Arguing for Salvation
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing tion. Without compunction he is not only at the bottom of an inextricable abyss but is without even the desire to extricate himself.
Anselm does not, then, take Stoic advice to free himself from passion.
Instead his first goal is to stir up passion, to intensify the experiences of desire and grief, of love of God and loathing of self. The rejection of passion assumes that emotions are only evoked by the material world. But Anselm, while retaining the passions even in their material manifestations of the passions—tears, caresses, swoons—transfers them from physical to spiritual objects. Where the Stoics and even the Christian Boethius, for example, think of liberation as the liberation from emotion, Anselm's liberation is the liberation of the emotions from the prison of sin. Boethius prays in decorous formality; Anselm basks in self-exposure and self-flagellation. Boethius's God remains the distant though revered principle and end of creation, while Anselm's is mother, father, brother, and lover.85
Arguing for Salvation The most persistent pattern of the prayers is that in the midst of this impossible situation, Anselm still finds room to make an "argument" that he can and must be saved. "Give me what you have made me want, grant that I may love you as you command as much as you deserve;" "perfect what you have started, give me what you have made me desire," Anselm demands in the prayer to Christ.86 Everything he has comes from God, what he has made of himself is, as he points out, precisely nothing.87
Therefore, if he is going to get what he desires, full love for and commitment to God, which God also commands him to give to God, God is going to have to give it to him in order that he give it back to God. Impossible, except that God's infinite goodness and mercy makes it possible. In this way, Anselm manages to solve the problem of uniting himself as lowly sinner with lofty God without diminishing, but rather by increasing, the difference between sinner and savior. Because God is so much better and more powerful than his creation, his expansive nature can stretch far enough to save the lowliest and most undeserving sinner. Ultimately, the condition that makes the sinner's union with God impossible, his lowliness and sinfulness, is exactly what makes the sinner's salvation possible, for to think his salvation impossible is to place limits on the mercy
85. Boethius, Consolatio philosophiae, 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), book III, meter 9, 270–74.
86. Ora. 2, S III, 6–7, 16–17; 19–20.
87. Ora. 8, S III, 26–27, 19–33.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing and power of God. He can be saved, he contends, if divine mercy "not be deficient."88 Salvation, which the prayers begin by painting as impossible, ends by becoming both necessary and mysterious. The first prayer to Mary concludes, "If my misery is too great to be set free, will your mercy be less than is fitting?" In one and the same moment she can save him and get rid of that which Anselm worries is so detestable it would make his salvation impossible: "Most merciful lady, heal my weakness, and you will take away the filth that offends you."89 In the second prayer to Mary, he states this logic in its starkest terms:
If it is—or rather because it is—that my sin is so great and my faith is so small, my love so tepid, my prayer so fatuous, and my satisfaction for sin so imperfect that I deserve neither the pardon for crimes nor the grace of salvation, this, this is the very ground for my supplication that in that which my merit does not suffice your mercy will not be lacking what is worthy of you.90
As he addresses St. Stephen, he states the solution more directly:
"Your merits are great, great Stephen, so that they can suffice for you and me, and if they are used for me, they are not diminished for you."91 To God through Peter, Anselm writes, "O God and you, his greatest apostle, is this misery of mine so enormous that it cannot be put up against the boundlessness of your mercy? If it can but it will not, what is the enormity of my guilt that exceeds the multitude of your mercies?"92
Anselm's construction of his salvation as impossible and necessary at the same time is supported by Anselm's depiction of salvation in a more general sense. In the prayer to the cross, Anselm emphasizes the character of the cross as symbol of salvation, but it becomes a sign of salvation even as it had been a sign and instrument of defeat and humiliation. In a beautiful series of contrasts, Anselm details the sense in which the cross became the instrument of contradictory, we might even say crossing, motives: "They [used the cross] that they might condemn the savior; he
[Christ] that he might save the condemned. They that they might bring death to the living; he to bring life to the dead."93 Anselm also describes the nature and role of Mary in salvation in paradoxical terms. "All nature is created by God and God is born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary generated God. God, who made all things made himself of Mary, and thus he remade everything he had made."94
88. Ora. 6, S III, 17, 69–70.
89. Ora. 5, 14, S III, 43–44, 46–47.
90. Ora. 6, S III, 17, 65–70.
91. Ora. 13, S III, 52, 57–58.
92. Ora. 9, S III, 32, 72–74.
93. Ora. 4, S III, 11, 19–20. See the longer series of contrasts, ll. 15–21.
94. Ora. 7, S III, 22, 97–100.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing In ways we will see paralleled in Anselm's speculative writings, in the prayers the moment of darkest despair is the moment of greatest light.
Anselm writes, addressing the cross, "With what delight will I rejoice in you, through whom, for the servitude of hell I inherited, the kingdom of heaven is given. . . . Without you was a future which horrifies me, though it only last a moment, and through you I expect that I will rejoice in eternity."95 This is the existential moment Anselm wants to produce over and over again in the prayers: self-examination which strips away every false sense of worth and shows the impossibility of self-actualization. Once there are no illusions left about any way of extricating himself, at this moment the necessary possibility of salvation by grace becomes clear.
Every prayer, whether to Mary, Paul, Peter, John, or Benedict, has the same narrative and rhetorical structure. His relationship to the story is always the same. Anselm writes again and again in elaborate repetition what we could summarize in the language of a personal ad: lowly sinner seeks intimate union with lofty one through their mercy. Anselm's prayers begin in and deepen the sense that salvation is impossible but conclude in the inevitable reunion of man and God. Thus, all the prayers repeat the paradox of the Incarnation, in which the inability to make up for sin, or to even speak given the depth of sin, is contrasted with the extraordinary gift of mercy and love given completely gratuitously.
"Let my tears be my meat day and night" (Ps 41:4) In the prayers, Anselm's longing for God is so intense, it is a combination of joy and grief: joy in anticipation of the union he seeks and grief at not having reached it. Even though anguished and grief-stricken to the end, the prayers conclude in impatient desire for the real fulfillment of what Anselm has shown to be contained in the logic of God. Thus, they are all desire, desire made more fervent both by the impossibility and the certainty (in hope and faith) of consummation. The prayers often reach a kind of crescendo of complex emotion, mixing and alternating grief, frustration, longing and hope. This mood is captured well in this series of agitated questions, echoing a style found frequently in Augustine's
Confessions: "What shall I say? What shall I do? Where shall I go? Where will I seek him? Where and when will I find him? Whom shall I ask?
Who will tell me of my love, since I am languishing for love?"96 While he waits for the satisfaction of his desire, he prays, citing and elaborating the Psalms, "let my tears be my bread day and night . . . let me be fed
95. Ora. 4, S III, 12, 43–47.
96. Ora. 2, S III, 9, 72–74.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing with my sobs, and let me drink my tears; revive me with sorrows."97 "Give me, O Lord, in this exile, the bread of tears and sorrow for which I hunger more than for copious delicacies."98 Anselm expresses his ongoing search for God in paradoxical terms, taking comfort in his sorrow, enjoying his state of insatiation, making clear that the prayers' goal is not to bring the quieting of emotion and turmoil but their increase.
The prayers have been well described as seeking "not comfort but interminable hunger for the perfect Lord." The goal of this kind of spiritual exercise is neither "consolation," nor "ecstasy," "not even union, but the Lord wherein he believes union is realized." Prayer and practice in the mode Anselm adumbrates is a working out of the Benedictine rule of "continual turning," according to Pascal Baumstein. 99 "Continual turning" is Baumstein's rendering of conversatione in the Rule of St. Benedict, as one of the vows of monastic life, along with stability and obedience.100
The same phrase is used in Anselm's prayer to Benedict where he notes that he promised (but has failed dismally) to live a life sanctae conversationis.101 The lack of conversatio is the only one of the vows Anselm makes explicit reference to in the prayer, though clearly the others are implied.
This notion of "continual turning," of ongoing conversion to God, captures both the hope that no matter how far one has turned away in sin it is possible to turn back, and the sense, as important to Anselm as it was to Augustine, that no conversion is ever complete in this life. This is, of course, the lesson that comes after Augustine's many conversions and even after the last one, as he writes, "during this life, which may be called a perpetual trial, no one should be confident that although he has been able to pass from a worse state to a better, he may not also pass from a better state to a worse."102 But this ceaseless desire, this restlessness Anselm seeks to increase rather than decrease in his prayers, is not only motivated by the need for continual and renewed conversion to God because of one's own sinfulness but also because of the intensity of desire for true and complete union such that there is no consolation along the way, not even a temporary and imperfect substitute. These two directions of restless dissatisfaction—with one's sinfulness and with the God not yet possessed—go together since the only cause for God's as yet in97. Ora. 2, S III, 9, 93, 95–96; cf. Ps. 41: 4.
98. Ora. 16, S III, 67, 82–84; cf. Ps. 126: 2, 79: 6.
99. Paschal Baumstein, OSB, "Anselm on the Dark Night and Truth," Cistercian Studies Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2000): 247.
100. Rule of St. Benedict, c. 58: Suscipiendus autem in oratorio coram omnibus promittat de stabilitate sua et conversatione morum suorum et oboedientia, coram Deo et sanctis eius.
101. Ora. 15, S III, 62, 12–13.
102. Augustine, Confessiones 10, 48.