Mapping the Extremes Part II: Lowly Sinner
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing Mapping the Extremes Part II: Lowly Sinner
The second part of creating the problem of the prayers, debasing himself, is accomplished by focusing on the extreme and hopeless character of his sinful state. Besides naming his actual sins, he describes his state in graphic and physical terms as decaying and wounded. In the prayer to St. Peter, using the metaphor of Peter as the good shepherd, he describes himself as the "sickly sheep" "groaning at the shepherd's feet" suffering from "full-grown ulcers, open wounds, progressive decay."48 He is, he writes, doubly or triply trapped in evil. He starts out as a sinner but finds himself worse off than he had believed: "I approached you as one living and accused; and here I am before you dead and condemned."49 He is not only "sterile in good" (having faith without works) but, worse, is "fertile in evil."50 His own failure is made yet more dramatic by the second chance he has been given by the Incarnation. Anselm makes this clear by comparing his own situation to that of Adam. "He [Adam] abandoned God,
God permitting; I fled from God, God accompanying me." While Adam "persisted in evil," Anselm is still worse, running toward evil while God is calling him back.51 Anselm has both been given a second chance Adam did not have and has failed to learn from the example Adam provided.
Thus his failure is more perverse, more unforgivable than Adam's.
In the prayer to St. Nicholas, Anselm starts out in despair over his sin and yet finds a way to lower himself still further. To reach God, he must lift his soul above himself (already an impossibility) but finds that his sins are so great that he can't make any movement. Then he considers the strategy of "spreading out his hardships before God" so that God might take pity on him. This too fails because of the limitlessness of his sin. He might succeed, he suggests, if his heart were truly contrite, but, alas, he laments, "my soul is overwhelmed by inertia," held down by his sins.52
The sins themselves he describes as part of a triple abyss: the abyss of the sins themselves, the abyss of the torments of sin (hell), and the abyss of divine justice. Despite the spatial impossibility he describes himself as surrounded by these three abysses, one above, God's judgments, one below, hell, and one which he is in or rather which is in him, his sins themselves. "I fear the one that hangs over me, lest it collapse on me and with my abyss and crush me into the abyss which is revealed below."53 In this carefully worked out image, Anselm constructs what Ward calls one of 48. Ora. 9, S III, 31, 32–33.
49. Ora. 10, S III, 37, 121–22.
50. Ora. 10, S III, 36, 101–12.
51. Ora. 8, S III, 27, 39–40; 40–41.
52. Ora. 14, S III, 55, 13–14; 57, 76.
53. Ora. 14, S III, 59–60, 135–46.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing his greatest prayers "for its balance of the sense of the holiness of God and the peril of sin."54
Anselm is not content simply to describe the depths to which he has fallen; he also constructs his situation as a double bind, as an abyss from which he cannot even in principle extricate himself. Anselm cannot reveal his sins because they are "detestable" and would make him detested, but, on the other hand, sins cannot be forgiven unless they are confessed. "I am so defiled by horrible filth," he writes to Mary, "that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from (avertatur) me. So wasting away with despair I look to you for conversion (conversionem), for even my lips are mute to prayer."55 In the prayer to St. John the Baptist, he further elaborates his hopeless situation. On the one hand, he must examine himself and know his own sinfulness since to remain self-deceived is the sure road to damnation. Yet this task cannot be accomplished for, he argues, any amount of self-examination would either be incomplete or unbearable: "If you could bear [looking at your sins], without a horror of grief, you would not be able to tolerate your toleration."56 So, examining himself wholly and truthfully is impossible since, from the horror of it, he would be unable to carry it out, or if he could, he would be horrified by his own ability to do it. But carrying it out incompletely or not at all is equally damning. "If I look at myself, it is an intolerable horror; if I do not look at myself, death is unavoidable."57
In the prayer to St. Benedict, the double bind follows from Anselm's monastic profession. He notes first his inability to live the life of virtue, describing his sins as so many and so strong that they drag him around and trample him underfoot. Even in what looks like his brave fight against sin he is really, he confesses, a "false monk." Hence, he cannot call himself a monk because he is not true to the monastic way of life, but if he denies he is a monk, he also lies. Hence, he concludes, quoting the book of Daniel, "anguish closes me in on every side," for "if I deny my sovereign king, my good teacher and my profession, it is death to me. But if I profess to be a soldier, scholar, and monk, my life argues that I am a liar; it is a judgment against me."58 He attempts to find his way out, having failed at worthiness, concealed in faith which would hide his sinfulness. However, he recalls in another prayer, "faith without works is dead," which he takes to mean he is condemned because of his "fertility" in evil and "sterility" in good.59 He is no longer merely accused but condemned, not just
54. Ward, "Introduction," 70.
55. Ora. 5, S III, 13, 14–16.
56. Ora. 8, S III, 27, 48–49.
57. Ora. 8, S III, 28, 57–58.
58. Dan. 13:22. Ora. 15, S III, 62–63, 29–31; 63, 35; 63, 39–43.
59. Ora. 10, S III, 36, 95–100; Jas. 2:20, 26.