, for the student's question is both about the choice as the devil's own and as the choice of evil over good. Taking the second first, there is a sense in which evil per se does not, cannot have an explanation.211 Qua evil, the act is inimical to explanation not because of a lack in our understanding but because it itself lacks being and hence intelligibility. As Deme puts it, "this 'I do not know' is certainly not a capitulation of the intellect before the mystery of evil, but the capitulation of evil before the intellect."212 As for the second, the notion of choice as a se, Anselm is trying to express the notion of a finite (hence dependent) and free (hence independent) will. The finite will's passivity, its capacity for being pushed and pulled (Anselm uses impelleretur and attraheretur, verbs of motion in their passive form), is not definitive. Those forces meet what is, or can be, an immoveable object. Anselm is not claiming that something can cause itself except in the sense that when the creature, having been given the tools and possibility of choice, chooses either to desert or maintain justice. In this sense, the creature creates his or her moral character; the angels made themselves just or unjust through their own choice. In this way, Anselm finds a kind
209. DCD 27, S I, 275.
210. DCD 27, S I, 275, 31–33.
211. Deme, "The 'Origin' of Evil," 179–81.
212. Deme, "The 'Origin' of Evil," 181. Deme goes too far in my view in his claim that the first
26 chapters of De casu are a failure to answer the motivation question, how Satan chose evil, as a "deliberate self-exposure to defeat, or a 'scorched ground,' which is intended to prepare the way for a fresh start." Deme, 177.
Exploring Division and Unity of middle way between Julian's notion of a free choice as uncaused and Augustine's and Paul's notion that the creature has nothing that he has not received.
The assertion of some opacity in the moment of choice does not make choice, as critics of libertarianism have argued, random, unmotivated, and unconnected to the character of the agent. First, the objection to freedom cannot be that the act has to be completely contained in the character before their choice. That would mean, as Rogers notes, that one would already have to be a "murderer morally before the crime."213 When the angels are created by God in such a way that they have two affections which can conflict and between which they must choose, this choice is one which fairly can be used to condemn or redeem them. The choice they have is about whether they will choose to accept the nature they have been given, as finite but free beings. This choice both comes out of what they are, creatures, and is morally significant and not arbitrary because a basic choice about how they choose to inhabit that identity.
While there is a certain point beyond which further analysis of this choice is not possible, it is perhaps not necessary to say that it is mysterious.214 Rather, Anselm has given what he thinks of as necessary reasons for his account of finite freedom. Reasons are necessary when they are derived validly from assumptions we are unable to give up without giving up basic principles, principles without which things as we know and experience them are unintelligible. That does not mean that Anselm thinks his explanation is utterly satisfying, but it does mean that he thinks he has shown that understanding human action without freedom is more unintelligible than the contrary. The dialogue has shown that finite freedom means, alas, having the ability to will what one ought not.
The answer to Paul's question, that creatures have nothing from themselves, is now understood existentially by reader and student, and held alongside the dialogue's other conclusion, that what is done with what is given is utterly one's own. The consideration of these two conclusions, combined with the actualization of the ability to will what one ought not, becomes the staggering impasse explored in Cur Deus homo. For the problem of Cur Deus homo is that humanity has fallen through an act utterly its own and in the process lost the very capability with which it could right itself. In De casu they conclude only that this possibility of wrong choice is itself good and from God.215
213. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 103.
214. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 104–7.
215. DCD 28, S I, 276, 6–15.
Exploring Division and Unity In Dialogue with Scripture Having examined these dialogues in detail, let us return to the issue of their connection to each other through their form, topics, and relationship to scripture. The topics of the three dialogues correspond to the first three crucial points of the Christian salvation narrative. De veritate is a consideration of the possibility of created being, of many truths in relation to the one truth. De libertate arbitrii is a consideration of Eden, the finite will as free, having righteousness and able to keep it. De casu is a consideration of the possibility of the fall, of finite being as free but able to will what it ought not. Those views are adumbrated in scripture in narrative form, as a story stretched out over time. Anselm explores these notions of created being and finite will by shifting from scripture's "horizontal" mode to a "vertical" one, His task, in other words, is the logical derivation of these moments and the incoherence of their contraries. The dialogues argue for these moments as logical possibilities, or rather, first as impossibilities, then as logically coherent and necessary possibilities.
In this sense, these works are no less "theological" than Cur Deus homo in the sense that they are no less tied up with the specifically Christian account of the human condition. Cur Deus homo differs from them simply in being concerned with the next event in the story, the path from fallen to saved when one is utterly responsible for but utterly unable to make that transition for oneself. But the dialogues and Cur Deus homo are also "philosophical" to the same degree, in the sense that they are about assessing, questioning, and defending the Christian narrative as thinkable, as logical. To think about the moments of this narrative in logical terms means making sense linguistically and metaphysically of the created world, the world of becoming, and about the nature of freedom, of having something of one's own as created.
These works are also "philosophical" not just in method but in content in an important sense: they are concerned with the most basic questions about human and finite existence; their questions are not narrow or sectarian but universal and philosophical. The dialogues attempt to respond to these questions in ways that are convincing and reasonable. Anselm's task is to make a case for his account as more convincing, more explanatory of the experience of finite, human existence than the Stoic or Platonic account with which it can be contrasted.
There is a connection between the series of difficult distinctions made in the dialogues (concerning truth, signification, giving, willing, causality, ability, possibility, and evil) and the subject of the dialogues (the world of finitude and becoming). Because the topic of these dialogues is not
Exploring Division and Unity God, whose simplicity and integrity are mirrored in the indubitably clear formulations of the Proslogion, Anselm's language devolves into complicated, scholastic (even if avant la lettre) distinctions mirroring the complex and fragmented metaphysics of angels and humans and of a God who sustains finite being and permits finite agency. In the Proslogion and Monologion when confronted with a paradox Anselm does not back off from or make a distinction in the logic of the term or perfection that seems to pose a problem. Thus, for example, he argues that God is all-powerful but cannot lie or do evil. He follows the logic of this claim more deeply and thoroughly, through and then beyond the apparent paradox to the conclusion that real ability is the power or ability to do and acquire what is for one's good; hence, the power to lie or do evil is impotence rather than power.216 In these dialogues, Anselm instead first outrages ordinary language and reason, next rewrites, and then makes a qualified return to ordinary language and distinctions. He works in and through and toward the logic of "in a certain sense yes and in a certain sense no." Some things both ought to be and ought not to be. A false statement has one kind of truth but lacks another. It is both possible and impossible for the world to come to be. There are evils which are something and others which are nothing. We both will and do not will. We will but do not will completely.
We both receive from God and give ourselves righteousness. This is the logic not of the transcendent God who is without qualification but of creatures whose existence is received and qualified, dependent, and incomplete. We are from the start of De veritate to the end of De casu diaboli working on the problematic logic of the world of becoming. The aim is to avoid
Parmenidean monism, the conclusion that nothing other than the One exists, and to answer Boethius's question in De hebdomadibus: How can things other than the One be said to be good or to be?
We must pay attention not just to the claims the dialogues make but also to the way they make them. They consistently use self-consciously edgy, paradox-courting formulations only subsequently explained by carefully drawn distinctions. In a way it is easy to summarize the conclusions or positions Anselm holds, which is what most commentators on Anselm do. But that leaves out an important question: why did Anselm not just do that, simply lay out his views? There is a three-part answer to this question. First, Anselm wants to do more than merely assert things. He wants to justify them, derive them necessarily from indubitable premises, from what both student and teacher already know to be true. Anselm's project is to show the necessity of his conclusions, why they must be the case and 216. Pros. 7, S I, 105, 9–16.
Exploring Division and Unity nothing else can, by a kind of relentless logic. His conclusions, he contends, are, though difficult, the only ones that make sense. He shows that by setting himself up against the most competent objector he can muster.
The dialogue form matches these aspirations. Its question and answer format is, Anselm writes in Cur Deus homo, "clearer to many, and especially to less quick minds, and on that account more pleasing."217 When Boso senses that his teacher is backing away from this level of examination and commitment to clarity and understanding, he chides him, reminding him of his earlier promise to explain "not to the learned, but to me and my fellow petitioners;" so Boso asks, do what you promised as, continue so as to satisfy "all our childish questions."218 The reaction Anselm wants from readers is like that of the student in De veritate, who remarks that the teacher's answers "have satisfied even children."219 Anselm's optimism about the effectiveness of dialectic seems almost unbounded. He considers questions in abstraction from the knowledge of the truth contained in revelation and the tradition, and takes issues up simply, in way that is accessible even to those without a detailed knowledge of that tradition. The dialogue form enacts that accessibility, and the objections voiced by his interlocutor give a forum for all, even the most impious sounding, objections to be aired.
Second, these dialogues, like Anselm's other works, are also exercises in making things less clear, not just questioning but wreaking havoc on everything the student thinks he knows with certainty to be true. Of course, the principle enacted in so many of Plato's dialogues is that the path to understanding must first dislodge mistaken certainty, dwelling in real uncertainty before being able to continue on the path toward knowledge. Anselm does not have to have read Plato to have an analogous pedagogy. Anselm is clear that the difficulty of getting to the truth is attributable not just to the limits of human intelligence (or the moral defects of interlocutors, which is what Plato's dialogues often highlight) but also to the character of the truth he is seeking. The God Anselm seeks in the Monologion and Proslogion is inherently both the most intelligible and the most impenetrable object for the human intellect. The world of plural truths and finite wills is no less bewildering, so much so that Parmenides was inclined to deny its reality altogether and even Plato seems to desert becoming, taking refuge in the eternal, unchanging forms. The difficulty of making sense of finite beings is that they are less intelligible in themselves. They seem more intelligible to us, of course, and it is this apparent intelligibility Anselm must first puncture. Hence, Anselm's
217. CDH I, 1, S II, 48, 11–13.
218. CDH II, 16, S II, 122, 17–21.
219. DV 12, S I, 196, 25.
Exploring Division and Unity first task is the complication of his subject, the immersion in the neither/ nor, both/and logic of finitude, and though teacher and student make their way through it, they do not and cannot completely move beyond it.
Third, Anselm's consideration of these topics takes this form because human being is part of the subject of these dialogues. Thus their form reflects the nature of and the participants' involvement with the subject. While we have seen that the Proslogion and Monologion have significant dialogical features, Anselm chooses to make that element explicit in these three dialogues by creating the personas of student and teacher. Anselm, like Plato, wants his philosophical, logical exploration of these conditions to have an actual, existential effect and uses the dialogue form to mirror and further that end. So, for example, in De libertate the student is made to feel his responsibility and helplessness, his ability and his inability, just as, we shall see in Cur Deus homo, Boso is made to feel the utter hopelessness of his situation without the Incarnation. The intended therapeutic effect is at least partially accomplished by the dialectical form of Anselm's arguments, not just their content. The student poses problem after problem for how the will could be forced to fall while the teacher maintains its inviolability. The student pushes the teacher harder and further for ultimate reasons for the devil's choice.
Both the student's objections and teacher's arguments have the kind of definitional, tautological necessity that makes the contrary view seem inexpressible without self-contradiction.
One motive for the formulations of objections and replies in unassailable and then paradoxical form is to draw attention to the method, to show its power to turn A into not-A and vice versa. Thus we see in these dialogues and not just in the logical writings explored in chapter 3 that Anselm seems to enjoy, at least partly for its own sake, playing with language and logic in this way. But another, more important part of the point of Anselm's deliberately provocative formulations is to provoke an emotional response in his reader, a sense of not just the difficulty but the impossibility of making completely satisfying sense of that which he holds by faith to be true. The student says repeatedly that he believes but cannot understand. This is not surprising given the way Anselm formulates the views he is defending. The student and reader are supposed to ride this emotional roller coaster, feeling both lost in the paradoxes and satisfied with their resolution into almost tautological certainty. The point is as much to hold on to the things of faith when they appear unintelligible as to see how they can be resolved. The student is pulled fairly radically from certainty to bafflement, from a sense of having understood with great clarity and certainty to a sense of the hopeless incoherence of
Exploring Division and Unity that which he believes. And back again. The student both experiences his power and the lack thereof, the dialogues' argumentative ups and downs mirroring his reasoning and the condition of the human will.
Compared to Platonic, Augustinian, or Boethian dialogues, Anselm's conversational partners experience both more devastating aporiae and together reach more sublime insights. Anselm's dialogues set extraordinarily high standards and expectations for the dialogue as a form that can both reach the highest truths and make them accessible to the largest possible audience. The form can achieve all of this only by the complete engagement of its participants, both of whom have complete faith in the process as one to which any question can be submitted and who themselves submit wholly to the process. Anselm strives for a reconciliation of propositions and persons. He never concedes what Socrates often must: that his partner can no longer follow his path and he must go on alone. But there is the rub. What the student's complete engagement makes possible is both a shared journey toward the truth but also a shared realization of the limits of discourse, of the lack of symmetry between words and things. This shared realization is a concession of the difference which remains in this life between what De veritate asserts are identical—knowing and doing the truth and the many truths and the One truth. Anselm and his student enact the possibility of believing and, hence, at least willing the true and the good without fully knowing it, while the devil, of course, once and for all enacted the possibility of knowing but neither willing nor doing the truth. The reconciliation of thought with Truth is postponed, the vision of the unity of all truths in the Supreme Truth is projected rather than achieved.
What is mirrored in the extreme rhythms of these dialogues is not the puzzle of what God is (the subject of the Monologion and Proslogion) but the puzzle of what it is to be human. What they adumbrate is on the same scale as Sophocles's Ode to Man: the wonder and terror of human being in the extremes of power and powerlessness, goodness and evil. The difference between Sophocles and Anselm is not just in how they understand human beings' peculiar condition but also on what, if anything, can be done about it. It is to this topic that Anselm turns in Cur Deus homo.
Uniting God with Human Being and Human Being with God Anselm's trilogy of works on the Incarnation are linked not just by their subject matter but also were linked in Anselm's thinking. De conceptu virginali, Anselm carefully explains in his preface, was prompted by a thread of argument left untied in Cur Deus homo that he is certain Boso will want completed.1 The connection between De incarnatione Verbi and Cur Deus homo has only recently come to light. A text edited by Constant
Mews, apparently an earlier draft of a section of De incarnatione, contains the mention of the author's desire to discuss not just the logic of the Incarnation and union of divine and human natures but the question which was to become the focal point of Cur Deus homo: "why however or by what beautiful and necessary reason or rational necessity did the supreme majesty—since he is capable of everything by will alone—assume our nature with our weakness and mortality."2 In the context of replying to Roscelin and reflecting further on the more traditional Christological problems he raised, Anselm seems to have come to a different question he wanted to consider.
Besides their interlocking composition and related subject matter, these works are linked by Anselm's reflection in all of them on his own methodology and project. Drawn in by Roscelin and criticism of his own account of the Trinity in the Monologion, Anselm is driven to describe and justify his foray into these topics with these methods. He makes not just one but three tries of tone and method in response to Roscelin in the 1. DCV Praef., S II, 139.
2. Mews's translation, along with the Latin text is found in Constant J. Mews, "St. Anselm and Roscelin: Some New Texts and Their Implications I: The De incarnatione Verbi and the Disputatio inter
Christianum et Gentilem," in Reason and Belief in the Age of Roscelin and Abelard (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), VI, 60. The edition of the whole fragment can be found on 82–85 of the same essay.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Epistola. In Cur Deus homo he manages a more polished, literary, and unified approach, one he carries forward, less elegantly but with the same ambition, in De conceptu.
Richard Southern has argued that in this period Anselm's work changed in an important way. The Monologion and Proslogion are internal dialogues, combinations of prayer and meditation and unconnected to contemporary debate, but Cur Deus homo takes up questions prompted by external objections and discussions. Southern points to Anselm's discussion and criticism of the soteriology of the school of Laon as well as Anselm's stated attempt to counter objections of "infidels" to the Incarnation and in dialogue with a real rather than fictional interlocutor, Boso in Cur Deus homo.3 Similar engagement with contemporary issues outside the monastery also marks the other two works. The Epistola is composed in response to external objections raised by Roscelin. De conceptu, besides continuing discussion of issues raised in Cur Deus homo, also takes up many of the same questions appearing in sentence collections associated with Laon.4
Southern clearly prefers the earlier Anselm, finding that Anselm's particular genius seems to have been muted by his move beyond the cloister, and Evans laments a kind of dilution in these middle years, observing, "Anselm's powers [were] much stretched by the effort to do justice to the claims of other men's views in these treatises of his middle years."5 Evans is surely right that Anselm is struggling to synthesize his own train of thought with issues raised by others, but we shall see that his powers are not waning but shifting.
The encounter with objectors and contemporary discussions taking place outside the monastic context prompts Anselm to reflect explicitly on his own method. Anselm does not merely tell us his thoughts in this regard but shows us something about his own process. In letters written about Roscelin, in the drafts of the Epistola, and within the final version itself, we see Anselm trying out different responses to Roscelin and what he represents. In Cur Deus homo, by contrast, we have a finished and polished literary product in which Anselm manages to synthesize his way of considering questions with the kinds of questions being raised by others. Moreover, like his earlier set of dialogues, Cur Deus homo combines intellectual rigor in the service of and as one with spiritual exercise almost as seamlessly as the Monologion and Proslogion. De conceptu, the 3. Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 198–99.
4. Gillian R. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1978), 187.
5. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God, 193.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God last of the three works, differs from the others in its more business-like marshalling of arguments. There is no dialogue partner, real or imagined, only a distant echo of Boso, who requested the consideration of its questions, and a few references to what "someone" might say in objection. In De conceptu, Anselm is relentless in his submission of problems to the rigors of deductive argument and to consistency with his deduced conclusions from Cur Deus homo and on the nature of freedom and sin from De libertate arbitrii and De casu diaboli. The result stands in striking contrast in both tone and content to parallel discussion in the sentences from the school of Laon. Anselm continues to explore the extremes of necessity and (apparent) impossibility of the things he seeks to understand but now with more self-consciousness and reserve.
Epistola de incarnatione Verbi: From Words to the Word Before composing the Epistola de incarnatione Verbi Anselm wrote two letters in response to Roscelin's claim that "either the three persons are three things or else the Father and the Holy Spirit were incarnate with the Son." In a short letter to John the monk he exudes patient reason, explaining that the claim that the persons are three "things" is true (though trivial) in the sense in which relations are things, but clearly nonsense if the things in question are substances.6 To Fulco, Bishop of Beauvais, Anselm writes full of righteous indignation, not bothering to engage Roscelin or his views, but instead instructing Fulco that "neither should any reason for [Roscelin's] errors be examined nor our truth be presented to him."7
The attitude in the letter to Fulco is at odds not just with his reply to his fellow monk, John, but with his attitude toward the student's objections in his three dialogues, toward Boso in Cur Deus homo, and towards
Gaunilo. As an objector, we could say that Gaunilo is more like Roscelin than Boso or the student. Both Gaunilo and Roscelin are actual objectors rather than Anselm's creations and are not dialogue partners like Boso.
Yet Anselm treats them quite differently. Anselm's response to Gaunilo is in some ways ad hominem, refusing to accept his arguments as sincere and rejecting his persona as fool, responding instead to him as "Catholic" rather than "fool," all the while boxing him into corners which make him indeed look the fool. But nothing he says to or about Gaunilo approaches the utter isolation he decrees for Roscelin, neither speaking to 6. Ep. 129, S III, 271.
7. Ep. 136, S III, 280, 27–28.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God him nor allowing him to speak in his letter to Fulco. He is an "other" Anselm is unwilling to find a shadow of in himself. Part of Anselm's outrage is surely fueled by the fact that Roscelin has apparently claimed that both Lanfranc and Anselm shared his view; it is easy to imagine that Anselm reacts so violently because affronted by such an unwanted association.8 But more substantively it could also be because Roscelin, if not in his views then at least in his mode of questioning, is too close to Anselm rather than too far away.
Anselm gives two justifications for this response. First, he maintains that to take up Roscelin's objections to the accounts of the Trinity and Incarnation is "to call back into the doubt of unsettled questions that which is founded firmly on most solid rock."9 Second, he notes that while the faith might be rationally defended against objections of non-Christians,
Christians must simply "hold firmly to their baptismal pledge."10
Anselm is still full of righteous indignation as he opens De incarnatione Verbi because parts of a letter he began on the topic has started to circulate against his wishes and because it is incomplete, it is misleading. Though Anselm does not say, it seems likely that he has in mind the letter to John the Monk rather than the one to Fulco because only the one to John attempts some explanation and begins working with distinctions between thing as substance or as relation to sort out the ways in which the persons of the Trinity are and are not "three things" as Roscelin asserted. Moreover, he writes because he has heard that Roscelin has not really recanted his view.
Roscelin also seems to prompt Anselm to back away from the audacity of his earlier attempts to understand the things of faith. To Fulco he writes that Christians should proceed from faith toward understanding rather than the contrary, and as he begins the longer De incarnatione he says even more strongly that those who do not believe will not be able to understand.11 He writes, "no Christian ought to dispute the ways that the Catholic church believes in its heart and confesses with its mouth."12 Of course, Anselm has always ascribed to a path from faith to understanding, but this emphasis on faith is a bit different, and the requirement of faith as starting point is articulated as a stern warning. Also, unlike the Proslogion and Monologion where Anselm aimed to establish conclusions on the basis of reason alone, convincing even to those without the will to believe, here he writes about the possibility of a failure in understand8. Ep. 136, S III, 279, 7–8.
9. Ep. 136, S III, 280, 32–33.
10. Ep. 136, S III, 281, 36–37.
11. Ep. 136, S III, 281, 38–40; EDIV 1, S II, 9, 5.
12. EDIV 1, S II, 6, 10–17, 1.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God ing, in response to which one should "bow [one's] head in reverence" to what one cannot understand.13
What prompts this tone and attitude? Partly, as was noted, Anselm is angry at being associated with Roscelin's heretical view. But some of the violence of Anselm's reaction might also be explained by his recognition of the long-fought and even violent battles of the past to work out and promulgate an orthodox position on both the Trinity and on the Christology of the Incarnation. It is not just, as Anselm says, that these matters are long settled, but also that they were settled with great difficulty and could, perhaps, be easily reopened as wounds so deep they are still healing.
Anselm's response may also be partly attributable to Anselm's new sense of his role as bishop, a role which thrusts on him such broader concerns. In the De incarnatione Anselm makes reference to the "inexplicable arrangement of God" by which he was "captured" and "held" for the office of bishop in the context of noting that Roscelin is rumored not to have thoroughly repented of his views as Anselm thought when he abandoned the composition of a full reply to him.14 In his letter to Fulco, Anselm requests that his letter itself be read out at the council to be convened on the subject of Roscelin's views.15 This letter, recommending silence as a response to Roscelin, is a public response rather than a private one to a fellow monk. The tone of his reply to Fulco, who is a bishop, and his mention of his own status now as bishop both point toward the bishop's role as public, expressing orthodoxy and suppressing heresy. His reference to his office as bishop in his full consideration of Roscelin's view implies that it is written with a view toward its public function. Anselm takes up his role as bishop with alacrity but reveals a sense that it has imposed a new level of circumspection on his speculative work. Whichever office or audience he preferred, the De incarnatione is informed by Anselm's sense of an office and audience that are markedly different than when he wrote from within the monastery.
The nature of Roscelin's position is different than Anselm's other interlocutors, both real and fictional. Unlike Roscelin, Gaunilo did not object to Anselm's conclusion (that God exists) but only to Anselm's claims for the argument that got him to that conclusion. And though in the dialogues, the student's questions (like Boso's in Cur Deus homo) are real and substantive, not just about Anselm's ways of getting to those conclusions, the important difference is that Roscelin is not asking a question; he is
13. EDIV 1, S II, 7, 4.
14. EDIV 1, S II, 4.
15. The Council of Soissons condemned Roscelin's views in 1092.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God proposing an alternate doctrine. For Anselm, the kind of reason Roscelin represents is reason in a battle with rather than seeking understanding of the things of faith. Alluding to Roscelin, Anselm writes that "selfconfident human wisdom can by thrusting sooner pull out its own horns than by pushing roll this rock."16
Despite the resonances between the opening of the De incarnatione and the letter to Fulco and their common connection to episcopal office, however, in De incarnatione Anselm is doing exactly what he advised Fulco not to allow: discussing Roscelin's view. It may even be that Anselm wants the reader to focus on his harsh critique of Roscelin, making it less likely he would notice that Anselm is now engaged in what he before forbade: reconsideration of these long settled matters. Anselm even uses the same metaphor to describe what he before rejected and is now doing.
In the letter to Fulco, he refers to the orthodox teachings on the Trinity and Incarnation as "that which is firmly founded on most solid rock" and calls "most foolish" any attempt to question these things again, to destabilize what is already firm.17 In the De incarnatione in one of the most memorable images in his writings, Anselm describes taking up the questions raised by Roscelin as going "laden with stakes and ropes and other implements to tie down and stabilize things in the habit of wobbling, working around Mt. Olympus in order to secure it lest some shock cause it to give way or overturn."18 His effort, he protests, is not, despite appearances, this ridiculous and presumptuous project of confirming the stability of the faith, but undertaken in order to "satisfy the petitions of brothers asking for this examination."19
This is not just an allusion to the earlier letter to Fulco but also to the closing lines of Boethius's De Trinitate. Boethius writes as he concludes the work that his account of the Trinity is superfluous, functioning as a support for what already stands firm, addressed to someone whose judgments are already the standards for truth.20 Anselm's elaboration of Boethius's metaphor in the image of tying down Mount Olympus brings to mind Socrates's reference to the difficulty of attempting to tie down the
16. EDIV 1, S II, 7, 5–6.
17. Ep. 136, S III, 280, 32–33.
18. EDIV 1, S II, 5, 20–21.
19. EDIV 1, S II, 5.
20. Boethius, De Trinitate, in Boethius: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), vol. VI, 30, 30–33. In a manuscript that seems to be an earlier draft of chapters 11 and 12 of this work, Anselm makes reference to Boethius's arguments against Nestorianism, a task Boethius takes up not in his De Trinitate but in Contra Eutychen et Nestorium. For the reference to Boethius in the manuscript Mews attributes to Anselm, see his "St Anselm and Roscelin I," in Reason and Belief, VI, 84. What Mews's analysis of this fragment shows is that Anselm is much more directly engaged with the tradition than his final version shows.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God statues of Daedalus.21 In the Meno the problem is with the objects one is attempting to understand (though maybe the objects that take flight in Socrates's analogy are our ideas, our confused thinking rather than the things or forms themselves), whereas in Anselm's analogy the problem is with the ridiculous figure who is dwarfed, both in size and stability, by the mountain he tries to secure in place. This task is doubly absurd because it is both impossible and unnecessary. If the mountain were unstable it would be impossible to fix it in place; and since it is stable while he is moving, he looks in the wrong direction for what needs to be stabilized. He should look at himself rather than the mountain. Thus Anselm, though intentionally drawing attention to the appearance of absurdity in his project, redirects the reader's attention to what is being secured here, not the thing itself but human understanding in relationship to it. Boethius's point at the end of De Trinitate, like Anselm's, is that the thing
(God) stays put but that he moves in relation to it, that the problem is with his understanding rather than the thing he attempts to understand.
Faith seeking understanding, then, also means coming to the issue with the right view of what and where the problem is – with the one who seeks rather than it what is sought. Faith seeking understanding, then, requires heeding the Socratic dictum, "know thyself."
We can see, then, both why and how Anselm wanted to revise his earlier replies to John and Fulco. The opening pages of the Epistola are an attempt to bring together the two extremes of his early responses. That to John was too abstract and intellectual, taking the issue up as a problem to be worked over by argument and distinction. That to Fulco was too passionate, too reactionary, too polemical. That to John takes up the issue without providing the context of orthodox belief and faith as a prerequisite to inquiry. That to Fulco asserts both doctrine and Anselm's (and Lanfranc's) orthodoxy, insisting on faith without any attempt at understanding.
The gap between Anselm's first two attempts to deal with Roscelin to John and to Fulco cannot, however, be completely explained by the monastic and, hence, in a sense private nature of the letter to John and the public character of the letter to Fulco. John, though a former monk of Bec, is not unrelated to the ecclesiastical and public aspect of the problem, for he was sent by Pope Urban II to advise Fulco, who was himself a monastic bishop.22 Thus Anselm's response to John's inquiry was unlikely
21. Plato, Meno, 97d–98a.
22. Mews, "Nominalism and Theology before Abaelard: New Light on Roscelin of Compiègne," in Reason and Belief, VII, 6. Mews also fills in more completely the political controversies and
God with Human Being and Human Being with God to have been simply part of his personal, monastic journey from faith to understanding. The dichotomy in these two first letters is not only due to their different audiences but is an expression of two different kinds of responses Anselm had within himself to Roscelin which the De incarnatione sets out to synthesize. Anselm wants to finish what he started in response to John; however, he wants to do it still respecting the parameters and the spirit of his reply to Fulco: that Roscelin qua Roscelin deserves no reply, that in fact to reply to him would be dangerous and inappropriate.
Anselm blends the responses of silence and open-minded discussion, censorious disapproval and rational neutrality, by crafting a context in which his thoughts are offered and should be read. In order to do so, Anselm articulates the basic attitudes of a community of believers in the opening to De incarnatione. This long opening of De incarnatione, described by Gillian Evans as a "little homily," is in some ways separable from De incarnatione, taking up the more general question of the "part played in the Christian life by the exercise of the intellect." It serves as a complement to the prologue to the prayers as an account of "religious emotion" and the "letter-homilies" to fellow monks about "good behavior."23 This moment of reflection on reason in the service of faith was prompted by the controversy with Roscelin but it has a broader application. It is less a change of mind or even development on Anselm's part than prompted by the need to express what he had taken for granted in his writings within the monastic context. The focus is on the right affective (rather than merely intellectual) attitude of faith as one takes up the intellectual task of examining the things of faith. A lack of faith is a lack of experience: without belief, no experience (expertus) and without experience, no knowledge (scientia).24 Anselm writes about the need for obedience to the commandments and the importance of having experience of the life of the spirit over the flesh as precursors for understanding: "The more richly we are nourished by those things in sacred scripture which feed by obedience, the more exactly we are conveyed to those things which satiate by understanding."25 To be sure, understandtensions around Fulco's appointment as archbishop and John's deployment as his assistant in "St Anselm, Roscelin and the See of Beauvais," in Reason and Belief, VIII, 106–19. Mews even suggests that the Roscelin Anselm sets out to refute is identical to Roscelin the canon at Saint-Vaast, and a critic of Fulco, his appointment, and John, contesting the legitimacy of Fulco's appointment as simony.
23. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God, 118, and 118–25.
24. EDIV 1, S II, 9, 6–8. The contrast Anselm ends with is experiencing vs. hearing about a thing and knowledge by experience (experientis scientia) vs. knowledge by hearing (audientis cognitionem).
25. EDIV 1, S II, 8, 19–9, 1.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God ing is not the same as obedience, Anselm makes clear, but the movement to understanding needs to go through obedience, through living the life prescribed by scripture, in order to progress toward deeper understanding of it.
Anselm accuses Roscelin and others like him of being like those who read only half of the scripture verse, "I have understood more than all my teachers," neglecting the second half, "because your testimony is my meditation." They proclaim, "I have understood more than the ancients," without reading the continuation, "for I have sought your commandments."26 In the whole introduction, Anselm is providing a kind of context in which to understand his work of reason, and by using these passages, he makes context literally the problem. The first half of both verses are assertions of self confident reason, while the continuations make clear that any success of understanding comes as a result of following divine wisdom and commands. Self-confident reason, more likely to uproot itself, does not grasp "that if someone supposes he knows something, he does not yet know it in the way it ought to be known."27 Knowing something "as it ought to be known" means, given the distinction Anselm makes, knowing through the experience of the life of faith in contrast to knowing indirectly and abstractly. Anselm is also noting the importance of the corollary to "know thyself:" know what you do not know.
The counterpart to knowledge "by experience" is knowledge by hearing, an allusion to the Pauline notion of faith as knowledge by hearing rather than sight. The believer knows that he does not know things as they
"ought to be known" but sees only "through a glass darkly" (1 Cor. 13:12).
Thus the contrast is not between Roscelin's ignorance and the knowledge of those who have faith but rather between one kind of knowing and another, and between a second order knowledge, knowing what you do not know, and second order ignorance, not knowing what you do not know.
The other prerequisite for discussion of spiritual questions, according to Anselm, is a rejection not just of the heresies of faith but also those of dialectic. These dialectical heretics are those who think "universal substances are only vocal sounds."28 This is the context of the passage discussed earlier most often taken as Anselm's assertion of realism.29
Now we can see why the wrong view of the relationship between words and things is cast as the source of Roscelin's heresy and as a symptom of a larger intellectual defect. In heretical dialecticians, Anselm claims,
"reason is wrapped up in corporeal images so that it cannot extricate it-
26. EDIV 1, S II, 9, 1–3; Ps. 119, 99–100.
27. EDIV 1, S II, 7, 8–9.
28. EDIV 1, S II, 9, 21–22.
29. EDIV 1, S II, 10, 4–13.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God self from them, nor is it strong enough to distinguish them from those things which it ought to contemplate alone and pure."30 Note that the contrast is not between reason and faith but between reason clouded by corporeal images and reason whose discernment is undistorted. Anselm does not have to be understood as asserting the separate and independent existence of those things he chides the dialecticians for not distinguishing. Rather, he is chiding dialecticians for their failures of clarity in their concepts.
The dialectician's view that color is not distinct from the material object is for Anselm a spiritual failure, a kind of intellectual life of the flesh parallel to a bodily life of the flesh. Anselm's analogy is between the kind of clouded moral judgment that can come from immersing oneself in a sensual pleasure and the clouded logic of understanding things as they exist in our present sense experience. Both suffer from a failure of imagination (in the modern sense), a failure to see things in a different way. The person living the life of sensual pleasure is unable to see any other possibilities for action; he is caught in a kind of addiction. The dialectician takes as complete his own shallow experience; he assumes that things are and are understood completely as they seem to him and to his senses.
Anselm paints Roscelin as overconfident in his own understanding and unable to see further than his own experience. As Anselm presents him, Roscelin poses his dilemma—either there are three gods or Father and Holy Spirit became incarnate with the Son—as a kind of double bind, one cannot reject one horn without accepting the other equally unacceptable one. More importantly for Anselm, it is a dilemma Roscelin is proud rather than troubled to have formulated. As we saw in Anselm's previous work, he also drives toward such inextricable dilemmas, but he does not rest there. He is troubled by his paradoxes and is always looking not at but beyond them, even if what lies beyond them seems to be darkness rather than light. He takes Roscelin, by contrast, to take pride in his own cleverness, sure of the superiority of his formulation over all those that have preceded his. Thus, Anselm's objection to Roscelin is not as monkish and reactionary as it might first appear. He is not insisting that Roscelin simply accept the orthodox position. The problem with Roscelin is one teachers notice in students all the time; he is merely interested in disagreeing in order to show that he is the smartest one in the room and as a way of rebelling against the teacher. He wants to parade his own strength rather than exhibit the vulnerability of one who is seeking the truth.
Constant Mews has examined the accuracy of Anselm's portrait of
30. EDIV 1, S II, 10, 1–4.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Roscelin and the "dialecticians" with which Anselm associates him. Anselm directs us towards Roscelin's "supposed belief that just as the world was composed of radically discrete entities, none of which shared a common or universal nature" the three persons of the Trinity are discrete.
But the real source of Roscelin's view is found in his account of words coupled with his theology, according to Mews. From Priscian he learned that nouns signify substance with quality; thus, the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit refer to persons (in the Latin tradition) or substances (in the Greek tradition). From theology he learned that there are no qualities in God. The names, then, have to signify substance. Therefore, the three names must signify that there are three things in God.31 While Mews describes Anselm's account of Roscelin as "creating a straw man," he concludes nonetheless that "Anselm was not wrong in recognizing the intellectual challenge" presented by the study of voces applied to theological language.32
In order to understand that challenge and Anselm's relationship to it, we need to recall Anselm's comment in his original letter to Bishop Fulco expressing indignation that he, Anselm, along with Lanfranc were presented as agreeing with Roscelin. An earlier draft of De incarnatione contained a comment by Anselm about his friendship with Roscelin.33 Anselm is linked to Roscelin in a more substantive way as well.
Anselm had been, he tells us, criticized for suggesting in the Monologion that the three persons of the Trinity could be called three substances, a charge also made against Roscelin.34 Moreover, the ground of this claim in the Monologion was based largely on the lack of a perfectly proper term.
There is, as we have seen, a thread running through a large portion of the Monologion and throughout Anselm's work emphasizing the distance between words and things, the conventional nature of words and their ac31. Mews, "Nominalism and Theology," in Reason and Belief, VII, 12–13, 24. For a fuller account of Roscelin's views, see also Mews, "The Trinitarian Doctrine of Roscelin of Compiègne and its Influence: Twelfth-century Nominalism and Theology Re-considered," in Reason and Belief, IX,
347–64.
32. Mews, "Nominalism and Theology," VII, 24, 33.
33. As noted by Mews, Anselm referred to Roscelin as a friend in an earlier version of EDIV.
See S I, 282 for the reference to Roscelin as friend, and Mews, "St. Anselm and Roscelin: Some New
Texts and their Implications II: A Vocalist Essay on the Trinity and Intellectual Debate c. 1080–
1120," in Reason and Belief, X, 43.
34. See Mono. 79, S I, 86. See also the prologue (Mono. Prol., S I, 8) in which Anselm justifies his remark by noting the similar language in Augustine's De Trinitate (7.4, CCSL 50, 259). See also Ep. 83, S III, 208, where Anselm, noting that he has been criticized on these grounds, also defends the use of "three substances" by reference to De Trinitate. Mews reproduces a letter by Walter of Honnencourt disapproving of Roscelin's use of the language of the Greeks of God as three substances as well as Roscelin's letter to Abelard which uses the same language. See Mews, "St Anselm and Roscelin II," in Reason and Belief, X, 50–51; 57–58.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God customed usages, a concern of Roscelin's as well. This way of thinking about language, of thinking about words on their own terms, looking at them rather than assuming you can look directly through them to things is a hallmark of the so-called vocales with whom Roscelin is associated.35
In the end, the difference between Anselm and Roscelin is not, clearly, as great as Anselm's opening to the De incarnatione makes it seem, and the vehemence of his language about Roscelin is surely prompted to some degree by his need to distance himself from views and practices to which he had substantial ties. The task, then, is to refute Roscelin but to use the kind of examination of language he engaged in to understand rather than destroy the orthodox view.
Anselm cannot immediately launch into the equivalent of the Proslogion in tone or approach after this cautionary introduction. From a pedagogical perspective, those who might be moved by Roscelin's challenge are not ready for that kind of open and deep exploration. He may also want to further distance himself from Roscelin—that is, Roscelin's particular conclusions, though not Roscelin's concerns and method. Thus,
Anselm's reply has not one approach but three. First, he engages in a battle against Roscelin.36 His strategy here is mainly negative, showing that Roscelin's view is itself absurd and nonsensical. Second, Anselm moves to a more affirmative argument, arguing that Roscelin's dilemma does not follow from the orthodox Christian view.37 Lastly, he responds with images of the Trinity in an attempt to foster some positive understanding of trinitarian relations.38
Doing Battle In this opening section, Anselm uses his formidable dialectical skills to thoroughly discredit his opponent. The same pursuit of contradic35. Mews, "Nominalism and Theology," VII, 30; "The Trinitarian Doctrine of Roscelin," IX,
353; "St Anselm and Roscelin II," X, 84–86.
36. The first part takes up sections or chapters 1–5. As Mews notes, the divisions of the text are not numbers in the manuscripts but are based on dividing signs in the text. There is some external justification for thinking of this section of the text as a unit. One of the earlier versions of the letter, that printed in Schmitt's edition in volume 1, extends up to what is the first few lines of chapter 6 in what Schmitt takes to be the final version. See Mews, "St. Anselm and Roscelin I," in Reason and Belief, VI, 58, n. 8, and S I, 281–90.
37. The second part is chapters 7–9 and 10–11of the final version, a two part discussion, first of how, given the Incarnation, both the trinity and unity of God are preserved; second, of the appropriateness of the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. Again there is some justification in the manuscript tradition for this division. Mews discovered a manuscript which contains a section very close to chapter 10 of the final version and a different version of chapter 11. Chapters
12–16 occur only in the final version, according to Mews. See Mews, "St. Anselm and Roscelin I,"
VI, 59–62.
38. EDIV, 12–16, S II, 30–35.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God tion that was aimed at leading deeper into mystery in the earlier works is now deployed polemically. Anselm justifies the use of reason rather than scripture as the tool of his refutation on the grounds that rational argument is a remedial step made necessary by the unsophisticated nature of his opponent. If someone (Roscelin is never named) who says he is a Christian, cannot understand from the text of scripture he apparently accepts that there is one God, then Anselm must begin more basically, using, he says, the reasoning with which the opponent himself supports his view.39 In Cur Deus homo, Anselm will cast rational argument as a kind of common ground for believers and non-believers, but here Anselm justifies the use of reason a bit differently. It is the lowest common denominator for those whose very rationality is perverted. This justification allows him to begin his discussion in the same way that he began his letter to fellow monk, John. Hence, he begins with what is meant by "thing" in the claim that the three persons are three things.
Anselm first argues that Roscelin's claim is either superfluous or inconsistent. Of course, the persons are three things "understood in their relations." If Roselin means only this by saying they are three, his claim is superfluous. On the other hand, when the opponent adds that the Trinity is three things "existing separately as do three angels or three souls," then his claim inconsistent. Anselm notes that Roscelin makes this argument in order to prevent the Father from being incarnated with the Son. If Father and Son are numerically one god, then the Father must be incarnate with the Son.40 But if the persons are separate as angels and souls, then there are three gods, not three persons in one God.
Anselm argues that when Roscelin adds "in such way that they are wholly the same in will and in power," this does not redeem but actually confirms that Roscelin means that the three are separate as substances.41
Thus it shows that Roscelin's view is itself inconsistent. Anselm's reasoning is a little oblique, but it seems be that if Roscelin said they were three things, meaning only three properties or three persons, he would not (as he does) attribute will and power to them separately qua Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. On the orthodox view, will and power belong to the persons in terms of what is common to them, that is, as divine, not in so far as they are distinct. The Son is powerful but not because or qua Son, rather qua divine. Anselm's argument seems to be that Roscelin's claim, which implies that the three persons each have will and power, even with his added qualification that the will and power of each is one and the same, is inconsistent with the orthodox view that it is not at the level of
39. EDIV 2, S II, 11.
40. EDIV 2, S II, 12–13.
41. EDIV, 2, S II, 11, 13–14.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God distinct persons that will and power attach to the Godhead but qua God.42
Roscelin asserts a level of separation between the persons that makes them three gods rather than one.
Anselm's strategy is to refute Roscelin no matter which of several ways his position is understood, showing that it is untenable whichever way it is understood. If the claim is that the Godhead is three in terms of its distinguishing properties (propria singula), then the claim is superfluous because it simply restates the orthodox view. But if the claim is that they are three as three angels or three souls, it is inconsistent, asserting not one but three Gods.
The next possibility is that they are three in terms of their common divinity. If the claim is that the persons are three things "with respect to what is common to them, that is, in the sense that singly and all together
[they are] one perfect God," then Anselm asks whether his opponent is a Christian because such a view amounts to the heresy of Sabellianism.43
The objector should follow out the logic of his position to its conclusion: that the three persons are one thing and there are no persons in God. If this is the view, Anselm notes, there is no reason to be concerned only with the Incarnation (that if Son is incarnate, so is the Father), for the Spirit also would be incarnate as well as begetting and begotten.
Anselm concedes a little ground rhetorically to the opponent, trying to make some sense of what would drive him to make such a claim. If Father and Son are numerically the same, Anselm reasons for the objector, then predicates of one are predicates of the other. If Son is incarnate, Father is incarnate. On this view, the distinction between Father and Son would amount only to two different names for one thing, like Peter and Simon for Christ's apostle, and a predicate attributed to one could not be denied to the other.44 Anselm goes on, however, from this more sympathetic account of the impetus for Roscelin's view to flog his opponent with its logical implications, drawing on the particular character of the "father" and "son" as relations. Unlike "Peter" and "Simon," to be father is to be the father of someone and likewise to be son is to be the son of someone. One cannot be both to oneself: "For if there is not in God someone other than the Father whose father he is, there cannot be a father.
And similarly if there is not someone other than the Son whose son he is, there could not be a son."45 This drive of the argument toward complication and paradox—we recognize from the Monologion. But it is used here to a different end: to push Roscelin's view toward absurdity, rather than
42. EDIV 2, S II, 13–14.
43. EDIV 3, S II, 14, 10–13.
44. EDIV 3, S II, 14–15.
45. EDIV 3, S II, 15, 25–27.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God toward a paradox from which Anselm will then draw a necessary truth.
Equating Roscelin's view with Sabellianism is another way of pushing his view outside the boundaries of rational discussion. In response,
Roscelin could simply agree, rejecting Christianity, but, Anselm notes, Roscelin counts himself a Christian. So the critique is once again that Roscelin is inconsistent, that he in that sense imposes silence on himself. Anselm's aside that he "supposes [aestimo]" that Roscelin would reply that he is a Christian feels like a kind of threat.46 Roscelin must accept these consequences of his view, in which case he places himself outside Christianity, or he must abandon his claim. The report Anselm had gotten, he noted in the introductory section, is that Roscelin is now reasserting this view, having only recanted earlier because of his fear of "being killed by the people."47
When Roscelin says the Father becomes incarnate with the Son if they are one thing, Anselm knows well that he asserts this not as his view but as the conclusion he wants to avoid. The only way to avoid it is to reach toward the other extreme: that the persons are three things. Anselm's strategy is to show that avoiding one shoal only knocks him into another, equally perilous for his Christianity. For if the view that there are no persons is unacceptable to Roscelin as a Christian, so also is the alternative because it comes to the claim that the three persons are three Gods or that neither Father, Son, nor Holy Spirit are God. On the one hand, if the claim is that there are three in terms of the divinity they share, then the existence of three Gods is being asserted. If, on other hand, Roscelin attempts to avoid this conclusion by claiming that the three together are one God, then that means only the sum of the three is God and none of the persons individually are God.
Anselm takes time to point out not only the impious nature of these conclusions but the ways in which they result in metaphysical absurdity. For if the three together are God, then God is composite. Anselm remarks that if one has a "simple (simplicem) intellect unobstructed by the multiplicity of images (phantasmatum), he understands simple things
(simplicia) to surpass composite ones."48 Anselm links the right state of the intellect, as "simple," meaning something like able to see beyond the clutter of material multiplicity, to "simple" in a metaphysical sense, the metaphysically higher and simpler immaterial realities. Now we see at a deeper level what Anselm meant by his earlier criticism of dialecticians as unable to see beyond "corporeal images (imaginationibus)."49
46. EDIV 3, S II, 14, 12.
47. EDIV 1, S II, 4, 18–5, 1.
48. EDIV 4, S II, 17, 14–17.
49. EDIV 1, S II, 10, 2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God The problem with "modern dialecticians" is not just their views about logic. Anselm complains that dialecticians fail to grasp "anything other than what can be understood by imagination or anything which has no parts."50 Thus, their logical views spring from a deeper root: the failure to grasp the possibility of immaterial being. In the Confessions Augustine describes having the same problem when he was still a Manichee, one he overcame with the help of Neoplatonism.51 While Augustine focuses on immateriality, Anselm emphasizes simplicity as a perfection, but both are working within a clearly Neoplatonic metaphysics. Appealing to the superiority of simplicity over composition, Anselm catches his objector in a Proslogion-like contradiction on the divine nature. His opponent would have to admit, Anselm argues, that if there were something indivisible both really and conceptually, it would be greater than something that is divisible. If God is composite, then the (patently absurd) claim is that we can conceive something greater than God.52
Anselm concludes this section by turning to the very clause which is supposed to save Roscelin from absurdity: that they are three things or persons "such that the will and power of these three things is one."53
Anselm asks what this could mean. Is it that these three things are divine natures (1) qua separate (2) qua their common will and power, or (3) qua both what is distinct and what is common? If qua separate, then they are three gods and they can be understood without reference to will and power. If qua their common will and power, then there is no need for whatever it is that is three because "one will and power suffice for God's perfection." If qua both, then, again God would be composed of parts which are not God.54 Anselm ends by noting that he would need a "large codex" to write out the absurdities which follow from Roscelin's claims.55
Anselm has given a strong sense of the kind of arguments that would fill that codex. Roscelin's view, that the three persons are three things, does not prevent the outcome Roscelin wishes it to (the Father and Holy
Spirit becoming incarnate with the Son). In fact, it leads to much more absurd consequences which contradict both reason and basic Christian doctrine. Roscelin, as Anselm interprets him, tried to claim a kind of common sense victory of the common man with himself as their precocious spokesman. Anselm's first task is to show him that he is in way over his head, that it is extreme naiveté or hubris to suppose he has found a simple and obvious solution. The arguments in these opening sections
50. EDIV 4, S II, 18, 1–2. My emphasis.
51. Augustine, Confessions, 7, 20.
52. EDIV 4, S II, 18.
53. EDIV 5, S II, 18, 10–12.
54. EDIV 5, S II, 18–19.
55. EDIV 5, S II, 19, 12.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God have the tone of God's speech to Job. It is as if Anselm is saying to Roscelin, "You claim a right to speak on this topic; well, gird up your loins like a man and see the difficulties into which you have stumbled." Anselm concludes this section with just this tone and a veiled threat: "Clearly he ought not be so willing to argue about profound matters, especially those about which being in error is not without danger."56
Supporting and Defending the Orthodox View In the next section, Anselm changes tone and tactics. Having shown that absurd consequences follow from Roscelin's claims, Anselm sets out to argue that what Roscelin claims (that either all are incarnate or the three persons are three things) does not follow from the orthodox view.
In this second section, Anselm speaks for his opponent, but this opponent is chastened by Anselm's first onslaught and is no longer confident of his ability to see the problem and its solution as a simple, common-sense matter. Anselm writes to someone more ready to hear his arguments and Anselm, though still tough on his opponent's arguments, is less dismissive and harsh in this section. He is less focused on the outrageous character of the position he is refuting and more on the problem itself.
Here, one third of the way through the work (section six of sixteen), Anselm engages in a bit of reflection on his work as a whole, placing the Monologion and Proslogion in the context of scripture and writings of the Church fathers.57 In the Monologion prologue Anselm directs anyone who finds in his work anything "exceedingly novel" or "differing with the truth" to Augustine's De Trinitate so that they can reassure themselves that Anselm's little work is neither false nor radically new.58 In the De incarnatione he is somewhat less self-effacing but just as defensive. Anselm places both his relationship to the tradition and his purpose for writing this text within his assertion that he ought not be condemned for any novelty which the work contains. For good reason, the translations do not reproduce the rather contorted complex of self-justification. In it Anselm embeds a description of his method and intention within his denial of heresy and innovation, but here is an attempt:
56. EDIV 5, S II, 19, 17–18.
57. The earlier version the Epistola printed in volume one of Schmitt's edition ends after the beginning of what is in the final version chapter 6 (EDIV 6, S II, 20, 1–13; cf. S I, 290). This draft fragment only poses the question Anselm imagines his objector still has: why Roscelin's dilemma does not follow from the orthodox position. Anselm's account of his task in replying and reference to the tradition from scripture through the Fathers and his own Monologion and Proslogion immediately follow this question in the final version.
58. Mono. Prol., S I, 8, 11–12.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God If in [the Proslogion and Monologion] there is anything which I did not read or do not remember reading elsewhere—not as if teaching what our teachers did not know or correcting which they did not say well but saying what they perhaps were silent on and which is not discordant but is consistent with them—I asserted [these things] in order to respond for our faith against those who, unwilling to believe what they did not understand, deride believers, and in order to help the devout pursuit of those who humbly seek to understand what they firmly believe—by no means do I think I ought to be criticized for doing so.59
There are a number of possible inconsistencies here. He claims first that what he has written is not novel, and then he qualifies that, adding that at least he did not intend novelty. But then again, he goes on, it might be novel but only so as to speak in the cracks between what church teachers did say to address a new issue, new perspective, or new problem.
Moreover, his intention in whatever repetition or novelty there is was not to teach or correct teachers. And if it does, it is at least consistent with what they said.
The passage brings to mind Freud's famous story about a man's multiple responses to being accused of returning a borrowed pot with a hole in it. The man protests in multiple and inconsistent ways: I never borrowed the pot; I returned it unbroken; the pot was already broken when
I got it.60 The inconsistent list of defenses and excuses are proof of what they protest. Anselm's protests are not strictly inconsistent, but at the very least one might say he doth protest too much. He reveals anxiety if not guilt and clearly feels the need to defend himself. These comments fall at this point in the text where Anselm is moving away from polemic against Roscelin to a substantive consideration of the issue. It is one thing to wade into these matters in order to refute heretics. It is something else to justify a foray into what he reminded Roscelin was settled territory in a way that goes beyond refuting Roscelin.
As other scholars have recently argued, Anselm has more in common with the dialecticians he berates in the opening to this treatise than he admits. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was standard to describe the eleventh century in terms of a contrast between "dialecticians" and "anti-dialecticians." On this account, Roscelin and Berengar of Tours are extreme and rebellious rationalists ready to jettison doctrine that could not be proved in dialectical argument, while Lanfranc and Anselm oppose this view and reject the use of dialectic in the-
59. EDIV 6, S II, 20, 15–21, 4.
60. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by Joyce Crick (Oxford University
Press, 1999), 95–96.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God ology, or at least carefully restricted its scope.61 Recent work has shown that this view is an oversimplification. Evidence of Anselm's knowledge and use of syllogistic forms of arguments, especially hypothetical syllogisms, learned from Boethian dialectic has been uncovered by Suzanne
Nelis. She argues that while Lanfranc may have turned from the new dialectic after the controversy with Berengar, Anselm "embraced the new curriculum" such that "arguments flowed from him preformed, as it were, by the rules of term and propositional logic."62 Moreover, there is an important sense in which Anselm is more rather than less rationalist than Berengar. While both championed the use of reason and, more specifically, dialectical argument, Holopainen claims that Berengar uses reason "as a means of interpreting the authoritative writings of the Church" while Anselm takes up the bolder task of "construct[ing] rational demonstrations for articles of faith . . . avoid[ing] appealing to or even citing the authoritative writings of the Church."63 As Mews argues, "both
Anselm and Roscelin wished to arrive at the doctrine of plurality within divine unity rationally rather than by simply reproducing the formula of the Athanasian Creed." and wished "not to fall into the trap of being obsessively concerned with individual words" but "to come up with an argument more in accord with reason."64 Berengar seems to have recognized the authority of the written record in scripture and church fathers but wanted to assert the right to interpret those authorities differently than the reigning majority. Berengar's objection to the conciliar rejection of his views is that "they simply condemned him for the reason that he was reported to have a view that was contrary to the view commonly held."65 To this we can contrast Anselm's submission of his text directly to Pope Urban II, submitting explicitly to his authority over it, along with Anselm's defense of his work as supporting the faithful by lending rational support to their belief and as in harmony with Church authority.
61. Toivo J. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology in the Eleventh Century (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 1–2.
Holopainen cites the studies of J. A. Endres as the important purveyor of the notion of a basic conflict between dialecticians and antidialecticians in the eleventh century. See, for example, J. A. Endres, "Die Dialektiker und ihre Gegner im 11. Jahrhundert," Philosophisches Jahrbuch 19 (1906): 20–
33; Petrus Damiani und die weltliche Wissenschaft, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters
8.3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1910). See also Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 163–64.
62. Suzanne J. Nelis, "What Lanfranc Taught, What Anselm Learned," Haskins Society Journal 2
(1990): 75–78; 76.
63. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 132, 159.
64. Mews, "St Anselm and Roscelin II," X, 86.
65. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 114, 113–18. For Berengar's evaluation of the judgments of the councils considering his work see Berengar of Tours, Rescriptum contra Lanfrannum, edited by R. B. C. Huygens (CCCM 84), 1988, 1.192-565 (40–51); 1.565–670 (51–54); 1.1078–1143 (66–67). As cited in Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 114, n. 105.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Anselm positions his work by first denying any connection to Roscelin and his method or project, giving him no quarter. But second, he lays exclusive claim to their common ground—the expansion of theological discourse into dialectical, rational argument. Anselm both claims this territory and attempts simultaneously to landscape it, if you will, trimming, shaping, and controlling it, making it safe to enter and blocking any move to barricade it off. Anselm is attempting to save his common ground with Roscelin—the use of linguistic analysis and reliance on reason rather than repeated formulas—from what he truly sees as their misuse by Roscelin. This, then, is the challenge Roscelin poses, to which the body of De incarnatione attempts to respond. Anselm analyzes language, especially common usage, not to force doctrine to fit it (the mistake he sees Roscelin as making) but rather to work out a way around and beyond ordinary language to formulations that better, though still imperfectly, express the reality he is attempting to understand. Anselm makes use of dialectical arguments not grounded in scripture or authority not as a challenge to authority (again, the mistake he sees Roscelin as making), but, as the opening section has already made clear, placing such arguments in and from the context of faith.
We have to understand the final version's reflection on its method and the way it differs from the earlier drafts as expressing Anselm's developing ideas on how to achieve this balance. One change we find is that Anselm's final version of the De incarnatione leaves out an explicit reference to and criticism of Boethius's Christology which appeared in an earlier one.66 Why did Anselm leave Boethius out of the final version? The problem Anselm brings up in this draft fragment, how the Son, already a person, does not assume a second person when he assumes human nature, was not explicitly raised by Roscelin. However, Anselm takes it up, noting that it was inadequately dealt with by Boethius and as a problem that results directly from Boethius's definition of person as "individual substance of a rational nature." In the final draft, Anselm turns this into a hypothetical objection voiced by no one in particular and does not mention Boethius's definition of person. The objection is that if there are two rational natures in Christ, and Christ is an individual person of the Trinity and an individual man, then he seems to have to assume two persons.
There is no indication of whether this problem came to Anselm before or after his encounter with Roscelin. It could have even been a question that 66. The second part of the text, as noted, is chapters 6–9 combined with a revision of a text fragment Mews has discovered, appearing in the final version as chapters 10–11. See Mews, "St Anselm and Roscelin I," VI, 84. Mews has edited and published the fragment which he argues convincingly is an earlier draft of chapters 10–11 of EDIV. See nn. 36, 37.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Roscelin himself raised. Like Roscelin's question, it points toward a possible contradiction in orthodox Christology. It is, in other words, a question very like the one Anselm chides Roscelin for having raised.
In this fragment we see Anselm doing what he takes such care not to do in his polished work: directly engage with an authoritative figure in the tradition. The intriguing possibility raised by this discovery is that Anselm, like Soviet propagandists retouching photographs, carefully airbrushed out figures that were really present at the inception of his writings. Such a strategy is both more and less bold than leaving in explicit references to other thinkers and doctrines. It is more radical in that Anselm goes directly to the articles of faith, without the mediation of traditional interpretation or even, in most cases, scriptural warrant, giving reason the task of constructing necessary reasons for articles of faith.67 It is more politic in the sense that it allows Anselm to avoid directly disagreeing with or contradicting an authoritative figure or position. Moreover, in this case, it helps Anselm pass off his text as completely prompted by and limited to the controversy with Roscelin. It would be presumptuous of him to take up doctrine unprovoked and take on Boethius, a revered authority. For then Anselm would be subject to the accusation he makes of Roscelin: destabilizing already settled doctrine.
But if Anselm's reflections are united around a refutation of Roscelin and framed as supporting rather than confronting traditional authorities,
Anselm is safe from such accusations.68 Moreover, Anselm frames his novelty not as conflict with the tradition but as speaking where authorities were "silent," not contradicting but completing their work. This way of positioning his work implies that Church doctrine is a work in progress, not thoroughly stable and settled. Despite the opening analogy of it to Mount Olympus, new things remain to be said, new issues to be confronted.
As he begins this new section, Anselm sets three tasks: to show that 1) even if there were three gods, it would not keep all from becoming incarnate with the Son, 2) that there is only one God, and 3) as one God, the incarnation of one of the three persons does not necessitate but rather makes impossible the incarnation of all three. These are taken up in chapters 7, 8, and 9 respectively. Chapters 10 and 11 (of which we have the apparently earlier draft) add discussion of 4) why the Son rather than the other persons became incarnate, and 5) why the Son, having assumed
67. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 132, 159.
68. One addition to the draft of chapters 10–11 in the final version is a coda referring back to the statements of Roscelin quoted at the beginning of De incarnatione, asserting the completeness of Anselm's refutation. See EDIV 11, S II, 30.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God humanity, does not assume two persons. Anselm adds at the beginning of chapter 10 that he had not intended to discuss the fourth issue, but there is a sense in which both it and the fifth question fit in the text. All are united as problems of unity and plurality in God as complicated by the Incarnation.
The argument of chapter 7 is a reductio of Roscelin's position. Anselm argues that even if there were three gods, as Roscelin understands them, still all three would become incarnate. It also overlaps with issues adumbrated in the Monologion on what it means for God to be God, omnipotent and the supreme good. If the divine nature is omnipotent—even if there were three gods—Anselm reasons, the power of God must be identical with the divine being. Otherwise, either God has parts, an imperfection, or power is an accident, without which God could be conceived.
Since omnipotence requires the omnipresence of divine power identical with the divine substance, and "just as the power of God is always and everywhere, so whatever God is is always and everywhere," including being incarnate. Hence, Anselm argues, all would become incarnate.69
This argument rests on the claim made next: that there can only be one God. This seems at first to make refutation of Roscelin more difficult. For if there are three gods and all three would become incarnate if one did, then a fortiori if they are not three separate gods but only persons in one God, then all three must become incarnate. But Anselm structures his argument in two parts, showing that God is, first, one, and then, second, three. It is another way that he shows he wants to do more than merely refute Roscelin but wants to educate those straying from orthodoxy more thoroughly. Thus, Anselm wants to show Roscelin—or anyone troubled by his claims—that they have not adequately thought through the unity or the plurality in God. God is both more a unity and more a plurality than Roscelin has yet dreamed of.
This is what Anselm means when he complains (twice) that his opponent is "lame in both feet" in regard to the Incarnation; the two "feet" or respects in which his opponent is lame on the incarnation are, on the one hand, the Son's unity of nature with the Father and, on the other, the difference of persons.70 The expression, "lame in both feet," seems to be an allusion to 2 Samuel 9:13 referring to the son of Jonathan, Mephibosheth, who was crippled in both feet from having been dropped by his nurse as she fled an approaching army. He was later taken in by David to eat at his table for life. David takes him in despite Saul's (the child's grandfather)
69. EDIV 7, S II, 22.
70. EDIV 9, S II, 24.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God animosity toward David. David's action taking in Mephibosheth seems to have been a proverbial example of God's loving kindness. We do not know how much of this story Anselm might have had in mind in making the allusion, and it could well only be the use of a standard expression for someone who is doubly wrong. However, if Anselm had in mind the story of Mephibosheth, it might be a fitting allusion, given the shift in Anselm's approach to his "opponent" as De incarnatione moves forward.
As he begins this section, he is no longer talking specifically to Roscelin but to those who have been affected by Roscelin's position. Thus, Anselm would be signaling his willingness to take them in, to bring them back into the orthodox fold. Between Saul and David, as between Anselm and Roscelin and his followers, there is a kind of family feud, not less but more rancorous than feuds between those who are unrelated.
This double lameness is the result of a misunderstanding about how the Son of God achieves a union of divine with human. If God assumes human being (homo), it is either in a unity with his nature as divine or with his person as Son, Anselm reasons. His opponent must think it is the former because only then would all three persons become incarnate. In order to make sense of how human and divine can become unified, Anselm must appeal to what he has complained Roscelin and the dialecticians do not understand: the distinction between individual and species, person and nature.71 With the distinction between nature and person he can both characterize his opponent as assuming a unity of divine and human nature, and explain the orthodox view as a unity of human nature with the person of the Son of God, one person with two natures. Anselm also uses it to show that the opposing view is incoherent, because, he argues, if all become incarnate, then "a plurality of persons who are different from one another would be one and the same person," which is, of course, impossible.72
In this argument, we can hear an echo of the pattern of argument we have seen since the Monologion, from necessity to paradox to necessity.
Roscelin's claims make orthodox Christology incoherent and impossible, but Anselm's examination of the problem shows the incoherence and impossibility of Roscelin's position and objections. Anselm concludes, as before, with necessary conclusions, but they prove the orthodox view rather than the one he originally argued to be incoherent. Anselm began from the apparently obvious view as expressed by Roscelin that if 71. EDIV 1, S II, 10; 9, S II, 24. See the discussion of this criticism of the dialecticians, chapter 3.
72. EDIV 9, S II, 24, 23–25, 2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God one person of the one God becomes incarnate, all three do, and ends by showing not only that the incarnation of one does not require that all three persons become incarnate but in fact makes it impossible. Anselm goes above and beyond on both aspects of the argument, proving, on the one hand, that the opponent's position is more absurd than it seems and, on the other, that his position is not only possible but the only rational option.
While the structure or strategy is similar to the works we have examined so far, clearly the spirit in which it is undertaken is quite different.
Objections are not put in the mouth of the fellow inquirers, like the student in the dialogue trilogy or Boso in Cur Deus homo. In those works Anselm either never associated these problems or objections with any actual objections that posed any real threat to belief or had by long reflection laundered them of any association with an external other. The objections did not pose a threat, not because they did not raise serious problems but because they are taken up within the context of faith seeking understanding, in a spirit of shared exploration. Any anxiety or defensiveness is virtually absent from the earlier works, while in the Epistola, even in this second section Anselm is angry and almost sarcastic. He is far less belligerant as the magister of the dialogues and is more threatened by Roscelin than he is by Gaunilo.
Anselm's confident assertion that it is necessary that only one person becomes incarnate and the absurdity of the opposite view is striking. It is true that a contradiction follows from Roscelin's view that the three persons become incarnate in one human being. There would, then, be one
(human) person who is at the same time multiple (divine) persons. But as he makes that argument Anselm must ignore the problematic logic of the orthodox account of the Trinity. He has not forgotten it utterly, as is clear in the last section of the text, as we will see below, but it is as if he cannot acknowledge it while he is still engaged in the task of defeating Roscelin.
In the same vein, showing the necessity of the orthodox view, Anselm sets out to show not only that it need not be the case that Father and Holy
Spirit are incarnate with the Son though they are one God, but that it is impossible for any but the Son to be incarnate. Anselm notes, as mentioned above, that this subject is beyond what he had intended but he includes a discussion of it since it has come up.73 In an earlier draft of these chapters of the Epistola Anselm apologizes for this diversion from the main topic.74
This part of Anselm's argument was originally crafted as a criticism
73. EDIV 10, S II, 25, 6–9.
74. Mews, "St Anselm and Roscelin I," in Reason and Belief, VI, 60.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God of Boethius's response to Nestorius. Boethius's argument is entirely negative, a reductio of the Nestorian position. Nestorius, Boethius argues, makes the unity of Christ no more than that of a heap, a juxtaposition of different things, which, since lacking unity, lacks also being and efficacy for salvation.75
In order to understand Anselm here, we must recall Anselm's position in the Monologion. While he argued there that God is one on account of his one essence, he concluded that God is triune "on account of three
I know not what [propter tres nescio quid]."76 Persons, he argued, exist independently of one another, each person an independent substance. Anselm, thus, rejected the language of persons (as well as substances) for the Trinity because persons, like substances, are independently existing entities. Given that there is only one divine substance, there cannot be a plurality of persons.77 Thus Anselm only took up the language of persons as improper and as equally acceptable or unacceptable as calling God three substances.78
In the Epistola Anselm accepts the language of persons he had formerly rejected by redefining "person" in such a way as to make it more acceptable as a way of distinguishing Father, Son and Spirit. In the earlier draft he gives Boethius's definition of person (individual of a rational nature) and explains that defined in this way, one cannot defend the Chalcedonian formula—one person, two natures—against the Nestorian claim that there must be two persons. For if there are two rational natures, human and divine, then there are two individuals and two persons.79 Anselm cites a different definition of "individual" as "a collection of properties which is not the same as in another, that is, not said of another." The fragment of the earlier draft discovered by Mews, Cur Deus magis, identifies this as the definition of the philosophi and Mews traces it back to Porphyry.80 The definition is repeated in the final version with75. Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, in Boethius: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library 74
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 92–101.
76. Mono. 79, S I, 85.
77. Mono. 79, S I, 85, 21–22.
78. Mono. 79, S I, 86, 5–13.
79. "Cur Deus magis," edited by Mews, in "St Anselm and Roscelin I," VI, 84. Anselm says only
"individual of a rational nature" instead of "individual substance of a rational nature" as Boethius does (Contra Eutychen, 92) but he seems to assume it in pointing out the problem with Boethius's argument, that the claim is that there are two rational natures in Christ, human and divine, thus two individuals, thus two persons.
80. "Cur Deus magis," edited by Mews, in "St Anselm and Roscelin I," VI, 84–85. See Porphyry, Isagoge, in Categoriarum supplementa: Porphyrii Isagoge translation Boethii 7.21, edited by Laurenzo
Minio-Paluello, 6–7, Aristoteles Latinus 1 (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), 13.24–14.2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God out attribution.81 But though Porphyry's role is not acknowledged, his account allows Anselm to save and fully endorse the language of persons for the Trinity.
Perhaps further covering his tracks, Anselm supports his claim by reference to the particular case of Jesus in the final version, instead of appealing to the "philosophers." "Jesus" designates not just any man but the one "announced by the angel, who is God and man, son of God and son of a virgin, and whatever else it is true to say of him as God and man."82 One cannot designate the Son of God without also designating the Son of man; the one person possesses all these attributes.83 A plurality of persons cannot have the same collection of properties or have the same things said of them. Thus, given the set of properties and predications particular to Jesus as Son of God and man, there can only be one person.
Porphyry's definition of an individual is less metaphysical and more linguistic than Boethius's "individual substance of a rational nature."
It is also subject to the criticism that it does not distinguish between an individual and heap. However, the looser definition allows Anselm to ground the single personhood of Jesus in the predications made of him as both God and man. Nevertheless, in the end Anselm's argument does really not say anything more than Boethius's reductio argument against Nestorius. For Boethius simply points out that if Jesus is two persons then all the things we say of him will be false.84
When we look more carefully at the Epistola we see that Anselm, even as he endorses the language of persons, has not moved as far as it might seem from the Monologion. In chapter 12 of the Epistola Anselm is refuting an opponent who, having rejected a multiplicity of gods, also might reject a multiplicity of persons. Anselm argues that a trinity of multiple persons is only problematic if based on the notion that God is three persons in the same way human beings are three persons (as fully distinct individuals). However, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit "are said to be three persons not because they are three separate things but because of a certain similitude they have with three separate persons."85 Just as of Adam cannot be called son, only father, and Abel can be called only son, not father, so Father cannot be called Son and Son cannot be called
Father. Anselm's explanation for how the term "person" applies is quite negative: "since Father and Son and Holy Spirit are three, and different from each other, and cannot be called by one another's [names]; there-
81. EDIV 11, S II, 29, 7–8.
82. EDIV 11, S II, 29, 9–12.
83. EDIV 11, S II, 29, 12–15.
84. Boethius, Contra Eutychen, 94–101.
85. EDIV 12, S II, 30, 15–17.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God fore, they are said to be three persons but not because they are three separate things."86
This is an argument based in language. It is a mode of argument we would expect more from Abelard than Anselm in that Abelard gives justifications and explanations for the language of the Trinity, saving the predications of orthodoxy, but does not give much access to the reality behind statements.87 Anselm's reasoning back to what an individual is based on how we talk about individuals, rather than grounding what we say on a metaphysical account of what an individual is is similiarly linguistic rather than metaphysical. Anselm has focused on language from the start in the Monologion. However, the pattern in the Monologion and Proslogion explorations of God was to push against the limits of language as the gateway toward insight into divine reality and to note the ways in which it always falls short. The Anselm of the Monologion recognized the limits of reason and language but strove mightily to overcome both. His reasoning was both more substantive and more evocative of the divine as beyond human comprehension. In the Epistola it is almost as if Anselm has given up the battle for real understanding and has settled for correct and justified belief. Though trinitarian scholars may disagree, to my mind the Monologion's more intellectually modest conclusion on the Trinity represents a deeper insight than the Epistola, which is, in comparison and up to this point, flawless as argument but lacking as insight.
Supporting the Faithful with Images of the Trinity Anselm does not, however, end his exploration on this linguistic note.
In the third and last section, Anselm further softens his approach to his opponent. The objections in this section do not spring from a desire to foment heresy but rather from a genuine difficulty in understanding. This opponent simply cannot understand because he sees nothing in his own experience that can be one and three. Anselm advises that he should simply bear (sufferat) something being in God that his intellect cannot comprehend. He should not compare things in space and time and composed of parts to the nature that is none of those things.88 Assuming faith, at issue is what to do about any discontinuity between what faith believes and what the intellect knows. The first answer is to tolerate that tension between what seems like it must be the case to our mind and experience,
86. EDIV 12, S II, 30, 27–30.
87. Eileen C. Sweeney, Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 93–95.
88. EDIV 13, S II, 31.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God that something cannot be three and one, and trinitarian teaching, without shrinking doctrine into the limited parameters of finite things. Believe and do not dispute, acquiesce to Christian authority, he concludes.89
Yet Anselm does not simply break off here, acquiescing to authority.
He undertakes the search for similitudes as act of charity toward a believer he no longer construes as a hostile opponent. This opponent does not glory in his own cleverness but is genuinely puzzled and even distraught by his desire to understand something of what he believes. To this kind of inquirer, Anselm suggests that there might be something of which we do have experience, something composite and in time and space that has some shadow of the feature found in God, that is, being one and three. Anselm proposes a spring from which a river flows into a lake as analogy for the Trinity, using without attribution the analogy
Augustine had put forward in De fide et symbolo.90 Anselm, unlike Augustine, names the entity that is spring, river, and lake as the Nile. Augustine argued that spring, river, and lake are all water, and the roots, trunk and branches are all wood; so in some sense of God the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct yet one God. The problem with this analogy, William Mann argues, is that wood and water are "mass nouns" and so the spring, river and lake are parts of water. He argues that when
Anselm makes the analogy about the Nile it is an improvement because the likeness is not based on water as a mass noun but on the Nile "a fourdimensional entity, occupying a certain region, not just of space, but of the spatio-temporal continuum," something like the Nile sub specie aeternitatis. This is what Anselm is getting at when he concludes, "the whole
Nile is the spring, the whole Nile is the river, the whole Nile is the lake."91
Similarly, then, the whole of God is the Father, the whole, the Son, and so forth. Mann argues further that this is how Anselm rejects modalism, the view that there is one God and that what is three are only three roles or functions: "Where there is wholeness, there is no room for apportioning roles or functions."92 The wholeness is not just the unity of God but the wholeness of God in each of the persons such that they cannot be mere functions of the one God but each wholly God.
89. EDIV 13, S II, 31.
90. Augustine, De fide et symbolo, 17 (CSEL 41, 19).
91. EDIV 13, S II, 32, 2–3. Cf. William Mann, "Anselm on the Trinity," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
277, 275–77. Cf. Christopher Hughes, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 166–86. Hughes attempts an interpretation of Anselm's analogy in the language of contemporary analytic philosophy and then tries to revise it to be applicable in contemporary terms.
92. Mann, "Trinity," 278.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God The analogy has several functions for Anselm. First it is designed to give the imagination something that has some of the character of being
"three in one." As image, the spring-river-lake = Nile is not supposed to be congruous in all respects. This image, Anselm reminds the reader, is of what is created, not creator, and of what is, unlike God, subject to the limits of time, place, and composition; only mutatis mutandis does the image represent the Godhead.93 Second, the analogy is supposed to provide a model of an entity that can support the pattern of predication asserted to hold for the Trinity. Thus Anselm writes, "the spring is not from the river nor from the lake; but the river is only from the spring and not from the lake, and the lake from both the spring and the river, such that the whole river is from the whole spring and the whole lake from the whole spring and the whole river."94
Were Anselm Abelard, he would stop here, with an account of the coherence of the predications of orthodoxy on the Trinity, supported by an example or examples of the coherence of such patterns of predication for created things in ordinary language. But the analogy has a third function. The image is supposed to function as a stepping-stone toward the goal of making sense of the Trinity on its own rather than created terms.
Thus the final two chapters of the work attempt to give an account of, first, the unity and, second, the plurality of the Godhead reasoning from God as "eternity itself."95 Eternity grounds unity because nothing can be external to eternity (at another place or time) nor can there be plural eternities or plural omnipotences.96 Anselm then explains the relationships of begetting and procession by arguing from the conclusion that there can be nothing external to the eternal God. "When God is begotten of God" that which is begotten is not external to the one who begets and when God proceeds from God, that which proceeds is not external to that from which it proceeds.97 Thus Anselm concludes with an argument for unity that is metaphysical and not merely linguistic.
Anselm grounds plurality on the relations within the Trinity. Father is distinct from Son, who is begotten, and "he who proceeds" is distinct from "him from whom he proceeds."98 This part of the argument is still in a certain way linguistic. Within the unity of the single eternity of God, there is Father and Son, he who proceeds and he from whom one proceeds. (Anselm refrains from using the name of the Holy Spirit here.)
Given that Father and Son are always distinct and the one who proceeds
93. EDIV 13, S II, 31–32.
94. EDIV 13, S II, 32, 12–19.
95. EDIV 15, S II, 33, 12.
96. EDIV 15, S II, 33–34.
97. EDIV 15, S II, 34.
98. EDIV 16, S II, 34, 27.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God and the one from whom he proceeds, Anselm concludes, "no one [name] can be said of the other."99
There is an important sense in which none of the three levels of discourse on the Trinity Anselm engages in the Epistola correspond to the kind of discourse on God and the Trinity we found in the Proslogion and Monologion. Before he turns to the image of the Nile, Anselm's arguments were negative. He showed that objections to the orthodox account themselves have incoherent implications. Second, he argued that unlike those objections or alternate accounts, the orthodox view is the only account which can remain coherent both in its assertion of unity and trinity. Dialectic has been exhausted, used to refute the challenge to orthodoxy as absurd and to support the orthodox view as the most reasonable view. But it is unable to get further. Anselm then moves to another mode of discourse: images or similitudes, which have only limited efficacy. Only the last two chapters try to get a hold of the notion of God as three in one, moving beyond dialectical refutation and inadequate images. However, even these last two chapters differ in tone from the Monologion and Proslogion discussions. The trinitarian discussion in the Monologion is more dynamic. It is not just that in the Monologion uses the language of procession and the Epistola relational opposition. The Monologion makes a daring attempt to derive the Son and Spirit from the notions of God's expression and God's love, while the Epistola essentially works with the relations as a given and attempts to explain how they remain three and God remains one.100 The Epistola is more restrained in its aspirations, moving from polemic and apologia to the images with which the Monologion ends.
It only ventures into metaphysics briefly and tentatively at the end, and more in pursuit of divine unity than divine trinity.
The Epistola and Anselm's Project The unique value of the Epistola is the access it affords us to Anselm's thinking and composition process. We can tell from the manuscript tra-
99. EDIV 16, S II, 34.
100. Cf. Peter Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics Developments of Latin Trinitarian Theology between c. 1075 and c. 1160," in Trinitarian Theology in the Medieval West, edited by Pekka Kärkkäinen (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Seura, 2007), 14–17. Gemeinhardt thinks of the Monologion argument as the more traditional text because it is based on Augustine's psychological analogy. Thus Gemeinhardt finds the shift to an account based on the notion of person redefined was necessary to meet the tougher challenges outside the monastery and for an audience using reflection on the Trinity as a part of devotional life. Gemeinhardt also sees the Monologion as an attempt to give a nontechnical account; shifting to the language of "person" in De incarnatione is leaving behind "the grammar of everyday language" and of the youth in the schools for a particularly theological terminology. For more discussion of the kind of progression Anselm's trinitarian thinking exhibits, see chapter 7.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God dition so well laid out by Mews that Anselm put several pieces together.
First, there is his polemical response to Roscelin; second, there is an independent account of the Incarnation and Trinity in dialogue with Boethius. Third, there are methodological remarks in his extended introduction and in chapter six, and the remarks commending the work to Pope Urban II, asking for any needed corrections to the work.101 What we find when examining these pieces and the way they come together in the final form is that, as Mews writes, "the smooth, deceptively simple philosophical style of Anselm did not spring automatically from his pen. It emerged only from careful pruning of initially elaborate and complicated reflections generated by a sophisticated and subtle mind."102
This work in its versions and fragments reveals, then, that Anselm's combination of relentless rationalism in the form of deductive arguments is a careful choice rather than an accident of his texts. Anselm combines this argumentative rigor with a certain lack of technicality in two senses. First, he omits the names of his sources, both those he uses and those he objects to.103 In the final version, he does not explain that the definition of "individual" is from Porphyry (or even "the philosophers" as his earlier draft admits), and he excises the mention of Boethius in his discussion of Christ as one person and two natures. Anselm's rejection of Boethius's definition of "person" and his solution, made possible by appeal to a non-Christian philosopher, are significant changes to the tradition. Anselm places those doctrinal and philosophical novelties within a refutation of Roscelin, turning the public controversy into a pedagogical tool. Roscelin's challenge becomes the occasion to rethink
"settled doctrine" in a way that is less threatening than Roscelin's attempt to do the same. In this way Anselm can downplay his own innovation but also can transform Roscelin (or his followers) from dangerous dissenters into a faithful seekers of understanding.
Second, Anselm avoids the technical language and argument forms 101. Mews notes that this kind of "voluntary pre-censorship" is rare before the mid-twelfth century. See Mews, "St Anselm and Roscelin I," VI, 65, n. 23.
102. Mews, "St Anselm and Roscelin I," VI, 64.
103. Anselm's leaving out of the names of sources is not, of course, somehow new or unique to him. In this context, it is one of several ways Anselm transforms his text into one that is less technical, one which appears to spring more immediately from his own introspective reasoning.
The issue of Anselm's lack of references to sources is most associated with the Monologion, since
Lanfranc explicitly criticized Anselm for failing to cite scripture and the fathers in the Monologion.
See chapter 4, section a. But in this case, by omitting the names of Boethius and Porphyry Anselm seems to be following rather than contradicting Lanfranc's advice. For in leaving out Boethius, Anselm seems less like he is engaging in theological controversy with a recognized authority, and in leaving out Porphyry he appears to be less engaged in the use of the technical tools and sources for dialectic in discussion of theological topics.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God of dialectic. Only, as we will see, in De conceptu does Anselm make more explicit references to the techniques of definition, divisio, and syllogistic argument forms. Lanfranc has been described as "dissembling" about his dialectical expertise on questions of faith "in order not to appear to have more confidence in [dialectic] than on the Truth and on the authority of the Holy fathers."104 Anselm seems to share with his teacher Lanfranc the conviction that rational consideration of matters of faith should not be (or at least not obviously) dialectical in a technical sense.105
Anselm's disentanglement of his arguments from the technical trappings of dialectic and debate serves as a way of purifying dialectic so that it can be used in theological discussion. Leaving out references to authorities also allows him to avoid openly disagreeing with a traditional authority and cluttering up the text with names and sources. Thus his rational journey appears to be driven by pure reason. This is not pure reason in a Kantian sense but in the sense that it is introspective, that it follows its own path raising and responding to questions that fall naturally out of its own process. The questions are not presented as those of a technical specialist or part of artificial debate but what anyone—or at least any monk—would or should ask. This kind of questioner is less an actually occurring phenomenon—within or outside the monastery—than it is
Anselm's quite conscious construction. Such a stance allows him to connect the intellectual rigor of his work with spiritual life, both grounded in the practice of monastic introspective meditation.
The Epistola is important because the trinitarian theology in it, along with that in the De processione Spiritus Sancti, is influential in the later
Middle Ages. In these works Anselm lays out a careful and coherent account of the terminology and its application. In so far as the Epistola heralds a new development in Anselm's speculative work, it seems driven by the need to write in a way more suited to the rigors of debate outside the monastery. It is more carefully constructed so that its claims can be less easily taken out of context.106 Anselm seems to have realized that, despite his protests against his works being copied and disseminated in ways he
104. André Cantin, "Saint Anselme au depart de l'aventure Européenne de la raison," in Les
Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe siècles: études anselmiennes (IVe session: Abbaye
Notre-Dame du Bec, Le Bec-Hellouin, 11–16 juillet 1982, edited by Raymonde Foreville, Spicilegium Beccense II (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1984), 615. A similar view is expressed by Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 51–3.
105. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 47–59.
106. Cf. Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics," 19–20. Gemeinhardt writes, "The Epistola de incarnatione Verbi illustrates how Anselm underlined the importance of being in tune with the doctrine of the Church when seeking to understand the faith. Compared with the Monologion, he does no longer restrict himself to the satisfaction of individual needs for rationability of the faith but struggles to defend the Church's faith against a real enemy."
God with Human Being and Human Being with God did not countenance, he could not control the use of his works. Having failed to control the audience of his works, he begins to write in ways that will not be so easily misconstrued. This represents the beginning of a gap between spiritual practice and theological speculation absent in Anselm's earlier works. The De incarnatione, along with Cur Deus homo, represents a kind of mean in this development, as Anselm more explicitly engages with the theological tradition and with contemporary theories and questions yet still constructs his works to further the understanding of faith.
The Epistola is in the end less compelling than the earlier works because it is more a product of Anselm's need to satisfy critics. He finds it necessary to state what he had taken for granted – basic orthodoxy and acceptance of traditional formulations—and devotes the lion's share of his efforts to fighting heresy and defending orthodoxy. The Monologion did not reject those formulations but did more daringly try to move beyond them. The heart of the Monologion and Proslogion's investigations is something between creedal assent and images: speculative, metaphysical striving to create and unravel paradox into necessity. Despite the different kinds of discourse in the Epistola, the speculative, metaphysical layer is almost totally missing as it jumps from arguments against heresy to arguments in defense of orthodoxy to metaphor. It does not attempt, as the Monologion and Proslogion do—even as they recognize their limits— to pierce standard formulations and move toward deepened rational and direct understanding.
In some sense, we shall see, Anselm finds his way back to his signature method and style in Cur Deus homo: reasoned argument, often language-based, undertaken for ambitious rational and spiritual goals, motivated by questions posed by external objectors, but integrated with and subordinated to a spiritual quest.
Cur Deus homo: From the Absence to the Presence of God Much recent discussion of Cur Deus homo has centered around the source of the objections to the Incarnation it takes up. The question is whether they are real Jewish or Muslim objections based on real encounters with Jews or Muslims. Earlier speculation had it that it was the Mutakallimun, emphasizing the power of God to act without secondary causes, who posed the question of the Cur Deus homo Boso articulates.107
107. René Roques, "Les Pagani dans le Cur deus homo de Saint Anselme," in Die Metaphysik im
Mittelalter, ihr Ursprung und ihre Bedeutung; Vorträge des II. Internationalen Kongresses für Mittelalterliche
Philosophie, Köln, 31 August–6 September 1961, edited by P. Wilpert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963), 192–96.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Others have taken the objections to be Jewish in origin, perhaps filtered through Anselm's friend Gilbert Crispin, who, unlike Anselm, is known to have had encounters with Jews living in London.108
Though Southern emphasized the differences between Cur Deus homo and Anselm's earlier work as engaged with non-Christian objections to Christian doctrine and with other Christian views rather than in response to his own inner promptings, Cur Deus homo and Boso's role in it are also in many important ways continuous with the earlier works. First, the trilogy and dialogues and the Proslogion do take up objections from those outside Christianity, though those objections are not made directly but mediated through scripture. The trilogy of dialogues takes up objections to Christianity's view of free choice and sin, objections voiced in the gospel of John by Jews opposed to Jesus. And, as we learned, the figure of the fool from Psalms to whom Anselm addresses himself in the Proslogion is associated, though not by Anselm, with Jewish rejection of Jesus' divinity. In De incarnatione, as we saw, Anselm takes up the challenge formulated by Roscelin implying the incoherence of Christian views of the Incarnation. Second, Cur Deus homo, like those other works, transforms external objections or objectors into those found within belief and the believer. Thus, regardless of their origin Anselm responds to the problems raised not as if they are a belligerent, external threat to belief, nor merely abstract, intellectual problems but transforms them into those in which the believer is existentially involved and implicated.109
In Cur Deus homo, Anselm is able is to carve a methodological place 108. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 198–99. Recent studies have pointed out that the objections Anselm tries to respond to are only found in Jewish objectors in a later period or in regions far away from England. See Gilbert Dahan, "Anselm, les Juifs, le Judaïsme," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Foreville, 521–34; and Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 178–81. Anna Abulafia argues that Anselm's opponent cannot be actual Jews or Muslims because his argument assumes explicitly Christian presuppositions of original sin that they would not accept. See Anna Sapir Abulafia, "St Anselm and Those
Outside the Church," in Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of AntiJudaism in the West (c. 1000–1150) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 131–48. Jeremy Cohen argues that even though Anselm does not seem to have contact with Jews or knowledge of Judaism, this need not "deter him from directing his arguments to Jews as he conceived them." Cohen describes Anselm's
Jewish objector as a "contrived, hermeneutically crafted Jew," a view I also argue for below based on the text. See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 178. For Cohen, Anselm's placement of generic, ahistorical, and rationally based objections put in the mouth of Jewish objectors is, on the one hand, a step toward the conflation of Jews with other unbelievers and toward the undoing of special status and protections due them, but, on the other hand, the conceit steers clear of invective, instead manifesting a "commitment to level-headed, reasonable encounter between opposing viewpoints." See
Living Letters, 178–80, 174.
109. Though there is a sense that De incarnatione represents an exception to this modus operandi, it works toward the same goal in the stages of the work.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God from which he can consider the questions he wishes to in rational terms, seeking the same understanding through atemporal, necessary reasons for the Incarnation as he did in De libertate and De casu diaboli for creation and the fall. Like the objections and arguments in the dialogues, Boso's objections take the issues out of their narrative form to consider them logically, in terms of necessary reasons. In the process, Anselm also transforms Boso. Boso begins by only posing the objections of the "infidels," not his own questions. His stance as a neutral, third-party observer on the matter is transformed into that of someone existentially implicated by the consequences of the argument in which they are engaged.
Cur Deus homo, then, displays the same pattern of argument which Anselm has always used, beginning from apparently insurmountable reasons why what faith believes cannot be true, seeking (and in some sense finding) the perfect congruence between words, thoughts, and things, the necessary reasons the claims of faith must be true. Anselm's arguments are, here as elsewhere, in the service of deepening the believer's commitment to faith.
The Parameters of the Discussion Boso begins by posing a barrage of objections, all showing the incongruity of the mode of human salvation with the divine nature. The main obstacle is God's power. Surely God had the power to do instantly and without suffering what he does by means of Jesus' life and death. The dilemma is this: if God could not have done it another way, he is without power; if he could but chose not to, he is without wisdom, suffering for no reason what is unbecoming.110 If God wills something, it cannot be opposed, Boso asserts; thus, he could simply will man freed from his sins.
And if he chooses to do something in a more difficult and unfitting way (through the passion of his son) when he could do it in some easier way, he cannot be counted wise. Moreover, he did not suffer out of love for the angels, so why for humankind? And why does he need to come down to vanquish the devil, as if the devil had the power to call God out into battle?111
Boso continues with a critique of one way of justifying the Incarnation, an account, he says, "we are wont to make use of," in which the devil has control over humankind by a kind of justice since man freely consented to sin. Hence, God can only free human kind by "justice" rather than "power," which happens when the devil unjustly kills a sinless
110. CDH I, 6, S II, 53.
111. CDH I, 6, S II, 54–55.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God man.112 Versions of this view can be traced back to Augustine and forward to the school of Laon.113 The language Boso uses to describe this view, that God was obliged to act with justice rather than power against the devil, comes from De Trinitate, though Augustine does not make the next claim Boso critiques: that if God had simply acted with power to release man from the devil it would have been an act of unjust violence.114
Nonetheless, Boso rejects this view by objecting to the Augustinian formulation of which it is an elaboration: that God must act by justice rather than power toward the devil. Boso objects on the basis of God's power.
"Both the devil and man are God's and neither can exist outside of the power of God;" hence, God would not need to use the devil to win man back, he argues.115 Further, he contends, even if human beings are justly punished, it is not just for the devil to have power over human beings.116
Boso in this way expands and specifies the central question of the work: "By what reason or necessity is God made man and, as we believe and confess, by his death restore life to the world when he could have done this either through another person, whether angelic or human, or by will alone?"117 This, Anselm argues, is a question asked by unbelievers (infideles) and believers (fideles) the learned (litterati) and unlearned
(illiterati).118 Anselm explains that he will take up these questions in dialogue form, which is "clearer" and "more pleasing," "especially to slower minds."119 The content and method of the inquiry is to be as accessible and as widely relevant as possible. Anselm does this by assuming the perspective of one who finds the Incarnation not just implausible but incoherent, not for sectarian reasons but from within the logic of monotheism shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims and also, at least as understood by the medieval Latin West, the Greek philosophers. While the fool's rejection of God as presented in the Proslogion and the objections of Anselm's "infidel" seem very different, in the form Anselm uses and discusses them, both are general, rationally based objections. These are the objections that would be made by "preor extra-Christian man and, metaphorically, the human mind under the tutelage of nature."120
112. CDH I, 7, S II, 55–56.
113. CDH I, 7, S II, 55, 17. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 204. For the broader history and provenance of the "rights of the devil" view, see Marcia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden:
Brill, 1994), vol. 1, 488.
114. Augustine, De Trinitate XIII, 13, 17–15, 19. Cf. Augustine, De libero arbitrio III, 31.
115. CDH I, 7, S II, 56, 3–4.
116. CDH I, 7, S II, 57–59; Cf. Med. 3, S III, 85–86.
117. CDH I, 1, S II, 48, 22–24.
118. CDH I, 1, S II, 48, 1, 5–6.
119. CDH I, 1, S II, 48, 11–15.
120. Mark D. Jordan, "The Protreptic Structure of the 'Summa Contra Gentiles,'" The Thomist 50,
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Though this is a description of the "gentiles" to whom Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles are addressed, it is a description that fits the objections
Anselm addresses in Cur Deus homo just as well. Whether Anselm was actually confronting actual non-Christian objectors to Christianity, he addresses that opponent without appeal to any specific faith or background using rational and not scripturally based arguments.
Boso plays a role in this process analogous to Gaunilo's: that of a rational skeptic who requires that all objections be considered and who will be moved only by absolutely certain and indubitable conclusions.
Boso is certainly as difficult to convince as Gaunilo. Both criticize what they see as less than fully rigorous arguments and goad Anselm into considering more questions and problems. Rejecting Anselm's first round of defenses of the Incarnation as mere "paintings on clouds," pleasing, insubstantial fictions, Boso spurs Anselm on to offer more than arguments from fittingness and proportion between the fall and its remedy in the Incarnation. Boso describes what he requires thusly: "The rational solidity of truth (veritatis soliditas rationabilis) must first be shown, that is, the necessity (id est necessitas), which proves (probet) God ought or could have humbled himself to those things which we affirm."121
It is this standard for success—solidity, necessity, and this level of persistent questioning on Boso's part—taking on, as Anselm puts it, "the persona of one who believes nothing until it is demonstrated in advance by reason,"122 which marks Anselm's inquiry and method as something new. In these opening chapters, Anselm does attempt to reply to Boso's objections, defending the orthodox view that the Incarnation and passion of Christ are neither unfitting for Christ to have undergone nor for the Father to have commanded and are also free rather than imposed upon either of them. He exclaims the fittingness of death, resulting from the disobedience of man, being restored to life by the obedience of a man, the fittingness of condemnation, originating from a woman's sin, transformed to justification by man born of woman, the fittingness of the devil, who conquered man by persuading him to eat from a tree, being conquered himself by a man suffering on a tree.123 Anselm also engages in careful interpretation and clarification of scripture passages to explain away any sense that Christ had to die.124 All to no avail. As noted above,
Boso describes the litany of fittingness as "painting on clouds," and in reno. 2 (1986): 184. The question of whom Aquinas intends to address in the Contra gentiles is also vexed, a question not germane to this study but see the brief discussion and listing of sources in Cohen, Living Letters, 371–72.
121. CDH I, 4, S II, 52, 1–6.
122. CDH I, 10, S II, 67, 1–2.
123. CDH I, 3, S II, 51.
124. CDH I, 9–10, S II, 61–7.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God sponse to the scripture interpretation, Boso states the most disturbing, pointed version of his basic objection: "It is strange (mirum) if God takes such pleasure in (delectatur) or needs (eget) the blood of an innocent man that only if this one was killed would he or could he spare the guilty."125
These opening chapters are linked to Augustine's discussion of the same questions in De Trinitate in several ways, not just in their reference to the rights of the devil. First, the pointed question itself comes from Augustine and even the demand for something more than aesthetic arguments or claims of fittingness is needed in response. For while Augustine's sermons sometimes rely on the kind of fittingness Anselm tries to satisfy Boso with, De Trinitate asks for reasons and understanding in a more rigorous form.126 Anselm perhaps also takes his cue from Augustine in formulating his argument as a response to objectors, for Augustine crafts his account of the logic of the Incarnation, passion, and death as occurring in response to "those who say" that God could surely devise another means for salvation.127 Thus, Anselm echoes the very questions and takes the standards for answers Augustine had laid out in De Trinitate and makes them even more strict, seeking necessary reasons in response to an objector who leaves Christ and faith out of view. At the same time, however, he also allows Boso to criticize what is essentially
Augustine's account as aesthetically pleasing but lacking in rigor and as leaving unanswered the basic question about why God would want or need to allow torture and death.
Anselm's commendation of the work, sent with the text to Pope Urban II, justifies the use of reason on three fronts: to refute fools (confutandum insipientiam), subdue infidels (frangendum duritiam infidelium) and nourish (pascendum) the faithful with reasons.128 There still remain things to be said and reasons to be tracked down on this topic, Anselm explains.
The Fathers were not able to say everything in their short lives; further, "the ratio of truth is so broad and so deep, it cannot be exhausted by mortals, and the Lord in his church . . . does not cease imparting the gifts of his grace."129 Thus, Anselm concludes, his attempt to lift himself (assurgere) to a consideration (intuendum) of the ratio of those things which are believed ought not to be reproached.130 Confronting objections as attrib-
125. CDH I, 10, S II, 66, 24–26.
126. See, for example, Augustine, Sermo 232, 2, 2. Augustine writes that it is not enough to show that salvation through Christ was worthy of God's dignity, but wants to show not that there was no other mode God could have used but that there was none more fitting (convenientorum). De
Trinitate XIII, 10, 13.
127. Augustine, De Trinitate XIII, 10, 13.
128. CDH, Comm., S II, 39, 3–4.
129. CDH, Comm., S II, 40, 4–6.
130. CDH I, Comm., S II, 40, 13–17.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God uted to unbelievers may be a kind of cover for considering questions that might be seen as impious if taken up by believers unprovoked by outsiders. In any case, answering objections thought to be raised by those outside the faith is a way of shoring up the faithful. The ebb and flow of literature taking up the challenge of Jews and non-Christians to Christianity tracks with the rise and fall of perception of threats from within Christianity as much or more than real threats from outside the faith.131 Anselm aims as a Christian to defend the faith from those without and to support it from within, but he also aims as a thinker to justify and protect the kind of discourse of "faith seeking understanding" in which he wishes to engage. What is critical is that Anselm understands these tasks as the same. This means examining the most basic, the most difficult principle of Christianity, its defining claim which is "scandal to the Greeks": that God became man and died for the sake of humankind. It means the examination of that claim for all the ways in which it seems wildly inconsistent with the divine nature.
The difficulties confronting them are forbidding. But Anselm creates a greater gap between where they stand and success by noting not just the difficulties of the Incarnation but also his own limitations as teacher. Even before Boso has posed his problems and explained his standards for success, Anselm balks. "I fear to treat subjects too high for me, lest, when someone may have thought or even have seen that I do not satisfy him, he will believe that I am in error with regard to the truth of the thing, rather than that my intellect is not sufficient to grasp it."132 This distinction is worth stopping over. It is, Anselm says, one thing to be stretched out toward but not yet in possession of the truth and quite another to be in error regarding it. Though different, these two positions might look the same on the outside: neither has achieved the truth. This distinction is that between the Monologion's "three I-know-not-whats" and Roscelin's error. Anselm hopes for (but is not sure he can succeed in securing) something more than faith but less than sight (species), which is not error but progress toward that for which "we pant (anhelamus)."133
Anselm appears to decline to take up Boso's question, voicing the humility about his own abilities and misgivings about his arguments that readers like Gaunilo seem to have wished he had expressed in the Proslogion. Anselm further protests that they cannot begin their discussion because they cannot possibly finish. Examining the topic Boso proposes requires an examination of other topics (such as power, necessity, and 131. See Cohen, Living Letters.
132. CDH I, 1, S II, 48, 25–49, 2.
133. CDH, Comm., S II, 40, 12.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God will) "so related to one another that none of them can be fully considered without the others."134 If the nature and relationship between these basic notions were worked out, some difficulties might be eased, Anselm adds, but he cannot do all that here. This remark might be as much about justifying a more abstract and dialectical examination of such notions as about what he can or cannot do within the confines of this text. While
Anselm implies that this level of difficulty might, if not in reality at least in principle, be surmountable, Boso's suggestion that Anselm briefly touch on all these linked questions provokes more protest. The topic is both important and beyond human understanding, requiring a "beautiful reasoning (ratio)" exceeding human understanding. If he "presumes to note down such beautiful material in unpolished and contemptible discourse," he will be judged to be, as others have been, "the perverse
(pravis) painter" of "a deformed figure of the Lord."135
Thus the problems are twofold, one on the part of the supposed teacher—that his mind is inadequate to explore the truths they must, and the other on the part of the topic to be discussed—that the coherence of its parts is so complete, the connection between its attributes so inextricable, that it cannot be discussed in part but only as a whole. In other words, Anselm is too distant from truth, and the truth he seeks is such an integral whole it cannot be explored except incompletely or imperfectly. For God is the perfect unity of his attributes just as the things to be discussed are part of a single truth, and Anselm cannot achieve that unity in either aesthetic or substantive terms any more than he can unify his own being.
Having described so fully the yawning gap between what Boso wishes to have demonstrated and what Anselm can hope to achieve, Anselm then sets about to close it. First, he finds the common ground he shares with Boso. The Boso of Cur Deus homo is closer to the "Catholic" Gaunilo to whose "faith" and "conscience" Anselm appeals in his reply, than the persona of the fool and unbeliever Gaunilo took on in his responsio.
In the post-Proslogion debate, Anselm chides Gaunilo for playing rather than being the fool in the sense that he cannot actually believe the arguments that he expresses on behalf of the fool. In Cur Deus homo Anselm secures Boso's agreement in advance to two basic principles. For after the preliminary discussion that left Boso unmoved in his objections, An134. CDH I, 1, S II, 49, 7–13. This seems to be a reference either to the Lambeth Fragments, or to some work which would take up the grammar, if you will, of those basic terms Anselm tries to lay out in the Fragments in order to put them to use more systematically to consider the kinds of questions with which Cur Deus homo is concerned.
135. CDH I, 1, S II, 49, 17–22.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God selm asks that they stipulate what will count as reasons supporting their conclusions. "I want us to agree," Anselm writes, "that we do not accept anything in the least unfitting (inconveniens) to God, and that we do not reject the smallest reason if it is not opposed by a greater."136
Besides the principle that God cannot act in unfitting ways, they assume that "human being was made for happiness [beatitudinem], which cannot be obtained in this life, nor can anyone arrive at happiness except by release [dimissis] from sin, and that no man passes this life without sin."137 Anselm adds that they should also accept "other things in which faith is necessary for eternal salvation." This might seem to mean Anselm is assuming the whole content of Christian belief, but he goes on only to list one more thing "neither impossible nor unfitting to God," that the "remission [remissio] of sin is necessary for happiness."138 This last is simply an inference from the other assumptions: if no one can live without sin and no happiness can be found with sin, then happiness cannot be had unless those sins are somehow gotten rid of. Listed right along with these stipulations is the dialogue's most famous assumption: that "neither the Incarnation nor anything we say about that man ever were."139
Some argue that since Anselm takes as accepted presuppositions for his argument that "no man passes the present life without sin" and "no one can attain happiness unless his sins have been forgiven," he is assuming the truth of the doctrine of original sin, which would be rejected by Jews and Muslims.140 Thus, his argument cannot be directed toward nor meant to be convincing to those outside the church. However, it seems clear that for Anselm these assumptions are basic and must be accepted by a rational and consistent interlocutor who is not simply, as Gaunilo was, holding a position for the sake of argument. For while these premises are not unobjectionable, Anselm seems to put them forward as rational assumptions about God (God would never do anything contrary to his nature) and the human condition (that human beings desire a happiness they seem unable to achieve or deserve on their own). Rejecting the former leaves one with an incoherent notion of God, and rejecting the latter, while not inconsistent with human nature per se, is to
136. CDH I, 10, S II, 67, 1–4.
137. CDH I, 10, S II, 67, 13–15.
138. CDH I, 10, S II, 67, 18–19.
139. CDH I, 10, S II, 12–13.
140. Abulafia, "St Anselm," 131–48. Cf. Cohen, Living Letters, 177, on whether that "no one can pass this life without sin" is known from experience rather than an explicit statement of original sin. Karl Barth argues that these premises, like that God is the being greater than which none can be conceived in the Proslogion, are specifically Christian principles that Anselm assumes in order to prove a different Christian principle. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, translated by Ian W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), 55–59.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God deny the most basic facts of human experience. It is, Anselm thinks, the most reasonable way of describing humanity's predicament, one worthy of being taken as their starting point because more consistent with rather than contrary to what we know about human being.
Anselm lays out here the basic parameters in which reason will work.
On the one hand, he takes resources away from reason, in setting up the discussion as taking place remoto Christo. On the other hand, he gives to reason some basic principles about human and divine being. Their shared assumptions are that God cannot act in an unfitting way and does act in accord with reason, and that human being desires but can neither achieve nor deserve happiness. This kind of faith in reason's conclusions as not just probable but necessary and in what is unfitting as impossible prompts some to ask whether Anselm is imposing necessity on God's actions by moving from what is fitting to what God is obligated to do.141 As we shall see, Anselm is sensitive to the problem of impinging on God's freedom by concluding that the very elements of soteriology he is trying to understand are necessary.142 Moreover, he also distinguishes carefully between arguments which conclude that something is "fitting" as opposed to necessary for God to do. Later in book II, Anselm argues that it is necessary that the one to restore human nature must be derived from Adam (because the contrary is unfitting to God) but that is it fitting that God create this human being from a woman without a man; in De conceptu Anselm argues explicitly that it is fitting but not necessary that God be conceived from a just virgin.143
While we shall return below to the question of how Anselm's conclusions can be necessary without imposing necessity on God, what is important to note here is that Anselm's faith in reason is extraordinary. His faith is in deductive reason (which yields necessary conclusions), we can see, because what Anselm means by something following from reason is that an impossible or absurd conclusion follows from a contrary assumption. The necessity is in our understanding the logic of divine action not 141. Anselm does not, as some accuse him, argue from decet to debet. Rather he argues that something unfitting for God is impossible. He does not say that what is fitting or even more fitting than an alternative is necessary. What he agrees with Boso on is that whatever is "in any small way reasonable (quamlibet parvam rationem)" and not opposed by something more reasonable is to be taken as necessary (CDH I, 10, S II, 67, 4–6). "Reasonable" is not defined, but it is distinguished from what is fitting. What Anselm seems to mean is that something is a conclusion of reason in the sense of necessary if its contrary is impossible or absurd. See, for example, CDH II, 9, S II, 105,
26–106, 4; DCV 17, S II, 159, 6–9.
142. See, for example, CDH II, 5, S II, 99–100 and 10, S II, 106–8. For my discussion of these passages, see 293–98.
143. See, for example, CDH II, 8, 102–4; DCV 18, S II, 159, 11–16.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God in necessity as imposed on that action. Faith seeking understanding is for Anselm the seeking of those necessary conclusions, the kind of conclusion Anselm equates with what is rational.
The Argument of Book I Arguing from these principles about God and human being, the two establish that sin dishonors God (though without injuring God) because it mars the order and beauty of the universe.144 Thus human beings owe God something to make up for this dishonor, but it is a debt they are unable to pay. This aspect of the argument has come in for the most criticism, notably by Abelard in the Middle Ages and by any number of modern theologians. Modern commentators have argued that Anselm's assertion that there is a debt that must be paid to repair God's honor attributes to God the attitude of a feudal lord, not that of the supreme good.145 Moreover, they have criticized the apparent valorization of violence in such an account, describing God the Father as sadist for demanding and Christ the Son as masochist for acceding to the demand for suffering and death.146
Anselm has been defended against theses charge by a number of scholars attempting to re-interpret the work in historical context.147 Southern argues that since in the eleventh-century world of Anselm "honor is a social bond which held all ranks of society in their due place," God's honor
"is simply another word for the ordering of the universe in its due relationship to God;" it is "the complex of service and worship which the whole creation . . . owes to the Creator and which preserves everything in its due place."148 Another kind of defense sees in Anselm's appeal to order the qua-
144. CDH, I, 15, S II, 73.
145. The list of those accusing Anselm of feudalism is long and distinguished. The classic formulation of this view is that of Gustaf Aulén, in Christus Victor: An Historical Study of Three Main
Types of the Idea of the Atonement, translated by A. G. Herbert (New York: Macmillan, 1966). See also
P. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989), 97; P. McKenzie, The Christians (London: SPCK, 1988), 270; G. Daley, Creation and Redemption (Dublin: Gill &
Macmillan, 1988), 190. For these references I am indebted to Richard Campbell, "The Conceptual
Roots of Anselm's Soteriology," in Anselm, Aosta, Bec and Canterbury. Papers in Commemoration of the Nine-Hundredth Anniversary of Anselm's Enthronement as Archbishop, 25 September 1093, edited by David
E. Luscombe and Gillian R. Evans (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 256–58.
146. Such critiques are compellingly laid out by S. Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006); and J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2001). See also the sources named in Lisa Sowle Cahill, "Quaestio Disputata The Atonement Paradigm: Does it still have Explanatory Value?" Theological Studies 68 (2007): 419–20.
147. See J. McIntyre, St. Anselm and His Critics: A Re-interpretation of the 'Cur Deus Homo' (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1954).
148. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 226. Robert Crouse argues that Anselm's notion of
God with Human Being and Human Being with God si-Aristotelian notion that "everything is created with a proper function to fulfill ."149 It is of course more the case that feudalism is an outgrowth and interpretation of this notion of things having natures and functions than vice versa. If God simply forgives transgression, then creatures have rejected their proper function in the universe, rejected their nature as created. Such a solution lacks perfect order and justice. Thus, God is not the easily insulted lord who demands subservience but rather a creator who cannot without contradiction act with less than perfect justice, cannot put aside the order and function of that which he has created. In a recent presentation, Marilyn Adams argued that God's design is to make human beings as his creatures successful, not just to forgive or punish but to restore human nature to its state of dignity; there is, as she puts it, "a divine determination to make something of us."150 Anselm makes this point quite clear toward the beginning of book II, crystallizing the conclusions of book I: "it is necessary that [God] perfect what he began with human nature."151
Lisa Cahill cites the work of Jürgen Moltmann in support of Anselm.
Moltmann defended the notion of Christ's life and death as atonement for guilt because "the guilty who recognize their guilt cannot live for they have lost all their self respect." Thus, he argues, we require some kind of expiation to "deliver us from the guilt that weighs us down and robs us of every kind of future."152 Moreover, as Cahill points out, "Anselm does not see the cross or suffering as the main point of the incarnation, much less as necessary to mollify an angry, unforgiving or violent God."153 In book I the topic is the Incarnation, why God became man, not why the God-man suffered and died. Anselm does turn to this subject in the second book, along with an attempt to understand the "fittingness" of Christ's being born of Mary, being free from original sin, and so forth, but the goal in these conversations, as well shall see, is to make sense of the suffering and death as consistent with the divine nature and will.
In book I the task is to come to see the need, indeed the necessity of the justice in the work is not derived from the feudal justice system of his day but is rather based on Augustine's notion of justice, "that rectitude of order which is the Will of God." Robert Crouse, "The Augustinian Background of St. Anselm's Concept of Justicia," Canadian Journal of Theology 4, no. 2
(1958): 111–19. Campbell makes a strong defense in his "The Conceptual Roots of Anselm's Soteriology," 256–63.
149. Campbell, "Soteriology," 258.
150. Marilyn Adams, "St. Anselm on the Goodness of God," as yet unpublished paper delivered at Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy, An International Conference to Commemorate the 900th
Anniversary of the Death of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, University of Kent, at Canterbury, 22–25 April, 2009.
151. CDH II, 4, S II, 99.
152. Cahill, "Quaestio Disputata," 423, citing Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today's World, translated by Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 2–3.
153. Cahill, "Quaestio Disputata," 423.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Incarnation. For if on one level, for Anselm what is necessary is the conclusion of a sound deductive argument, it is also the case that necessity can be glossed as need: what human being must have on pain of moral and spiritual annihilation. Anselm's goal is to describe the problem for which the Incarnation is the only solution. First he must show that some way of returning to justice and order, some payment of the debt, some regaining of the dignity of human nature is necessary to save human nature. Both divine justice and mercy make it impossible for God to give up on his creation, Anselm argues; he must in justice find a path for the expiation of guilt, and must in perfect mercy make salvation available to sinful man.
This combination of premises creates an insuperable problem. Anselm puts it this way to Boso: "Can you think that man, who has sinned at some time, and never made satisfaction to God for his sin, but rather has been released unpunished, is the equal of an angel who has never sinned?"154 Boso replies, "these words I can say and understand [cogitare], but I cannot understand [cogitare] their meaning [sensum] just as I cannot understand [intelligere] falsity to be true."155 This is, of course, the status Anselm assigns to the fool's denial of both his notion of of God and of God's existence. Both can be said and the words can be understood, but they cannot be meaningfully connected in a consistent way to the logical structure of things. That is, it is not just that these claims are false but that they could not possibly be true.
This impasse precipitates the great intellectual and existential crisis of the dialogue. For without satisfaction for sin, there can be no human happiness; and, they have come to realize, humans are incapable of offering that satisfaction. Boso struggles to maintain that his own acts of penance, contrition, sacrifice, abstinence, and obedience can in some way honor God. Boso thinks of these acts as the giving up of certain goods in payment for sin: "Do I not honor God," he asks, "when, on account of fear of him and love, in contrition of heart I abandon temporal joy, and spurn, in abstinence and labors, the delights and ease of this life, giving away and distributing my abundance, and in obedience submit to him?"156 Anselm does not claim that Boso cannot give these things up because of his sinfulness but recasts them as acts of desire, undertaken for their pleasure and done in great joy: "For in this mortal state, there should be such love and such desire to attain that for which you were
154. CDH I, 19, S II, 84, 17–19. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate XIII, 13, 17–14, 18. Anselm like Augustine argues that the Incarnation is a result of original sin, but he rejects the notion that salvation must occur through the Incarnation because of the rights of the devil.
155. CDH I, 19, S II, 84, 20–21.
156. CDH I, 20, S II, 86, 28–87, 2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God made, which is the meaning of prayer, and such sorrow that you are not there yet, and such fear that you might fail to obtain it, that you ought to find joy in nothing unless it helps or gives you hope of attaining it."157
Thus Boso realizes that if he owes all this and his very being to God in justice (that is, they are what God deserves because of his nature) and would even without a debt offer them to God out of love and desire, there is nothing over and above these to give in payment for sin. Anselm then asks, "What will happen to you? How will you be saved?" To which Boso replies, "If I consider your reasons, I do not see how. If, however, I hasten back to my faith: through Christian faith 'which works by love' I hope I can be saved."158 Anselm reminds him that he may not make appeal to his faith since they have "set aside Christ and Christian faith as if they did not exist."159 Though he has been led into straits (angustias), Boso agrees to continue without recourse to faith but to proceed by reason.160
Boso is ready to concede, but Anselm keeps him from doing so for four more chapters. The postponement is excruciating. In chapter 22, Boso describes himself as in despair without the consolation of faith;161 in chapter 23, as Anselm prepares to make the situation yet more difficult, he protests that he could not be more frightened no matter what else is added on;162 and in 24, Boso concludes that divine mercy and human hope have perished.163 Anselm still puts him off one more time: "wait a little longer," he instructs.164 Not only, Anselm continues, must man without Christ find some way to honor God, he must also in all his weakness overcome the devil in order to make up for having dishonored God by yielding to the devil. Anselm makes the condition of human life without Christ yet more vivid by describing it in parable. It is as if, he explains, a servant who was assigned a task and told not to throw himself in a ditch from which he could not extricate himself has thrown himself into that very ditch.165
Anselm asks, "will his inability be valid as an excuse for not doing his appointed work?"166 Of course not, Anselm exclaims, for the inability to pay the debt, far from being an excuse, is itself guilt: "the effect of sin does not excuse the sin that was done."167 Being an orphan, in other words, is no grounds for mercy on the charge of killing one's parents.
Anselm has, just as he did in his earlier works, set up an apparently irresolvable problem. In rejecting the view based on the right of the
157. CDH I, 20, S II, 87, 5–8.
158. CDH I, 20, S II, 87, 29–88, 1.
159. CDH I, 20, S II, 88, 4–5.
160. CDH I, 20, S II, 88, 8–10.
161. CDH I, 22, S II, 90.
162. CDH I, 23, S II, 91.
163. CDH I, 23, S II, 91.
164. CDH I, 24, S II, 92, 2.
165. CDH I, 24, S II, 92, 16–17.
166. CDH I 24, S II, 92.
167. CDH I, 24, S II, 92, 32–93, 2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God devil, Anselm makes the problem of the incarnation even harder to solve than it was on the reigning contemporary view. Anselm rejects this view because he takes it to diminish divine power, by making the devil somehow equal to God, wrestling for humanity. Without the devil, everything, all the power and the credit, is on God's side, and nothing remains on the human side that can be given. Given, as Southern puts it, "only a debtor who cannot pay, and a creditor who cannot be paid, common sense and logic equally suggest that the creditor must forever forgo his payment."
The result, Southern continues, is "man and God facing each other with no go-between to bridge the gap.168
This, as we saw, is exactly the way Anselm construes the human condition in his prayers. As in the prayers, this realization within the dialogue is the low point, the point of Boso's absolute despair. However, it is also the moment of resolution of book I because it brings Boso to an understanding of the true human condition. For with the realization comes the conclusion that absent Christ, there is no means of achieving human happiness. Anselm describes the dilemma thusly: "Either [we must] find a satisfaction for sin outside the Christian faith, which we have shown above to be necessary, which no reason can show, or else [we must] believe indubitably in this [Christian faith]."169 Thus, as in the Monologion, the moment of inextricable paradox is at the very same time, though from a slightly more advanced perspective, the moment of insight into the necessity of that which seemed impossible. Here it is the incoherence of the absence of the Incarnation that moves Boso to conclude its necessity. As with the Proslogion's proof, Anselm attempts to bring his reader to understand that it is impossible to give up as much as one must to hold the contrary position. For the only way of accommodating the claim that the Incarnation is not necessary is either to hold an inconsistent position or to give up the principles Boso conceded were incontestable: first, that the end of human beings is happiness, which they cannot achieve for themselves and cannot remain deserving of because not free from sin, and, second, that God must have attributes consistent with the perfection of the divine nature. To reject these principles is to reject the notion of a God who deserves the name and of the most universally available evidence about human nature. To give up the conclusion that follows from these principles, the necessity of the Incarnation, is to place oneself in a universe that makes no sense and in which the position of human beings is, as it was for Camus, absurd. In the same way, Anselm argued in re168. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 209–10.
169. CDH I, 25, S II, 95, 29–96, 2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God sponse to Gaunilo that to reject his argument for God's existence was to reject the intelligibility of language and the world in general.
Book II: Deriving the Fittingness of the Things of Faith Boso now asks for what book II will consider (the argument Anselm was so disturbed to see the book circulate without), not just the necessity but the fittingness of the Christian solution. Anselm must show, in other words, that just as Eve was for Adam not just, as the saying goes, the only but also the most beautiful woman, so Christianity is not just the only but also the best solution for human kind. In this shorter, second half of the work Boso becomes a more traditional dialogue partner, whose contribution consists mostly in affirming his teacher's conclusions and posing occasional questions. He has reached this stage, however, having overcome his sense of the incoherence of the Incarnation by means of the arguments they went through in book I. Boso, less combative as book I closes than at its opening, explains that he did not engage in this discussion to have his doubts removed but to find the reasons for his confident belief.170
Boso's early criticism of arguments based on fittingness as "insubstantial paintings on clouds" returns as Anselm attempts to argue for the fittingness of Christ's being born of Mary. 171 Anselm argues that of the four possibilities for creating human beings, from man and woman, from neither man nor woman (as Adam was created), from man alone (as Eve was created), or from woman alone, only the last was untried. God uses this method in order to show that this possibility, like the others, lies in his power.172 Anselm then asks Boso about his arguments showing the fittingness that Christ was born of woman alone rather than any other possibility, "Does what we have said appear solidly established, or is it groundless as a cloud?" With Boso's approval for this argument, Anselm continues in what both agree is "painting on solid truth."173
Note that Anselm is here making a subtle distinction between what has been established as solid truth rather than painting on clouds (the conclusions of book one), and what he is doing here, which is painting but not on clouds (as Boso accused him of doing at the start of book I) but on "solid truth." That is the difference between necessary arguments and those showing "fittingness" and, thus, between the character of the arguments of books I and II.174
170. CDH I, 25, S II, 96, 6–7.
171. CDH I, 4, S II, 51, 21–52, 3.
172. CDH II, 8, S II, 104, 3–11.
173. CDH II, 8, S II, 104, 13–17.
174. Anselm does claim that some of his conclusions in book II are necessary and not just fitting. See, for example, CDH II, 16, S II, 119. See also CDH II, 9, S II, 105–6. The argument in the latter passage is that the Word, the second person of the Trinity, must be the one that becomes
God with Human Being and Human Being with God A shadow of Boso's former, more questioning side remains. Anselm tries to put off Boso's question about how God made a man without sin from the sinful substance of the human species. (Anselm has already argued that God has to create the savior from the same race as Adam, rather than from some new humanity, else that savior would not be able to redeem Adam's line because outside of it.) Anselm counsels that if we cannot understand it, we should "with reverence allow a thing of so great a magnitude to remain hidden."175 Boso still, though perhaps less aggressively than in book I, goads Anselm on. "For," he argues, "you will better persuade me that higher [altior] reasons are hidden in this matter, if you show some that you perceive, than if, by saying nothing, you make it appear that you do not understand any reason."176 A bit later Boso reminds Anselm even more gently of the stipulations that opened their discussion to explain "not as to the learned, but to me and my fellow inquirers."177 So Boso requests that Anselm please go on and settle "all our puerile doubts."178 Anselm takes up that challenge in response to Boso's continued prompting, offering explanations for all the basic elements of orthodox Christology.
The claim Anselm must defend is that salvation cannot happen through the God-man unless "the same one is perfect human being and perfect God."179 This Christology creates problem after problem, as the God-man must retain characteristics of both God and man in order to be appropriate as redeemer and able to offer satisfaction. He must, for example, be taken from the sinful human species without himself being sinful. "How," Anselm asks, "from a sinful mass, that is the human species, the whole of which was infected with sin, does God take a man without sin like an unleavened lump from a leavened one?"180
More contradictions follow from the combination of divinity and humanity, a number having to do with the coexistence of necessity and freedom. Boso objects first that God is compelled to become incarnate in order to avoid doing something inappropriate or less than perfectly. Anselm explains that there are two kinds of necessity, depending on whether one willingly or unwillingly is placed or places oneself under some obligation.181 God only acts from necessity in the sense that he maintains his "immutable honor" which, Anselm argues, is not "propincarnate; it is a mix of some necessary arguments (where neither the Father nor the Spirit separately or together can become incarnate because this would produce absurd consequences) and of arguments from fittingness (that it is more fitting that the Son become incarnate because it is more fitting for the Son to supplicate the Father).
175. CDH II, 16, S II, 117, 5–6.
176. CDH II, 16, S II, 117, 20–22.
177. CDH I, 2, S II, 49, 25–26.
178. CDH II, 16, S II, 122, 20–21.
179. CDH II, 7, S II, 102, 21.
180. CDH II, 16, S II, 116, 18–20.
181. CDH II, 5, S II, 99–100.
182. CDH II, 5, S II, 100, 24–28.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God erly" called necessity.182 The same problem returns in slightly different form concerning the requirement that the God-man cannot sin. Boso objects that it must be true that Christ could have said words that would have been a lie. Anselm replies with some fairly sophisticated verbal distinctions, defending the apparent contradiction that it is both true that Christ could say the words that would be a lie and that he cannot lie.
First, he explains, we can say that God can lie in the sense that he could if he wished.183 But, Boso objects, that means he is necessarily just and not so freely.184 Echoing the complex distinctions of the Lambeth Fragments and De casu, Anselm explains that one is said to give what one does not take away when one could, and one is said to do something when one does nothing to prevent something though one could. Thus, the angels give themselves virtue, or have it of themselves, by not forsaking their goodness when they could; they are virtuous because they did not give up their virtue, not because they could sin. God has virtue of himself.185
In what sense, then, Boso asks, is it necessary that the God-man die?
Anselm repeats the distinction between the power of doing something and the power of wishing to do something, arguing that Christ could have preserved his life but could not, given his nature, wish to.186 But this only moves the problem down the line, for while it might not be necessary that Christ die, it would seem to be necessary that Christ wish to die.
Anselm resolves the contradiction but only at the price of fairly radically redefining inability. For, he explains, "that he cannot not die is nothing other than that by his immutable will he willed to die."187 Anselm explains, ability is "often said in the usual mode of speaking [usitata est huiusmodi multum locutio]" of something when the ability is in something else, as when we say 'this man can be defeated' for 'someone can defeat him.'"188 A similar distinction and redefinition is necessary for the notion of obligation. When we say, for example, that the poor ought to receive alms, this means that the rich ought to give them.189
Also, Anselm continues, when anyone, divine or human "wants to do that which is his to do or not to do, we say that he ought to do it since that which he wishes ought to be."190 Applying these distinctions to God, Boso concludes: "I see that it is not reasonable that [Christ] lets himself die because he ought to [ex debito], for the honor of God, and nonetheless that he ought [debuit] to have done what he did."191
183. CDH II, 10, S II, 107, 1–7.
184. CDH II, 10, S II, 107.
185. CDH II, 10, S II, 107, 27–108, 6.
186. CDH II, 16, S II, 120, 21–26.
187. CDH II, 16, S II, 122, 10–13.
188. CDH II, 17, S II, 123, 15–20.
189. CDH II, 18, S II, 128, 30–32.
190. CDH II, 18, S II, 129, 3–5.
191. CDH II, 18, S II, 129, 14–16.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God With this Anselm comes perilously close to contradiction. He diffuses contradiction only by redefining the terms almost beyond recognition. These verbally complex and sophisticated strategies rest on the notion of freedom as that which one has or does per se. This is, of course, the main thesis of Anselm's account of freedom for finite beings, angels and human beings, in De libertate and De casu. Anselm took care in those dialogues not to define freedom as the ability to sin or, more generally, to choose between alternatives. He extends this notion to God's freedom, where it applies more completely and simply. God has everything from himself, Anselm notes, and acts not from necessity but from his
"eternal immutability."192 When God acts to maintain his honor (honestatis), the necessity is "nothing other than the immutability of his honor."193 Though he does not make it explicit in De libertate and De casu, he is moved to see freedom in terms other than as a choice between alternatives partly because of the need to safeguard a coherent notion of divine freedom that would not require that God be able to sin or choose wrongly. Anselm, though he recognizes the problem it creates for divine freedom, focuses on the perfection of the divine nature, rejecting the notion that freedom requires the possibility that God do otherwise than he has or should do. In this sense Anselm is clearly more rationalist than voluntarist, but his openness to raising difficult questions allows him to have
Boso voice the concerns being debated by dialecticians like Peter Damian and others about possible constraints on divine power.194
Peter Damian asked whether God can restore virginity to one who has lost it and more broadly whether God can change the past. A negative answer seems to lead, Damian points out, to the conclusion that God cannot do anything other than he has done, while a positive answer seems to commit God to contravening the principle of noncontradiction. Though some of the arguments Damian makes seem similar to those Anselm uses (Damian's work was composed in 1065, and Cur Deus homo completed in 1098),195 Anselm, one could argue, succeeds in achieving Damian's
192. CDH II, 10, S II, 108, 7–8.
193. CDH II, 5, S II, 100, 24–25.
194. Pierre Damien, Lettre sur la toute-puissance divine, edited and translated by A. Cantin,
Sources chrétiennes 191 (Paris: Cerf, 1972). Cantin's edition gives the pagination to follow the old Patrologiae latina edition, PL 145. See also Toivo Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology in the Eleventh Century (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 6–43; "Peter Damian," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Winter 2008 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2008/entries/peter-damian/; and Simo Knuttila, "Anselm on Modality," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
111–31.
195. Damian, like Anselm, knows and refers to the problem of future contingents in Aristotle;
God with Human Being and Human Being with God objectives better than Damian. Damian was concerned to preserve divine omnipotence and also to curb what he saw as dialecticians' impious excess in taking up as mere logical conundrums questions about what
God can and cannot do. Though the question of whether God can restore a virgin originated in Jerome, Damian complained that it had been taken up in frivolous ways by dialecticians and wishes to put a stop to such pointless questions, which serve more to show one's cleverness than to bring real understanding.196
Anselm considers the question of the necessity of God's actions and the nature of divine freedom and power substantively and in a way that flows naturally from questions believers should be considering as serious and central matters of their faith. Moreover, Anselm takes up the real core of the issue, the metaphysics of God's will and power, before moving to the kind of puzzle created by God's relationship to time that so fascinated dialecticians. In his reply, Anselm articulates a version of Boethius's distinction between antecedent and subsequent necessity in discussing how the pure faith of the virgin in Jesus' death does not (even though it preceded it) necessitate Jesus' dying. Anselm argues that no necessity precedes Jesus' willing to die, but of his death one can say that because it did or was going to occur that it was necessary in a different sense, a kind of necessity which in no way causes his death.197 Only in the context of this particular temporal problem does Anselm mention
Aristotle's Peri hermenieas discussion of future contingents.198 Moreover, Damian attempted to make an argument based on complex verbal distinctions having to do with the lack of past or future in divine eternity that seem only to have confused matters to the point that his fame rests largely on the infamous claim that God can contravene the principle of non-contradiction and undo the past (even though he does not actually seem to have held this view).199 In seeking to quell controversy and put he also relies heavily on the notion of God's eternity in relation to which our tensed verbs do not exactly apply, as well as argues that God's will, because so completely efficacious imposes necessity rather than has necessity imposed on it. Damien, Lettre sur la toute-puissance (De divina omnipotentia), 607A–B; 608D–610B. Holopainen holds the view that though Anselm could have known Damian's work directly, it is more likely that they "were drawing on the same tradition of dialectical discussion" and had both received similar background on the topic from the town-schools of Italy they both attended. See Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 29.
196. See Damien, Lettre sur la toute-puissance (De divina omnipotentia), 602D–604B; 611D–612A.
Cf. Holopainen, "Peter Damian."
197. CDH II, 17, S II, 125, 3–31.
198. See Boethius, Consolatio philosophiae, in Boethius: The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library 74
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), Bk. V, pr. 6, 428–31.
199. For the debate over the interpretation of Damian's views, see Holopainen, "Peter Damian." The view that Damian rejected the universal applicability of the principle of noncontradiction
God with Human Being and Human Being with God an end to contentious and purely academic, dialectical debate, Damian seems only to have stirred it up. But Anselm's verbally sophisticated arguments are clearly more successful per se and in their reception.
The paradox of finite freedom, we saw in the dialogues, is that it is action that is per se in those who have received everything. The paradox of divine freedom is that divine action is free yet necessary. Anselm moves to support both halves of the paradox, both God's freedom and God's perfection, just as he insists on the impenetrability of the ways of God and the quest for understanding, that is, necessary reasons, for God's actions.
As we saw in Monologion and Proslogion, Anselm did not qualify divine attributes when they posed a problem in themselves or in conjunction with others for God's perfection, but rather argued that those perfections are intensified in God. Thus the paradoxes posed by power, justice, mercy, and so on were surmounted by the very perfect and unlimited character of the divine. In the same way, Anselm manages to hold the extremes of freedom and perfection simultaneously by leaning into rather than backing away from either freedom or necessity in God. There is necessity but the necessity is a result rather than a cause of God's will, Anselm argues.
That God is not able to do something (lie or change) means that he acts by his "insuperable power (potentia) and strength (fortitudo)," which in turn means not that he is unable but that "there is necessity in all others things prohibiting them from making and binding them from not making anything which is against what God says."200 When we say of Jesus Christ that he cannot not die, Anselm explains, "we do not signify in him any inability to keep or to keep willing his immortal life, but the immutability of his will (immutabilitas voluntatis), by which he freely (sponte) became man so that persevering in his same will he might die, and [we signify] that nothing can change this will."201
These terribly precise formulations make clear that Anselm is not willing either to compromise divine freedom to accommodate divine perfection or vice versa. He very carefully does not say that God must act as he acts because of his own nature. One could argue that such a move would be a way of freeing God from any necessity because his will would not be compelled by anything outside of his nature. Anselm seems to was expressed by J. A. Endres, in "Die Dialektiker und ihre Gegner im 11. Jahrhundert," Philosophisches Jahrbuch 19 (1906): 20–33; and Petrus Damiani und die weltliche Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 8.3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1910). Modern scholars disagree, though in different ways, with Endres's view. See, for example, Irven M. Resnick, Divine Power and Possibility in St. Peter Damian's De divina omnipotentia (Leiden: Brill, 1992); and Simo Knuttila, Modalities in Medieval Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993).
200. CDH II, 17, S II, 123, 27–30.
201. CDH II, 17, S II, 124, 5–9.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God recognize but avoid taking this position by having Boso express it. Boso floats the notion that God could no more avoid dying than he could stop being "who he was." Anselm replies carefully; God's nature does not necessitate his willing but his will as immutable results in what is "improperly" called necessity.202 In this way there is no limit on God's will by his own nature or, a fortiori, by any other nature. Rather the divine will itself, its complete and insuperable power over itself, grounds both the coherence and the freedom of what God wills.
What is too often overlooked is that Anselm goes further than addressing the metaphysical problem about divine freedom. He takes up the way in which Christ's suffering and death works toward salvation with more subtlety than critics have claimed. Notably, Anselm's chapter title on this topic is not about the death of Christ but about the life of Christ as "released to" or "paid back" (solvatur) to God.203 When Boso poses the question in terms of some honor given to God by the Son, Anselm answers in the language of De libertate and De casu: that of keeping righteousness. The Son endures suffering not for its own sake but to keep righteousness as "an example given to men, that on account of whatever disadvantages (incommoda) [they might suffer], they might not turn away from the justice they owe to God."204 The language of justice vs. advantage from De casu returns both to explain that the passion is for the sake of keeping righteousness even when it conflicts with advantage (and so not as a valorization of violence as necessary or desirable) and to make the Son's act the doing of exactly what was not done in the fall: the keeping of righteousness for its own sake. Christ undoes the sin of Adam by succeeding where Adam failed. The difference is that unlike in the case of Adam, or even John the Baptist, Christ did not as God owe his life to God, did not receive it as creatures receive it but had it from himself.205
Thus Anselm concludes, the Son does not "owe" his suffering and death to God but gives it freely from righteousness, and that, moreover, he "offers himself to himself."206 Thus Anselm carefully opens and closes the gap between the Father and Son, pointing out, on the one hand, that the
202. CDH II, 16, S II, 120, 30–31; 122, 1–2; 122, 10–13.
203. CDH Capitula, S II, 46.
204. CDH II, 18, S II, 127, 12–21.
205. CDH II, 18, S II, 129, 5–25.
206. CDH II, 18, S II, 129, 17–18. In this way, Anselm can be defended against the criticism, voiced even by Cahill, who otherwise defends Anselm, that Anselm "sets up too great a contrast between the roles or perspectives of the Father and Son, so that Jesus Christ seems to supply something that God demands." It is clear, too, that the Son's act is not "obedience" in the sense of submitting to "an external authority" but both a commitment to justice and to and from God himself for Anselm. Cf. Cahill, "Quaestio Disputata," 423–24.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Son "offers himself to himself" but that, on the other hand, we customarily and fittingly express this as the Son offering himself to the Father.
The latter formulation, Anselm explains, brings listeners to "feel immense piety," presumably because of the way in which it brings out the price paid, that the Son gives up something, freely endures a loss, in order to keep justice, which restores justice for human beings.
When we look at all the questions taken up in book II we begin to see the enormity of the task Anselm has taken on. He attempts not just to show the necessity of the Incarnation in a general way, but to derive the details of the Incarnation as presented in scripture, Christ's virgin birth and death, as well as a fairly complete Christology, working out the status of Christ's knowledge, vulnerability, and will. In an important way—though not in quite the way Southern argued—Cur Deus homo does represent a transition in Anselm's work. Book I gives us an argument structured much like the Monologion and Proslogion, beginning from what looks like the irrationality of belief in the Incarnation, progressing to the incoherence of the absence of the Incarnation, which then becomes the grounds of its necessity. Book II, on the other hand, works out the particular conditions of the Incarnation. Doing so requires more and more complex verbal distinctions to hold off contradiction, contradiction created by the perfect though paradoxical solution of the God-man. In its method of argument, book II resembles most De casu diaboli; like De casu it is full of the kind of distinctions Anselm laid out in the Lambeth
Fragments. These kinds of distinctions, which are used in De casu to make sense of the metaphysical complexity and incompleteness of creaturely being, come to be used here because its topic is not just the complexity of creaturehood, the humanity of Christ, but the complexity of creaturehood joined to the simplicity of the divine. The distinctions Anselm devises are in the service of the more general paradox that the God-man both has what he has from himself (since he is God) and has everything from God (since he is man to whom God gives whatever he has).207 Thus
Anselm's problems are further compounded because he must move between two different metaphysics joined in the God-man. The task is the separation and then careful rejoining of the strands of creaturely and divine being such that Anselm can conclude,
To this end, that the work of restoration of man might be accomplished, the diversity of natures and unity of persons served, so if the human nature could not do it, the divine nature would do it, and if it was unfitting for the divine nature, the human nature would do it, and not as different from
207. CDH II, 10, S II, 108, 11–12.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God each other but the same person in which both [natures] existed perfectly, through the human nature would pay what was owed and through the divine nature would be able to do what was expedient.208
Throughout most of book II, Boso declares himself more than satisfied with Anselm's arguments, arguments whose goal is the development of a coherent set of terms and distinctions making it possible to think the Incarnation. The reasons beings offered come closest to matching Boso's desire when Anselm finally says he will try to show "how human salvation follows from [the Incarnation]."209 This is the last link in the chain of argument. They have moved from the proof that human salvation is impossible without the Incarnation in book I, to attempting to show positively how salvation takes place through the Incarnation. "This," Boso exclaims, "is what my heart desires. For although I seem to understand, yet I wish to get from you the interwoven connections (contextionem) of the argument."210 Like Anselm on the brink of the name of God that gives him the Proslogion proof for God's existence, Boso wishes for that crucial and unbreakable link between God and humanity, and between divine acts and human understanding. When Anselm does his best to offer it,
Boso exclaims, "nothing more reasonable, more sweet, more desirable can the world hear. And I take such confidence from this that I cannot say how much I rejoice and my heart exults."211
Thus, as book II closes, Boso reaches the opposite end of the intellectual and emotional spectrum from that in which he ended book I. Book I ended in deep despair of both understanding and salvation, while book
II approaches ecstatic understanding. Together Boso and Anselm experience both the exhilaration at the project of reconciling human reasons with the deepest mysteries of faith, and the despair when those reasons seem to lead them to the impossibility of that reconciliation.
There is a kind of bipolarity in Cur Deus homo we have also seen in other works, especially the Monologion and Proslogion; Anselm alternates between extreme underand over-confidence in its arguments, a wavering reflected in Boso's alternation between demanding and docile questions.
Anselm either promises certain and necessary arguments, like those in the Monologion and Proslogion, or worries (or have Boso express worry) that he cannot even approach the subject of the Incarnation. The alternatives seem mutually exclusive: either his words capture these lofty things as they are, or all he can offer is figments, paintings on clouds, words that float free unconnected to things. Anselm does not move from these ex-
208. CDH II, 17, S II, 124, 20–24.
209. CDH II, 19, S II, 129, 29–30.
210. CDH II, 19, S II, 130, 1–2.
211. CDH II, 19, S II, 131, 3–5.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God tremes to a middle position; rather, he continues to reach for the one extreme, alternately conceding or worrying that if he falls short in any measure, he lands at the other extreme.
Like the Proslogion, this text is not unambiguous in its triumph. The first hint that there will be a less than perfectly happy ending is Anselm's repeated protestation that they have not nearly exhausted even the reasons Anselm might be capable of, no less those which are beyond Anselm and human beings in general. Boso asserts to the end his right to collect these reasons that are "owed" him at some future date, but Anselm, noting "the uncertainty of the future," neither promises nor refuses.212
The discussion goes on, the matter to be discussed always exceeding the time and capacities of those who, like Boso and Anselm, come together in good will and faith to discuss in terms of reasons. Thus the desire for understanding, the desire to dwell in the presence of the truths believed by faith, is never quite satisfied.
There is a deep sense the Cur Deus homo is thematically central to Anselm's work as a whole. God become human is, for Anselm, a kind of middle term, identical with God and human being. In the Incarnation, the two extremes are brought together without remainder. The Incarnation, as Anselm construes it, is, on the one hand, the necessary and only solution for the human predicament, and, on the other hand, the most thoroughly unlikely, impossible event, contradicting not just the nature of human being but the nature of God. Thus all Anselm's arguments in which paradoxes are shown to be necessary and vice versa mirror the sense in which the Incarnation is both a resolution and a problem.
Here as elsewhere, Anselm presents arguments so that they are a hair's breadth from paradox or, in this case, from failure. It is not so much that Cur Deus homo repeats and imitates the argument structure of the earlier works, but rather that they imitate the structure of the Incarnation as Anselm understands it and articulates it in Cur Deus homo.
The conceit of the work is that the attempt to answer the most penetrating objections reason can muster will lead to exactly the same place the prayers did: the Incarnation as the only solution for the human predicament. That necessity, both rational and existential, is derived from the notions of debt accrued (by human being) and payment required (by God) and payable only by the God-man. This construction of the situation, many point out, leads to a distorted emphasis on Christ's death. It is worth remembering, however, that Anselm does not begin from this as a premise but that it results from his method as well as the assumption
212. CDH II, 17, S II, 126, 17–18.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God about the divine nature from which he begins. Anselm is moved to think about Christ's death not as the point of his life but as that in the Christian account of the Incarnation most difficult for human understanding to grasp. It is his very focus on answering every possible objection to the Incarnation that leads him to ask why God had to die, had to allow the sacrifice of his Son, clearly the most impenetrable surd within that story.
In that sense, it is Anselm's commitment to the discovery of necessary reasons that leads him to focus on the cross. Anselm also, as was noted above, exacerbates the problem because of his evacuation of the notion of the rights of the devil. God and only God has control of a situation in which He/his Son is tortured and killed. The commitment to God as "that than which none greater can be conceived" only increases the incomprehensibility of the Incarnation and the crucifixion. Lastly, if the God of the Proslogion forms one prong of the dilemma, human nature in its finitude and fallenness forms the other. Because human beings cannot restore themselves, without the Incarnation (and death) of Christ, human beings are, Anselm insists, lost in the despair Boso experiences at the end of book I. Anselm's premises construct the problem for which he argues Christ's atonement for humanity is the only answer. This, of course, is neither a defense nor a critique of Anselm's soteriology, but an attempt to see it in the larger context of his argument as a whole. It is important to consider not just the outcome of this argument and what it implies about God and his incarnation (as so many have) but to consider the premises from which those conclusions are derived.
It is important to note as well how Anselm himself sees the results of his argument. In the Meditation of Human Redemption, a companion piece to Cur Deus homo, Anselm reflects not on the God who demands payment but on the Son who freely suffers.213 He proposes meditation on the Incarnation not as designed to humble God but to raise up human nature.214 God becomes human and suffers freely not in order to hide the divine nature (nor to punish those who fail to recognize him beneath a disguise) but to show what was "unknown" about God.215 While it is perhaps not wholly "unknown," what the Incarnation reveals with emphasis is the divine rejection of earthly models of power and success, the revelation of an utterly different model of kingship and servanthood, and thereby a new understanding of divinity and humanity.
213. Med 3, S III, 86–88. On the Meditation on Human Redemption and its relationship to Cur Deus homo, see 318–27.
214. Med. 3, S III, 87, 102–3.
215. Med. 3, S III, 85, 30–45.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God De conceptu virginali: Joining and Dividing Nature and Sin
Anselm opens De conceptu describing its task as explaining the "other rationale"—other than the one given in Cur Deus homo—for how the Son can be born from sinful humanity without original sin.216 Though this connection is important and will be discussed below, there is an important sense in which Anselm is dissembling here. The topics taken up in De conceptu are not merely loose ends from Cur Deus homo. Rather, the topic of Jesus' freedom from original sin is taken up in order to consider original sin more deeply. After the crucifixion, original sin and the virgin conception are, we might say, the most peculiarly, embarrassingly
Christian doctrines following from the Incarnation. Anselm's project in De conceptu is to subject them to an unrelenting rationalism. The juxtaposition of that which is "scandal to the Greeks" with a steady beat of deductive argument is a bit jarring. And it is not only modern sensibilities who find something unusual going on in this text. Even a cursory comparison to discussions in sentence collections from the school of Laon makes it clear that this work is no less ground breaking than Anselm's other works, that, as Evans notes, the "conceptual devices" Anselm uses here are "as inventive and as philosophically daring" as those in Cur Deus homo.217 Augustine's account of the consequences of the first sin in descendants of Adam in concupiscence, repeated in early twelfth century school accounts, is more psychologically descriptive and compelling than Anselm's, even to those who disagree with and are even repelled by it. By contrast, Anselm's, we shall see, is utterly formal, devoid of any descriptive content. Anselm deduces the consequences from concepts rather than by appeal to any human experience.
There are two different things that are sometimes called "original sin": the sin of Adam and Eve and the sin that is the punishment for that sin inherited from them by their descendants. In order to avoid confusion, I shall call the sin of Adam and Eve the "first sin" and that which all inherit, "original sin." The first sin was the topic of De casu but "original sin," Adam's sin as inherited, is Anselm's topic here. Anselm derives original sin in the descendants of Adam as follows. Since only ratio-
216. DCV 1, S II, 140–41.
217. See the texts edited by Odon Lottin in Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Tome V:
Problèmes d'histoire littéraire (Gembloux, Belgium: J. Duculot, 1959). Evans points out the overlap of topics between De conceptu and the Laon sentences as evidence of Anselm's increasing awareness of and attempt to address questions from external sources. See Evans, Talking about God, 172–73, 186.
This is surely true, but once one follows that link, what is most striking is how different Anselm's discussions are from discussions on these topics in the sentence collections. See below for these comparisons.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God nal souls can have justice, only rational souls can have sin, even original sin.218 Moreover, since justice is righteousness of will kept for its own sake, justice is present only in the will; thus, sin also can only be in the will.219 The will (in which injustice or justice is present), the affections and uses of the will, the action, the work, or effects of injustice—all these are distinct from justice or injustice per se. Moreover, neither are bodily parts nor the senses sinful or sinning, Anselm argues.220
Anselm then carefully gathers up these conclusions, "that sin and injustice are nothing, that they are present only in a rational will and that no being except a will is properly called unjust," and brings them to bear on what it means, as the Psalmist writes, that man is "conceived in iniquity" (Ps. 51:5).221 From his previous arguments, Anselm poses the following dilemma: either from the very moment of conception an infant has a rational soul (and rational will), or at conception he has no original sin. Both of these are, Anselm argues, absurd. For if the former were the case, it would mean the presence of original sin in and, hence, the condemnation of countless souls never making it to the state of developed fetuses and infants. But if the latter were the case, one contradicts scripture, which asserts the corruption of the seed, conception "in iniquity."222 Anselm allows his interpretation of scripture's claim that "man is conceived from unclean seed" to be pushed by these rationally derived conclusions. The claim is true, Anselm explains, not in the sense that "in the seed there is the uncleanness of sin or sin or iniquity but that from the seed itself and from its conception, from which human being begins, he receives the necessity that when he will possess a rational soul, he will have the uncleanness of sin which is nothing other than sin and iniquity."223 There is no more fault in the seed than in spit or blood; fault is in the evil will only, Anselm maintains. In this way, Anselm concludes, we can hold both that sin only characterizes a rational will and that the seed is "unclean:" "It is clear therefore both how there is no sin in infants from the moment of their conception and how those things from divine scripture opposing this are true."224
A passage edited by Lottin from sentences at the school of Laon takes up the same passage asserting human beings to be "conceived in iniq-
218. DCV 3, S II, 142, 13–14; 143, 7–11.
219. DCV 3, S II, 143, 16–17.
220. DCV 4, S II, 143–45.
221. DCV 7, S II, 147, 26–148, 13.
222. DCV 7, S II, 148. Anselm cites Job 14:4 and Psalms 51:5.
223. DCV 7, S II, 149, 1–5.
224. DCV 7, S II, 149, 9–10. Here and in a later passage, DCV 14, S II, 156, Anselm refers to scripture passages describing the seed as unclean and being conceived in iniquity as "opposing" his own position. It is, perhaps, a portent of full-blown scholastic disputation in which texts and authorities are cited which seem to oppose one another.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God uity" but gives a strikingly different account of it. Besides lacking anything like the depth of Anselm's consideration—there is no discussion of the nature of injustice or sin, or of the body or its acts as opposed to reason and the will as what can actually sin or be sinful—the Laon master simply retells the story of Genesis, naming concupiscence and mortality as the effects in the sense that they are punishment for Adam and Eve's disobedience.225
For Anselm, original sin is a kind of omission. Human nature has "the obligation to make satisfaction for the sin of Adam" and as long as it fails to do so, it sins.226 So it is not doing something but being unable to do something, having an obligation without the ability to fulfill it, that constitutes original sin. To be sure, Anselm adds to that inability the further disadvantages of a corrupted body and a soul unable to understand justice, but the obligation and the inability to meet it is what original sin is for him.227 In De casu we learned that the sin of Adam and the devil is in not accepting their finitude, their creaturely status. The effect of that first sin, passed down as original sin to subsequent human generations, is living out that finitude, creaturely status without the gift of justice. It is because everything is received that not having received (because having deserted) justice, the fallen human being cannot retrieve that justice nor make up for having deserted it.
The biggest problem for reason, of course, is understanding how original sin is passed down. Both the what and the how are dictated by the same logic but the juxtaposition of the nature of original sin with the means of its inheritance is odd. On the one hand, sin (original or otherwise) is not in anything (not even the seed, despite the assertion in scripture that the seed is corrupt) other than the evil will. Thus sin, whether the first sin, original sin, or individual sin, is not physical. On the other hand, the passing down of this sin, though it is only in the will, is physical in a sense. Sin is passed down through the seed, that is, through the means of propagation, from man and woman. Christ avoids original sin by circumventing those means of propagation. The logic Anselm employs to reach this conclusion is particularly elegant. Though all human beings share personhood or individuality and human nature with Adam, it cannot be in virtue of either of these that human beings share in Adam's sin.
If original sin were attached at the level of either humanity or personhood, then Adam would have to have had the obligation imposed by original sin before he sinned since he was person and human being before his
225. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 258, #331.
226. DCV 8, S II, 149.
227. DCV 8, S II, 150, 2.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God sin.228 It can only be "by virtue of being Adam the sinner" that others can be born with his debt.229 Adam's descendants are Adam by virtue of their propagation, Anselm notes, not qua themselves as individuals, but in the sense that all human beings are descended from Adam. What Adam had by grace, the gift of justice and the ability to keep it, he would have been able to pass down to those born of him. Since he deserted justice, he also lost the ability to pass down that justice to his progeny.230
The elegance of the explanation is Anselm's deduction of the link to Adam by propagation. On the one hand, it allows him to leave human nature and personhood free of sin. What it means to be human, both as a member of the species and as an individual, is in an important way left intact by original sin. On the other hand, Anselm uses propagation to assert the real connection of all human beings to Adam, in their virtual presence in him as their generative source. The link of all to Adam in propagation is universal in extension but not in intension; it is not, in other words, at the level of what it is to be human per se. More precisely, it is universal in extension save for one exception, that of Christ. This is likely Anselm's strongest motivation for giving this account of original sin. Having original sin attach to human beings at the level of their propagation from Adam allows Anselm to explain how Jesus is fully human while free from original sin: because his generation is outside the usual means or propagation.231
This view also allows Anselm to explain the connection between the fall, original sin, and sexual reproduction in a different way than was conventional. Anselm, like others in the tradition, does not think the first sin was sexual but, in Augustine right through to Anselm's time and beyond, sexuality is implicated because of the sexual consequences of the fall on Adam and Eve. However, Anselm connects original sin to sexual reproduction differently; we can see this by comparison of his view to the sentences of William of Champeaux. William's account of the nature of original sin focuses on the fault (culpa) for the sin of Adam as "not in the eye or any other members except in that through which the human species must propagate, namely in the male member and in the desire (concupiscentia) of the womb (vulve) and in [their] illicit motion."232
Hence, "whomever is generated with concupiscence, which is the punishment for the first sin, contracts the stain of guilt and condemnation by which they should be damned for eternity."233 What is striking in this
228. DCV 10, S II, 151, 12–15.
229. DCV 10, S II, 151, 7. My emphasis.
230. DCV 10, S II, 152.
231. DCV 12, S II, 154–55.
232. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 205, #251.
233. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 205, #251.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God account is the emphasis on the body, on the effects of original sin on the body, and on the body's corruption, which is argued to pass to the soul, which is itself pure but becomes corrupted by contact with the body.234
Anselm does mention that the reproductive capacity before the fall functioned completely in accordance with the rational will but no longer does; after the fall he writes that it is characterized by a "bestial pleasure."235 However, these claims are not deduced from the basic principles about the nature of sin and justice as the rest are. In fact, when Anselm mentions that post lapse, sexual acts are accompanied by a brutish pleasure not present before the fall, it is part of a presentation of a different understanding of scriptural references to the corrupt seed, not his own view at all. He only notes that when corruption is said to infect the seed of those whose propagation is accompanied by such pleasure, the same conclusion is reached: exactly and only the seed taken from the Virgin is exempted from corruption.236
Since these comments about postlapsarian sexuality as disordered are not substantively tied to his account of either the first sin or original sin, it is hard to say why Anselm inserts them. It could be a kind of concession to authority, to Augustine's authority in particular, or to these claims as truisms he could neither gainsay nor omit. Anselm does not reject or even question these views of sexuality as elements in the human condition that are in some sense consequences of the fall. Anselm's anguished prayers and meditations show adequate evidence of his agreement with Augustine on the struggle against and shame in sexual desire.
However, Anselm is not here interested in the lived experience of original sin or even its psychology but only its logic, only the derivation by reason of original sin and the mechanism of its propagation. That mechanism—propagation—interests him here only in that sort of bloodless sense. But by making reproduction the means of transmission, he can connect sexuality to the fall and original sin in a non-arbitrary way. Yet at the same time he can redefine the nature of original sin not as concupiscence, nor as having some special attachment to sexual desire, as Augustine did, but as the permanence of the first sin, the choice to desert justice, which as inherited becomes not having justice and being unable to retrieve it.
Anselm also argues, counterfactually, that even if God begot a human rather than divine person from the Virgin, that human being would
234. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 38–43, #43–#46.
235. DCV 10, S II, 152, 18–21; DCV 14, S II, 156, 12–14.
236. DCV 14, S II, 156, 14–20.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God still be free of original sin. Again, what interests Anselm here is the logic of incarnation and original sin more than, we might say, the facts of the matter. This same short chapter is also the location of some of Anselm's clearest language on the kind of reasoning he is seeking. He asks his reader to "carefully consider (speculamur) the wise justice of God with the pure vision (intuitu) of reason," in order to see the absurdity of any sin passing to a seed outside the normal processes of reproduction.237
Anselm goes on to describe the way in which a "rational mind clearly grasping" will see the freedom from sin of any human being conceived by God's own will.238 Though, of course, Anselm is only referring to the grasping of this particular consequence, Jesus' freedom from original sin, it gives us a kind of insight into Anselm's project in this text, which is itself a purified version of what he aims at in his search for "necessary reasons" in all his speculative works. De conceptu is devoid of any explicit pedagogical or devotional context, a feature that makes it almost, in G. R. Evan's phrase, "clinical."239 The virgin, so important in the logic of De conceptu, never appears as anything other than "a factor in the great mechanism of the process of salvation."240 That does not mean that the project has no pedagogical or devotional intent. Rather Anselm pursues his pedagogical aims with his reasoning. Nonetheless, De conceptu does display Anselm's style of reasoning in a particularly stark way. Anselm's project is to derive the elements of the soteriological narrative logically, to take the horizontal version of events playing out in time and try to think it vertically, as an argument rather than a story. This was true of the three dialogues, considering creation and fall, and the consideration of the Incarnation and salvation here continue the larger project of Cur
Deus homo. The passage cited above, on the clear and rational search for understanding of divine wisdom is one of the clearest statements on Anselm's part that he sees his project in these terms, and, second, it receives another dimension in his characterization of his work as attempting to see from a divine perspective. Seeing is key here—he uses terms (speculamur and intuitu) linked both to vision and to nondiscursive knowing more characteristic of divine or angelic cognition than human understanding for the kind of insight he is trying to approximate. Of course,
De conceptu and Anselm's other works are discursive, offering arguments for conclusions. But the kind of arguments Anselm seeks here and elsewhere, those famous "necessary reasons," aim for connections between premises and conclusion that are logical or conceptual rather than contingent or empirical. These kinds of connections approximate vision, in-
237. DCV 13, S II, 155, 15–21.
238. DCV 13, S II, 155, 23.
239. Evans, Talking about God, 188.
240. Evans, Talking about God, 188.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God tellection rather than discursion, immediate and synthetic rather piecemeal grasp of the truth.
The logical as opposed to narrative point of view Anselm maintains both to explain original sin and exempt Jesus from it requires heavy emphasis on the different means of propagation of Jesus as opposed to other human beings. In Cur Deus homo Anselm expatiates on the possible ways in which God could create a human being, exhausting the logical possibilities available to God: 1) from a man and a woman ("as constant experience shows"), 2) from neither a man nor a woman (Adam), 3) from a woman without a man (Eve). The remaining possibility, 4) from a woman without a man, is the possibility fulfilled in the generation of Jesus.241 The argument from fittingness he makes in Cur Deus homo, we recall, is that none of the first three means is easier for God than another (if one were easier, it would make that means the most fitting for the Incarnation) and that the fourth way is the most fitting (nil convenientius) "in order to prove that this way is subject to his power and is put aside for this very work."242
In De conceptu he takes another significant step in his attempt to give an account of the logic of salvation, by distinguishing between three orders of events: the miraculous, the natural, and the voluntary, in order to explain why Jesus escapes original sin. The need for the distinction is clear: if the propagation of Jesus from woman alone is miraculous, then it is not subject to the laws of natural propagation and, thus, to original sin.243 To serve that argument, Anselm hardens slightly the contrast between miracle and nature in comparison to Augustine. Augustine, discussing miracles in contrast to natural events (most often in the context of objections to miraculous events as unbelievable), works rhetorically to bring the natural and miraculous closer together. First in the City of God, he discusses a kind of middle ground between natural and miraculous: the prodigious or monstrous "is not contrary to nature but contrary to what is known of nature."244 In De genesi ad litteram, he argues that miracles are made possible by the same "seminal reasons" from which natural events flow, either by special reasons "implanted by God's Providence in anticipation of extraordinary events," or "God makes use of ordinary reasons, drawing out their natural effects without the normal delay and circumstances."245 By contrast Anselm describes miracles as when the
241. CDH II, 8, S II, 104, 3–11.
242. CDH II, 8, S II, 104, 6–7.
243. DCV 11, S II, 154, 11–15.
244. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XXI, 8, 2. My emphasis.
245. Jean-Luc Solére, "Nature," in the Dictionnaire du Moyen-Âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 967–76; 973. See Augustine, De genesi ad litteram VI, 13, 24–14, 25; De Trinitate III,
5, 11.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God will of God "from these natures and wills accomplishes that which they themselves would never do in accordance with their use and purpose."246
To be sure Augustine and Anselm share a view of the ultimate unity of the natural and miraculous. Anselm does not revert to Augustine's language of "seminal reasons" out of which all occurrences—ordinary, unusual, and miraculous—fall. He does note, however, that miraculous action does not do harm to acts of nature and will not even "when it seems to oppose them," for, he writes, "they have nothing except what they have received from [divine will], nor has he given them anything except what is subordinate to him."247 Moreover, it is as true for Anselm, as it is for Augustine before him and even Aquinas after him, that their nature is not Newtonian nature, operating according to laws without exception, but the ancient notion of nature as "for the most part." For Anselm as for Augustine before him and Aquinas after "a natural process is only a usual one, and tolerates derogations."248 We see this in Anselm's description of the possibility of propagation from man and woman as what "constant experience shows."249 On this view, exceptions, portents, and prodigies, are also, though in a different sense, part of nature. But since Anselm makes no mention of the middle category (the unusual, prodigious, or monstrous), he makes the line between the natural and the miraculous sharper by making the miraculous directly controlled by God and not in any sense flowing from the nature itself. Anselm's categories are also sharper because they are logical and conceptual, not blurred by empirical data. Anselm gives a couple of examples of both natural and miraculous occurrences, but the miracles are clear examples of divine action—water into wine, radical conversion by grace—and the natural processes he mentions are not observed but generic and proverbial—downward motion of the heavy and vegetative production.250
By contrast, Augustine brings in examples of unusual events to contextualize the miraculous by exploring the category between it and the usual course of things, and Aquinas's little work, On the Occult Operations of Nature, considers things like the operation of magnets and the tides, as well as the curative properties of relics, both to continue the same project of contextualizing the miraculous but also to subject both miraculous and surprising natural occurrences to rationalization.251 Aquinas is worried about surprising occurrences breaking down the notion that nature
246. DCV 11, S II 153, 18–22.
247. DCV 11, S II, 154, 8–11.
248. Solère, "Nature," 573.
249. CDH II, 8, S II, 104, 4.
250. DCV 11, S II, 153–54.
251. Thomas Aquinas, De operationibus occultis, in Opuscula philosophica, edited by R. Piazzi,
(Torino: Marietti, 1954), 159–60.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God is regular, implying that anything can come from anything. His answer is hierarchization: lower causes can be moved in ways unusual for them by higher causes, but like usual events, unusual events too have causes.
Anselm is not concerned with the gap between how things appear to us (as random) and how they really are (acting according to hidden properties or higher agency). He is assuming clear categories and a God's eye view, separating natural and miraculous so as to free the miraculous from the conditions of nature without freeing the Son, born of miraculous means, from human nature altogether. The only kind of hard to categorize cases Anselm mentions are other miraculous births, like that of John the Baptist or Isaac from aged parents. But they are mentioned in order to place them with natural propagation as the "healing of a nature weakened . . . to recall it to its operation." They are opposed to Jesus' birth, along with the genesis of Adam and Eve. Only Jesus, Adam, and Eve are "something unheard of, unthinkable and unknown in nature."252
Jesus' birth has to be removed both from natural propagation and from Adam's will. This is the third category of events, those produced by the will. Here again Anselm links propagation and sin but only indirectly. Propagation from a man and a woman is also partly in the human will.
Besides the natural process, the will of at least one party has to be engaged to set that natural process in motion. Hence, Anselm argues, since
Adam's sin, not willing to keep justice, is in the will, he can only affect those whose propagation can also be tied back to his will, that is, everyone except Eve and Jesus.253
The logic of what is appropriate for divine action continues to drive Anselm's argument as he meets possible objections. Anselm's arguments from "fittingness" are not in contrast to those grounded in necessary reasons but an extension of what is sought from them: rational understanding of what is believed by faith.254 Anselm derives the redemption rather than replacement of fallen human being from this logic: if God had simply filled the vacancy of those saved with a new cohort of sinless human beings, then Adam's reproductive capacity would have been in vain.255 Anselm argues this is a "necessary" conclusion. In the next chapter, he takes care to argue that it is only "fitting" that Jesus is conceived from a just rather than sinful virgin, not necessary.256 But the
252. DCV 16, S II, 157, 17–24.
253. DCV 12, S II, 155.
254. Cf. the different view of David Hogg, Anselm of Canterbury: The Beauty of Theology (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004).
255. DCV 17, S II, 158, 16–19.
256. DCV 18, S II, 159, 13–16.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God difference between the two levels of argument in this case is more about preserving divine prerogatives and power than different levels of certainty from a human point of view.
Anselm stops at this point to reflect on the relationship between the arguments given in De conceptu and those given in Cur Deus homo for the same conclusion: that Jesus is without original sin. These comments tell us how Anselm sees the possibility of multiple arguments for the same conclusion. In De conceptu, Jesus is argued to be free from sin because sin, even original sin, attaches to the will (and so is not in "the seed" except as its future), and propagation, even from a sinful virgin by miraculous means, frees her offspring from sin. In Cur Deus homo, he argued that the virgin is "purified by faith" and hence her seed is purified of sin.257 These are fairly different accounts of how Mary's offspring escapes original sin. The argument from Cur Deus homo finds a way out even if the "seed is corrupted," while De conceptu takes on the logic of original sin, including its justice. It argues that the seed from which Christ was born cannot be corrupted on its own terms, and, thus, does not require an external act of faith on Mary's part. Anselm even adds that qua human, not appealing to Jesus' divinity, Jesus is free not just of "the necessity for sin and debt of Adam" but also of the inability to recover justice or overcome the burden of a corrupted body.258 The Cur Deus homo argument is attractive for the way in which it finds in Mary the cause of Christ's sinlessness, but in De conceptu Anselm takes on the bigger problem of original sin itself. Thus it is not just in comparison to other considerations of these topics from the period that Anselm is more systematic, but Anselm is in De conceptu more systematic than in his own previous work. In De conceptu he grounds his conclusion on deeper and more basic principles and builds on the account of sin and freedom he worked out in De libertate and De casu.
Anselm is clearly unbothered by any possible tension between the two arguments for the same conclusion on different grounds. That they do not contradict one another is all that matters. This stance has some
257. The focus of the argument in Cur Deus homo is not on how faith could purify; that it can is more or less accepted as a given; the only question is whether it must be true faith. If so, it would mean that it must have been true that Jesus was going to die and that his death was freely chosen.
The whole argument is another example of Anselm's attempt to derive the Christian soteriological narrative from the nature of God and humanity by rational argument. For the account takes the two events, the birth of Christ and his death, out of temporal sequence to lay out their logical relationship. This is, of course, a crucial issue in Cur Deus homo as in De conceptu: understanding how there are necessary reasons linking the events of salvation but do not impose necessity on divine action.
258. DCV 17, S II, 158, 27–159, 6.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God of the feel of Augustine's scriptural hermeneutics—that there are many roads to Rome means it does not matter which one you take as long as you get there—now applied to logical arguments. The different roads, however, are not mere means to reaching the right conclusion but rather spiritual exercises in themselves. Nor is the discussion closed by having found these two paths, Anselm notes. If some "other, deeper ratio" could be found, he would, he says, gladly accept it in the same way in which he would abandon his own if it is found wanting.259 As in Cur Deus homo the incompleteness and defeasibility of the project is essential to it for Anselm.
In De conceptu, mostly likely because of its less polished, less literary character compared to Cur Deus homo, Anselm makes explicit the form of his arguments as hypothetical syllogisms. Two of Anselm's arguments are overtly counterfactual hypotheticals. Even if Christ were only human, he would be free not only of Adam's debt but also the burden of a corrupted body and inability to repay the debt. And even if original sin is assumed to be "as grave as possible," that is, to include making individuals bear responsibility for the sins of all their forbears not just Adam
(a claim Anselm later rejects), Christ is free from original sin. Such argument forms, along with other school forms like definition and divisio used in the text, give the proceedings a technical, dialectical feel that in other works Anselm has taken more care to avoid or disguise.260 The bones of the argument are much more visible. Seeing the argumentative scaffolding, if you will, gives it the character of rational speculation and exploration, more than that of something designed to be final or foundational. This is not inconsistent with Anselm's claims to have found
"necessary reasons," because what "necessary reasons" mean for him is having this rational and deductive form, being reasoned in the sense of following from definitions and principles it is rational to accept.
In fine proto-scholastic form Anselm crafts the problematic as he closes De conceptu so that he can occupy the middle ground on original sin. The extremes are, on the one hand, that descendants of Adam, especially infants, cannot be understood to have any sin or to be punished for a sin that they did not commit, and, on the other hand, that infants have the same kind of guilt for the sin inherited from Adam as Adam did for committing it. Anselm's argument for distancing himself from the latter view is, even he would have to admit, more convincing than his argument against the former. Anselm asserts the very reasonable view that
259. DCV 21, S II, 161, 3–7.
260. Evans, Talking about God, 185.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God original sin cannot be imputed to infants in such a way that they should be punished as if they personally had committed the sin that only Adam
(and Eve) did. Though both are deprived of justice, Adam is deprived because he deserted justice, but the infant because someone else (Adam) did.261 Anselm's focus is on the clear injustice of the sin or guilt being as great for Adam's descendants as it is for him.262
In order to argue that infants both have and should have some other kind of sin and some other kind of punishment for something they did not do, Anselm is reduced to parable and a kind of aesthetic argument.
He has already explained the how of original sin in the particular connection between Adam and his descendants through propagation, but he has not explained the why. The problem of why is attacked first with an aesthetic argument, in which Anselm appeals to a kind of symmetry but not identity between sin in Adam and in his descendants. Adam sins through his will as an individual or person, yet he sins "not without" his nature such that it too is affected by the sin. Conversely, in infants their sin, their lack of justice, is not a result of a personal willing but from the blemished nature they inherit from Adam, but since that nature exists in persons, sin is transferred to their person.263 Thus, in the one case, personal sin is transferred to the nature, and in the other the blemish of nature transfers to the person. Anselm even uses his favorite literary device to emphasize the complementarity: similar sounds with opposite meaning: "the voluntary desertion of justice accuses the nature and the inability to recover justice does not excuse the person," Anselm writes.264
Such an argument makes no pretense of explaining the justice of infants being saddled with a sin they did not commit, but does give it a kind of orderliness so that it does not seem simply random.
The additional argument in parable form for the justice of original sin does not appear until he has spent some four chapters softening the blow of its unfairness. Anselm argues that the burden of original sin is less than some have argued and even he assumed for the purposes of argument; moreover, he contends that infants are not burdened by the sins of other ancestors after Adam.265 Original sin, unlike personal sin, is equal in all, and he defines it precisely as the consequence of receiving a rational soul irrespective of any corruption of the body preceding or following its animation.266 There is in this at least the fairness that all are equally afflicted. Most importantly, Anselm insists that even in the case of original sin, each bears the burden of his own sin, not that of his fa-
261. DCV 26, S II, 169, 17–19.
262. DCV 23, S II, 165, 26–28.
263. DCV 23, S II, 165, 20; 15–18.
264. DCV 27, S II, 170, 17–19.
265. DCV 22, S II, 161; 24, S II, 166–67.
266. DCV 27, S II, 170.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God ther or indeed Adam.267 Adam's sin is one thing and the infant's is another, the former a cause and the latter an effect, and the former more grave and the latter less so.268 At least in Lottin's collection of passages from the school of Laon, there are not similar discussions of the relative gravity or a strong distinction between the first sin and original sin.269
When Anselm finally does come to the question of the justice of original sin in the penultimate chapter, it is as a reply to objectors, who argue that as human beings do not blame infants for another's sin neither should God.270 Anselm's reply distinguishes vigorously between human beings and God, arguing that human beings and God should regard Adam's offspring differently. Human beings do not justly blame someone for a fault they themselves have and which they themselves cannot heal, whereas God "rightly demands from a nature what he gave it and what is justly owed to him."271 While to be sure the main point is to create some space so that God is not unjust in his punishment, the important corollary is that human beings are unjust to blame each other.
Only after these qualifications does Anselm offer his analogy as a way of offering some understanding of the subjection of unbaptized infants to divine judgment. He imagines the case of husband and wife, elevated by grace rather than merit, committing a crime that justly deprives them of their privilege. "Who will say," Anselm asks, "that the children whom they generate after their damnation ought not to be subject to the same servitude but rather ought rather to have restored by grace the goods which their parents justly lost?"272
It is not truly satisfying but it is hard to imagine how he could do better. Again, we can compare Anselm's treatment to that of the school of Laon. We do have a version of their discussion of the problem of why the unbaptized are damned. The argument in the Laon sentences is based on what would be consistent with God's providence. God infuses the body generated from parents with a new soul before the fall as well as after; after the fall, the new soul is infused into a corrupt body, which in turn corrupts the soul. This situation, the writer maintains, is not divine "cruelty" but the implementation of divine providence, which does not change because of the "stupidity of men."273 After noting the "maximum benevo-
267. DCV 26, S II, 169–70.
268. DCV 26, S II, 169–70; DCV 23, S II, 165–66.
269. In a passage discussed in more detail below, the authors do note that those souls of infants separated from the body before baptism will receive "the lightest" punishment. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 43, #46.
270. DCV 28, S II, 170–71.
271. DCV 28, S II, 171, 7–8.
272. DCV 28, S II, 171, 13–15.
273. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 43, #46. Another passage in Lottin's collection asks the
God with Human Being and Human Being with God lence" of God who provides in baptism the "medicine of salvation," the passage ends thusly: "as far as those who perish before baptism, why does
God ordain that they will not reach baptism? The judgments of God are hidden."274 This conclusion is more honest than Anselm's, which claims to penetrate God's judgment a bit further, yet it is hard not to admire Anselm's determination to try to make sense out of that which defies human understanding.
Anselm concludes by defending infants who have undergone baptism but perished before they are able to repent.275 The rhetorical effect of this conclusion is to mitigate the harshness of the previous conclusion justifying the damnation of the unbaptized. The closest analogue to this last argument seems to be the dialectical push and pull of scholastic quaestiones. Anselm argues, on the one hand, against those who think unbaptized infants ought not be condemned and, on the other hand, against those who would condemn baptized infants because still incapable of justice. Anselm, thus, positions himself on middle ground, though still firm on the notion that baptism is required for salvation. What baptism removes, Anselm explains, is not the original inability to have justice but the culpability for not having it.276 This goes some way toward clarifying the function of baptism and, again, positions Anselm's position as a mean between extremes. For baptism is neither for Anselm without effect nor the complete wiping away of original sin.
Anselm concludes with a disclaimer that sounds very like his concluding remarks in Cur Deus homo and repeat what he already said midway through De conceptu. He does not so much "affirm" these things as "conjecture" them, waiting for something better to be revealed to him by God or another faithful inquirer.277 The open-endedness of the conclusion of Cur Deus homo is not, then, only because of the particular questions still left unanswered to which he hopes to return, but remains because of the nature of the issues and his own understanding. It is not, in other words, accidental but essential to the undertaking. We might think Anselm's disquestion about the justice of the passing on of original sin and, like other accounts, including Anselm's, focuses on the mechanism for its inheritance, even drawing an analogy for the passing on of original sin to the way in which a depraved and irascible father can produce a depraved and irascible son. There is some sense in which from something corrupt comes other corruption, "although," the author hesitates, "we do not know how to explain what kind it is, how it is said and why." Lottin,
Psychologie et Morale, 257, # 328.
274. Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 43, #46.
275. DCV 29, S II, 172.
276. DCV 29, S II, 172, 18–20. Anselm clarifies further that baptism only releases from the culpability that is a result of the original inability to have justice; it is not, in other words, a release from culpability for personal sin chosen freely.
277. DCV 29, S II, 173, 4–7.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God claimer is either pro forma or out of a kind of fear of being associated with Roscelin. However much the latter might be true, Anselm states in this disclaimer nothing different from what would have been assumed within the context of monastic discussion. Just like the common ground of "faith seeking understanding" that had to be laid out more explicitly in the Epistola, so here he must make explicit the lack of finality in his inquiry, its function in a process of seeking that is ongoing.
An important shift in Anselm's thought is evident in De conceptu: it is a move toward scholastic form, or rather since scholastic form did not yet exist, we might say, a move toward creating scholastic form. Anselm takes up the kinds of questions discussed in the schools of the day. Those discussions, as we see from Lottin's collection, tend to breakdown topics and texts into separate questions. Anselm considers the questions but works as much as possible to integrate discussion of these issues into his own broader agenda.278
In De conceptu Anselm places himself rhetorically as the mean between extremes rather than, as we might characterize his earlier work, at both extremes at once. Here extremes are mapped out the as a means to finding middle ground. In the other works, a pedagogical purpose was served by exploring those extremes and enacting the simultaneous necessity and paradox of the most important truths about God and creature. In this way Anselm gave a kind of intensity to the issues he discussed in these earlier works, dramatizing them even as he explored them in logical rather than narrative form. Part of his pedagogy was to arrive at aporiae as a means to understanding the issues as well as the limits of human reason. The earlier works, if not strictly speaking dialogues, explored these extremes through some kind of dialogue. Even the monologue in the Monologion is a kind of dialogue with himself in the person of one who knows nothing of God; and, of course, the Proslogion is a dialogue with himself, engaging the fool and addressed to God. In this sense, De incarnatione Verbi is a dialogue as well, not quite with Roscelin, but with those who might be persuaded or troubled by the dilemma Roscelin proposed for orthodox Christology.
De conceptu is truly different, both less dialogic in its approach and less prone to explore the fine line separating paradox from necessity. The questions of De conceptu are important and difficult questions to work
278. There are exceptions, for example, the discussion of why the first sin is imputed to Adam more than Eve, which both per se and as taken up by Anselm does not form part of the grand logic
Anselm is attempting to work out here (DCV 9, S II, 150–51). This question is discussed in the texts collected by Lottin, so perhaps Anselm felt he had to address it even though he could not make it fit seamlessly into his argument. See Lottin, Psychologie et Morale, 202–3, #246; 206–7, #253.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God out, but they are not the basic logic of salvation explored in Cur Deus homo.
The key question for Anselm is the one raised for him as he explored the problems raised by Roscelin: why the all-powerful divine nature had to become incarnate, suffer, and die. Exactly how that incarnate God is human but without sin is surely important, but it is secondary, a question logically at a lower level. The same is true, in the end, for the anthropological end of this problem—how human beings came to have original sin while Christ did not. The more basic anthropological question were explored by De libertate and De casu. The explorations of De conceptu are not different from earlier works because their topic is more "theological" than "philosophical" but rather because its questions are less basic.
Nonetheless, there is a sense in which Anselm is pursuing rather than ignoring devotional and pedagogical goals in De conceptu even though the style of presentation is stark and unliterary. The pedagogical goal is to deliver a tour de force, an illustration of the compelling logic of salvation not just in the big picture sense but in the descent to details.
Like book II of Cur Deus homo, that logic is offered at the level of fittingness, painting but on "solid truth." The end result is still stunning but in a different way than the works on the most basic questions about human nature and salvation and those taking up the existence and nature of God. Anselm's audacity is to look through the lens of reason at original sin and the sinless birth of Jesus, continuing to construct a "vertical" consideration of the horizontal story of salvation in more and more detail. He tries to understand it all from the perspective of reason, exactly as the "mechanism." The work approximates a divine perspective, outside of time, attempting to see the whole logic of the matter at once, rather than as a story unfolding, in ways that might appear contingent or ad hoc in time.
Searching for Necessary Reasons and Meditating on Human Redemption According to Eadmer, Anselm wrote De conceptu along with Meditation on Human Redemption in the period right after the completion of Cur
Deus homo.279 The Meditation (appearing as Meditation 3 in Schmitt's critical edition) is a more exclusively devotional piece on the Incarnation and death of Christ as redemptive, but it quite accurately summarizes the most basic conclusions of Cur Deus homo. Like Cur Deus homo, the 279. Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury/Vita Sancti Anselmi archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, edited and translated by Richard W. Southern (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1962), book II, xliv, 122.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God meditation rejects any "rights of the devil" over man or God and makes the same case that since man must make reparation and only God can do so, the God-man who chooses to sacrifice himself freely is the only path to salvation.280 If we compare it to the Proslogion and Monologion, both of which Anselm presents as meditations, we observe that Anselm has divided what those earlier works combine in such a seamless and striking manner: prayerful meditation and deductive argument. It is a sign of even greater separation between academic and devotional pursuits to come that Anselm appended his meditation to his largely argumentative text rather than composed a single text in which they were interwoven.
The tension between subject (the birth and death of Christ) and method (deductive reason issuing in necessary conclusions) in these argumentative works is greater than in the Monologion and Proslogion. The topic of the divine nature one and triune as subject of speculative study has many precedents in Augustine, Boethius, and others. By contrast, finding "necessary reasons" for the Incarnation and death of Christ (and reasoning as if there were no Christ) is a project stunning in its audacity and in the thoroughness with which it is pursued. Perhaps because of its audacity or because of the criticism Anselm received on Proslogion and Monologion combining meditation and speculative argument, he no longer attempts to completely integrate arguments with a believer's meditation on the "good news" of salvation. However, Anselm gives signs in both Cur Deus homo and the Meditation on Human Redemption of the ways in which argument serves rather than undermines meditation even as he takes rationalism to new extremes.
Anselm works truly and sincerely under the auspices of "faith seeking understanding," yet the nature and role for reason in Anselm is still a precursor to the modern model of neutral, objective reason. Our tendency is to read back from the modern notion of rationality and find in "faith seeking understanding" the attempt to enclose or restrict reason within faith. However, the project of understanding what is believed, first in Augustine and then more explicitly and self-consciously in Anselm, is in an important sense a step toward the modern model in a couple of ways. First, the search for necessary reasons for God's actions in the Incarnation shows a confidence in reason as Anselm is ready to open up the things of faith, in all their difficulty, detail, and concreteness, to the questions of reason. Rational insight into the divine nature, the path prescribed by "faith seeking understanding," is only possible if the human intellect can make rational sense of divine action. And since "rational" for Anselm
280. Med. 3, S III, 84–91.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God means "available to deductive reason," "rational" means capable of being understood as necessary in some sense. Human reason has to be able to discover such reasons, and the divine nature itself must have reasons and display them in ways accessible to human reason. In the Meditation on Human Redemption, Anselm draws special attention to the accessibility of the truth of redemption to any who will receive it. God does not humble himself in the Incarnation to hide himself but rather to show himself, Anselm declares: "You did not assume human nature in order to conceal (operires) what was known about you but in order to disclose (aperires) what was unknown."281 Truth neither deceives nor hides. "Though the truth does not manifest itself to everyone, to none does it deny itself."282
Second, Anselm moves toward a more modern notion of reason in the way in which he takes up objections originating from hostile quarters. Already in the dialogue trilogy Anselm disengages the objections from their hostile context to take them up in a more neutral fashion. Anselm extends this approach in both Cur Deus homo and De incarnatione, for these objectors are more real and specific than Jews in the Gospel of John. Boso speaks for infidels and Roscelin for heretics.
In Cur Deus homo, the infidel objectors are one step removed by the literary device of the text, their objections expressed by Boso, mirroring their actual status for Anselm, for whom they are a theoretical possibility rather than a living, breathing reality.283 In Anselm's one known encounter with actual non-Christians, the Muslim troops of Count Roger in Sicily, Eadmer tells of their reverence for Anselm and willingness to convert and of Anselm's kind offerings of food to them, but makes no mention of any interest on Anselm's part in their arguments or their salvation.284
Yet Cur Deus homo does try to address what Anselm understands as nonChristian objections rationally, seriously, and moderately, free of invective.285 This does not mean that the objections posed by Boso were actually voiced by actual non-Christian objectors. Anselm presents them as such but then, as noted above, responds to them without vilifying non-belief or skepticism but rather taking up their questions on their own merits and as the same as those believers should be asking. Anselm can respond to them with a kind of disengaged reason because he has taken their objections to be rational rather than sectarian threats in the first place.
In De incarnatione, Anselm responds on different levels to the objections posed by Roscelin, first polemically to discredit Roscelin but then
281. Med. 3, S III, 85, 36–37.
282. Med. 3, S III, 85, 42.
283. See 277–79.
284. Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, book II, xxxiii, 110–12.
285. Cf. Cohen, Living Letters, 174–75.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God more constructively, defending the orthodox formulation and, finally, offering positive ways toward understanding. That Anselm engages the unbeliever more openly and sympathetically than he does his fellow
Christian, Roscelin, or his anonymous interlocutors in De conceptu, is not so surprising. Roscelin represents a real rather than merely conceptual threat. He is a threat on two fronts, to believers who might have their faith undermined by his arguments, and to Anselm whose own views have been implicated as supporting Roscelin's. Those against whom he argues in De conceptu are effectively theological rivals. Anselm does not hesitate to let deep and troubling questions come out in the Epistola and De conceptu. They are addressed, but he does not use the more daring speculative forms and formulations he was willing to in earlier work and in Cur Deus homo.
Anselm's opponent, whether in the form of his friend Boso, the infidels represented by Boso, his opponent (and former friend) Roscelin, or the anonymous precursor of the scholastic "quidam" responded to in De conceptu, is constructed and responded to with reason, reason Anselm shares with that opponent. Thus, the opponent, whether Christian or not, gives voice to questions which really are Anselm's as well. As Boso sets out to present objections to the Incarnation, he notes that "they" seek because they do not believe, while "we" seek because we believe;
"we" because we are seeking reasons, and "they" because they are unwilling to accept without reasons. It is, he asserts, "fair (aequum)" that he present the arguments of unbelievers since "it is one and the same thing that we seek."286 Significantly, he does not retain the divide into "we" and "they" as the arguments get under way but joins both together as the "we" who have a common task. The task is a task for reason and the reason that is used is the same for believer and unbeliever. That is Anselm's radical claim. When it is taken seriously, it is rationalistic in the extreme, difficult if not impossible to square with Anselm's insistence in his prayers and in the prologue to the De incarnatione on faith as the starting point.
However, taking this claim seriously does not mean that Anselm flirts with atheism or skepticism about Jesus' divinity. He does, however, allow questions and problems basic to Christian belief to be raised and to penetrate his defenses, so that whether they are originally his own or not, they become those for which he seeks understanding, not mere refutation. This transformation takes place in three stages. First, Anselm makes objections neutral and generic, untraceable to particular or sectarian parties but the objections of reason itself, those which a proverbial
286. CDH I, 3, S II, 50, 16–22.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God "anyone" would wonder about. Second, Anselm takes the difficulty out, not of the objection but the objector. He works, in other words to turn a hostile objector into one who is open to argument. So far Anselm's method presages later rationalism.
But Anselm goes beyond mere open-mindedness and neutrality. In Cur Deus homo the questions Boso asks from outside the faith are transformed into his questions, into questions the answers to which are of vital, final importance for him as an individual. Less dramatically, De incarnatione goes from polemical refutation, to reasoned argument against a rational opponent, to images and attempts at substantive explanation of the admittedly impenetrable God for one who genuinely wishes to understand. In Cur Deus homo, Anselm leads Boso beyond neutral third-party observation; in De incarnatione, he leads the objector beyond questions posed as a challenge to orthodoxy. Both interlocutors, though from different directions, come to place of needing to know, hoping and, more, "panting" to understand.
This last movement is clearest in Cur Deus homo, the most polished literary work of the group. Anselm and his interlocutor are brought to see that the answer is not merely academic, the winning or losing of an academic joust. Rather for Boso (and through him the reader) the problem becomes not answering abstract questions from unbelievers but understanding one's own existential predicament, one's need for Christ.287
The arguments are designed to have existential import for Anselm and for his readers, for the faithful, and cannot be meant merely to defeat an opponent with whom one shares nothing. Clearly, when Anselm thinks he has succeeded (and to the degree that he has succeeded) in the Proslogion or in the Cur Deus homo in the persona of Boso, Anselm expresses the joy of one who has discovered and understood something for himself, not one who has merely bested an opponent in debate.
Anselm takes up the most challenging questions for the believer, formulated in the most challenging way, whether by non-Christians in Cur
Deus homo, Christian heretics in De incarnatione, or those being debated in schools outside the monastery in De conceptu. He does so in a way that serves the needs of faith and reason. For the challenges these interlocutors pose set a difficult task for reason, so difficult that the task for reason mirrors in structure and becomes a means toward the individual's quest for God. Faith is served both in the success and the failure of Anselm's rationalism. For insofar as reason succeeds, faith is supported and 287. As Cohen points out, Anselm makes no move to suggest that his work be used to convert
Jews or others as others did for their work in this genre. See Cohen, Living Letters, 180.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God deepened, and insofar as reason comes up against its limits, the call for faith (and continued attempts at understanding) is renewed.
Rather than allowing the kinds of questions which skeptical reason might pose to function as a kind of distraction from faith, Anselm's goal is to have them serve faith. A comparison to Peter's De divina omnipotentia is instructive. Damian is clearly frustrated that conundrums like whether God can restore a virgin are circulating in which both affirmative and negative answers seem to result in impious claims about the divine. He wants to put a stop to such questions, if we are to take him at his word, but does so by actually taking this one up. Whether God can restore a virgin is not a question that arises out of the content of Christian faith. As Anselm's three works on the Incarnation show, Christianity has enough difficult questions of its own to cope with without making up new and titillating puzzles. Of course, such puzzles do raise serious questions about God's freedom and power as operating in time and raise basic questions about the nature of freedom and power per se. Anselm wishes to raise these questions too, in all their difficulty, but in such a way that they spring from that which faith believes. While Damian attempts to put to rest idle questions posed by disembodied reason, Anselm takes up difficult questions to have the aporiae they expose serve faith.
Anselm's pursuit of paradox and necessity, of that which cannot be understood and which cannot not be understood, is simply the most extreme version of this strategy. It sets the highest goal for reason in seeking necessity from paradox, plumbing faith's deepest mysteries, thereby revealing more problems before delivering greater understanding. In Cur
Deus homo it is quite literally the Pauline "absence of things hoped for" that Boso is asked to dwell within, for the task of book I of Cur Deus homo is to make Christ's absence more and more real to Boso. Anselm is convinced that the thorough consideration of the world and human being remoto Christo will lead inexorably to the necessity of the Son's incarnation.
His conceit is that by making Christ disappear, he can be made to appear.
The finding of problems, even contradictions, in the divine nature in the Monologion and Proslogion, the creation of aporia about the will and the fall in the dialogues, are all ways of making the thing that is sought disappear, by moving it beyond the power of reason to grasp it. In the Proslogion Anselm makes reason feel the losses it proposes, the loss of the word and Word. In Cur Deus homo, Boso must experience the absence of Christ in order to come to see his presence as necessary. Thus, rationally examining the claims of faith Anselm seeks to understand, in all their apparent impossibility, is the very way toward understanding them as necessary. In the same way, in the prayers, realization of the impos-
God with Human Being and Human Being with God sibility of saving oneself leads to the possibility of salvation by the allpowerful, all-loving God. This, then, is what Anselm means when he has
Boso declare that the task for the reason of unbeliever and believer is the same. For the very assumption of the nonbeliever, that there is no incarnation or no God, becomes the possibility the believer must consider which will lead him toward a glimpse of the logic of the contrary. This consideration will lead him both to greater understanding but also understanding of what he does not understand.
In the companion meditation, Anselm is clear on the role seeking understanding has in spiritual life. Extending the metaphor of monastic rumination, Anselm advises chewing, sucking and swallowing: "Chew by thinking (cogitando), suck by understanding (intelligendo), swallow by loving and rejoicing."288 Cur Deus homo and other treatises clearly fit into Anselm's overall program as chewing and sucking. Chewing involves a kind of breaking down, analogous to the consideration of objections and criticisms (cogitando), while sucking involves pulling out all the juices to savor the taste, analogous to finding the logic, the reasons for what is believed (intelligendo). As in the prayers, the crucial first step is throwing off lethargy, rousing oneself to consideration of these things with mind and heart. That is achieved by letting oneself be drawn into consideration of these matters, allowing questions and problems to arise, and then moving from questions to answers, problems to reasons.
This strategy of rationalism in the service of faith has its dangers.
Even if Anselm intends (and even if he succeeds) in transforming the problem from being an outsider's objection to a genuine question for believers, making it an internal problem to grapple with intellectually and emotionally, surely others did not make this transition so thoroughly or successfully. Moreover, even if Anselm succeeds for himself and his readers, the internalization of an outsider's perspective may be just as much a kind of violence to that other as externalization. The attempt to understand and dwell within another's shoes can as easily result in the re-creation of another in one's own image. The obvious danger is that one will only create another which is more self than other. The next move, though not made by Anselm, is to reject and berate the outsider for not being the other of one's own creation. This, of course, is exactly what happened in some Christian attempts to understand their Jewish contemporaries. Having only the constructed, idealized Jew based on their reading of Hebrew scripture, medieval Christians were unable to accept the reality of medieval rabbinic Judaism, an otherness not part of their
288. Med. 3, S III, 84, 10–11.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God image. It led them, on the one hand, to burn copies of the Talmud as heretical to Judaism, and, on the other, to inveigh against the perversity of Jewish unbelief in Christianity. For how could they fail to believe when the evidence and arguments were so convincing?
Rational reflection on theological matters can become what Kierkegaard so brilliantly caricatures in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
"Suppose a man who say that he has faith, but desires to make his faith clear to himself, so as to understand himself in his faith. Now the comedy begins again. The object of faith becomes almost probable, as good as probable, extremely and emphatically probable."289 Kierkegaard worried that this project had produced the false and elitist confidence of the believer. The other possibility is the one enacted in the burning of the Talmuds in the Middle Ages and, of course, beyond: the disparagement of those Jews, Muslims, or heretics who were not converted by arguments like Anselm's.
If there is anything that saves Anselm from becoming Kierkegaard's caricature (or worse), it is the potent prick of desire that reminds him he does not have what he wants. Anselm always, at the beginning, middle, and end of his most indubitable arguments feels and allows himself to feel his lacks—of understanding, feeling, unity, sanctity. His unsatiated desire keeps him from self-satisfaction and security at his success over an opponent. Anselm begins his meditation describing the delight and enjoyment of the contemplation of one's salvation through Christ, and one might mistake this, as many have expressions of joy in the treatises, for the triumphant completion of Anselm's project. 290 But it is absolutely crucial to note that the meditation ends not in delight but in desire: "I beg you, Lord, make me taste by love what I taste by knowing (cognitionem), that I might perceive (sentiam) by feeling (affectum) what I perceive
(sentio) by understanding (intellectum)."291 God has made him seek (quaerere), now he asks to find (invenire), has taught the knocking, now, he asks, open to the knock.292 What has been achieved is seeking, knocking, not the experience of union and presence, not the disappearance of all barriers between self and God, finite mind and Truth. As was noted earlier about the similar ending to the Proslogion, it is not that nothing has been achieved in the chewing and sucking of reason on the things of faith, but it is equally important to realize that for Anselm it is not yet time to swallow: not everything has been achieved.
289. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, edited and translated by Alastair
Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 177.
290. Med. 3, S III, 84.
291. Med. 3, S III, 91, 196–97.
292. Med. 3, S III, 91, 203–4.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God Anselm notes the peculiar state in which his inquiries conclude: a grasp of the reasons supporting the things of faith, simultaneously seen as exceeding one's grasp. In both the Epistola and Cur Deus homo, Anselm refers to suffering or tolerating what one cannot understand even as he proclaims, both before and after such statements, to have found indubitable reasons.293 Anselm is constantly drawing attention to this tension, acting it out, not just describing it. Part of the truth of faith he seeks to understand is what cannot be understood about it, as well as what can.
Anselm expresses that tension in his meditation in a series of parallel constructions of opposites, his favorite literary trope:
What strength [is there] in such weakness? . . . What exaltation in such humility? What [is there] to revere in such contempt? O concealed valor: a man hung (pendentem) from a cross suspends (suspendere) the weight of eternal death for the whole human race; a man nailed (confixum) to wood loosens
(diffigere) the bonds (affixum) holding the world in perpetual death. O secret power: a man condemned with thieves saves men condemned with devils; a man stretched on a gibbet draws all to himself. O hidden strength: one soul sent into torment extracts innumerable [souls] from hell; a man submits to the death of the body and destroys the death of souls.294
We saw many of these types of parallel constructions in earlier works, most frequently in the prayers. For Anselm the story of Christ's life and death is a story of the way in which outcomes come from their opposites, strength from weakness, salvation from damnation, life from death. In this way he expresses both what is radically overwhelming to ordinary expectation in the effect of Christ's passion but gives to it a kind of order, the order of paradox. Life, salvation, freedom do not emerge randomly from things unrelated to them but come from their opposites. Anselm's ordered paradoxes attempt to express a kind of aesthetic coherence to salvation. The effect is to give a sense neither of disorder and irrationality, nor or their opposites, but of a kind of order and rationality beyond human reason.
Bringing oneself to inquire is for Anselm, as it was for Augustine, the meditation makes clear, a way toward self-knowledge, which is intimately tied up with knowledge of God. Anselm expresses this important Augustinian theme in his argumentative works by bringing his interlocutor to aporiae. Anselm's arguments explore what one does not understand, first about the faith and then about objections to the faith. Finding out what one does not know by identifying with heretics and infidels, see-
293. EDIV 13, S II, 31, 4; CDH II, 16, S II, 117, 7.
294. Med. 3, S III, 84, 19– 85, 29.
God with Human Being and Human Being with God ing what is compelling and worthwhile about their questions, is the first movement. It is followed by a second—understanding what it means to live remoto Christo, understanding oneself in one's true condition without salvation. Self-deception and the lack of self-knowledge is a theme
Anselm sounds several times in this third meditation. His first mentions of it are somewhat defensive and accusatory, to the effect that those who do not grasp the truth are self deceived, which is the other side of the claim, mentioned above, that the truth does not refuse itself to anyone.
Thus, Anselm concludes, anyone without the truth has only himself to blame.295 This is the double-edged sword of rationalistic optimism and the rejection of esotericism. Insofar as truth is available to all, those who do not see the same truth can be blamed, and the more certain one feels of one's own truth, the more those who do not assent can be discounted. If Anselm ended on this note, it would be difficult to mitigate charges about the role of Cur Deus homo in clearing an intellectual path for religious persecution. But the ignorance for which one can be blamed is ignorance of self; the path toward the truth runs through the self. Anselm returns to the lack of self-knowledge as the meditation concludes. At this point he is no longer defensive but fully identifies with the state of self deception, speaking as did the opening of the Proslogion to that "little man (homuncio)": "You were without help and did not know it."296 Turning to address Christ, he recalls, "I was in darkness for I knew nothing of myself."297 What he does not know about himself is his own sin, according to the meditation. That sin, we know from the dialogues, at least in its original form, is lack of knowledge and acceptance of oneself as dependent creature. Thus to grasp one's need for God is to grasp oneself and to grasp God as beyond one's grasp.
295. Med. 3, S III, 85, 44–45.
296. Med. 3, S III, 89, 156.
297. Med. 3, S III, 90, 171–72.
The Later Works From Meditatio to Disputatio In the last two works of Anselm's corpus, De processione Spiritus Sancti and De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio, the basic themes of earlier works return: the metaphysics of God, the most specifically Christian (and most difficult) theological problems, and the "metaphysics of creaturehood." In these works we get a chance to see how Anselm's way of working with these issues developed by the end of his career. The most obvious change is that these last works are in more than one sense the most "scholastic" of his Anselm's writings. Even though avant la lettre, the works move further toward the scholastic model of disputation than the works on the Incarnation considered in chapter 6. The elements of dialogue in the classical, literary sense—particular interlocutors whose characters, prejudices, fears, and concerns become part of the discussion, where there is (more or less specifically laid out) a dramatic setting and some kind of dramatic transformation of the participants, especially the objector—have all been suppressed in these works.
De concordia uses the pronouns "us" (as those inquiring together), "you" (as the one posing objections), and "I" (as the one answering objections), but the "dialogue" is in indirect discourse; the "you" quickly disappears, reabsorbed into the "we" of Anselm's reply and silenced by the "I" who speaks without further interruption. Moreover, unlike De libertate and De casu, it takes as one of its main tasks the harmonization—not just of free choice with foreknowledge, predestination and free choice— but of scripture passages with Anselm's views and with each other. Thus not just in its suppression of the elements of dialogue, but in treating scripture markedly different from Anselm's dialogue trilogy, De concordia presages later scholastic methods.
De processione has a defined rather than disembodied objector in the
From Meditatio to Disputatio Greek church to whom the work returns for further arguments and objections. There are in addition a number of attempts to argue on the basis of other views those in the Greek church profess to share, but there is no dialogue between the Greek and Roman views. The work is virtually unbroken and unanswered argument on the topic, as befits the occasion for its writing—Anselm's presentation of the Latin view against the Greeks at the Council of Bari in 1098 at the request of Pope Urban II.1 Like De concordia, a significant portion of the text is used to interpret scripture passages. Unlike, for example, the way in which the three dialogues are related to scripture, a deep consideration of only a few passages as a way of getting to the central themes in Christianity they adumbrate, these texts use scripture passages in the mode of a sic et non, as expressing apparent contradictions in scripture itself and in relationship to Anselm's positions.2
Gillian Evans argues that Anselm was pushed into this more disputational form in an attempt to write in the "new fashion" "acceptable to contemporary tastes."3 The result is less distinctively Anselmian, less a work, she writes, that "only [Anselm] could have written."4 It is clear that these works are different, yet they do develop out of themes and strategies we have seen in Anselm's previous work and there are important ways in which they could only have been written by Anselm. The extraordinary and relentless facility with language and argument, paradox and distinction, as well the construction and analysis of analogies and metaphors that mark Anselm's earlier work are present here as well. Moreover, we see in these works an important link between Anselm's mode of thinking and the full-blown scholasticism that was developing around
1. See Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury/Vita Sancti Anselmi archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, edited and translated by Richard W. Southern (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1962), book 2, xxxiv, 112–13. For an account of the council and who was present correlated with other contemporary chroniclers as well as thoughts about the relationship of the work to the terms of the actual debate, see Giles E. M. Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 178–93.
2. Commentators have noted the greater quantity of scriptural passages in De concordia and De processione but have generally seen this as an increase in scripture's importance to Anselm in the latter works, rather than, as I do, as a change in the way in which scripture is integrated into these works. Cf. Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 6, and Thomas A. Losconcy, "Will in St. Anselm: An Examination of His Biblical and Augustinian Origins," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, edited by Foreville, 701–8. See also,
André Cantin, "Quelle Evolution? Quelle Signification historique des Méthodes d Anselme?" in Saint Anselm—A Thinker for Yesterday and Today: Anselm's Thought Viewed by our Contemporaries, Proceedings of the International Anselm Conference, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique Paris, edited by Coloman Viola and Frederick van Fleteren, Texts and Studies in Religion 90 (Lewiston, N.H.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 183–99.
3. Gillian R. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 194–95.
4. Evans, Talking about God, 194.
From Meditatio to Disputatio and after him. Regardless of whether he is an innovator or follower of this development, these works form a window from which to see the transition toward scholasticism in a single author of remarkable talent whose work illuminates both what has come before and what follows.
De processione Spiritus Sancti: From Private Reflection to Public Debate As was noted in chapter 6, Anselm's language to describe the Trinity underwent one shift from the Monologion to the De incarnatione. Where the Monologion rejected the language of persons as truly proper to the Trinity, concluding with the Trinity as "three-I-know-not-whats,"5 De incarnatione took up the language of persons, though in a qualified way, in order to respond to Roscelin and, perhaps, critics of Anselm's own strategy in the Monologion. In De processione there is a second shift as Anselm concentrates on the analysis of the persons of the Trinity as constituted by their relations.
A number of scholars see Anselm's shift in language for the Trinity as a progression in some way—from Augustinian to Aristotelian language, from a psychological to relational model, from one grounded in procession to one grounded in relations of opposition. Anselm had to move to this notion of relations in an Aristotelian sense, some argue, in order to deal successfully with the questions of those trained in dialectic as well as differences with the Greek church.6 Anselm is pushed into this controversy with the Greek church, rather than moving this way of his own accord, just as he was pushed by Roscelin to discuss the Incarnation in relation to the Trinity.7 Nonetheless, Anselm has taken up the task given him by Pope Urban enthusiastically. What I consider here is how the occasion (the conflict with the Greek church) and the aim (decisive defense of the Latin view on the procession of the Holy Spirit) are connected not just to the shift in trinitarian terminology (based on opposing relations), but to the method, tone, and aim of theological discourse Anselm takes up in this work.
5. Mono. 79, S I, 85, 14.
6. Peter Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics: Developments of Latin Trinitarian
Theology between c. 1075 and c. 1160," in Trinitarian Theology in the Medieval West, edited by Pekka
Kärkkäinen (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Seura, 2007), 10–13.
7. Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics," 20, n. 34. This in contrast to Deme who suggests Anselm chose to interest himself in the controversies of the day. See Daniel Deme, The Christology of Anselm of Canterbury (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate , 2003), 143.
From Meditatio to Disputatio Shifting Terminology Anselm begins with what is shared with the Greek church: the names for the three persons. The Father and Son are already given as relational names and Anselm deftly fits the Holy Spirit into this same mode as the Spirit of someone, asserting further that "he is the spirit of God and the Spirit of the Father and the Son."8 This is not, Anselm adds immediately, to jump to the desired conclusion but to articulate further shared ground: "For although the Greeks deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, they do not deny that He is the spirit of the Son."9 Further common ground is educed from what it means to say in the creed, "God from God." God is from God in two ways, both churches hold, by being begotten and proceeding. The "cause of plurality" in the Trinity, Anselm asserts, is that the persons cannot be called by each other's names.10 It seems odd to say that the names can cause plurality, but what Anselm seems to mean is that the Father is father because there is another who is son. In the same way the Spirit is spirit because the spirit of someone else. In other words, the names in so far as they have some kind of meaning are relational names requiring plurality. There cannot be a father without a son.
Anselm's strategy is in effect to box in his opponents by constructing a basic principle governing divine predication of the one and triune
God: "So, therefore, the consequences of this unity and this plurality are so combined together (contemperant) so that neither the plurality which follows from relation transfers to those things in which the simplicity of aforementioned unity resounds (sonat), nor does the unity hinder plurality where this relation is signified."11 The restatement of this principle in the sentence which follows it is the only entry by Anselm in Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum, a compendium of what is deemed standard doctrine; Anselm's principle was also used to express the Latin view at the Council of Florence in 1438 to 1445.12
What Anselm articulates in this tightly constructed principle in De processione is not so different from what he writes in chapter 43 of the Monologion: "For they are so opposite in their relationship that none can assume the property of another; they are so harmonious in their nature
(concordes natura) that one always holds the essence of the other."13 What is common to both stylistically is the use of parallel oppositions whose tension seems to hold them in balance. What is different, besides the use
8. DPS 1, S II, 178, 6–7.
9. DPS 1, S II, 178, 10–12.
10. DPS 1, S II, 179, 12–14.
11. DPS 1, S II, 180, 30–181, 2.
12. Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics," 22.
13. Mono. 43, S I, 60, 5–7.
From Meditatio to Disputatio of more technical sounding language in De processione, is that De processione makes explicit the ways in which the two claims balance each other such that unity and plurality act as a check on each other: "While the unity does not even lose its consequence where it does not meet with an opposition of relation, nor does relation [lose] what is its own except when it is opposed by inseparable unity."14 This, of course, fits the purpose of De processione, whose goal is to construct limits on what can be said in a more doctrinal and public way than the reflections of the Monologion. De processione's principle does not merely allow but demands the filioque while disallowing claims like "the Son exists from Father and Spirit." Given the principle that the only differences are relational, Anselm argues that it must be the case that either the Son exists from the Holy Spirit or the Holy Spirit from the Son.15 But the former cannot be the case: the Son can neither be begotten by the Spirit (else he would be son of the Spirit) nor proceed from the Spirit (else he would be the spirit of the Spirit).16 Therefore, the latter, that the Spirit proceeds from Son (and Father), must be true, Anselm concludes.
Anselm attempts to derive the filioque by considering what actually defines the Holy Spirit as distinct from the Father. Anselm insists that it is being from the Father that makes the Holy Spirit Holy Spirit. While it is true that the Holy Spirit, unlike the Father, has no Son and has no Spirit proceeding from Him, these differences are "not the cause (causa) of [Father and Son] being distinct persons."17 What and that the Holy
Spirit is is being from the Father; he has both his existing and his being other simultaneously.18 If that were not the case, the Holy Spirit could preexist the Father, which, clearly, would destroy the whole notion of the Trinity. In the same way, the distinctness of Father and Son is the source of both alterity and being simultaneously. The Father is and is different from the Son because Father of the Son. In the same way, "what the Spirit is essentially is from the Father (hoc ipsum quod est essentialiter, sit spiritus sanctus de patre)," Anselm insists, contra the Greeks.19 If not, he argues, there is no way to distinguish Father and Spirit since both are one and the same God.20 In this Anselm is also very clearly claiming, contra the Greek church, that the persons are the relations.21
14. DPS 1, S II, 181, 2–4.
15. DPS 1, S II, 183, 15–18.
16. DPS, S II, 185, 21–22.
17. DPS 2, S II, 186, 20–187, 6.
18. DPS 2, S II, 187, 19–188, 7.
19. DPS 2, S II, 186, 5–6.
20. DPS 2, S II, 186, 8–9.
21. Gasper notes that, of course, Greek views on these topics were not monolithic and that Gregory Nazianzen not only used the same analogy we will see return later, that of spring-riverlake, but that Gregory shares with Anselm "the emphases on the Trinity representing properties not natures and on the fact that it is the names which provide distinctions rather than any distinc-
From Meditatio to Disputatio But the opposition is not just between the persons—that, for example, Father and Son define each other by their opposition (because father, not son and because son, not father)—but also between unity and plurality. God is one up to and until something requires plurality and vice versa. Anselm argues that if God exists from God it must be that the whole exists from the whole. Here the unity required by the unity of God who cannot have parts is explanatory. If whole is from whole and the persons are not separate gods, then when the Son is from God, he is from the one, whole God, hence from both Father and Holy Spirit, "if" (the crucial qualifier) "nothing opposes it."22 The same thing can be said for the Holy
Spirit: if from God, then from whole God, then from Father and Son.23
Thus, Anselm argues, unity is what is operative: either the Son is from the Holy Spirit (and Father) or Holy Spirit from Son (and Father) unless something prevents it. Something does prevent the Son being from the Father and Holy Spirit. The Son cannot be from the Holy Spirit either by being begotten or processing; if begotten, the Holy Spirit would be the Father, and if proceeding, the Son would be the Spirit of the Holy Spirit.24 All the relations, including the relation of the Holy Spirit to Father and Son, are governed both by unity and relation, relation in so far as Holy Spirit is distinct from both Father and Son, and unity in so far as the Holy Spirit is God from God, whole from whole. The Holy Spirit is from the whole of God, except where he cannot be. He cannot be from himself; hence, he is from Father and Son.
Anselm also argues not just that the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son but that the Spirit, like the Son, is "God from God."25 He maintains, contra the Greeks, that the Spirit's being "God from God" is the reason for his being from the Father, rather than vice versa. If the Spirit were
"God from God" because the Spirit is from the Father, that would mean that the Spirit is from the Father qua Father, in which case he would "exist not from the Father's deity but from the Father's relation," a result which is, Anselm contends, "stultissimum."26
Anselm is willing to consider the possibility of two different procestion of being." Gregory too is "conscious of the need to emphasize that each individual person of the Trinity was at the same time wholly and completely God." Gasper, Anselm's Theological Inheritance,
141–43.
22. DPS 1, S II, 184, 10–11.
23. DPS 1, S II, 184, 11–12.
24. DPS 1, S II, 185, 20–24.
25. The Nicene Creed only describes the Son (and not the Holy Spirit) as "true God from true
God, light from light" but Anselm derives this as an attribute of the Spirit, which like the filioque is not in the creed. DPS 2, S II, 189. He also argues that since the Greeks do not object to this corollary drawn from the premises of the creed, that the Holy Spirit is "God from God," then the objection to the filioque cannot just be because it is an addition to the creed.
26. DPS 2, S II, 189, 23–190, 7.
From Meditatio to Disputatio sions for the Holy Spirit, one as existing from the Father and another as given or sent out from God, but argues that such a distinction cannot be used to defend the orthodox view, in the claim that the Spirits exists from the Father but is sent by or through the Son. Anselm insists that if there are two different processions, the Spirit must be understood to proceed from both Father and Son in both.27
Anselm's way of distinguishing the persons here is sometimes described as grounded in "relations of opposition" or "opposition of relations," by which is usually meant according to a type of relation which is in its essence nonreciprocal. Thus, Father is father because of the Son and for this very reason cannot be son of his Son.
Anselm is strongly taking the position that there is a privileged way, an essential way of distinguishing the persons, and that the privileged way is according to these asymmetrical relations. The entire system of predication Anselm has mapped out for the Trinity is governed by an exclusive "or": A is B or C but neither both nor neither, and, moreover, being B is exactly what makes it impossible A to be C and vice versa. The logic which governs here is not just the principle of excluded middle, either something is A or not A. Anselm explicitly denies that this logic is tight enough to direct trinitarian predication: Father and Son are not distinct because the Son has a father but the Father does not, Father is not distinct from the Spirit because the Spirit has no spirit proceeding from him while the Father does.28 Rather the notion of reciprocal limitation operates both in the relations between the persons and between divine unity and plurality. In this way, Daniel Deme argues, Anselm transforms
God's self-relation into "a rigid formal system" that functions as a logical "trap" for his opponent.29 Anselm's principle, as he applies it, does have something of that feel. Any escape one might make in one direction, whether it is unity or plurality, Anselm quickly points out, is cut off in the other.
There are important ways in which the argument forms and strategies in these two long opening chapters are continuous with Anselm's earlier work. His arguments are grounded in definitions and essential properties of the persons and divine nature out of which he constructs a necessary chain of inferences. The grounds of his claims are uniformly reason; he makes no reference to scripture or authority in these opening two chapters.30 Even the common ground the Latin and Greek churches
27. DPS 2, S II, 189, 1–9.
28. DPS 2, S II, 186, 15–20.
29. Deme, Christology of Anselm, 145.
30. There is one quotation of scripture in chapter 2: John 3:8; DPS 2, S II, 189, 5–6.
From Meditatio to Disputatio share is articulated in terms of positions or propositions, not, scripture or even strictly creedal language. Though Anselm makes reference to the creeds (Athanasian and Nicene), they are treated as generating propositions to serve as premises rather than as texts to be interpreted. He follows the logic of the divine rather than creaturely metaphysics, in the sense that rather than distinguishing different sense of terms, mirroring the complexity of creatures, he follows the logic of simplicity as befitting the divine. The arguments he constructs using the principle of the mutual limitation of plurality and unity are often disjunctive syllogisms: either A or B; not A; therefore B. He plays out the absurd consequences of A (e.g., that Son is from the Holy Spirit) even when it is not really necessary because this is not an alternative even remotely considered by either party. The rhetorical impression created is of an intensely and completely logical advocate who methodically considers all possible options and concludes that there is one and only one that can be true. It recalls the arguments of De incarnatione in which Anselm systematically took up and refuted each possible configuration of his opponent's position.
De processione has an intensity and relentlessness of argument piled upon argument not matched in Anselm's earlier works. Deme complains that "the treatise proceeds through an almost unreadable speculative logical proof structure, where one proof follows the other."31 As a result, De processione is, he argues, "the least spiritual and most ideologically prejudiced of all his works."32 Gone are the reflections on the way in which all language falls short of the divine reality. Instead, Anselm's basic principle, immortalized at the Council of Florence and in Denzinger, sets up strict parameters for trinitarian language. Anselm has always been relentless in his composition of necessary arguments requiring assent, but there is a sense in which De processione is more about winning than previous works. Anselm's task is more about articulating the necessary principles of orthodoxy than "faith seeking understanding." While these are not necessarily opposed and De processione is the use of understanding to understand the things of faith, it is surely less exploratory, less interested in having its audience experience the moments of aporetic paradox than the Monologion and Proslogion. Anselm is after certainty in a way that is not balanced by the articulation of intractable problems
31. Deme, Christology of Anselm, 144.
32. Deme, Christology of Anselm, 144. Gasper disagrees, however, describing the work as "entirely unpolemical." What Gasper seems to mean by this, however, is that Anselm's approach is not to "berate and insult his fellow Christians but to persuade them rationally." Gasper, Anselm's Theological Inheritance, 185. Anselm is surely respectful and focused on the issue not the proponents of the Greek view, but he is also focused very sharply on defeating that opponent.
From Meditatio to Disputatio and paradoxical outcomes the way we have found in earlier works. This mode of arguing without hesitation and without concession continues for the rest of the work as Anselm sets out to refute possible objections.
The Rhetoric of Refutation Jasper Hopkins's analysis of the structure of De processione divides it into Anselm's basic argument for the Latin and against the Greek view
(completed in the first chapter) followed by his defense of the Latin view in response to a series of possible objections from the Greeks, the task which occupies the remainder of the work.33 There are, however, more complex divisions in the text marked by the shifts in tone and approach to the issue. A close look at the text shows that the division between Anselm's positive statement and defenses against objections is not so clear.
Anselm considers objections (though unattributed) in chapter 1, and even though at the opening of chapter two Anselm names the Greeks, the alternation of the attribution of objections to the Greeks and simply to "someone" or voiced passively as "it is asked," continues throughout the work.34 Hopkins and Richardson's translation adds "the Greeks" to the text as the source of objections in ways that are perfectly sensible because they are specific and known to be Greek views.35 Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Anselm does not always name the Greeks as the objectors, referring explicitly to the Greeks as or more often along with the Latins where he is articulating shared views.
The second and more substantial reason for dividing the text a bit differently is to bring out the difference in the nature of the objections and Anselm's tone as he works through the arguments. The first two chapters form a unit as Anselm's basic statement of his view; the objections he articulates in these opening sections are in effect used to further his own position. So, for example, the discussion of whether the Holy Spirit is "God from God" serves as a gateway for Anselm to discuss what makes the persons both plural and distinct.36 Similarly, the objection that the Holy Spirit's procession means being "sent by" rather than
"being from" the Father allows Anselm to derive the filioque from both meanings of procession.37
Having made his argument for the filioque, Anselm then sets out in 33. Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 110–11.
34. See DPS 8, S II, 199, 7; DPS 11, S II, 206, 20; 208, 1.
35. DPS 9–10. See Anselm of Canterbury, 4 vols., edited and translated by Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1976), vol. 3, 209–12, 214.
36. DPS 2, S II, 185–87.
37. DPS 2, S II, 188, 15–189, 17.
From Meditatio to Disputatio the next section to confront the scriptural evidence. What is remarkable about these discussions (occupying five chapters or sections of the sixteen-chapter work) is how similar they are in their argumentative strategies to the nonscripture based arguments with which Anselm began.38 A favored pattern is to cite the passage, propose alternatives for its interpretation and, using the same disjunctive syllogistic form, dispose of one alternative so that only the other remains (sometimes he argues that both alternatives lead to the same conclusion that Spirit proceeds from Father and Son).39 For example, Anselm starts off with John 17:3: "But this is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent." "The only true God," Anselm goes on to argue, signifies either Father and Son together or Father or Son alone. But Father alone or Son alone has to be able to signify the "only true God" or each person would not be "perfect God" and God would be a composite of the persons.40 Anselm's other favorite strategy, also recognizable from other works, is to construct a string of phrases which are equivalent and, hence, substitutable.41 Thus Anselm argues, that when Jesus refers to the "Holy
Spirit whom the Father will send in my name," "'the Father will send in my name' means only 'the Father will send in the name of the Son.' Hence, what does 'the Father will send in the name of the Son' mean except that the Father will send as if the Son were sending, so that when the Father sends, the Son is understood to send?"42 What is unusual here is not Anselm's use of these argument forms but his use of them on scripture. This was not, we recall, how he worked with scripture in the three dialogues, works which are described by Anselm as concerned with scripture, nor is it how Augustine used scripture to support the filioque.43
38. According to some commentators, Anselm sets out to justify the filioque from scripture while Augustine does not. See Dennis K. P. Ngien, "The Filioque Clause in the Teaching of Anselm of Canterbury—Part 2," Churchman 118 (2004): 219. Cf. David Coffey, "The Holy Spirit as the Mutual
Love of the Father and the Son," Theological Studies 51 (1990): 199. The contrast stated this strongly does not hold. Augustine's position that the Holy Spirit comes from Father and Son and does quote scripture by way of introduction and explanation of this point. See Augustine, De Trinitate IV, 20,
29; V, 11, 12; 14, 15. Augustine cites some of the same passages Anselm does (John 14:26; 15:26). The difference is that Anselm cites many more scripture passages, relying very heavily on passages from the Gospel of John (15 of the 25 passages cited in chapters 3–7 and 11, those sections devoted exclusively to scriptural evidence, are from John; the remaining ten come from six other biblical sources).
39. DPS 7, S II, 199, 7–23.
40. DPS 3, S II, 190, 21–30.
41. On the method of argument by "equipollent propositions," see chapter 3.
42. DPS 4, S II, 191, 15–192, 5.
43. See Augustine, De Trinitate IV, 20, 29; V, 11, 12; 14, 15. Augustine does not attempt to analyze the reference of subject terms and pronouns as Anselm does both because his treatment is less polemical and because his approach to scripture is less narrowly grammatical and logical than Anselm's.
From Meditatio to Disputatio The context of the debate with the Greek church perhaps requires this kind of analysis since they share scripture but not its interpretation, but there is something narrow and legalistic about his approach to scripture in De processione that we have not seen in other works. Anselm analyzes these passages only in order to establish the reference of the nouns or noun phrases referring to God or the persons. His readings are intricate and precise. He argues, for example, that "the breath of his Mouth" in "the heavens were established by the word of the Lord, and by the breath of his mouth all their excellence" (Ps. 32:6) means "the Father's essence," "for His mouth is nothing other than His essence."44 Anselm makes an argument that the reference of the pronoun quis in "not anyone knows the Son except the Father" is not just human persons but any person (else the passage would not have "except the Father").45 And so on.
We can almost tot up the points Anselm is amassing as he moves through passage after passage.
There is a feel to both of these opening sections of relentlessness and almost lightning round speed as Anselm sifts through arguments and objections as quickly as he can. He, for example, immediately counters scripture passages put forward for the Greek view with others supporting the Latin view.46 The breathless quality, both in the presentation of arguments and the interpretation of scripture, only seems to abate after Anselm senses he has taken the hill and can defend from a position of strength. In the next section of the text, Anselm begins to answer more substantive and problematic objections and turns to consider the plausible rejoinders the Greeks can make to the Latin view. Thus Anselm discusses the ways in which they would defend their view against the outright absurdities into which Anselm argues it falls, and gives what he takes to be the strongest arguments and evidence they can offer in favor of their view. Thus, Anselm considers both what are the most important substantive problems with the Latin view—that it introduces gradation into the Trinity and gives the Holy Spirit two causes or sources—and the most substantive rejoinder for the Greek view—that they do not deny any role for the Son in the procession of the Spirit, but claim that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.47
Objectors argue that the filioque introduces gradation, Anselm ex-
44. DPS 5, S II, 194, 27–195, 28.
45. DPS 7, S II, 198, 2–5.
46. DPS 7, S II, 198, 6–10.
47. Gasper speculates that the notion of the Holy Spirit as per filium might correspond to a discussion in the original debate at Bari; Anselm writes "we are told" that the Greeks hold this view of the Son's role in the procession of the Holy Spirit. Athanasius may be the source of this formulation, Gasper notes. See Gasper, Anselm's Theological Inheritance, 186.
From Meditatio to Disputatio plains, because it implies that the Holy Spirit cannot exist until after the Son is begotten. What should be said instead, the objector continues, is that both exist equally from the Father, that the Son and Holy Spirit are to the Father as brightness and heat, and, hence, exist not from each other but equally from one sun.48 On the one hand, in his response Anselm upholds the analogy for the way in which it mirrors that Son and Holy
Spirit are neither "lesser nor later" than each other nor than the Father.49
On the other hand, he points out the ways in which the analogy does not hold. We do not say that "the sun exists from the sun, or that the sun and what exists from the sun are the same thing, or that the three things are one sun."50 If the sun were like the Trinity in these respects, either the heat would have to come from the brightness or vice versa because it would come from the whole (just as the Holy Spirit, who is God from God, comes from the whole God, hence from Father and Son).51 Moreover, if the Trinity did follow the pattern for sun, brightness and heat, there is no way for the Spirit to be the Son's Spirit without the Son being the Spirit's Son. But like the Roman church, the Greek church wants to affirm the former and deny the latter.52
Anselm's response to the Greek view that the Holy Spirit is through the Son is an elaborate analysis of his own analogy for the Trinity as spring, river, and lake. He first argues that the passage from which this view derives, "all things are from Him and through Him and in Him"
(Rom. 11:36), cannot be applied reflexively to the persons, else they would exist from, through, and in themselves, which is impossible.53 But Anselm then accepts the language, not as the persons being from, through and in themselves, but of Holy Spirit as being through the Son just as all things are created through the Word: "Let us see what follows if we say this and peace be between us," Anselm declares.54 Anselm thus marks how far he is willing to go to meet his opponent, to take their claim as a supposition by taking it back to his own analogy of Trinity. The springriver-lake analogy seems to support a distinction between the way in which the Holy Spirit is from the Father as opposed to the Son being from the Father, for the lake is from the river in a different way than it is from the spring. Here for the only time, Anselm has his opponent address him directly in the second person, laying out most clearly the terms of their difference: "the question between us is about the word 'procession,' which you assert to be from the Son and we deny."55
48. DPS 8, S II, 199, 25–32.
49. DPS 8, S II, 200, 6.
50. DPS 8, S II, 200, 1–12.
51. DPS 8, S II, 200, 21–25.
52. DPS 8, S II, 201, 1–9.
53. DPS 9, S II, 201, 15–202, 8.
54. DPS 9, S II, 203, 1.
55. DPS 9, S II, 203, 26–27.
From Meditatio to Disputatio Anselm undertakes a defense of the spring-river-lake analogy as supporting the Roman rather than the Greek view of the Holy Spirit's relationship to the other persons with a kind of earnest thoroughness that is out of keeping with the relative weakness of analogical arguments but completely in line with the tone of the work as a whole.56 He devotes several pages to the analysis of the analogy, deriving the conclusion that Holy Spirit is from Father and Son as the lake is from both river and stream with the same necessity as he derived it from the metaphysics of God and from scripture. Anselm first makes the same argument he made earlier without the mediation of the analogy, that you cannot have the Holy Spirit through the Son without him being from the Son. In the same way, then, through the river implies from the river, he argues.57
The most interesting argument is his attempt to distinguish the spring qua spring from the river qua river. "In the spring the water bubbles up from the depths; in the river, the spring flows down from the spring; in the lake it collects and remains."58 One is not from the other in virtue of what distinguishes it from the other two but in virtue of what is one and the same: the very same water.59 In the same way, then, Holy
Spirit is from what is common to Father and Son, deity, rather than what distinguishes them.
Anselm uses the second person in direct address once more, this time in his own voice to address the Greeks at the end of a second series of interpretations of scriptural passages. "Do you see how," he asks,
"in these [passages] I have proposed, that what he attributes as if to one [person] cannot be separated from the other two persons?"60 Anselm does not interpret the passages literally but reads them as referring to the doctrine of the Trinity.61 He cites a number of passages where Jesus refers to the Father but not the Holy Spirit; on these, Anselm argues that given the basic unity of the three persons in one God the Spirit must be inferred.62 For example, Anselm writes, "when [the Son] says, 'Who sees me sees the Father,' the Holy Spirit is not divided off, since who sees that in which the Father and Son and Holy Spirit are one cannot see one of these without the two others."63 In a similar way, Anselm argues, we
56. Anselm does refer once in De processione to the contrast between the analogy as temporal and spatial and the eternal God. See DPS 9, S II, 204.
57. DPS 9, S II, 204, 1–12.
58. DPS 9, S II, 204, 31–205, 2.
59. DPS 9, S II, 205, 2–3.
60. DPS 11, S II, 207, 21–22.
61. Nine passages are discussed, 7 from the Gospel of John, two from Matthew and only one where Jesus mentions the Spirit but not the Father (John 16:13). The passages are John 15:26, Matt.
16:17, Matt. 11:27, John 14:9, John 16:13, John 17:3, John 5:26, John 14:10–11, John 14:9.
62. DPS 11, S II, 206–9.
63. DPS 11, S II, 207, 12–15.
From Meditatio to Disputatio need to understand the Holy Spirit to proceed from Father and Son even though it is not explicitly said. Anselm knows that, both in his analysis of analogies for the Trinity and in his interpretation of scripture, his case rests on similarity. Defending himself against the claim that asserting the procession of Spirit from Father and Son is merely "to assert by our own sense what is nowhere said," Anselm proposes an alternate account of his interpretive principle: "We are taught by those things which are said to understand in a similar way in similar sayings things which are passed over in silence, especially when there is no rational contradiction in those things which are not said, where we see most clearly that a rational necessity follows."64
The last section of the work (chapters 14–16) is both a summary and an attempt to give an account of the relations between the persons in language that takes on the peculiarities of the divine metaphysics. The tension in these chapters is between the certainty with which Anselm declares his conclusion proved and the complications of divine metaphysics that make complete understanding impossible. On the one hand,
Anselm constructs a tight box—or rather triangle—forming the boundaries of trinitarian predication on all sides. From "rational" considerations, Anselm contends, he arrives at definitions based on the set of opposed relations he began with. On the other hand, in formulations somewhat reminiscent of the language of the Monologion and Proslogion,
Anselm reflects on the discontinuities between personhood in the godhead and in creatures.
In this section for the first time in the work Anselm dwells on the difficulty of grasping how Son and Holy Spirit can exist from the Father, and Holy Spirit can be principally from the Father (his concession to the Greek view) without making Son less than the Father and the Holy Spirit less than both.65 Anselm notes that procession and begottenness are just as different in God compared to creatures as is existence. Thus in God nothing is earlier or later, lesser or greater, more or less, even between the begetter and begotten, between that which proceeds and that from which it proceeds.66 The language to describe exactly how this works is extremely fine-grained: "the whole is not so much equal to and similar to and coeternal with itself as it is identical with itself and wholly sufficient unto itself through itself."67 Without some careful reading and knowledge of divine simplicity to see what distinction Anselm is actually making here, one might easily misread his claim as of the form "God
64. DPS 11, S II, 208, 5–11.
65. DPS 14, S II, 214, 5–10.
66. DPS 14, S II, 214, 7–20.
67. DPS 14, S II, 214, 16–19.
From Meditatio to Disputatio is not A but A." A shadow of the kind of language from the early works in which fine-grained distinctions were and were purposely only the tiniest hair away from contradiction is still discernible here: "For the Father is not one God and the Son another God, nor are they dissimilarly that which they are; but in that which this one is Father and that one Son this one is different from that one." And, he continues, "when we say God from God, and Son from Father, we do not understand one God from another God but the very same God from the very same God, even though we say the one from the other, i.e., the Son from the Father, construe this to mean not that one God exists from another God but that the same God exists from the same God—even though we say 'the one exists from the other,' i.e., that the Son exists from the Father."68 The language is precise, not mystical or poetic, but what it works to describe is so unlike anything else that the claims have to be pondered carefully. The tempo for the reader slows noticeably in these moments and stands in contrast to the quick pile up of arguments in the early sections. The very accuracy and care of the language is the source of its beauty as Anselm cuts the facets on the diamond with extraordinary skill, to give some sense of the peculiar nature of the Christian Trinity as, according to Burcht
Pranger, "unity achieved . . . without the suspension of otherness."69 Just as the paradox of the Incarnation reappears in a sense in the structure of Anselm's arguments, there is something trinitarian captured in the reasoning itself. For there is a sense that reasoning has remained even as it has been exceeded, that claims which seem to be only synonymous restatements are nonetheless saying something different.
Anselm concludes his treatment almost triumphantly: "Behold we see from how much truth and how much necessity it follows that the Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Son."70 It follows so necessarily from premises that are taken from the shared faith of Greek and Latin churches,
Anselm declares, that if the filioque is false, "the Christian faith is destroyed," and when it is taken as true, only other true things follow.71
The language devised to sum up the differences between the different persons following this claim of victory does not invite the same comparison to the language of the Monologion or Proslogion made above. Anselm articulates six clearly drawn distinctions, two pertaining to each person,
68. DPS 14, S II, 213, 18–24.
69. M. Burcht Pranger, "Unity and Diversity in Anselm of Canterbury," in Saint Anselm—
A Thinker for Yesterday and Today, edited by Coloman Viola and Frederick van Fleteren, Texts and Studies in Religion 90 (Lewiston, N.H.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 324.
70. DPS 14, S II, 215, 5–6.
71. DPS 14, S II, 215, 9.
From Meditatio to Disputatio one of which is exclusive to that person, one shared with one other person but not the third. The clarity and simplicity of the language, which does not have to take account of the complexity of the simple divine nature, is a series of affirmations and negations: having and not having a father, having and not having a son, having and not having a spirit which proceeds.72 The same negatives are evoked as Anselm throws his complete rhetorical weight onto the notions of relations of opposition. The persons are different because one exists from the other not vice versa;
Son exists from the Father, not Father from Son; Holy Spirit exists from the Father, not Father from Holy Spirit.73 Anselm's strategy from the beginning, when he defined the Holy Spirit as the spirit of someone, was to expand this logic of relations grounded on oppositions to the relationship between Son and Holy Spirit. So, he concludes, Holy Spirit exists from the Son, not Son from Holy Spirit.74
There is only a resolution of the tension between argumentative certainty and any residue of docta ignorantia remaining in De processione in a weak sense. If the opening section is marked by combativeness and extreme confidence in the coherence of the Latin view (he protests too much, perhaps), the final statements are somewhat less so. Anselm ends his reflections on a theme from De incarnatione: that divine and human persons are not differentiated in the same way. Anselm illustrates this point by likening the unity of three persons in the trinity to that of one point or line with another placed directly on it, and to light within light. For point, line, or light, there is no increase in quantity or plurality when one is added to another.75 In what is perhaps a final, diplomatic move, Anselm avoids saying bluntly that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Instead he concludes with a characterization of each of the persons of the Trinity in terms of characteristics that are unique to them and that they share with one other of the persons and with the godhead as a unity.
When we look at the work as a whole, its progression fits classical rhetorical models. Anselm makes his argument in the strongest terms possible in the opening section, then becomes somewhat less combative by considering and then refuting the strongest claims that might be made for the opposition. He concludes by summarizing in a strong but less confrontational mode.76 Though De processione is less extreme in its modulations, the work it most resembles in this regard is De incarnatione. De
72. DPS 16, S II, 216–17.
73. DPS 15, S II, 216, 14–19.
74. DPS 15, S II, 216, 19–22.
75. DPS 16, S II, 218, 10–14.
76. Cf. Cicero, De inventione, in De inventione. De optimo genere oratorum. Topica, translated by H.
M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), book I, xlii, 78–lv, 109, 123–61. Anselm uses many of the modes of refutation described by Cicero. Refuta-
From Meditatio to Disputatio incarnatione has more pastoral aims, while De processione brings classical rhetoric more readily to mind because of its very public and quasijuridical function. In a way what we learn from its rhetorical structure is how Anselm uses classical rhetorical forms to his own ends, a transformation we can read backwards through his corpus, seeing the rhetorical grounds of the pedagogical structuring of earlier texts.
As most readers of De processione have noted, Anselm's argument could not have done much to persuade the Greek Church and in an important way, Anselm cannot have taken that as his aim.77 His strategy is more like that of a defense lawyer, whose task is not to win over the prosecution but the jury. But there is no one to play the role of juror. Those at Bari and any larger audience for the work are already proponents for one side or the other. It could be that De processione was no more constructed to convince the Greeks than Cur Deus homo was to convince Jews and Muslims but rather to support and defend the Christian faithful. The difference is that De processione is for public purposes not private devotion. We can in this way see it as a further development of an apparently pure, neutral reason in which the goal is to make the strongest possible arguments in an abstract sense to an ideal and neutral rather than real audience. It is continuous with the project of the Proslogion, which was to show even to one unwilling to believe they cannot not understand.78 So here, Anselm's goal is to show even—in principle though not in fact—to those unwilling to grant the filioque that it must be true, else the whole of faith is false. But both in the Proslogion and in De processione, the point was not to actually convert those who are really unwilling but to give to the willing an argument that is convincing because not predicated on their willing belief. What is different is that in the earlier works, from the Proslogion to Cur Deus homo, Anselm constructed his arguments to convince the unbeliever who exists within every believer and aligned his project with the spiritual project of edifying that believer, through raising questions, awareness, and understanding. In De processione the support is institutional rather than individual and at that level tends more toward triumphalism than edification, it must be admitted. Given its use for institutional support, one can ask whether De processione's extension of the model of neutral reason represents progress or loss. tion, for Cicero, comes after the speaker has presented the basic arguments for his view and turns to consider the possible objections the opposite view can make, doing such things as presenting the most plausible grounds for the opposing view, granting it some points as a means toward a more convincing refutation.
77. See Gasper, Anselm's Theological Inheritance, 188, and Deme, Christology of Anselm, 144–45.
This despite Eadmer's claims to the contrary. See Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, II, xxxiv, 112–13.
78. Pros. 4, S I, 104, 6–7.
From Meditatio to Disputatio The same question, whether De processione represents progress or loss, could also be asked about the terminology Anselm develops and defines here. Scholars examining the development of theology from the perspective of high and late scholasticism, classify Anselm's reflection on the Trinity in the Monologion as serving personal spiritual development. This project is for them somehow less important or rigorous than the kind of formulation of clear terminology and argument to solidify and support orthodox belief in De processione. For Gemeinhardt, Anselm's reflection on the Trinity in the Monologion, insofar as it followed in the path created by Augustine's psychological analogy, "was adequate to meet the needs of the monks of the abbey of Bec who did not raise critical questions about the Trinity but simply wanted to be delighted by being taught that man was able not only to believe in God but also to recognize the inner rationale of the Trinity in himself." It was not sufficient to deal with "the main question that had arisen at the end of the eleventh century: how to speak of the unity of God while maintaining the threeness of persons."79 On this view, Anselm and theology must make a choice between "follow[ing] the grammar of everyday language and down-to-earth dialectic" (the perspective out of which Roscelin speaks) and "hav[ing] to establish linguistic usages on its own and thus detach itself from the knowledge the youth gained in the schools."80
However, Anselm always both takes the tools of grammar and dialectic into his theological works and works hard to show the ways in which those tools and that language are transformed by his subject matter, whether it is God or creatures as from God. De processione is different in being more confident and conceding less to a reader who needs to be brought along. In short, it is more professional, more the product of a distinct and independent academic discipline. While conceding that "it might not be easy to detect the mystery of the Trinity in [De processione's] formula," Gemeinhardt concludes that it is a "major step" beyond
Augustine and "more intellectually satisfying than the mostly polemical or pastoral treatises of the Fathers."81 From the perspective of later scholastic theology, this is a fair judgment. The question to which we shall return after a consideration of Anselm's last work is whether the blessings of this progress are unmixed.
79. Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics," 14–15.
80. Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics," 17.
81. Gemeinhardt, "Logic, Tradition, and Ecumenics," 24.
From Meditatio to Disputatio De concordia: Uniting Freedom and Grace De concordia opens without fanfare and we have no particular account of the occasion for its genesis. Anselm notes only that there are three questions connected to free choice, difficulties in its compatibility with foreknowledge, predestination, and grace. Measured by the text as a whole, Anselm's level of interest, and mode of approach, in each of these three problems is not equal. First, Anselm devotes different amounts of the text to each controversy; only 20 percent as much space is dedicated to predestination compared to foreknowledge and almost twice as much space to grace compared to foreknowledge (so the proportions are approximately 30 percent for foreknowledge, 10 percent for predestination, and 60 percent for grace). Second, scripture is used to varying degrees in each section. In the section on foreknowledge Anselm waits until he is half finished with his analysis to consider scripture passages, weaving in a few passages between longer discussions of the meaning of necessity and free will; the short section on predestination refers only to two passages from scripture. The discussion of grace and free choice, by contrast, begins with a series of scripture passages, one set pointing to the determining factor of grace in salvation, the other set strongly implying that salvation depends on the choices one makes.82 Part way through the discussion of grace, Anselm shifts to analogy as his mode of explanation and into hortative instead of argumentative mode, reflecting on the role of scripture and the way to interpret it. It is a mix of motifs and voices we recognize from other parts of Anselm's corpus less completely fused than in other works. Though there is no explicit statement or external evidence of it, one might easily characterize the work as incomplete not in content but in polish, in the integration of its different styles and questions.
The disproportionately long treatment of the third controversy signals Anselm's main interest, but his interest is broader than just the consistency of grace and free choice. When Anselm considered free will and the choice of evil in De libertate and De casu, he did not take up the question of what moral choice and development looks like after the fall.
It is to this question he turns in De concordia, considering not just the effect of original sin but the complications consequent on temporality, the very temporality from which De casu so carefully abstracted. This leaves him with the task of trying to understand three things: moral progress
(from good to better), moral decay (from bad to worse), and conversion
82. DCP III, 1, S II, 263–64.
From Meditatio to Disputatio (from bad to good). (De casu explored the transition from good to bad).
Moral life requires free choice, Anselm has already argued, and here the question is how to live out that moral life in time in conjunction with divine foreknowledge, predestination, and grace. Seen from this perspective, the first section on free will and foreknowledge takes up the larger context of living a moral life in time—its relationship to and consistency with eternity. Anselm's approach to the second controversy, free will and predestination, is also through the analysis of temporality and eternity.
Free choice and predestination are consistent because predestination, like foreknowledge, Anselm argues, is not something that happens before our actions but characterizes a perspective on those actions outside of time, in eternity. Grace, on the other hand, is God's interaction with free and moral beings in time, bringing up a set of issues both more complicated and requiring different approaches and evidence than foreknowledge and predestination. Hence, I turn to the first and second controversies together and then to the last and longest section of the work on grace and free choice.
Time vs. Eternity The way Anselm takes up the problem of foreknowledge and free choice is, of the three questions, most reminiscent of his earlier work.
The same fine distinctions and logically rigorous arguments we recognize from the three dialogues return. In a way that he had taken care to leave out before De conceptu, Anselm explicitly describes the logical form his argument will take; he will, he explains, assume the two things whose concurrence is argued to be impossible (foreknowledge and free will) and see if some impossibility follows from his assumption.83 His use of this form on this controversy is quick and elegant. Given a contingent act foreknown by God, we can infer that that which God foreknows is necessarily going to occur and, thus, conclude that "it is necessary that something be going to occur without necessity."84 This is not, though it sounds like it, a contradiction: "by no means to one rightly understanding is there any incompatibility between the foreknowledge from which necessity follows and the free choice from which necessity is removed, since it is necessary both that what God foreknows come to be in the future and that God foreknows something to be future without any necessity."85 The elegance comes in the way Anselm describes the coexistence of foreknowledge with freedom in a way that sounds quite close to—with-
83. DCP I, 1, S II, 245, 9–246, 7.
84. DCP I, 1, S II, 246, 9.
85. DCP I, 1, S II, 246, 10–13.
From Meditatio to Disputatio out being—a contradiction. Anselm then uses another favorite strategy, the distinction of what we say as opposed to what is really meant. In this case, what we say and what we mean are, again, near opposites. "We often say [something] is necessarily the case which no force compels and say
[something] necessarily is not the case which no prohibition prevents."86
As we shall see, these are not just cases of speaking loosely, as when we might call something very likely necessary, but cases of real necessity.
Rather Anselm is drawing attention to a deeper ambiguity in necessity and does so by describing that ambiguity as a kind of paradox.
To explain how these complex statements can be true, Anselm makes use of a distinction similar to Boethius's between antecedent and subsequent necessity.87 However, he postpones making the distinction, instead spending several long paragraphs outlining contrasts between the ways in which one and the same thing can be both necessary and not necessary. In other words, he uses necessity in its different senses before he actually explains the different senses. For example, he writes, "it is necessary that something be going to come to be without necessity."88 He continues in this vein, explaining that it is equally true that "something did exist and does exist and will exist but not out of necessity, and that all that was, is, and will be is necessary. For a thing to be past is not the same as for a past thing to be past" (and similarly for future and present).89 He returns to the original problem to state in a succinct way how necessity and contingency coexist: "In this way it is true that the sinful act that a man wills to do happens by necessity, even though the man does not will it by necessity."90 Anselm even uses the two senses to apply to human and divine willing in just the same way: "just as it is not necessary that God will what he wills, so it is not necessary in many cases that man will what he wills. And just as it is necessary that whatever God wills come to be, so that which man wills is necessary."91 Anselm adds a qualification to this parallel between divine and human wills. What man wills necessarily takes place only in that subset of cases where God has given the human will the power to make happen what it wills (subsequent necessity), and where God has willed neither to compel nor prevent the will from willing (antecedent necessity).92 But even the qualification repeats the contradictory appearance of the claims that have to be carefully parsed out to make sense.
"Why is it strange (quid mirum)," Anselm asks rhetorically after in-
86. DCP I, 2, S II, 247, 6–7.
87. DCP I, 3, S II, 250, 13–24.
88. DCP I, 1, S II, 246, 9.
89. DCP I, 2, S II, 249, 10–14.
90. DCP I, 3, S II, 251, 3–5.
91. DCP I, 3, S II, 251, 5–10.
92. DCP I, 3, S II, 3, 251.
From Meditatio to Disputatio undating the reader with these kinds of statements, "if in this way something is both from liberty and necessity?"93 Coming and going are opposites but are the same movement in different respects, he adds, as in the case of the sun, "we see that it is the same point from which it recedes and to which it approaches."94 Anselm does spend some time trying to present an account of the difference between time and eternity in order to make some sense of these apparent contradictions; for example, he makes the analogy that just as in the present, all places are encompassed, so in eternity all times are present.95 Scripture uses the past tense, describing human outcomes as "established" and "predestined," as a way of signifying eternity or the "eternal present," in which everything is simultaneously present. Nonetheless, time and eternity are so different that "something is not in time which is present in eternity and something was in time which is not past in eternity."96
Anselm uses the two senses of necessity and the contrasts between time and eternity over and over again, far more often than he explains the two senses to decipher his apparent contradictions. Many more could have been cited, and a complete survey would require transcribing most of these chapters. Why this disproportion? Understanding these statements forces the reader to bring the different senses of necessity to bear on the apparent contradictions Anselm constructs. Anselm's point seems to be to get us over the sense that there is something "strange (mirum)" about the same thing occurring both freely and necessarily, the same thing having radically different attributes in time and in eternity. It is as if we have to have this repeated in as many different ways as possible to begin to process the shift in perspective required to see how the same thing is, in different ways, free and necessary, and in time and eternity.97 But this does not quite explain the degree to which Anselm obviously courts contradiction in his terse and surprising formulations.
He clearly enjoys the paradoxical aspect of his formulations, and the op-
93. DCP I, 4, S II, 253, 1–2.
94. DCP I, 4, S II, 253, 5–8.
95. DCP I, 5, S II, 254, 13–15.
96. DCP I, 5, S II, 254, 16–18; 255, 6–10.
97. Rogers argues that Anselm's view of eternity and God as eternal is what she calls a "genuine four dimensionalism" distinct from the views of both Boethius and Augustine, who also argue it is God's eternity which prevents his knowledge of our future actions from being determinative but who only hold this view inconsistently or unclearly. Katherin Rogers, Anselm on Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176–77, 180–84. For Anselm, she explains, there are two different perspectives, our temporal one, from which only the present exists and the future is not yet, and God's eternity, from which "everything is simply 'there'" (181). Anselm is certainly more thorough in his analysis of this distinction between time and eternity and more determined to make the contrast clear. What is important in addition, however, is the way in which that thorough analysis serves, as this kind of analysis has before, both to make the concept clearer and to make clear the degree to which the divine life in this aspect as in all others is far beyond anything we can grasp clearly.
From Meditatio to Disputatio posing pairs of propositions serve as much to "make strange" the coexistence of freedom and necessity and time and eternity as to inure us to it.98
Anselm seems to be attempting, as he has from his earliest works, to induce wonder both at the degree to which what seems unintelligible in the faith can be made sense of and the degree to which that very sense can intimate that full understanding lies far beyond human capacity.
All this leads, Anselm argues, to the somewhat surprising conclusion that the necessity that is found in the will and its actions is not inconsistent with free will but that necessity is actually caused by freedom. The acts of the will are necessary in two ways. They are necessary because
"compelled by the will to be done" and because "what is being done cannot at the same time not be done." However, Anselm continues, "free will causes (facit) these two necessities, which it can avoid before they occur."99 Thus, elements that seemed inconsistent are not just compatible but require each other for consistency. Anselm, as he often does, proves more than he has to. In this way, he emphasizes, again, the superintelligibility of that which is believed—that it makes even more sense than we might imagine and that we have not begun to probe its depths.
The problem that remains, however, is whether God's foreknowledge or knowledge "is from things or whether things have their existence from his knowledge."100 Both answers are problematic. If the former, their existence does not derive from God, and if the latter, "God is the maker and author of evil works and hence does not punish the evil justly."101 Anselm refers readers to De casu and De conceptu, repeating that injustice is nothing and, hence, not caused by God. He adds a distinction not found in earlier works. God causes injustice in a certain sense: he causes what it is, but not that it is.102 That is, God causes all actions and movements "because he causes the things by which, from which, through which, and in which they are made."103 The will, like a sword or tongue, is what it is as created by God, whether used for good or ill. Though the will is "that in virtue of which a substance or action is called just or unjust," the will itself is not anything more or less essentially whether it acts justly or not. 104 Thus
God causes what the acts are which follow from the will in terms of their essence, but causes the goodness of good act, not the evil of evil acts.
Anselm also makes reference to the distinction between the good of 98. The phrase "make strange" from Russian formalism is used advisedly to describe Anselm's strategy here. His aim, like that of the formalists, that is, is to undermine any uncritical and passive acceptance of notions without thinking them through.
99. DCP I, 3, S II, 251, 23–28.
100. DCP 1, 7, S II, 257, 29–30.
101. DCP I, 7, S II, 257, 31–258, 4.
102. DCP I, 7, S II, 259, 6–10.
103. DCP I, 7, S II, 259, 2–4.
104. DCP I, 7, S II, 259, 5–6; 12–14.
From Meditatio to Disputatio justice and the good of benefit from De casu. The evil of disadvantage or harm, is in some cases (like pain) something, and in some cases, nothing
(like blindness). However, in De concordia, Anselm adds that God causes harms that are something. Anselm first quotes Isaiah on God "who causes peace and creates evil" (Is. 45:7). He then explains, God "creates harms by means of which he disciplines and purifies the just and punishes the unjust."105 This seems at first to be a different view of evil than that expressed in De casu, where Anselm claimed that the evils which are nothing (injustice, blindness) "are followed by" many disadvantages which are evil and which are something.106
The contexts of the two sets of remarks are a bit different. In De casu, Anselm was attempting to explain why we fear evil if it is nothing. He notes that there is some basis for those fears by conceding that there is a sense in which some evils are something. There his focus was that there are real things that people suffer from. Blindness may be nothing, an absence, but its consequences for the blind person are not nothing; similarly for injustice. In De concordia, by contrast, Anselm is concerned with God as cause of everything and God's care as providential, purifying, and punishing. In both places Anselm asserts a three-part division of evil: the evil of injustice (opposed to the good of justice), which is nothing; the evil of disadvantage (opposed to the good of benefit), which is subdivided into evils that are nothing (e.g., blindness) and evils that are something (e.g., pain).107
What is unclear is how or whether to put this division of evil together with Anselm's claim that God causes the evil that is something. Anselm says only, "when this evil is something, we do not deny that God causes it."108
I think this requires more clarification than Anselm provides. Does he mean that God causes blindness in a different way than he causes pain, as punishing or purifying? If we group together things which are something
(whether things like good deeds or evils that are something, like pain) as opposed to things that are nothing (like evil deeds and blindness), then we could read Anselm as claiming that God causes only what blindness is but both what and that pain is. He might be able to make metaphysical sense out of such a distinction but it would be difficult to make moral sense out of it. If one is part of God's providential plan, then both are.
However, it is clear from the context that Anselm's real interest in De concordia is saving God's moral goodness along with his omnipotence.
Anselm is willing to say that God causes natural evil and the subsequent suffering from it as part of his providential plan, just as Augustine, Bo-
105. DCP I, 7, S II, 258, 25–27.
106. DCD 26, S I, 274, 13–15.
107. DCD 26, S I, 274, 8–15.
108. DCP I, 7, S II, 258, 24–26.
From Meditatio to Disputatio ethius and others argued. Hence, God's moral goodness is consistent with God causing (even if only in the sense of allowing) suffering (the evils of disadvantage). Anselm does not add further clarification for God's role in evils like blindness or pain, but turns to the more problematic case, his role in the evils of injustice. Only for the evils of injustice does Anselm distinguish between God's causal role in what vs. that they are.
The view that God causes only what but not that there are evil deeds but causes both what and that there are good deeds itself raises difficult questions, Anselm notes. How does God cause good things only by his goodness and cause evil things only through the fault of man or devil?
"What [role] does God have in evil things without having blame and man have in good works that is praiseworthy, so that the good deeds of men are clearly seen to be imputed to God and the evil ones to man?"109 These questions remain outstanding from the three dialogues. They were not really answered at the Council of Orange in the rejection of SemiPelagianism. The council asserted that human beings do their own will when they act wrongly but that it is by God's grace that they are able to perform good actions.110 This is a troubling asymmetry and Anselm gives only cursory treatment to the second controversy (between free choice and predestination) in order to get to it.
In the disproportionately short second section, Anselm uses the same arguments for foreknowledge he did for predestination. Like foreknowledge, Anselm argues, it is not really predestination since everything is present to God at once, not earlier or later.111 And just as free will and foreknowledge go together with God foreknowing that a free act will take place, so nothing is predestined "except as it is in foreknowledge," occurring only with the "necessity which succeeds" not that which "precedes" a thing.112
Reusing these arguments mutatis mutandis for predestination masks some of the differences between the challenges predestination as opposed to foreknowledge poses for free choice. For saying that God predestines is active, that God causes things to be or not, while saying that God foreknows seems, at least, more passive. Anselm puts off until the last section the deeper difficulty in this problem. All he says at this point is that when God predestines, he causes "not by constraining or restraining the will but by leaving the will to its own power." "Although,
109. DCP I, 7, S II, 259.
110. The Council of Orange, canons 15, 20, 23, in vol. 8 of Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, edited by Joannes Dominicus Mansi (Paris: H. Welter, 1901; repr. Venetiis: Apud Antonium Zatta, 1762), 715–16. See the next section for Anselm's answer to these questions and its relationship both to Pelagianism and Augustine. Cf. Augustine's similar language, Opus imperfecta contra Julianum, 5, 57.
111. DCP II, 3, S II, 262, 10–11.
112. DCP II, 3, S II, 262, 9–12.
From Meditatio to Disputatio however, the will uses its own power," he continues, "it does nothing which God does not cause in good works by his grace, in evil works not through his but through the will's own fault."113
Free Choice and Grace: God's Role in Human Action in and over Time The third controversy (grace and free will) opens with a sic et non of competing scripture passages, one set asserting the need for and complete reliance on grace, another set declaring human free choice in the exhortation to choose rightly and in the scolding when one does not.
"Since in sacred scripture we find certain [passages] which seem to favor grace alone and certain [passages] which are thought to establish free choice alone, without grace," Anselm explains, some "arrogant (superbi)" people have opted for free choice alone, others giving up on the idea of freedom in order to make room for grace.114 His task will be, then to show that free will and grace coexist and cooperate. Anselm's path to this conclusion is to show, first, that salvation requires righteousness.
If, further, righteousness requires grace as well as free choice, he will have shown not just the compatibility but mutual dependence of grace and free choice for salvation. Thus, his argument is a kind of triangle; he joins two sides, free choice and justice, and then forms the third side of the triangle, joining justice and grace. If justice requires both grace and free choice, then grace and free choice require each other.
Anselm makes this connection by arguing that right willing, acting justly, is a result of having a just will, not the other way around.115 The move here is significant, first, because it allows Anselm to argue that justice cannot be acquired by our own acts and so must be a gift that can only come from God.116 Thus, Anselm concludes, free will requires grace because righteousness cannot be had unless, first, it is given by God (and so, is grace) and, second, is kept by free choice.117 This, of course, is exactly the account Anselm gave in De casu diaboli and he follows it with a repetition of the same Pauline passage so important to Augustine and around which De casu's account was built: "What do you have that you have not received?" (1 Cor. 4:7).118 Here for the first time, Anselm adds the ending of the verse: "And if you received it, why do you glory in it as if you have not received it?"119 It is fitting that he adds it here, as it describes the already fallen state, which is the work's topic.
113. DCP II, 3, S II, 262, 4–7.
114. DCP III, 1, S II, 264, 6–10.
115. DCP III, 3, S II, 265, 26–266, 7.
116. DCP III, 3, S II, 266, 13–16.
117. DCP III, 3, S II, 266.
118. For a discussion of this passage and its importance for Augustine and Anselm, see chapter
5, 180, 211–13.
119. DCP III, 3, S II, 267, 4–5.
From Meditatio to Disputatio The substance of the claim that one can only will justice if one has justice touches on two important issues. First, there is the chicken and egg problem of moral development: which comes first, just acts or justice?
Does performing just acts make you just or do you perform just acts because you are just? Anselm's answer is decisive and is the same answer he gave in De casu: just acts flow from already having justice; you can only will justly if you have justice.120 For Anselm this is a question about grace, about not being able to give oneself what one does not already have. We cannot, he concludes with Augustine against Pelagius, give yourself virtue or in any way acquire it by your own power. Or, to put it another way, any power by which you acquire it is received. Second, there is the question of the relationship of justice and just willing. Having justice is for Anselm willing rightly, willing justice for its own sake. No one has justice unless they will it and no one wills it unless they have it. This is Anselm's point in De veritate when he writes, "We have righteousness only by willing it; and by the very act of willing it we have it."121 This is not a contradiction to the claim in De concordia that one can only will justice if one already has justice. Rather, De veritate argues that even though having and willing justice are simultaneous and, in a way, logically entail one another, "receiving this righteousness is by nature prior to having it or willing it—since having it or willing it is not the cause of receiving it but receiving causes (facit) both having and willing it."122 In De casu diaboli, we recall,
Anselm argued that had the angels willed to keep righteousness only out of fear, instead of willing righteousness for its own sake, their act would have been without merit.123 Thus doing the right thing but for the wrong reason is without moral value for Anselm, as it was for Augustine.124
That one cannot give oneself justice, that it must be given as a gift reveals that Anselm and Augustine have a truly different morality than that of the pre-Christian philosophers. Anselm seems aware of this, chiding both those who, as a consequence of biblical teachings on grace, abandon free will, and those (whom he describes as "arrogant") who simply think virtue is a matter of choice. On the arrogance of those who credit themselves with their virtue, Anselm is echoing Augustine. In the Confessions, Augustine complains of the Platonists' pride and lack of recognition of whatever virtue they have as received, citing again first Cor-
120. DCP III, 3, S II, 266.
121. DV 12, S I, 194, 26; 195, 8–9.
122. DV 12, S I, 195, 18–20.
123. DCD 23, S I, 270, 6–13. See chapter 5, section c, for my discussion of this passage.
124. For Augustine on this point see his analogy between the person who acts for the wrong reason as like the runner running hard but on the wrong track. Enarrationes in Psalmos 31, 2, 4. I am grateful to Sarah Byers for this reference.
From Meditatio to Disputatio inthians' question, "What do you have that you have not received?"125 In a sermon dedicated to the discussion of the Epicurean and Stoic views of happiness and virtue, Augustine asks the Stoic sage, where did you get the virtue you admire so much and see as the source of happiness? The true source of happiness is not one's own virtue, Augustine replies, but the source is "the one who has given you virtue, who has inspired you to desire it, and granted you the capacity for it."126
Nonetheless, even given this important solidarity with Augustine's sense of the arrogance and falsehood of the claim that human beings are the authors of their own moral excellence and agreement with the strongly intension based character of moral action, Anselm has mapped out a different way of avoiding Pelagianism than Augustine. Much ink has been spilled on the relationship between grace and free will in Augustine, and this issue cannot be explored in depth here. Nonetheless, most scholars of Augustine agree that for Augustine grace is irresistible.127 However, Anselm argues, as we saw in De casu and as is repeated in De concordia, that God gives the gift of righteousness but that human beings can choose to abandon it. Thus for Anselm though freedom per se
125. Augustine, Confessions VII, 9 and 21.
126. Augustine, Sermo 150, 348. 3. I am grateful to Paul Kolbet for this reference.
127. Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111–12. Harrison notes that in some contexts Augustine "seems to allow room for man's response to God's acts of grace, in acceptance, co-operation, or love" Nonetheless, she concludes, "these arguments do nothing to mitigate Augustine's insistence on what we might call the seemingly 'irresistible' nature of the operation of divine grace. There are indeed passages which clearly state that it is God who effects in men's hearts the movements of their wills so that He can bring about through them what he wanted to accomplish Himself (Gr. et lib. arb., 42) and that the will is powerless to stop God doing what he wants (Corrept. 45); that divine grace works 'indeclinabiliter et insuperabiliter' (Corrept. 38)." Cf. James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8. Wetzel, like Harrison, but more extensively, defends
Augustine and rejects the Pelagian libertarian position as incoherent, while O'Daly and Rist are more critical of Augustine. See James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 216, 220–22, Gerard
O'Daly, "Predestination and Freedom in Augustine's Ethics," in The Philosophy of Christianity, edited by Godfrey Vesey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 85–97, and John M. Rist, "Augustine on Free Will and Predestination," in Augustine: A Collections of Critical Essays, edited by R. A.
Markus (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 218–52, esp. 229–34 (reprint, Journal of Theological Studies 20 [1969]: 429–35). Rist seems to hold the same view of Augustine's position in his more recent
Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) but his discussion is less pointed and criticism more diffuse. See Eugène Portalié, A Guide to the Thought of Saint
Augustine, translated by Ralph J. Bastran (Chicago: Regnery, 1960), 196–98, 223–29, for an attempt to defend both free choice in a libertarian sense and necessarily efficacious grace in Augustine. Cf.
Eleanore Stump, "Augustine on Free Will," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–47; Stump tries to give an account based in Augustine which preserves a kind of autonomy for the will, but even if this were a plausible account of Augustine (and there is reason to be skeptical), it surely does not seem to be the path taken by Anselm.
See also the attempt to apply Stump's view to Anselm in Stan Tyvoll, "An Anselmian-Quiescence
Approach to the Problem of Grace and Merit," Budhi 3 (2004): 35–58.
From Meditatio to Disputatio does not involve the choice between alternatives, for creatures, in order that an action be a se (which is required for moral responsibility), it must involve the choice to keep or abandon righteousness. Thus for Anselm that choice cannot be engineered by God to its inevitable outcome.128
In this Anselm is like those Wetzel characterizes as Augustine's more "philosophically minded" interpreters who are bothered by the notion of irresistible grace because it annuls any human contribution and, therefore, makes moral responsibility impossible.129
What is surprising about De concordia is how little it adds to De casu.
What one expects in De concordia is an account of how choice and the need for grace are qualitatively different after the fall. But Anselm does not describe the grace required for fallen man any differently than he described the grace given to Adam and to Satan; the gift of righteousness and the choice, to keep or to fail to keep righteousness, is the same situation with which they were confronted. While, again, Augustine's view of the precise differences between prelapsarian and fallen humanity are much debated, it is perhaps uncontroversial to say that Augustine asserts that there is a profound change in fallen man, a corruption and weakness which afflict him which did not afflict Adam.130 After the fall, because of the corruption brought about by original sin, God's grace operates through the direct gift of grace, preparation of the will to accept it, and in the construction of the circumstances of choice.131
Anselm certainly takes account of the consequences of the fall, arguing, as he did in Cur Deus homo, that lacking justice as well as the abil128. Cf. Kane, Anselm's Doctrine of Freedom and the Will, 181–88, and Rogers, Anselm on Freedom,
30–54; 77–78, who contrast Anselm with Augustine on this point in similar terms.
129. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 8–9.
130. See Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 79–82, Rist, Augustine, 128–32, and "Augustine on Free Will and Predestination," 229–34, on the different moral positions of Adam vs. fallen humanity. Rogers argues, however, that these distinctions do not mean that Augustine holds libertarian freedom for Adam in contrast to fallen man; he is, she argues, consistently compatibilist before and after the fall. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 43–52.
131. See, for example, Augustine, De spiritu et littera, 34, 60. However, besides describing the way in which God prepares the will internally and externally, the same passage also proposes that assenting or dissenting to God's invitation is a matter of free choice and that the receiving and having in some sense come from the one who receives. This, of course, is exactly the path taken by Anselm, as noted in chapter 5. Augustine reverts unambiguously to his more standard view that assent or consent is a gift given by God that cannot be rejected. Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum 13. Stump,
"Augustine on Free Will," 137–38. See also Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue 201–2, 206–7, 216–
18, and Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth, 112. Wetzel and Harrison argue that this does not mean that God is manipulating circumstances in such a way as to make puppets of human beings but freeing human beings from the bondage of the distortions of affect and intellect consequent to the fall.
Rist, even though he describes human beings as "puppets" in an early essay quite critical of Augustine, defends to some degree divine intervention as making freedom once again possible. See Rist,
Augustine, 134–35, and the earlier essay, Rist, "Augustine on Free Will," 229, 235.
From Meditatio to Disputatio ity to acquire and even to understand justice are the results of sin and, hence, do not excuse the lack of justice but are themselves "reckoned as sin."132 Moreover, he adds, the appetites and impulses toward concupiscence and anger, which are the consequences of sin, are also "reckoned as sin."133 However, Anselm explains the role and need for grace in fallen man without ever moving, as Augustine does, to revise his account of free choice as fundamentally changed or damaged after the fall.134 Anselm notes that grace assists in so many ways after the giving of righteousness he cannot even name them; however, when he attempts to expand on this, he returns to the same narrative: one can only keep righteousness by willing it, but one can only will it if one has it and cannot have it except by grace. Hence, he concludes, "no one keeps [uprightness] except by this same grace following . . . for free choice has and keeps
[uprightness] only by prevenient and subsequent grace."135 There is no further account of the role of subsequent grace than this account of receiving, willing, and keeping righteousness, thus his claim seems to be that grace follows in the sense that were it not for grace, there would be no righteousness to be kept. He does describe a bit later a somewhat expanded role to grace as strengthening the affection for justice and lessening the appeal of vice, assisting "free choice to receive or keep uprightness," but he does so in a context which reasserts the possibility of refusal of grace.136 Grace fails to follow grace, fails to bestow more gifts beyond the gift of righteousness, only when free choice "by willing something else deserts the uprightness it has received."137 Thus Anselm does not in any way imply the irresistibility of grace, as Augustine sometimes does.
Anselm's analogies for explaining the coexistence and cooperation of free will and grace soften the edges but not the substance of his differences with Augustine. Anselm describes the situation of fallen human kind as like a naked man who is unable by himself to obtain clothing: if he remains naked or if he were to throw away clothes given to him, he would be responsible for his nakedness. But if he is given clothes, his being clothed is due to the one who gave it. Thus Anselm can support the formulation of Augustine and the Council of Orange, that good deeds are attributed to God and evil ones to man. God does not just give the clothing but also provides "the ability to keep and to use it." Nonetheless, Anselm maintains unambiguously (unlike Augustine) that the
132. DCP III, 7, S II, 273, 17–23. Cf. CDH I, 24, S II, 92, 9–93, 2.
133. DCP III, 7, S II, 274, 3–9.
134. Augustine, Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, VI, 11, 12, and 14.
135. DCP III, 4, S II, 267, 15–16.
136. DCP III, 4, S II, 268, 1–12.
137. DCP III, 4, 268, 2–3.
From Meditatio to Disputatio naked person "has the ability to use or not to use the clothing he has received," leaving to human choice the possibility of rejection.138 Anselm concludes that when scripture speaks of grace alone, free choice is not ruled out and, conversely, when it attributes salvation to free will alone, grace must not be understood as excluded. Just as "no understanding can exclude either mother or father from the generation of offspring," he argues, so salvation is impossible without both grace and free will.139
The same view is supported by a longer analogy of the development of faith and righteousness to the growth of seeds. Without the right seeds and cultivation, the human heart does not make progress toward salvation, Anselm begins by saying. That seed is the word of God, which makes willing rightly possible because one must know what to will to will rightly. The conception of what to will is not, however, a sufficient but a necessary condition of faith and requires in addition right willing.140 The sending, preaching, hearing, and understanding of the word of God are all grace, Anselm explains, but "are nothing unless the will wills what the mind understands," and the will can will rightly only if it has received righteousness, "willing rightly when it wills what it ought."141 Righteousness (rectitudo) is the "growth" of the seed of preaching, without which the planting and watering have no issue. In other words, knowledge of what to will is not enough; the will must receive and do righteousness. One expects the analogy to work the other way, with the grace of received rectitude as the seed coaxed into growth by the word and its preachers, but it is clear why Anselm draws it the other way. First, it makes more sense on scriptural grounds. Anselm is alluding to the parable of the seeds being scattered on dry, rocky, or shallow vs. fertile soil and he refers to Paul's use of the same metaphor (1 Cor. 3:6–9), describing his own work as planter but God's as giving growth.142 Second, it makes logical sense. The growth of the seed is where the significant agency is, and Anselm wants to stress both that having an upright will is key, not mere knowledge, not just knowledge of the mind but the heart—this is what makes the fertile soil for the seed of the gospel. And the fertile soil is the coproduct of God's gift of righteousness and the receiving and accepting of that gift.
138. DCP III, 5, S II, 269, 15–18.
139. DCP III, 5, S II, 270, 5–9. Anselm says that offspring are not produced "unless through" the mother (nisi per) and "not without" a father (non . . . sine) (DCP III, 5, S II, 270, 6) and the distinction seems to imply unequal—though equally necessary—roles. He does not elaborate further, but the most obvious way of taking it is that the mother is a means while the father is active cause; hence, analogously, free choice is the means through which salvation takes place but grace its active cause. This way of talking allows him to put the emphasis on grace as more significant but leaves in tact the notion of free choice as able to reject and accept a se.
140. DCP III, 6, S II, 271, 5–8.
141. DCP III, 6, S II, 271, 11–16.
142. DCP III, 6, S II, 270, 21–24.
From Meditatio to Disputatio In this passage Anselm strikes another important Augustinian chord: the relationship between grace and freedom in the genesis of faith. Does
God cause belief or is there some action on the part of the believer to accept the invitation to believe? Augustine writes that he erred in thinking that "the gospel having been preached to us that we might consent is proper to us and be judged to come to us from ourselves."143 That some believe and others do not, he made clear in later writings, is not due to their merit in believing (or vice versa) but rather to the fact that God has prepared the will of some but not others.
Anselm takes up this problematic and one of its most important scriptural touchstones, Paul's notion that "faith comes by hearing" but interprets it according to his own account of the harmony of grace and freedom. While Augustine emphasizes God's setting into motion on every level the movement toward belief, Anselm carefully lays out God's role in giving the word and sending its preachers but comes back to the notion that none of this means anything without willing rightly. Willing rightly requires righteousness, which must be accepta, meaning both offered by God and accepted by the human being, as Anselm made clear in De casu diaboli. "Hence," Anselm concludes, "we have shown, I think, how it is not superfluous to invite men to faith in Christ and to what faith demands even though not all will accept (suscipiant) this invitation."144 On the one hand, like Augustine, Anselm argues that faith in what is preached in the scriptures is not an autonomous human response to that which is heard and the will must be ready to receive this truth, a readiness which is itself a gift of grace. On the other hand, the gift on which faith depends, righteousness, human beings must freely decide to keep or reject.
This elaborate analogy of seeds and their cultivation to grace and free will is an answer to the question of why scripture "invites free choice to right willing and acting" and "blames disobedience" when "no one can have or receive (accipere) righteousness unless grace gives it."145 Having just concluded that scripture never means to exclude either grace or free choice as necessary for salvation, Anselm offers the analogy as a way
143. Augustine, De praedestinatione sanctorum, 3 (7). Augustine quotes in this context the same error described in the Retractationes (1, 22, 2–4). It is the same discussion in the text quoted in chapter 5, discussing Augustine's reflections on "what do you have that you have not received?"
In this passage, Augustine credits the Pauline question with showing him the error of thinking that belief somehow arises before God's grace and that grace is given to those who first meritoriously believe. Cf. Augustine, De spiritu and littera, 34, 60. In this passage Augustine describes God as bringing about faith through the exhortations of the gospel, among the other ways God creates the conditions for faith. The ambiguity of the passage is that Augustine, even as he asserts God's role in making us will and want what we will and want, also refers to the assent or acceptance of God's gift as accruing to the believer.
144. DCP III, 6, S II, 273, 4–6.
145. DCP III, 6, S II, 270, 11–14.
From Meditatio to Disputatio to begin answering how scripture can exhort human beings to do something they do not have in their power.146 This is a question about both whether preachers should bother to preach and whether scripture unfairly blames human beings for not having what God failed to give. When
Anselm turns, then, to interpret scripture on the basis of his analysis of the seed and its growth, it is to show that the passages imply (even if it is not stated explicitly) that the seed of preaching will not germinate without God turning the will and that righteousness is not given unless by these seeds.147 He understands as necessarily implied by these texts what he has just argued for logically, the requirement of both grace and freedom, both the proposing of faith in the gospel as well as the gift of righteousness.
Anselm has already noted that God gives righteousness neither to all nor on the basis of "antecedent merit."148 In this, Anselm follows the Augustinian and orthodox position. Anselm could, however, have rejected the notion of antecedent merit without holding that God did not give grace to all.149 For since Anselm holds that faith or keeping righteousness for its own sake is a response to grace already given (the gift of righteousness) that one freely chooses to keep or not, he could explain the lack of universal conversion and salvation as the rejection on the part of some of that grace without lapsing into Pelagianism and making salvation depend on nature without grace. One could go even further and make the case that Anselm does not completely reject the view that God offers salvation to all. In De casu Anselm argued painstakingly that the devil did not receive not because God did not give, but that God did not give because the devil did not receive. Thus Anselm could assent to the claim that God does not give grace to all but hold that this is because he does not give to those who do not accept or receive.150 There is even a passage in De concor146. In this context, Anselm offers what seems to be an aside on how to interpret scripture more generally. Anselm argues that scripture contains all that is necessary for salvation but that if something is obtained "by reasoning (ratione)" which is not contradicted by scripture, then it is
"accepted by its authority." Since scripture "opposes no truth and favors no falsity," its nondenial of a claim is effectively support, Anselm argues (DCP III, 6, S II, 271, 28–272, 7).
147. DCP III, 6, S II, 272, 8–27. The passage Anselm is interpreting is from Isaiah (1:19): "if you are willing and hearken unto me." What must be supplied that is not explicitly stated is that willing in question is upright willing—words alone will not bear fruit without righteousness and righteousness is impossible without the words of scripture, which reveal what uprightness is (DCP III, 6, S
II, 272, 9).
148. DCP III, 3, S II, 266, 24–26.
149. Rogers, Anselm on Freedom, 141–45.
150. Augustine flirts with but then rejects a similar move. In Letter 102, 14–15, Augustine argues that perhaps Christ willed to reveal himself (directly or through preaching of his word) to those he foreknew would believe and did not reveal himself to those he foreknew would not believe. He rejects this suggestion in the Retractationes (2, 31, 57), contending that his claim then, that salvation was never lacking to anyone who was worthy of it, did not mean "worthy" in the sense of meriting salvation but in the sense of being part of God's plan and receiving God's grace. Anselm
From Meditatio to Disputatio dia that seems to suggest this: "Grace so follows its own gift that it never fails in its giving . . . unless free choice by willing something else deserts the uprightness it has received."151 This is a view, then, not just consistent with Anselm's view on grace and freedom, but in a way is its logical conclusion. Why Anselm did not make draw this conclusion is unclear. It likely represented a bigger break with Augustine and tradition than he was able to make at the time. Abelard, who later did suggest that God offers grace to everyone, still did so in such a way as to leave to human beings before receiving grace the choice to accept or reject. In other words,
Abelard makes grace universal by taking what at least appears to be a Pelagian position.152 This Anselm is not willing to do or even appear to do.
Though the bulk of Anselm's discussion focuses on the basic choice to keep (or fail to keep) righteousness, there are a number of passages that in different ways consider moral development over time. Anselm asserts the possibility of moral growth, an increase of righteousness as a result of choice and action, first, as a kind of concession in the midst of his argument that one must have righteousness to will righteously. He writes somewhat cryptically, "I do not deny that an upright will wills an uprightness which it does not yet have when it wills more uprightness than it has."153 The claim seems to be that once in possession of an upright will, having chosen to keep the righteousness given by God, one can by more righteous choices increase the uprightness of one's will. If, subsequently, the will chooses to keep righteousness, then it "merits" an additional increment of received justice or "the power of good will." These are what Anselm calls the "fruits of the first grace."154 Anselm seems to mean that the choice to keep righteousness is maintained only because of this subsequent grace given as a result of the first choice that strengthens perseverance against future temptations and assaults.155 Anselm also observes that having an upright will, willing to keep justice for its own sake, makes one just but that eternal life requires more. It requires can argue for the universal availability of grace and still avoid Pelagianism, as Augustine seems to think he cannot, by maintaining that grace precedes belief but that since grace is not irresistible, one can avoid both the conclusion that salvation is merited and that it is (contrary to revelation and experience) universal.
151. DCP III, 4, S II, 268, 1–3.
152. See Rogers, 142–43, for her speculation on why Anselm did not take the position that grace is offered to all. She takes Abelard's position to be Pelagian, which is a matter of some debate.
What is not debated is that Abelard was taken as holding a Pelagian postion. In the list of Abelard's heresies is the view "that free choice alone (per se) suffices for some good." See John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 326, n. 4, and Constant
Mews, "The List of Heresies Imputed to Abelard," Revue bénédictine 95 (1985): 109.
153. DCP III, 3, S II, 266, 4–5.
154. DCP III, 3, S II, 266, 26–267, 1.
155. DCP III, 4, S II, 268, 7–12.
From Meditatio to Disputatio being just "without any injustice." The example he gives of someone who is just but lacks complete justice is someone who is chaste but envious.156
In Cur Deus homo Anselm also makes the claim that happiness "befit[s] no one except him in whom justice is so pure that there is no injustice in him."157 However, in Cur Deus homo, he is discussing the necessity for the Incarnation, not, as he is in De concordia, the necessity of coming to possess all the virtues in order to be unqualifiedly just and, therefore, worthy of happiness. Anselm shelves more discussion of how to become
"free of any injustice," noting only that "it is possible only through holy pursuits [studia] and the grace of God."158
The picture we get of the path of moral development for Anselm from these passages is of slow, halting progress. Tiny steps forward are made possible only with strong support, and only move one asymptotically toward complete or pure justice. Though justice strengthens over time, it does so mostly through increased support.
The path of moral corruption has a radically different shape: that of a straight and swift plunge into the abyss. After one "freely (sponte) falls in voluntary sin," Anselm writes, "one can in no way rise again unless lifted up by grace but is submerged by one's own merit from sin to sin into the bottomless abyss of sin, a depth without measure, unless held back by mercy."159 A bit further on in the text when he has shifted back to more technical analysis of the two inclinations (affectiones), the will for happiness (beatitudinem) and for justice, Anselm's describes the psychological mechanisms leading to this descent. After the desertion of justice, the will for what is beneficial remains while true happiness (beautitudinem) is lost. The result is the inability to achieve what one desires and a turn to false benefits—those things that are true benefits for animals but not human beings. This condition of the will "fervent with desire for benefits
(commodorum) which it is not able not to will" but unable to achieve is a recipe for the most complete and insurmountable unhappiness.160 In Cur
Deus homo Anselm likened this condition to that of falling into a pit one is unable to climb out of. Here he makes clear that fallen, sinful human beings live in the frustration of never getting what they want; they keep pursuing more and more of that which is a woefully inadequate substitute for the true good they truly want. It is a psychologically sophisticated picture of the path of sin, a similar structure to repression in Freud— turning with an ever greater appetite to an unsatisfying substitute for what one truly desires—but with an inverted genesis. For Anselm the
156. DCP III, 4, S II 268, 18–19.
157. CDH I, 24, S II, 93, 7–9.
158. DCP III, 4, S II, 268, 23–25.
159. DCP III, 8, S II, 275, 11–14.
160. DCP III, 13, S II, 286, 9–27.
From Meditatio to Disputatio path of sensuality is a repression of the desire for God rather than vice versa. It is clear, then, that there is no path out of this hole without grace restoring the will for righteousness and taking away the sin of the consequences of the fall (though not the consequences themselves).161 But it is also clear that Anselm maintains his position that human beings abandon righteousness (given by grace) not because they lack the ability to keep it but because they fail to will it.162 The onus but also in some sense the merit remains with human beings.
Anselm inserts a brief and counterfactual account of an alternative narrative for the path of moral progress that comes closer to mirroring that of moral corruption. It comes as part of the explanation for why the "penalty for sin" remains in this life, even though the sin itself is blotted out by baptism. If those choosing justice for its own sake were immediately transformed, there would be no room for faith and hope,
Anselm argues. For if "human beings were to see those who were converted to Christ pass immediately into incorruptibility, none would be able to so much as will to take himself away from such beatitude as he would see."163 Then the path to righteousness would have the same shape as the path toward corruption, an immediate and complete ascent. The problem is that seeing clearly and immediately the effects of conversion would take away the merit of those who saw it because they would know of this beatitude by "experience (experimentum)" rather than "faith," Anselm argues.164 The point is not that merit comes because of a kind of ignorance—from not knowing that the path to beatitude lies in willing justice over benefit, but rather that to will justice in order to get benefit is not a meritorious choice. The faith rather than experience of beatitude Anselm speaks of in De concordia is a reference to the faith that in choosing justice over benefit, death over lying, one believes and hopes for beatitude but that this is not the reason for that choice. What one chooses, justice for its own sake, is also the reward in which one believes and for which one hopes: the coming of the kingdom of God.
It is interesting that in this last work Anselm uses the term "kingdom of God" several times, a term used fairly infrequently in his speculative writings and more commonly in the letters.165 The context in the letters
161. DCP III, 8, S II, 274, 22–275, 2.
162. DCP III, 10, S II, 278, 22–24.
163. DCP III, 9, S II, 276, 13–15; cf. DLA 9, S I, 221, 26–29.
164. DCP III, 9, S II, 277, 3–5.
165. DCP III, 9, S II, 276, 12–277, 2, 8. A computerized search of Anselm's writings shows only nine uses of regnum dei (and grammatical variants) in the treatises as opposed to forty-nine in the letters. Conversely, even given the greater number of pages of the letters, beatitudo and its variants is much more frequent in the treatises, occurring sixty-six times in them, as opposed to twenty-six times in the letters.
From Meditatio to Disputatio is specifically eschatological—contrasting Eden with hell or the kingdom of God to come—language not common in treatises. The more common term in the treatises, beatitudo, is less specifically temporal. The notion of the kingdom of God (and the related term that is also used in the same chapter of De concordia, "the heavenly kingdom") makes an allusion not just to the end times but also to justice, to the just reign of God.166 The emphasis is on deserving happiness, as Anselm refers several times to the need to merit the promised happiness.167 Like in the Gorgias myth of the afterlife, the point of reward after death is that the choice of justice should be recognized in a just universe, that there should be a world in which justice reigns, not that justice itself needs or must have a reward other than itself. And, as Anselm has made clear several times, justice must be chosen for its own sake in order for it to be meritorious.
Anselm, then, places the life in which human beings now find themselves as different from these two precipitous narratives, straight up to incorruptibility or down into inextricable depravity. Human beings are neither consigned to the torments of hell but also are not simply delivered into the kingdom of God. This alternative is presented as merciful, for God delays the transformation of the blessed so that more may be born and more may merit beatitude. But it is also just, for human being is like the servant flogged before someone else paid his debt. Though he is freed from the "graver torments" he would otherwise have suffered, his scars quite justly remain.168 The promise of beatitude can still be fulfilled, on condition that "while lying in the affliction of his flogging until such time as it passes away, [he] vow in heart and in word fidelity to his master and correction for himself."169
As Anselm concludes he brings the discussion back around to the terms in which he had posed questions at the end of the first section, on free choice and foreknowledge, terms which were also those of the Council of Orange. Anselm had asked,
How does God do good things only through his goodness and evil things only by the fault of human beings or the devil, and how does human being do good by free choice being led by (praesulante) grace and evil things only
166. DCP III, 9, S II, 276, 20.
167. DCP III, 9, S II, 276, 277.
168. DCP III, 9, S II, 277, 11–29.
169. DCP III, 9, S II, 277, 27–29. In the midst of this analogy, Anselm explains the difference between the fate of human beings and angels faced with the same choice and the same fall. Had the servant when he sinned already been given some great honor, he would both receive punishment and be disinherited of this honor. However, if reconciliation happens before an honor promised but not yet given, then after reconciliation, the disinheritance can be avoided. The angels, alreadyenjoying heaven, lose it irrevocably, while human beings, not yet enjoying heaven, do not. DCP III,
9, S II, 277, 22–29.
From Meditatio to Disputatio by the operation of his own (propria) will, and what [part] does God have in evil without being at fault and human being in good things which is to his credit, such that the good deeds of men are clearly seen to be imputed to God and the bad things to man?170
Anselm's answer, summing up the fruits of his reasoning thus far, is that a) God causes good acts that they are good both through their being
(per essentiam) and through their justice (per iustitiam), but b) in evil acts, God causes only their goodness per essentiam, by giving the will, free choice and justice, while c) it is human beings who causes their injustice by acting "by their own (propria), that is, unjust will."171 Human beings d) cause good acts in the sense that they "cause the fact that they are not evil," because, he explains, although able to desert justice, keep it "by free choice, [justice] being given and followed by grace."172 Anselm formulates carefully, here, nesting in this one sentence his delicately balanced set of claims on the roles of freedom and grace. Justice is grace given, grace both preceding and following any human act; nevertheless, free choice acts not out of a neutral state to accept or reject grace proffered but to keep or walk away from grace already given. Its range of action is narrow, in one sense, as we saw in De casu, limited to the negative of not rejecting grace; hence, Anselm's formulation here of human agency as not simply and wholly causing the goodness of their own acts, but only causing that they are not evil.
Anselm's closing reenacts the delicate balance he has attempted to find between divine and human agency reflexively, on his own work. He closes with the obligatory humble, pious, and orthodox claim for his own work: anything which "suffices" for any inquirer he does not attribute to himself but to God's grace in him. However, he adds, had anyone given such answers to him, "I would have given thanks (gratias) since he would have satisfied me." "I wanted," he concludes, "to give out gratis what I received
(accepi) by grace (gratis)."173 One cannot be sure why Anselm uses the language of "satisfies" and "suffices" for his own answers, which he has always characterized in previous works as only helpful and provisional. We have no sign he puts these reflections forward in any more certain spirit of their completeness than he has other writings. But with such a closing
Anselm mirrors for his own agency in the work his view of human agency in the light of sin and grace. There is a little bit of self assertion in this closing which is less about Anselm personally or about his own work than about the human condition. Yes, any scant good human beings do is down
170. DCP I, 7, S II, 259, 23–28.
171. DCP III, 14, S II, 287, 25–288, 7.
172. DCP III, 14, S II, 288, 7–9.
173. DCP III, 14, S II, 288, 12–19.
From Meditatio to Disputatio to God's grace, yet they accept those gifts and can in turn function as genuine agents with them, giving what they have received. In other words, though only with what he has been given, Anselm has done something.
What, then, does Anselm add to the account of free choice and the fall in De concordia not found in the dialogues? He adds the distinction between the will as instrument and the will as inclination (which is in turn subdivided into the will for benefit and the will for justice as in De casu). He has also brought the discussion more into the public debate, out of his own idiom and much more clearly in dialogue with Augustine and the canons of the Council of Orange. It is also in dialogue with scripture, but scripture conceived more as a series of propositions capable of contradicting each other. In this he continues to move away from treating scripture as a kind of meditative treasure trove in which each verse has the possibility of yielding the whole, as he did in the three dialogues. The work is, as Anselm himself tells us, his attempt to respond to "three difficult quaestiones,"174 questions for debate pro and con in this newer, more public style.
What is most striking, however, is that even given Anselm's engagement in a new style with the problems of freedom with foreknowledge, predestination, and grace, topics which he had not explicitly taken up in De libertate or De casu, is how little the substance of his view shifts in De concordia. He sees his task, clearly, as taking the De libertate and De casu view on free choice and the fall and placing it in an account of foreknowledge, predestination, and grace. Unlike Augustine at the end of his career taking up the same issues, Anselm does not shift, even rhetorically, his libertarian position. Of course, Anselm is not, as Augustine was, in the midst of a highly fraught battle with Pelagius for what Augustine clearly saw as the soul of Christianity. Still Anselm places his discussion of these issues as quaestiones, matters of debate, recognizing in the form the history and ongoing public controversy over them. He anticipates that others will ask how his account of the will and the fall would mesh with an Augustinian account of grace and predestination.
Though Anselm commentators have argued rightly that Anselm maps out a different position on free choice than Augustine, there is a deep and important sense in which this difference is less significant than it might seem at first. For that difference is located within a much deeper and broader agreement on what is more significant to both Anselm and Augustine than the mechanics of free choice. They share what is at the root of both De concordia and the three dialogues: the grounding of human being in the condition of creaturehood, those for whom everything they
174. DCP III, 14, S II, 288, 11–12.
From Meditatio to Disputatio have is received. In this is a rejection of metaphysical or moral sufficiency, what Augustine and Anselm both reject about classical and secular models of what it is to be human and to live well. As Paul Kolbet writes, "the anti-perfectionism of [Augustine's] critique of pagan virtue is a piece of his fundamental conviction that receptivity to divine love (mediated in all sorts of ways) is the core human self." Sin, then, as Wetzel points out, is for Augustine the desire to "create ourselves out of nothing," a kind of pure autonomy. Augustine's emphasis on sin, Wetzel implies, is a way of correcting the self-understanding based on the illusion of pure autonomy and moving to a truer sense of human finitude and dependence now freed to seek what it desires in God, not self.175 To these claims Anselm could and did say only, "amen." The difference is that Augustine, perhaps, did not think he could preserve this vision without doing away with independent human agency for fear of granting possession of something "not received" to human being. Anselm sets as his task the preservation of the principle that everything is received, including the possibility for agency in the free affirmation of one's insufficiency and creaturehood.
The End of Anselm's Authorship What, then, are we to make of the Anselmian project, at the end of his oeuvre? These two works remain a pair for the ways in which they presage later forms, quaestiones and disputationes. This is true in terms of the questions they take up, the literary form in which their arguments are placed, and the way in which they take up scripture as party to those debates. Scripture is used as source for authoritative statements and starting place for debate as we see Anselm putting into practice the same strategies for the posing and answering of questions we saw in the school of Laon texts collected by Lottin.176 Just as scholars like Gemeinhardt applaud Anselm's taking up of and competence with the terminology of persons and relations of the Trinity, philosophers have praised the greater technical clarity of De concordia with its distinction, as mentioned above, between the will as instrument and will as inclination.
Though both of these late works reflect clear changes in Anselm's style and method, De processione remains the outlier. There are still moments in De concordia and its thrust as a whole which display Anselm's argumentative flair for linguistic analysis combined with a taste for complexity and paradox. De concordia is faithful to Anselm's vision of the 175. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, 235.
176. See chapter 6 for some examples of points of comparison between Anselm and the school of Laon.
From Meditatio to Disputatio human condition as defined by its relationship to God, the creator. Even the analogies Anselm elaborates, of the naked man, God's husbandry, and the servant, though not as frequent in his early treatises, evoke
Anselm's pastoral ministry, letters and prayers; analogies seem to have been a frequent part of his conversation with fellow monks, it seems clear from the collection of similitudes associated with Anselm.177 While
De processione has its analogies as well, their force along with its more formal arguments is to establish a claim and disprove its contrary.
There is a level on which, despite the admiration of scholars of later scholasticism and contemporary philosophical commentators, the changes that culminate in these works do not represent an unambiguous improvement. Anselm's clearer distinctions and technical language are a response to critics who are not Anselm's fellow monks engaged in prayerful meditation on the things of faith, seeking for greater insight and depth, but opponents fighting more to be right than to be edified.
This may be an unfair characterization, and from his earliest writings Anselm was never the enemy of clarity. But his genius, more in evidence in the earlier works, lies in his ability to combine clarity and rigor with a sense of the deeply inaccessible character of what he seeks to understand.
Clarity was originally pursued not just for its own sake but in the service of being more deeply aware of infinite depths still to be contemplated.
The dominant mode of Anselm's earlier works is of reason not so much in the service of orthodoxy but more in the service of an ongoing call to deeper reflection, less as an end point than a part of a longer journey. The diminished emphasis on the pastoral and pedagogical is not just the absence of a literary flourish or of affective impact but an intellectual loss because a loss of reflection on who the knower is and their relationship to what is known. Writer and reader, speaker and audience have been disembodied, their position and limitations bracketed in the attempt to construct neutral arguments designed to be effective for anyone. The lack of any embedded human standpoint (as distinct from shared premises or institutional identity) in De processione is for Anselm more likely a product of the occasion for this piece, rather than a broader position on rational theological, method. It is, paradoxically, Anselm's most occasional work, composed for a very definite time and purpose, and the most neutral and disembodied. Yet it is also present in De concordia and, more importantly, is an intensification of an element in Anselm's thought that has been there from the beginning, now brought to serve a public and institutional rather than private and individual purpose.
177. Anselm, De humanis moribus per similitudines, in Mem. 39–104.
Conclusion Reason, Desire, and Prayer There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of objections to Anselm's project, one to its speculative expression—that it is too thoroughly rationalistic, and the other to its spiritual vision—that it is based on a distortedly negative view of the human person as sinful and of God as vengefully demanding payment. Though there are some signs of fraying over time in Anselm's work, the argument of this book is that the rational and spiritual projects are elements of an integral whole: reason serving spirituality and spirituality giving value to reason. The final question for reflection, then, is whether attempting to see Anselm's work whole makes it possible to respond to these objections.
Reason and the Monastic Life Anselm's commitment to reason is bold and uncompromising. He keeps a vow to unleash reason, giving it leeway to ask the hardest questions, to lead believers down the darkest paths. We might say that the results, judged by the standards of reason, the very reason Anselm sets in motion, are mixed. Anselm's analysis of ordinary language leads to conclusions that require the embrace of contradictories and the multiplication of senses and distinctions. Gaunilo speaks for many when he objects that Anselm has not managed to present necessary, indubitable conclusions to convince unwilling or ignorant unbelievers. And even to the degree that Anselm succeeds, he does not do so without exposing deep difficulties for reason in the faith he wants to understand. As Bencivenga notes, "the practice of questioning the system in order to establish it is, after all, a practice of questioning the system."1 Richard Southern comments
1. Ermanno Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense: The Case of Anselm and his God (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 89.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer on the double-edged sword of Anselm's thought: "Although [Anselm] was the most lucid and decisive of writers . . . he casts over every subject an iridescence filled with contradictory possibilities."2
If, as seems clear, reason does not conclude its journey with clear and complete understanding, and Anselm is neither unaware of nor surprised by this outcome, the question is why Anselm has engaged in this project. As Bencivenga puts it so engagingly, "this stuff is too serious to be a game, it raises too many questions to be a way of enforcing power, it's too much in earnest to be the devil's work, however indirectly."3 Anselm cannot, in other words, be simply playing with language and reason. He hopes for and wrings from them some real results. On the other hand, the results are too nuanced and complex to serve unambiguously to shore up the faithful and the institution of the Church (on this, De processione might be the exception), and it would be perverse to see Anselm as intentionally aiming to destroy by subversion the faith he sets out to understand.
Bencivenga answers his question about why Anselm engages in this project of reason by noting the combination in Anselm of two contradictory impulses, "the one for novelty, surprise and change, and the one for stability and order."4 While these impulses are separated in modernity, he argues, Anselm pursues both and holds them together with reason.
Anselm is both more committed to the constructive powers of reason than his earlier medieval predecessors and more cognizant of the limits of reason, arguably, than many who were to follow him.
It is important to note that Anselm's embrace of reason is paired with a rejection of esotericism. Though they differ on much else, two of Anselm's important twentieth-century commentators, one a theologian,
Karl Barth, the other a philosopher, Richard Campbell, agree on Anselm's stance against esotericism, noting that Anselm grounds his reflections in the shared language of available public discourse.5 "An2. Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 436.
3. Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense, 84.
4. Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense, 108.
5. Richard Campbell, From Belief to Understanding: A Study of Anselm's Proslogion Argument on the Existence of God (Canberra, Australia: The Australian National University, 1976), 196–97; Karl
Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, translated by Ian W. Robertson, (London: SCM Press,
1960), 69. Campbell with some justification takes this as his point of difference with Barth, arguing that nonetheless, Barth takes Anselm's project to be internal to theology, to be in an important way only intelligible from within the faith. Richard Campbell, "Fides quaerens intellectum—Deo remote," in Saint Anselm—A Thinker for Yesterday and Today—Anselm's Thought Viewed by Our Contemporaries, Proceedings of the International Anselm Conference, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique Paris, edited by Coloman Viola and Frederick van Fleteren, Texts and Studies in Religion 90 (Lewiston,
Reason, Desire, and Prayer selm," Barth writes, "is not in a position to treat Christian knowledge as an esoteric mystery, as a phenomenon that would have to shun the cold light of secular thinking. . . . Anselm knows just one question, one language and one task of theology." "Proving" in this context, according to Barth, "means wishing to make the Faith comprehensible to everyone, not only to himself, not only to the little flock but to everyone."6 Truth,
Anselm claimed in the Meditation on Human Redemption, denies itself to no one.7 Anselm begins his speculative work with this tremendous openness, a combination of optimism and humility. What Anselm believes in rejecting esotericism is that there is no claim or argument he wants to protect from outsiders and that as inquirer he is no better or worse than any objector, real or imagined. This is the positive side of rationalism, the seeking of reasons that are accessible to all, and Anselm is arguably the medieval thinker whose commitment to reason in this sense is most audacious and complete. But Anselm's rationalism does not end here;
Anselm also attempts to make reason recognize and be responsible for what it produces.
Thus, second, Anselm's difficult formulations and his tight logical arguments serve not just the conclusions he seeks to establish but are valued as process; they are, in other words, part of a pedagogy. As we saw throughout Anselm's dialogues, whether the topic was grammar, free choice, or the Incarnation, the student was required to pay close attention to follow Anselm's logical moves and substitutions. Anselm's arguments and distinctions are too dense and too fine to understand without engaging the whole of one's intellect and attention, and Anselm takes pains to point out the consequences of lapses of attention not just to each step but to the arc of argument. One can imagine such a style being a way of attracting young monks, fresh from their own dialectical and grammatical studies, fascinated by the conundrums of logic and reason. But Anselm does not allow the participants' examination of language and argument to remain external to their existential condition; they must take responsibility and take the consequences of being the one who says and argues as they do. As Anselm makes explicit in dialogues from De grammatico to Cur Deus homo, participants cannot remain disinterested; rather the teacher redirects the consequences of the positions of his interlocutors back on them. Gaunilo is deprived of the ability to either accept or N.H.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 169–70. For Campbell, what believer and unbeliever have in common is language. See also the similar critique of Barth by M. Burcht Pranger, "Unity and Diversity in Anselm of Canterbury," in the same collection, 317–41.
6. Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, 68–69.
7. Med. 3, S III, 85, 42.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer reject the existence of that than which none greater can be conceived and Boso is made to experience his condition remoto Christo not as a mere intellectual supposition but as an existential disaster. These are, of course, the famous instances but there are, as we saw, smaller, somewhat less dramatic moments of the same kind throughout Anselm's corpus, like the student's recognition that the consequences of his claims make him neither human nor rational in De grammatico. Anselm gives Gaunilo,
Roscelin, and his followers a dressing down before he takes up their objections, forcing them to accept the consequences of their claims on their other beliefs, commitments, and practices.
This pedagogy is another aspect of Anselm's rejection of esotericism.
His openness to the questions and objections of reason turns back on the objector who is called on to reason. He cannot be disembodied and disinterested but must make himself vulnerable to the consequences of his own reasoning. In the Proslogion argument, Anselm finds a way to do this elegantly and simply in a redarguitio elenchica where the fool's very uttering of his claim assumes what is contradicted by its content.8 In this sense, too, then, the Proslogion is unum argumentum, because Anselm does not have to appeal to other assumptions and positions of his opponent to show how they are inconsistent with his objection, but uses the objection against itself.
Anselm does not distinguish the subject matters of two different pursuits: philosophy and theology, nor two different stances: faith and reason. He does not separate rational reflection into an academic realm separate from what Pierre Hadot would call spiritual exercise. Anselm brings the full force of his reasoning down on God's existence, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the procession of the Holy Spirit in much the same way as he examines free choice and logical problems. At the same time, however, he allows the full force of the existential impact of the responses to these questions to wash over him, find expression in his text, and, ultimately, work to transform his reader. Thus, these exercises of reason are monastic spiritual practices for Anselm, the "chewing" and "sucking" portions of rumination, as he wrote in the Meditation on Human Redemption.9
Third, as we saw time and again, Anselm is willing to take reason to the brink and even beyond its own limits. In this way, Anselm's speculation defies later categorizations. His reflection on the divine nature leads down roads that bring to mind later scholastic developments and mysti8. See chapter 4 and Louis H. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word: Essays in Medieval Philosophy
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 91.
9. Med. 3, S III, 84, 9–10; see also chapter 6.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer cal theology. The structure of reasons pro and con, of objections and responses, presage scholastic disputatio but also are like attempts to get beyond reason and language, to move toward their breakdown as a way of more closely representing the unrepresentable.
What is most striking is that Anselm takes both projects to be the same. Following the logic of the divine being in the Proslogion and Monologion leads him to conclusions that are indubitable, founded on the identity of word and thing, subject and predicate, and yet, he asserts with equal vehemence, paradoxical, signifying the gap between words and God. Anselm does not just use reason to expose, explore, and enjoy the paradoxes of the divine; he carries it forward from Creator to the creature. Reflecting the shift of the topic from God, whose simplicity and integrity are mirrored in the simple formulations of the Proslogion, the language in the three dialogues devolves into complicated, scholastic distinctions, mirroring the complex and fragmented metaphysics of angels and humans. Though Anselm projects a unity of truth in De veritate and will in De libertate and De casu diaboli, retrieving that unity takes a path through a series of paradoxes and apparent contradictions—truths that are not true, freedom mastered by sin, abilities that are inabilities, doing that is passivity, possibilities that are impossible, and evil that both is and is not something. In the pursuit of the reasons for the Incarnation the formal structural pattern alternating paradox and necessity finds its original home in Anselm's account of the logic of the Incarnation as the impossible but necessary solution to the absolute paradox of the human predicament.
Anselm's steps toward neutral rationality, toward clarity and precision of expression are not, then, in the service of simply solving puzzles (either as a game or once and for all) but in the service of depth to be explored. If the rejection of esotericism and championing of reasoning in the service of pedagogy are about the middle of Anselm's arguments in the search for middle terms, the beginning and the end of his rational pursuits are tied to spiritual practice. For those arguments begin with as close to nothing as Anselm can manage and then struggle from nothing to everything, experiencing both the success of those endeavors and their fragility, finding, as the Monologion puts it, that "nothing" easily demolishes all efforts.10 In this the arguments mirror the prayers, which are marked no less by a kind of relentless logic, as they explore the problem of salvation starkly, exposing it in all its difficulty. In both genres—prayer and argument—Anselm takes up the problem of nothing,
10. Mono. 19, S I, 34, 8–9.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer that there is nothing we have which is not received. Reason emerges from nothing and the problems of nothing to move toward being, but, if the aim is truth and certainty, Anselm overshoots. He plays out the consequences of reason to certainty and beyond, toward paradox and opacity.
We arrive at the God who is greater than can be conceived at one end, and the act of deserting justice equally beyond understanding at the other.
There is a recurrent and significant motif in Anselm not just of exposure but the pursuit of difficulty and paradox. Most commentators have assumed that Anselm pursues answers in order to offer reassurance that faith is tenable and supportable. Anselm never allows his conclusions to congeal into certainty, avoiding any smug self-satisfaction as well as any aggression toward others not similarly convinced.11 But, even more, such rest, stability, and satisfaction are the complete opposite of the goal of the spiritual life designed by the Benedictine rule as Anselm understands it. The project of Benedictine spiritual life is not assured certainty, not a completed conversion but continual conversion. Anselm's describes this life in the starkest possible terms in the unfinished De humanis moribus. The discipline of the rule requires that one "stay awake when he wants to sleep, fast when he wants to eat, thirst when he wants to drink, remain quiet when he wants to talk, read or stand or walk when he wants to sit, endure many injuries, desert wholly one's own will [propria voluntate]."12 This is a not a picture of rest or self-satisfaction but a practice of making oneself uncomfortable, never at home, never at rest.
"No one comes to perfection," Anselm said, "unless he strives to arrive at more than he can reach."13 Anselm seems to have taken to heart the portion of the Benedictine rule in which a monk who is asked to do the impossible is advised to accept the command meekly and obediently.14 The exercise is continual and unending, the impossibility of completion an integral part of the task itself.
One might conclude as even some of Anselm's admirers have, that Anselm's arguments are not arguments at all but prayers. But there is another possibility, which is that Anselm's arguments—perhaps all arguments—are more like prayers than we might think. Prayer and argument share the same desire: union, of word with thing, of self with God. Both begin with alienation, of word from thing and self from God; else there
11. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, edited and translated by Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 177; and chapter 6, 325.
12. Mem. 68.
13. Mem. 168.
14. Rule of St. Benedict, translated by Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Mastro (New York: Doubleday, 1975), chapter 68, 103.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer would be no need for prayer or argument. Anselm brings out this parallel because he is more extreme in the union he seeks—his arguments are not to be just valid but indubitable—and more honest about the distance to be traversed from which he begins and which remains once he has done all that can be done. Anselm realizes that the incompleteness of his attempt is not something that might be overcome by someone else or in his own next assay. It is structural and permanent, both because of the ultimate unknowability of God and because of the nature of language itself. In the Monologion, Anselm takes pains to argue for the identity of God with his
Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, by analogy to the model of human language. But he notes the paradox at the root of such a unity. Even though he argues for the identity of God and his Word, he also notes that they must be distinct for reasons just as necessary as the reasons why they must be the same: "For the word, in that it is a word or image, is related to the other, only because it is the word and image of something."15
What Anselm reveals is the paradox at the heart of language, that words must capture their objects and be distinct from those objects. Thus the project of reason, uniting word and thing, is destined to fail, leaving a gap between word and thing for faith to stretch across toward closure.
The task of reason is so closely tied to Anselm's spirituality that the path of reason itself mirrors Anselm's spiritual path toward but never quite reaching God. We have seen that not only are Anselm's arguments, analogies, and poetic use of language compelling individually in their own right but the way in which the patterns of argument, models of friendship, and modes of prayer mirror each other, makes the Anselmian corpus even more richly rewarding. We see across it common passions and longing, relentlessness, and striving and have to admire his ability to craft the expression of the same spiritual project in so many different contexts.
There is, then, a link between the narrative line of desire and argument Anselm constructs in his different works and the strong emotions of ecstasy and despair that are expressed throughout: because Anselm seeks such heights, he falls so low, or almost does. This single arc toward God created by language and desire traversing the infinite distance between the lowly sinner and the inaccessible God is only the idealized shape of the rhetorical and existential direction of Anselm's work, for God as terminus is never reached. The devotional and the more speculative writings portray the inevitable failure to complete this line as a fall, a return to ground zero. At times Anselm seems to experience his situa15. Mono. 38, S I, 56, 24–26.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer tion as an intense either/or: one either makes it all the way to God or falls into the depths of despair at his total absence.
Anselm does not end his speculative works in this despair nor, as many have thought, in the triumph of reason fully capturing its object, any more than the prayers end in ecstatic union or the letters in perfect community. In both it is, rather, an orientation toward that end in increased longing and desire. What he gains through emotional and intellectual introspection is a greater understanding of the incompleteness of his knowledge and the impossibility of reaching his heart's desire; the result is that he feels his separation more painfully and is propelled more urgently toward union.
"Religion of the Sick Soul"
If we can conclude that Anselm's use of speculative reason mirrors and serves the spiritual end of bringing the individual closer to God in and through a realization of the remaining distance, we cannot escape the necessity of examining another set of objections to Anselm's vision.
The moments that gave pause working through these different expressions were places in the letters, the prayers, and the atonement theory.
No matter how far we go toward understanding these through nuanced interpretation and developed sense of context, the sublimation of particularity and physicality into the general and the spiritual and the replacement of love of another human being for the other's sake for love of them for God's sake in the letters are very different than contemporary intuitions about human relationships. In the same way, the extreme expressions of self-loathing in the prayers, the feudal-sounding appeal to honor, and the requirement of payment and suffering in Cur Deus homo seem profoundly wrong to modern sensibilities.
When we focus on these problematic aspects, we can describe Anselm's vision as falling under William James's descriptor from The Varieties of Religious Experience, "religion of the sick soul." This notion, though not the specific content and assumptions of James's analysis, is a vivid way of capturing with one expression the elements in Anselm that seem most foreign to modern sensibilities. For James the "religion of the sick soul" focuses on evil as "something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity" that "requires a supernatural remedy."16 He describes "their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind
16. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature, edited by Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (New York: Routledge, 2002), 108.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer of misery" "based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart."17 "To the healthy-minded way," James continues, "the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased."18
The depiction of the sinful self, of human friendship and community only within the monastic life, of divine honor to be assuaged—these are all aspects of Anselm's thought that seem to fit James's notion. Sin, for Anselm, requires the utter debasement of the self before God, before a God who is infinite plenitude, who requires everything his creation is and more, which they can never repay. The result seems to be not so much the fostering of community but the evacuation of their community for the community of vassals with an absent God. Whether we begin with the God of the Proslogion or Cur Deus homo, we still end up in largely the same place, with the God who is everything to our nothing. This is, of course, a gross caricature and much of the effort of this study has been to present a more nuanced Anselm. And yet, there is something to the caricature that cannot quite be explained away, and if we admit that there is something problematic that remains after the work of interpretation has been done, the question is what to say about these aspects of Anselm's thought and their role in an evaluation of Anselm today.
After depicting the "sick" as opposed to the "healthy-minded" approach to belief in the divine, and just as the reader (like the original enlightened Harvard audience) begins to congratulate herself for superior healthy-mindedness, James reverses direction quickly and elegantly:
"Systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever" leaves out of its account all that is most troubling in human life.19 Thus, it can "hardly be regarded by any thinking man as a serious solution" but is a "mere syllabub [a frothy English dessert] and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison."20 "Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle."21
James faults the "healthy-minded" approach for papering over the limitations and vulnerability that mark human existence, limits that are experienced in the sorrow, loss, and death no human life can escape. Human limitations and the desire—and inability—to overcome them is, we have seen, Anselm's main theme. He expounds this theme, on the one
17. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 130, 106.
18. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 129.
19. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 131.
20. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 283.
21. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 282.
Reason, Desire, and Prayer hand, in linking reason with the project of seeking the God who ever exceeds our grasp and, on the other hand, in the deep analysis of the "metaphysics of creaturehood," which is the condition of finitude, desire, and vulnerability combined with freedom. In the first, Anselm uses the tools of dialectic to attempt to comprehend, and recognize his failure in comprehending, the Deus absconditus. In the second, Anselm adumbrates an account of human being and moral and spiritual life different from but as compelling as Plato, Aristotle, or the Stoics. Anselm exhorts human beings to live into rather than attempt to escape the conditions of finitude in desire, dependence, and vulnerability. For Anselm God become human in the Incarnation is a mirror of and response to this condition, while sin is the attempt to reject it.
In James's terms, then, we can say, Anselm has not offered a "syllabub" and, though he has not answered the sphinx's riddle, he has worked long and hard both to try to solve it and display its irresolvability, neither declining to take up the challenge nor pretending to have succeeded. As his understanding of the Benedictine rule prescribes, Anselm has not aimed at comfort but recommends and hopes to produce in his readers, as Augustine did, restlessness, the opposite of smug self-satisfaction, keeping the mind and heart ever in motion toward an ever more desired but still distant goal.
For James, the "religion of the sick soul" is deep though flawed, and at some level it is hard to escape the same conclusion for Anselm. This study has attempted to go some way toward exploring the depth—the weight and seriousness of the moral and metaphysical outlook in Anselm's corpus. We also have seen in the flaws their intimate connection to depth. And though there are other deep reflections on matters human and divine that have been woven without such flaws (though perhaps possessing others), Anselm deserves a place among deep thinkers as a potent alternative to frothier mixtures.
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INDEX 303–18, 321–22, 347, 350; De concordia, 12, 177, 209, 229, 329, 346–67, 368; Epistola de incarnatione Verbi, 3, 11–12,
42, 68, 77, 102–3, 245, 247–77, 320–22, 330, 343–44; De grammatico, 74–93, 94, 101–2, 105–7, 125, 185, 215–16, 223, 372;
De humanis moribus, 231n191; Lambeth Fragments, 10, 75–76, 93–101, 106–8, 133, 165, 184, 189, 195, 212, 214, 230, 245, 264–65, 284; letters of, 1, 4, 6n24,
8, 9–10, 38–73, 104, 113n10, 114n16, 115, 116, 235–36, 246–52, 255, 257, 363, 376;
De libertate arbitrii, 11, 78, 98, 175–78, 192, 196–211, 224, 228, 240, 247, 279, 295; Meditation on Human Redemption, 7n30, 302, 318–20, 371–72; Monologion, 6, 11– 12, 61–62, 101–3, 110–47, 149, 153–5, 157,
169–74, 255, 269–71, 274, 277, 330–32; prayers of, 1–4, 6–10, 13–37, 41, 48–9, 51, 72–73, 108–9, 117–21, 123–24, 145– 47, 150, 290–91, 323–24, 368–76. See also prayer and individual saints' prayers by name; De processione Spiritus Sancti,
12, 116, 145–46, 276, 328–29, 330–45, 367–68, 370; Proslogion, 2–6, 8, 11, 15, 76, 106–7, 110–23, 147–74, 241, 278, 344,
372–73; Reply to Gaunilo, 2, 38, 114, 117, 122, 154, 156–58, 162–63, 183, 201–2, 204, 243, 247, 249, 252; De veritate, 11,
64, 74, 78, 98, 101, 106–7, 175–78, 181– 96, 203, 211, 225, 231, 240–42, 354 apophaticism. See theology appellation, 80, 88–90, 92, 105 Aquinas, Thomas, St., 9, 103, 105, 107, 117,
Abelard, 103–5, 192–93, 255n34, 271, 273, 287, 361 Abulafia, Anna Sapir, 278n108, 285n140 action: human, 187–90, 192, 225, 227–31,
238–39, 289, 350, 352–55; evil 238–39, 351–52; good, 192n60, 350, 352, 365; moral, 187, 192–93, 196–97, 205n102, 227–29, 346–47, 355 Adam, 20, 23, 103, 198, 202, 270, 286, 292–93, 298, 303, 305–6, 309, 311–15, 317n278, 356 Adams, Marilyn, 81, 88–89, 101–2, 125, 170–71, 288 Adams, Robert Merrihew, 160 Alan of Lille, 131n86 Ambrose, 60n100, 228n183 analogy or metaphor: Anselm's use of, 20,
23, 26–28, 31, 36, 71, 118, 127, 128–29, 132, 138n121, 142, 143–44, 150, 154–55, 169–70, 172, 224, 250–51, 254, 256, 272–73, 274n100, 277, 290, 315, 324, 329, 339–41, 345, 346, 349, 358–59, 364, 368, 375 angels, 58, 180, 196–98, 200–202, 213, 215–17, 219, 223–24, 226–27, 229–34, 237–39, 279, 289, 294–95, 354, 364n169; good, 213, 216, 219, 226–27, 229–34, 237–38. See also devil Anselm: appointment as archbishop, 38–39,
42, 49, 53, 55, 58–9, 63, 65, 69–70, 249; Cur Deus homo, 2, 3, 4, 11–12, 173, 175,
178–79, 239–40, 242, 243, 244, 245–47, 257, 268–69, 277–302, 303, 308–9, 312–13, 316, 318–24, 326–27, 344, 362, 371, 376–77; Cur Deus magis, 269–70; De casu diaboli, 11, 58, 175–77, 190–92, 196,
200–201, 203, 205–6, 211–40, 294–95, 298–99, 346–47, 350–51, 353–56, 365– 66; De conceptu virginali, 246–47, 276, 131, 146, 151–2, 171, 192n60, 281, 310 argument, 8–10, 78–82, 147, 172, 262–63,
275–77, 278n108, 279, 292–93, 312–13, 319, 322, 334–38, 373–75; by equipollent proposition, 79, 87, 147, 337;
Index Barth, Karl, 5–6, 110, 119n33, 123n45, argument (cont.) 147n64, 151, 155, 160n215, 285n140, 370–71 Baumstein, Pascal, 33, 34n103, 39n5, 40 beatitude, 11, 15–16, 18, 47, 56–57, 63–65, deductive, 247, 289, 303, 319; from fittingness, 31, 41, 148–49, 197, 200, 227, 281–82, 285–86, 288, 292–93, 299, 309, 311, 314, 318, 353; ontological, 36,
75–76, 111, 123, 148–65, 172; retorsive or readarguitio elenchica, 164; syllogistic,
79–81, 82–86, 87, 106, 164n147, 263, 313, 335, 337. See also dialectic; necessary reasons Aristotle, 41, 45–6, 50, 52, 75, 76, 77, 82, 84,
112, 124, 198, 205, 225–30, 232–33, 285–86, 289, 291, 355, 363–64 Bec, Abbey of, 13, 19n29, 38, 40, 42, 44,
48–9, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58–59, 65, 67, 116–17, 148, 176 being, 97, 107–9, 126–28, 152, 159–61, 182,
192, 195; finite, 11, 99, 133, 135, 192, 211, 225, 234, 236–37, 240–41, 243, 295; necessary, 135, 147, 165, 168; perfect; 168, 172, 213. See also God; predication belief. See faith Bencivenga, Ermanno, 7n30, 75n13, 76, 93,
89, 91, 103, 107, 108, 187, 224–25, 227, 229, 295n195, 330, 378; Aristotelian categories, 76, 82n41, 87, 89, 91; Aristotelian views attributed to Anselm,
41, 46, 89, 103, 105, 330 atonement: theory of. See soteriology attributes: divine. See God Augustine, 3n8, 6n24, 15, 47, 60n100, 62–3,
119n32, 171, 369–70 Benedict, St., prayer to, 20, 32–33 Benedictine rule, 7, 20. 33, 72, 113, 118, 374,
69, 71–72, 81–82, 105, 112, 116n24, 120–21, 125n52, 129–35, 137–38, 140–41, 143–46, 148, 153n189, 157, 166n248, 168n258, 169n266, 173, 180–82, 187, 191–92, 196–99, 202–3, 209–12, 215n133, 220, 225–29, 235, 239, 244, 255n34, 260–61, 272, 274n100, 280, 282, 288n148, 289n154, 303, 306–7, 309–10, 313, 319, 326, 330, 337, 345, 349, 351–57, 359–61, 366–67, 378; Confessions, 32, 120; Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, 198–9, 202, 220, 222, 225–27, 357; correspondence with Nebridius, 47; De doctrina christiana, 47,
187–88; De fide et symbolo, 272; De libero arbitrio, 3n9, 112, 148, 153n189, 157, 198n78, 280n114; De magistro, 82, 220, 222; De praedestinatione, 180n16, 212, 356n131, 359n143; De Trinitate, 130–31, 134n102, 134, 137n115, 140n128, 140, 143–44, 146n158, 146n159, 250–51, 255n34, 255, 261, 280, 282n126, 282.
See also free choice; grace Aulén, Gustaf, 287n145 authority: religious, 2, 6, 8, 21, 46, 58, 60,
Berengar of Tours, 77–79, 262–63 Bestul, Thomas H., 7, 13–16, 34 body: effects of original sin on, 305, 307,
312, 313, 314–15 Boethius, 9, 16, 30, 76–77, 81, 91n76, 103n121, 105, 116n24, 134n103, 146–49, 173, 182–83, 188, 190–92, 199, 235–36, 241, 250–51, 264–65, 269–71, 275, 296, 319, 348–49; Consolation of Philosophy, 30, 116, 134, 148, 182, 188, 235–36, 250,
269, 296; Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, 250, 269–70; De trinitate, 250–51; De hebdomadibus, 182, 190, 235, 241 Bordo, Susan, 173n281 Boso, 2–3, 12, 57, 66, 179, 242–43, 245–47,
249, 268, 277–84, 286n141, 289–94, 295, 298, 300–301, 302, 320–24, 372 Boswell, John, 43–44 Burke, Kenneth, 17 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 27–28, 34n105, 35n107 Cabassut, André, 27n71 Cahill, Lisa, 287n145, 288, 298n206 Campbell, Richard, 156, 159–60, 165, 62–63, 68, 116–18, 172, 263–65, 272, 275n103, 276, 304n224, 307, 334, 360n146, 367; philosophical, 82; secular, 68–69 173n280, 186–87, 195n67, 199–201, 209n118, 287–88, 370–71 Cantin, André, 276n104 295n194, 329n2 Cattin, Yves, 194n64 Cassian, 45–46, 49, 55 De casu diaboli. See Anselm baptism, 20, 315–16, 363 Bari: Council of, 116, 122, 234, 255, 329,
331–33, 335–36, 338–42, 344
Index dialogue form, 11, 78, 80–82, 85–87, 92, categories. See Aristotle causality, 11, 94–97, 98–101, 129, 212–14,
175–82, 191–97, 210–11, 213–14, 229, 236–37, 239–44, 280, 317, 327–29, 366 disadvantage: evils of. See incommoditas
Dreyer, Mechthild, 190n60 Duclow, Donald, 187n36, 194n66 215–16, 218, 238–39, 241, 353–54, 365 choice. See free choice Cicero, 45–46, 49, 149n170, 228–29, 343n76 Châtillion, Jean, 177n8, 177n9 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christology: Anselm's, 264–65, 267–69, 270,
Eadmer: Vita Sancti Anselmi, 44n20, 76n13, 78, 114–15, 117, 163n230, 318, 329n1, 344n77; Historia novarum, 59n95 emotion, 2, 4, 15, 19, 29–30, 32, 43–44, 45,
293–94, 307–9, 311–12, 313, 334–35, 344. See also Jesus Christ; Trinity Clayton, John, 113, 168 Cohen, Jeremy, 278n108, 281n120, 283n131,
46–47, 51, 55, 63–64, 168–69, 189–90, 233, 281–82. See also despair; joy; sorrow Endres, J. A., 77n21, 263n61, 297n199 Epistola. See Anselm Epistola de incarnatione verbi. See Anselm esotericism: Anselm's rejection of, 327, 370,
285n140, 320n285, 322n287 Colish, Marcia L., 75–80, 92n82, 111n4, 148n168, 170n273, 182n22, 280n113 De conceptu virginali. See Anselm De concordia. See Anselm Consolation of Philosophy. See Boethius Corbin, Michel, 152, 153, 181n18, 194, 372–73 eternity, 32, 64, 112, 273, 296, 306, 347,
207n109, 228 council. See councils by their place names Corinthians, Epistle to the, 50, 253, 353, 358
Cowdrey, Herbert, 61n107 creation, 11, 127–28, 132, 137, 159–60, 182, 349–50 eudaimonism, 196–97, 205n205, 226–27 Evans, Gillian R., 74–75, 117n27, 120, 246,
252, 303, 308n239–240, 313, 329 evil, 11, 22, 23, 64, 98, 165, 177, 188–91, 207,
197, 224, 279, 287, 292, 323–4 creatures: metaphysics of, 100, 179, 195–96, 213, 219n145, 220–22, 234–36, 241, 351–52; of incommoditas (disadvantage), 190, 226, 235, 298, 351–52 existence: argument for God's. See God; 211–15, 219, 223, 224, 225, 230–31, 233–34, 236, 241, 288, 299, 305 327, 328 335, 366–67, 373, 378. See also being Crispin, Gilbert, 48–50, 54n76, 66, 278 cross: prayer to, 19, 31, 32 crucifixion. See Jesus Christ argument; predication faith, 3, 110–12, 119, 121–24, 145, 148–50,
164–65, 180n16, 248, 250–54, 276–77, 281, 282, 283, 285, 319, 321–23, 325–6, 358–60, 369–72, 374–75; seeking understanding, 110–11, 112n8, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 149, 179, 250–51, 268, 283,
287, 317, 319, 321, 324,335 Father: God the, 21, 26, 137–40, 255, 257–59, Dahan, Gilbert, 113n11, 278n108 Damian, Peter, 295–97, 323 Davies, Brian, 82n40, 156 Dazeley, Howard L., 154n190 Delhaye, Phillippe, 196n71 Deme, Daniel, 219n145, 238, 330n7, 334–35,
270, 273, 281–82, 287, 298–99, 331–34, 336–43. See also Trinity Fall, the, 11, 121, 180, 197, 201, 202, 206,
344n77 despair, 3–4, 15, 17, 23–24, 25, 28–29, 32, 47, 208–9, 216–19, 306–7, 315, 356 filioque controversy, 1, 332–33, 336–38, 342,
163, 290, 291, 300, 302, 375–76 devil, 177–78, 180, 202, 207, 216–19, 225, 344. See also Anselm; Trinity; Greek church Florence: Council of 331, 335 fool: in the Proslogion, 6, 8, 106, 111, 112n8,
230–32, 234, 237–38, 244, 279–80, 281–82, 289n154, 290–91, 302, 318–19, 356, 360. See also angels dialectic, 77–79, 82, 85, 88, 91, 104, 106–7,
113, 119, 122, 123, 148–49, 151n177, 154, 159, 162, 165, 179, 247, 284 foreknowledge: divine, See God 118, 147n164, 167, 223–24, 242, 253–55, 260, 262–64, 267, 274–76, 295–96, 330, 345
Index 251, 271–72, 273, 287, 300–301, 320–22, 377–8; power of, 31, 34, 166, 266, 277, 279, 280; providence of, 71, 190, 351. See also argument; Anselm Gombocz, Wolfgang L., 88n65, 154n190 Gospel: of John, 18–20, 25, 27, 32, 55, 98–9,
Frankfurt, Harry 199, 218 free choice, 8, 94, 176, 180n16, 196–202, 209–10, 212, 215, 219–20, 225–26, 230– 31, 278, 295, 328, 345–47, 350, 352–59, 361, 363–36, 371–72; Augustine on, 198, 215, 355–56 freedom, 11, 100, 108, 176, 179–81, 196–205,
177–81, 183, 196, 247–8, 251–2, 257, 278, 337, 340 grace, 3, 9–10, 26, 31–32, 48, 176, 178, 180–
208–11, 212–13, 218–19, 224–28, 230– 31, 239–40, 295, 297–98, 308, 323, 349– 50, 355–56, 359–61; in finite beings, 201, 202–7, 209–10, 224–26, 229–30, 237–38, 239–40; God's. See God Freud, Sigmund, 173, 262, 362 friendship: in Anselm, 4, 16, 20, 41–7, 49,
81, 197–98, 209–11, 215, 282, 306, 315, 346–47, 352–66; in Anselm compared with Augustine, 198–99, 211–12, 215n133, 355–61, 366–67 goodness, 125–26 grammar, 74–80, 91–93, 106, 195, 345 De Grammatico. See Anselm Greek church: Trinitarian theology of, 329–
51–6, 60, 65–8, 70, 72–73, 255, 375; compared with Aristotle 45, 50, 52; compared with Cassian, 45, 46, 55; compared with Cicero, 45, 46, 49; spiritual, 47–8, 54, 57, 66, 68 Fröhlich, Walter, 38–42, 59n95, 68–70 Fulco, Bishop of Beauvais: Anselm's letter to 32, 338–39, 344. See also Bari, Counsel of; filioque controversy; Anselm Gregory of Nazianzen, 332n21 Gregory the Great, St., 15, 28, 60n100 guilt, 31, 262, 288–90, 306, 313 Gundulf: Anselm's correspondence with, 50, concerning Roscelin, 247–52 Funkenstein, Amos, 278n108 54n76, 63 Galonnier, Alain, 78, 81, 86n59 Gasper, Giles, 116, 163n231, 182n23, 329, happiness: in Aristotle, 45 happiness: will or inclination for. See will;
332n21, 335n32, 338n47, 344n77 Gaunilo, 2, 6, 110, 122–23, 154, 156–58, beatitude Hare, John, 196n71 Harrison, Carol, 355n127, 356n131 Hartshorne, Charles, 155 Haseldine, John, 46, 51–52, 67–68 Hayen, André, 111n3–4, 119n31, 165n238, heaven. See beatitude.
Henry, Desmond P., 74–75, 77–82, 87–88, 161–64, 247, 249, 268, 281, 283, 285, 292, 371–72 Gemeinhardt, Peter, 274n100, 276n106, 330–31, 345, 367 Gilbert Crispin. See Crispin, Gilbert Gilson, Etienne, 5, 36n110, 110 God: existence of, 124–127; 148–65; 90, 92–94, 102–3, 125n56, 170n272, 185, 194 Holopainen, Toivo J., 62n107, 77n20–21, freedom of, 108, 198–99, 201, 280, 281, 285–86, 293–98, 302, 312n257, 323; foreknowledge of, 328, 346–7, 349–50, 352, 364, 366; goodness of, 9, 10, 17, 22, 30, 100, 112, 124–26, 130, 157, 182,
351–52, 364; honor of, 40, 219, 287, 289, 293–95, 376, 377; justice of, 23, 95, 130–31, 145, 166–67, 226, 280, 288–89, 297, 299, 308, 364, 365; mercy of, 1, 9,
14, 17–18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30–32, 53, 73, 153, 161–62, 165–69, 221–22, 272–76, 289–90, 297, 331–32, 336–37; names of, 76, 85, 89–92, 95–96, 99–100, 104, 108–9, 114–15, 130–35, 133–34, 153–55, 166–69, 331–33, 336–37; as having a place, 46–47, 49, 51, 69, 71, 96–97, 120–21, 132–34, 135, 143–44, 158, 167, 79n29, 114, 147n164, 263, 265n67, 276n105, 295n194, 296n195 Holy Spirit. See Trinity; Anselm; filioque controversy homosexuality: in Anselm, 43–44 Hopkins, Jasper, 82n40, 88–90, 100–103, 113n9, 170n272, 177n8, 184, 201n90, 209n84, 229n184, 329n2, 336 Hughes, Christopher, 272n91 Hume, David, 158–60 images: Anselm's use of. See analogy Incarnation, 1–2, 11, 172, 245–46, 248–50,
256, 265–66, 277–83, 288–89, 291–92,
Index Kent, Bonnie, 196n71 Kierkegaard, Søren, 50, 196n71, 325, 374n11 King, Peter, 88 knowledge, 105, 137–38, 252–53; human, 299–303, 308–9, 318–21, 323–24, 371–73. See also Jesus Christ; Son, God the; Trinity incommoditas (disadvantage): evils of. See
105, 123, 137–38, 141n133, 143–45, 150 evil indubitable reasons. See necessary reasons injustice, 190–91, 192n60, 219–21, 225, 230,
Lambeth Fragments. See Anselm Lanfranc, 6, 40, 44, 60–62, 77–79, 114, 234–35, 279–80, 304–5, 316, 350–52, 365. See also justice intimacy: desire for, 21, 25–9, 36, 47, 145 investiture controversy, 42, 69–70 116, 130n76, 148n164, 248, 251, 255, 262–63, 275n103, 276 language, 8–10, 16–17, 36, 74–82, 90–94,
96–8, 100–109, 128–29, 136–39, 141– 43, 154–56, 161–63, 164–67, 169–70, 172, 184–88, 194–96, 255–56, 271–72, 341–43, 374–75; artificial or technical: as opposed to ordinary, 74, 79, 81, 90, 185, 275, 368; human: compared with divine, 129, 136, 171–72, 375; improper,
94; ordinary or natural, 8, 74, 77, 79–81, 85, 90, 92–94, 97–98, 134–35, 185, 187–89, 191, 194–95, 223, 234–36, 241, 273, 369; perfect, 119, 135, 137, 172; theological, 97, 108, 132, 169, 185,
Laon: school of, 246–7, 280, 304, 315, 367 Libera, Alain de, 75 De libertate arbitrii. See Anselm linguistic analysis, 1, 11–12, 74–109, 119,
James, William, 376–78 Jesus as Mother: image of, 27–28, 34 Jesus Christ, 14, 18–19, 21, 25–29, 27–31,
34–35, 102–3, 177–80, 183, 189–90, 264, 269–70, 278–79, 281–82, 287, 288, 290, 292, 294–96, 298–9, 301–2, 305–6, 308–9, 311–13, 318–19, 340, 359–60, 364; crucifixion of, 1, 28, 302–3; death of, 298, 301–2, 318–19; human nature in, 102–3, 121, 245, 264, 267, 288–89, 291, 299–300, 302, 311, 318, 320; person of, 299–300, 330–4, 336–43, 367; as without sin, 293–95, 303–9, 311–13. See also God; Son, God the; Trinity Jews: as addressed by Cur Deus homo, 277–78,
280, 283, 285, 320, 322n287, 324–25, 344; in the Gospel of John, 178–79 John, the Baptist, St., 99, 298, 311; prayer to,
264, 367 Logan, Ian, 148n168–169, 151n175, 154n190, 156, 159n207 logic, 74–80, 84–85, 87–88, 92–94, 334–35;
19, 20, 24, 30 John, the Evangelist, St.: prayer to 18, 19, 20, modern, 80, 161, 187 Lottin, Odon, 304–7, 315–17, 367 love, 15–16, 26–28, 30–32, 43–44, 47–58,
21, 25, 27, 32, 55; Gospel of, 113, 178–79 John the monk: Anselm's letter to, 247–48,
251–52, 257 Jolivet, Jean, 103–4 joy, 2, 4, 15, 19, 29, 32, 43, 47, 51, 63–4, 66,
65–68, 71–73, 143–45, 171, 228–29, 376; erotic, 52, 72; of God, 2, 29–30, 54, 56–57, 72, 229; romantic, 16, 43, 50, 72; spiritual, 50, 54–55. See also friendship 168–9, 174, 236, 290. See also emotion Julian of Eclanum, 198–9, 202, 203, 212, 220,
222, 225, 226, 239. See also Augustine justice, 9, 176, 189–93, 196–97, 205n102,
Mackey, Louis H., 16–17, 156–57, 160–61, 220–21, 225–30, 232, 233, 237–39, 279–80, 287–90, 297, 298, 299, 304–7, 312, 314–15, 353–54, 356–57, 361–66, 373. See also God; will 164, 168n260, 169n267, 173, 372n8 Malcolm, Norman, 155, 165n236 Manicheanism, 198, 199, 220 Mann, William, 131n85, 272 Marenbon, John, 78n27, 81–82, 361n152 Marion, Jean-Luc, 123, 152–53, 215n133 Mary: Mother of Jesus Christ, 1, 8, 14–15, 18,
Kane, G. Stanley, 201n90, 209n119, 219n143–144, 227n178, 232n195, 356n128 Kant, Immanuel, 56, 152, 155, 157n199, 171,
21, 24–27, 28, 31–32, 34, 270, 286, 296, 307–8, 312, 323; Anselm's prayers to, 8,
14–15, 18, 21, 24–28 192–93, 196–97, 226, 228 Kenny, Anthony, 154n190
Index original sin. See sin Ovid, 72 Mary Magdalene: Anselm's prayer to, 1, 20, 22, 28, 35, 117 McGill, Arthur C., 111n3–5, 119n31, 151n175–
Pailin, David A., 110n2 paradox: Anselm's use of, 11–12, 31–3, 50,
McGuire, Brian Patrick, 16n19, 44, 54n76 Meditation on Human Redemption. See Anselm meditation: in Anselm, 1, 6–7, 13–14, 34–5,
94–95, 100–101, 120–21, 127–28, 133–5, 138–41, 154–55, 166–73, 202–4, 220– 22, 297, 373–75 Parmenides, 11, 94–95, 107–8, 133, 182n23,
67, 98, 115, 117–20, 124, 126, 246, 253, 302, 318–19, 325–7 Meinong, Alexius, 160 Meno paradox, 121. See also Plato mercy. See God merit: role of in salvation, 17, 31, 35, 145,
195, 212, 241, 243 Pascal, Blaise, 35 passion. See emotion passivity, 98, 189–90, 215, 233, 235, 238, 373
Paul, St.: prayer to, 18, 20, 26–7, 32; 166, 198, 211–12, 237, 315, 354–55, 359,
360–64. See also grace, Pelagianism, metaphor: Anselm's use of. See analogy Mews, Constant J., 103–4, 245, 250–52, 255– theological views of in Anselm 177, 180,
202–3, 211–12, 219, 231, 239, 253, 323, 358, 359. See also Corinthians; Romans pedagogy: Anselm's, 10, 80–82, 86–87, 6, 263–64, 268–69, 275, 361n152 miracles, 18, 67, 309–10 Moltman, Jürgen, 288 monastic life, 1, 5–6, 27, 33, 39, 46, 51–52,
242–43, 317, 371–73 Pelagianism, 180, 192n60, 198, 209, 211–12, 220, 352, 355, 360–1, 366, 378 perfection, 63, 66, 102, 127, 131, 139–40,
56–59, 63, 65–73, 119, 369, 374, 377–78.
See also Benedictine Rule Monologion. See Anselm 150, 152, 155, 158–9, 165, 168, 199–200,
260, 297; divine, 10, 100, 126, 137, 139– 40, 152, 165; existence as a, 155, 158–9; human, 63, 66; of language. See language persona: Anselm's use of, 1, 116–18, 122, 124,
Nagel, Thomas, 231n190 names, divine. See God necessary reasons, 8–9, 12, 37, 93, 132,
146, 243, 247, 281, 284, 322 personhood: Boethius' definition of, 264, 141, 143–4, 147, 171, 172–73, 205, 211, 239, 279–81, 288–89, 291–301, 308, 312n257, 313, 318–19. See also argument necessity: types of, 346–50 Nelis, Suzanne J., 79, 147, 263 Neoplatonism, 105, 110n2, 159, 160, 181n20,
269, 275; in human beings, 102–3, 104, 106, 305–6, 314, 341; in the Trinity, 12,
145–6, 247–8, 254–61, 264–72, 274–75; of Christ. See Jesus Christ Peter, St.: prayer to, 19–20, 23, 31–2, 113,
258, 323 Peter the Chanter, 113 philosophy: Anselm's work as, 1, 5–6, 13, 30, 235–36, 260 Nestorianism, 250n20, 269–70 Nichols, Aiden, 150 Niskanen, Samu, 39–40 nonbeing, 96, 107–8, 133, 182, 190–91, 46, 101, 110, 116, 118–19, 123, 134, 148,
178, 188, 295–96 place: God as having a. See God Plato, 41, 72, 86, 102–4, 107, 189–91, 195,
212–14, 234, 236. See also nothing nonsense: Anselm's use of, 79, 87, 90–91, 199, 227, 229, 236–37, 242–43, 251n21, 378; dialogues of, compared to Anselm, 179, 242, 244; ethics of, compared to Anselm, 378; forms of, 91, 102–4, 236, 243; Gorgias, 179, 189, 199, 364; language in, 75; Meno, 121, 179, 251 Pope, Alexander, 188 Porphyry, 91n76, 269–70, 275 Pouchet, Jean Robert, 7n30, 178, 181n18,
97, 135, 150, 185, 220–22, 247 nothing, 125–28, 132–33, 136–37, 213, 220– 24, 235, 350–51, 373–74 obedience: monastic, 33, 52, 51–2, 58–59,
66, 68, 70, 219, 228, 252–3, 281, 289, 298. See also Benedictine Rule Olsen, Glenn W., 43n17, 43n19, 44n21, 53 ontological argument. See argument Orange: Council of, 352, 357, 364, 366 ordinary language. See language 197n71, 229n185 power, 94–5, 144, 165–66, 199–200, 205–9,
Index rhetoric, 4, 12–13, 16, 47, 55, 73, 114, 120, 241, 243–44, 257–58, 260, 279–80, 296– 97, 352–54; of the human will, 199–200, 205–9, 215, 225, 244, 348, 352–4, 361; secular, 69–70; of God. See God Pranger, M. Burcht, 123–24, 178n13, 182n21,
147, 204 righteousness, 11, 176, 180, 183, 193–94, 196–7, 199, 201–3, 205–10, 223, 229, 240–41, 288, 298, 353–54, 356–61, 363 rightness: truth as, 176, 191–93, 226–27
Rist, John, 179n73, 355n127, 356n130 Rohmer, Jean, 196n71, 228 Rogers, Katherin, 101n113, 102n116, 215n133, 342, 370n5 Prantl, Carl, 74 prayer, 16–17, 150, 374–75; in the Monologion, 120–21, 123; in the Proslogion, 146–47; Anselm's compared to earlier, 14–16. prayers: of Anselm. See Anselm predestination, 197, 212, 328, 346–47, 352,
105n127, 111n4, 193n60, 198–99, 205n102, 218, 225–28, 231n190, 237n207, 239, 349n97, 356n128, 360–61 Romans, Epistle to the, 64, 99, 203, 339
Roques, René, 117n27, 277n107 Roscelin, 12, 42, 77, 102–7, 245–52, 254–62, 355–56, 366 predication, 92, 106–8, 133, 176; existence as 264–69, 275, 278, 317–18, 320–21, 330, 345, 372 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56 a predicate, 154n190, 155–56, 158–60; of God, 130–32, 134, 152, 154n190, 182, 258, 270–71, 273, 331, 334, 341 Priscian, 76, 255 procession of the Holy Spirit, 9, 12, 273–74,
Sadler, Gregory B., 5n19, 110n1 saints. See individual saints by name Sabellianism, 258–59 salvation, 2, 8, 11, 30–32, 34, 64–65, 180,
330, 334, 336, 338–9, 341, 372. See also Trinity; Anselm De processione Spiritus Sancti. See Anselm prodigal son: parable of, 173–74 Proslogion. See Anselm providence: divine. See God Psalms: in Anselm's writings, 14, 16, 32,
198, 211–12, 279, 282, 289, 293, 300, 308, 318–20, 324–27, 346, 353, 358–67.
See also heaven; soteriology Satan. See devil Saxer, Victor, 22n47, 28n77 Schmitt, F.S., 13–14, 38, 40, 94n87, 105n127,
112–13, 148, 179, 229, 278, 304 punishment: for sin, 20, 44, 53, 64, 189–90, 114n14, 118n28, 148n167, 256n36, 318 scholastic: Anselm's work as, 5, 12, 133n97,
198, 227, 232, 303, 305–6, 314–15, 364 167, 172, 241, 304n224, 313, 316–17, 321, 328–30, 345, 368, 372–73. See also theology scripture, 11–12, 62–3, 98–9, 113, 117–18, quality: as Aristotelian category, 76, 81–82,
84–85, 87–88, 90–91, 94, 100, 104, 124–25, 130, 165, 193, 222, 255 175, 176–83, 197, 213, 228–29, 240, 252–
53, 257, 261, 278, 281–82, 299, 304–5, 328–9, 334–35, 337–38, 346, 349, 353, 358–60, 366–67 self-knowledge, 251, 326–27 seminal reasons, 309–10 Seneca, 148 separation: theme of, 1, 4, 10, 18–19, 22, 34,
Rakus, Daniel T., 196n71, 228 rationalism: in Anselm, 1–6, 110–15, 117–20, 122–24, 135, 148–53, 170–73, 181, 252– 54, 263–64, 279–82, 285–87, 290–3, 318–26, 368–78. See also reason realism, 102–6, 253 reason, 2, 6, 111, 119, 122, 143, 191, 275, 280–
83, 286, 303, 319, 322, 324, 369–74; human, 3, 171, 300, 317, 319–20, 322, 326; neutral or objective, 179, 344 receiving from God, 11, 180, 192, 212–13,
36–37, 43, 46–50, 52, 63–65, 70–71, 93, 106, 143, 149–50, 167, 222, 283–84, 291,
373, 375–76 Sharpe, Richard, 38n1 signification, 80, 88, 90, 92, 96, 131, 134, 214–16, 218, 219, 230–31, 233, 234–35, 236, 314, 354, 356n131, 358, 360–1 reconciliation, 4, 61, 244, 300, 364 rectitude. See righteousness reward: heaven as a, 63, 65, 229–30, 232,
161, 176, 183, 184–87, 193–94, 241; per aliud, 88–90, 92, 105, 130, 142–43; per se, 88–92, 105 sin, 8, 10, 16–17, 19–21, 23–5, 29–37, 363–64
Index Tonini, Simone, 177n7, 177n10 theology: Anselm's work as, 5–7, 76–79, 107, sin (cont.) 196–202, 208–9, 278, 285, 289–91, 293–5, 303–9, 311–15, 327, 362–63, 367, 377; personal, 314, 316; original, 20, 278, 285, 288–89, 303–9, 312–16, 318, 346, 356; in the prayers 8, 10, 16–17, 19–21, 23–5, 29–37; and freedom 196–202, 208–9; the first sin, 219, 234.
See also the fall Slattery, Michael P., 107n133 Soissons: Council of, 249 Solère, Jean–Luc, 309n245, 310n248 Son: God the, 137–40, 219, 247, 254–55, 110–11, 118–19, 156, 167, 169n267, 240, 345, 370–73; negative, 141–43, 156, 167,
Trinity, 5, 9, 25, 42, 45, 62, 101–2, 116, 129, 136–41, 143–44, 145–46, 147, 168, 247–49, 255–60, 265–266, 268–75, 276, 330–43, 345, 372. See also filioque controversy; God; and the persons of the Trinity by name truth: doing the, 98, 189, 196; highest,
130, 134, 244; unity of, 191, 211, 238, 244, 373; of signification, 176, 183–87,
193–95. See also signification type-token distinction: in Anselm, 185–86 257–60, 264–65, 267–70, 272–74, 293, 298–99, 302–3, 311, 331–35, 337–43.
See also Jesus Christ; Word, Son of God as the sorrow, 2, 10, 28, 33, 48, 64, 71, 236, 290, unbelievers: as addressed by Anselm, 6, 111,
278, 280, 283, 321–22, 324, 344, 371. See also Jews unity: desire for, 7–11, 29, 36–37, 46–50,
377. See also emotion soteriology, 2, 31–32, 52–3, 102–3, 180, 187, 198, 211–12, 279–82, 287–91, 293–95, 298–300, 301–302, 376. See also heaven; salvation Southern, Richard W., 6–7, 14–16, 19n29,
52–53, 57, 60, 63, 120, 169, 374–76; with God, 7–8, 10, 30, 32–33, 48, 57, 71–73, 120, 150, 169; of the will, 11, 57–58, 61,
63, 71, 193, 210–11, 213, 238; of truth, 191, 194, 211, 238, 244, 373; of word and thing, 8, 10, 89–90, 108–9, 144–45, 375 universals, 77, 88–89, 101–3, 105, 107, 125 uprightness. See righteousness Urban II, Pope, 12, 263, 275, 282, 329, 330 usus atque leges, 42 21–2, 38–41, 43–47, 52–54, 59n95, 61–62, 67–70, 78–79, 106–7, 117n27, 163, 182n23, 231n191, 246, 278, 287, 291, 299, 369–70 spirit, 4, 18, 46, 49, 60, 126, 136–37, 139–40, 198, 252, 258, 268–9, 331–4, 337–41, 343 spiritual life. See monastic life spirituality: in Anselm, 1, 4, 5–6, 16, 26, van Buren, Paul M., 148n165, 150 van Fleteren, Frederick, 130n76 Vaughn, Sally N., 38–41, 59n95, 67–68, 34–37, 71–72, 119, 170–71, 324, 369, 376–78 Steiger, Lothar, 81 Stock, Brian, 77n20, 123–24 Stoicism, 30, 36, 75, 229, 236, 241, 355,
70n144 Viola, Coloman, 149n170, 152 De veritate. See Anselm virgin. See Mary: Mother of Jesus Christ
Visser, Sandra and Thomas Williams, 135,
Stolz, Anselm, 111n5, 119n33, 155, 169–70 Stump, Eleanore, 198n75, 215n133, 355n127,
142n137, 143n142, 158n205, 164n232, 185, 187–88, 191, 196n70, 199, 201n90, 236n204, 236 Vita Sancti Anselmi. See Eadmer Vuillemin, J., 192n60 vulnerability, 36, 45, 233–34, 254, 299,
356n131 substance: Aristotelian, 42, 76, 81–83, 85, 87–92, 103–4, 138, 255, 269; God as, 42, 116, 134, 145–46, 247–48, 255, 257,
suffering, 23, 48, 63–65, 97, 165, 189–90, 377–78 232, 234–36, 287–88, 298, 326, 351–52 Sweeney, Eileen C., 5n19, 13n1, 103n120,
Ward, Benedicta, 14–15, 20n33, 23–24 Wetzel, James, 355–56, 367 will, 8, 49, 56, 58, 59–62, 68, 70, 71, 72–73,
110n1, 131n86, 192n60, 271n87 syllogism. See argument 203–7, 217, 224–27, 230, 348, 354–55,
index Williams, Thomas. See Visser, Sandra Wilmart, A., 13n1, 14n8, 38n1 Wolsterstorff, Nicholas, 158n202 Words. See language Word: Son of God as the, 136–40. See also
358, 361; for advantage (commoditas) or happiness, 9, 11, 196, 205, 225–30, 232–33, 237–38; finite, 219, 220, 224–26, 230–31, 232–33, 238–9, 350, 355–56; for justice, 9, 11, 176, 196–97,
218, 225–30, 232–33, 237–38, 298, 354, 362, 363, 392; as instrument, 206, 366, 367; of the good angels, 231–32. See also free choice; freedom; unity Son, God the worship, 146–47, 287
Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word was designed in Filosofia and typeset by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Natures Book Natural and bound by Thomson-Shore of Dexter,
Michigan.
