4. do say that God has every perfection.
brian leftow kind are able to have it and they would (ceteris paribus) be better or more valuable members of the kind if they had it than they would be if they did not. One point Anselm is making is that wisdom is an improving attribute for rational beings. The other comparison is between things able to be wise (men) and things not able to be wise
(masses of gold). In this second case, "whatever is not wise would be better if it were wise" does not compare a thing in an actual state with the same thing in another possible state. It asserts instead that things of a kind to be wise are better or more valuable than things not of such kind. Involved here, obviously, is the idea that some kinds of thing are objectively better to be than others: being a spirit, for instance, is supposed to be better than being a physical object
(Mon. 15). Members of superior kinds can not have some improving attributes for inferior kinds. It improves a human body to be muscular. Spirits can not be muscular. But presumably Anselm thinks a very weak spirit is still a better thing than a very muscular body.
Thus when Anselm calls being wise "in every respect better than its negation," he asserts that being wise is an improving attribute for a kind, and being able to be wise does not entail belonging to a kind with a superior.
Anselm's other rules for selecting descriptions for God come in this passage:
Just as it is blasphemous to suppose that (God) is something which in some respect it would be better not to be, so (God) must be whatever in every respect it is better to be than not to be. For (God) alone is that than which nothing at all is better. (Mon. 15) Let us call being a member of a kind with no superior a perfection, and also call every improving attribute for that kind a perfection.
Then there are at least two rules here:
3. do not say that God has any non-perfection, and 4. do say that God has every perfection.
To smooth the discussion, I will talk of attributes, not descriptions, despite what was said above.7 Then (3) dictates denying God membership in every kind with a superior and possession of every improving attribute only a member of such kinds can have. Rule (4) dictates ascribing to God membership in the highest kind in the scale of kinds and possession in the highest degree of the improving attributes for Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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that kind (if these attributes have highest degrees).8 The last sentence of the last-quoted text is not an apt support for these rules. God could be the best actual thing without having all perfections and even if He had some non-perfections, as long as every other actual thing was even less impressive. The last sentence quoted supports only
(1) and (2): as we have seen, these trade precisely on the idea that God is the best actual thing. This rather suggests that Anselm does not clearly see how (3) and (4) differ from (1) and (2). But (3) and (4) do in fact differ: they avoid the problems of (1) and (2). For one thing, perfections provide a genuinely usable decision procedure for filling out the concept of God. We can know what kinds have superiors and what features are as such improving for various kinds without knowing anything at all about God – we can learn this through experience of other things. For another, it is at least plausible that as Anselm thinks, "wise" is a perfection, and so (4) will select it. For it certainly seems as if anything that could be wise and is not, would be better if it were wise, ceteris paribus. And if we are willing to traffic at all in such claims as that one kind of thing is more valuable than another, we are likely to find it at least a bit plausible that rational being is a kind with no superior.
Like (2), (4) is meant to select intrinsic attributes, but does not select only these. Consider being such that it is up to one whether there is anything outside oneself that one has not created ex nihilo.
This sort of control over what exists sounds like a perfection; it seems that anything that could have this attribute would be greater if it did. But this attribute is not wholly indifferent to accompaniment.
Nothing can have it if it coexists with something over the existence of which it does not have the right sort of control. Having it depends not just on the creator's inner state, but on the state of the world outside the creator.
Rules (3) and (4) direct us to compare possible states of God. So the result of applying them is an at least partial conception of the actually greatest being as it would be in its best possible state. But there is a problem: nothing in Monologion 1–14 assures us that this being is in its best possible state. Anselm's initial argument is simply to the existence of something that is actually best of all existing things – whether or not it itself could be still better. He does not attempt to show that the best being actually is in its best possible state until the Proslogion.
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brian leftow the proslogion Anselm sought in the Proslogion "one argument" that would yield all the Monologion's theses – including, then, that the best actual being is in its best possible state. Actually, the Proslogion goes even a bit further, arguing that the best actual being is the best possible being in its best possible state. The decision procedure the Proslogion uses to fill out the concept of the best possible being compares thinkable
(roughly, possible) states of God. Chapter 5 displays the Proslogion's decision procedure this way:
What then are you, Lord God, than whom nothing greater can be described? . . . the greatest of all things . . . who made all other things from nothing. For whatever is not this is less than can be described. But this cannot be thought of you.9
This is an example of the Proslogion's "one argument" – really one form of argument. Unpacked, the argument runs this way:
5. God = that which is in the greatest describable state. So 6. No possible being can be described that would if actual be in a greater state than God actually is in.10
7. Suppose for reductio: we can describe God as the greatest of all things (etc.), God can be the greatest of all things (etc.),11
God would if so be greater than if not so, and God is not the greatest of all things (etc.). Then 8. When we describe God as the greatest of all things (etc.), we describe a possible being (God) in a greater state than God actually is in.
9. By (6), we cannot do so. So 10. (7) is false, by reductio. So 11. If we can describe God as the greatest of all things (etc.), God can be the greatest of all things (etc.), and God would if so be greater than if not so, then God is the greatest of all things
(etc.).
Anselm takes the truth of the antecedent to be obvious. We can generalize from (11) to get 12. For all F, if we can describe God as F, God can be F, and God would if F be greater than if not F, then God is F.
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Given (12), Anselm can derive divine attributes easily. The Monologion sought only God's intrinsic attributes. The Proslogion apparently wants more: the first description Anselm selects for God in Chapter 5 includes a non-intrinsic note, having made all other things.
This could be understood as intrinsic if we took it as being such that there is nothing distinct from Him which He has not made, a description God satisfies whether or not there are other things. But Anselm wants all the Monologion's results to fall out of his unum argumentum. The non-intrinsic reading is one of the Monologion's results.
If God can have all perfections, this argument-form justifies (4):
"therefore you are . . . whatever it is better to be than not to be"
(Prosl. 5).12 Let G be a sample perfection. If God can have all perfections, then God can have G. If G is a perfection, either being G is being of the most valuable kind of thing, or G is an improving attribute for that kind, one such that anything of that kind that can be G would be better if G than it would be if it were non-G, ceteris paribus. Obviously, then, God would be greater with than without G. So if we can describe God as G, by (12) it follows that God is G.
But there is a problem. Proslogion 15 uses the argument-form illustrated above to conclude that God is greater than can be described: if He were not, Anselm reasons, we could describe a greater, namely a God so great as to be beyond our powers of description.13 If God is greater than we can describe, then even if the greatest thing we can describe is a God who is F, God might nonetheless be greater still, by being in a state we cannot describe that is incompatible with being
F. Proslogion 15 casts a pall over Anselm's whole method. Anselm asserts, for instance, that the argument-form (or equivalently (12)) selects being wise. It does so only if there is no quality available to the highest kind of thing that is superior to being wise and incompatible with it: for if there is, it is not true that God would if wise be greater than He would be if not wise. Perhaps we know of no such quality, but if God is greater than we can describe, how can we be sure that there is not one and that He does not have it? That wisdom is among the best qualities we can conceive God to have does not seem to count for much once divine inconceivability enters the picture.
The Proslogion does not exactly take it for granted that one being can have all outputs of its argument-form. Anselm sees at least prima
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brian leftow facie problems reconciling some outputs with others: can God be both perfectly merciful and perfectly just? Merciful and impassible?
Omnipotent and unable to sin? But it seems fair to say that Anselm thinks all these prima facie problems can be overcome: he thinks all outputs of the argument-form are in fact compatible, though it may be hard to see how they can be. Still, if the reasoning leading to (12) and (12) itself fairly represent Anselm, he faces a problem.
To use (12) to derive a divine attribute – say, necessarily perfect justice – we must know that God can have it. Can we know whether
God can be necessarily perfectly just if we do not know what other attributes God can have? Perhaps there is a case that God can have necessarily perfect mercy as well. But perhaps, too, nothing can be both necessarily perfectly just and necessarily perfectly merciful. For it might well be that if God can have both, He is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful, or even that if God can have both, He is necessarily perfectly just and perfectly merciful: each conclusion would follow in widely accepted modal logics. But as we see shortly, it is difficult to reconcile these two attributes. If they are not in fact compatible, it is not the case that God can have both. He can have at most one. In order to be sure that there are no such conflicts, or to decide them if they exist, we would need to know all attributes
God can have – a daunting task – or else know some attributes God does have, which limit the ones He can have. The most we can know without the survey or some knowledge of what attributes God has is that prima facie God can be (say) necessarily perfectly just. But we cannot produce the survey. And if we have only (12) to tell us what attributes God has (save for being that than which no greater is describable), we cannot learn what attributes God has without first knowing which ones He can have. Nor is it as if Anselm starts with a base set of given divine attributes (other than being that than which no greater is describable) and evaluates others as to whether they are compatible with these. On Anselm's approach, all attributes save the key one start on a par, equally to be ascribed to God only if (12) so dictates.
It is not an option to deal with this by deleting "God can be F" from (12). That clause alone keeps (12) from producing supposed divine attributes God cannot really have – which would render (12) ineffective. So if only (12) tells us what attributes God has, and the most we can plug in as a premise in conjunction with (12) is that prima
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facie God can be F, the most (12) can give us is the conclusion that prima facie God is F. That is, we must modify (12) to 12a. For all F, if we can describe God as F, prima facie God can be
F, and God would, if F, be greater than if not F, then prima facie God is F.
"Prima facie" allows for the possibility of conflicts between attributes God prima facie has. If two of these are incompatible,
God has at most one. If we start not knowing any attributes God does have (save being that than which no greater is describable), and (12a) tells us only what attributes God prima facie has, (12a) takes us all the way to a claim that God actually has an attribute only if it turns out that having this attribute is compatible with having every other attribute God prima facie has.
According to Proslogion 5, we should ascribe every perfection to God. But it is a live possibility that He cannot have all perfections.
Take it for granted that God can belong to the highest kind. (Arguably deity is the highest kind, or is if there can be deities. If that is right,
God cannot belong to it only if there cannot be a deity.) Even so, it is not obvious that all attributes that are improving for that kind are compatible: perhaps some kinds have more than one possible summit, more than one intrinsic state for a member of that kind than which no greater is possible. Perhaps being perfectly just would be one summit for a deity. Perhaps being perfectly merciful would be another. And perhaps there is just no way one God can be both. After all, one might think, someone perfectly just would never remit a deserved punishment, but someone perfectly merciful would at least sometimes remit a deserved punishment. There being two summits for deity is compatible with God's being something than which no greater can be described, as long as neither summit is greater than the other. And perhaps this can be so: perhaps two possible Gods, one with the rest of the perfections plus perfect mercy and not quite perfect justice, the other with the rest of them plus perfect justice and not quite perfect mercy, would just be incommensurable in overall perfection.
If it is a live option that God cannot have all perfections, it is a live option that (12a) will not fill out the concept of God. Suppose that perfections F and G are not compatible. Then we must decide: would something having all other perfections plus F be greater than
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brian leftow something having all the others plus G? If +F>+G, we pick F.
If +G>+F, we pick G. If +F=+G or the two are incomparable, we are at an impasse. In fact, (12a) may not even let us conclude definitely of a single attribute that God has it. Suppose that the prima facie candidates sort themselves into sets such that we cannot by (12a) decide which set God has. And suppose no single candidate figures in every set. We can then know that God has one of the sets, at least if we know that God is a perfect being and a perfect being must have one of the sets. And we can know that God has this set or that set or that . . . But we cannot say of any individual member F of any set that God has it. For if candidates sort themselves into mutually exclusive sets and we do not know which set God has, the only way to show that God has F would be to show that F is a member of every set. results Let us ask, then, what sort of attributes Anselm's rules pick out. Rule
(2) selects attributes F such that any non-F is less perfect than any F.
This restricts its output to attributes that locate things having them on a scale of value encompassing every object, that is, which are such that, for any object, either it is an F or it is in some respect more or less perfect than an F. One may wonder how many such attributes there are. And one may wonder whether (2) picks, say, omniscience. Is any omniscient being better than any angel? Some omniscient being might know more than any angel (if no angel is omniscient, which is not clear). But perhaps there are many omniscient beings, and unless being omniscient entails having the rest of the divine nature
(again, unclear), perhaps some omniscient beings are overall less perfect than some angels. The rule also selects only attributes F and G such that either every F is a G or every G is an F. For suppose that every F is better than every non-F, and every G than every non-G.
Then if every F is not a G, then some G is better than that F. If some G is also a non-F, then a non-F surpasses some F, and so it is not true that every F is better than every non-F. If either every F is a G or every G is an F, something actually is both F and G. So an advantage of (2) is that any attributes it selects are compatible.
Rule (4) does not require a common value-scale encompassing all objects. Like (12a), all it requires is that we be able to compare an Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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object as F with itself as non-F. (4) selects God or perfect being as kinds to which a perfect being would belong, if perfect being is a kind.
In Proslogion 5, Anselm quickly recaps the results of the Monologion:
(12a) selects being creator ex nihilo, supreme good, source of all good, and "whatever it is better to be than not to be." In Monologion 15, the latter includes being living, wise, omnipotent, true, blessed, incorporeal and eternal (atemporal). "Incorporeal" raises questions: is being incorporeal part of belonging to the highest kind? Is it true that were something of this kind able to be incorporeal and not so, it would be greater if it were so? Like questions arise for being atemporal.
Monologion 16 adds being just, beautiful (on which see Prosl. 17), blessed, immortal, incorruptible, and immutable. It has been questioned whether being immortal or incorruptible would necessarily be good things: perhaps even heaven might be boring given enough time, life on earth would be more surely so, and boredom would be the least of one's worries in an everlasting hell, at least as hell is usually conceived. Nothing about mere prolongation of life guarantees that the life will be worth having (or so at least it seems to me). But if we suppose we are talking about the immortality or incorruptibility of a being also blessed – which presumably includes being perfectly happy, among other things, and inter alia immune to boredom – presumably the guarantee of ever-more life is itself worth having. If this being is in addition atemporal, the whole worry about boredom blows over: it takes time to get bored. As to immutability, I will just note that it follows from atemporality if nothing atemporal is possibly temporal. For everything that changes exists at two times, at one of which it has an attribute F and at another of which it lacks it. So something atemporal possibly changes only if it is possibly temporal.
Anselm gives perfect-being arguments for his doctrine of divine simplicity, the idea, already met, that God is identical with each of (what we would otherwise call) His intrinsic attributes (Mon.
16–17). Whether a perfect being really is, as such, simple is one of the deepest-lying issues between "classical theism," the broad sort of God-concept Anselm favors, and its contemporary critics.
The Proslogion adds being knowledgeable, merciful, impassible, and impeccable. Here only impassibility will raise questions, but Anselm presumably thinks that being immune to negative affects (sorrow, grief, etc.) is a component of being completely blessed.
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brian leftow (4) and (12a) select the maximal degree of any degreed attribute they select. If, for example, it is better to live for one year than for one month, and so forth, then to live forever becomes automatically the best, and so is selected. (A timeless being, if alive, lives forever, in that at every time it is equally true that timelessly, it exists.)
If "rational" passes, (4) and (12a) select the maximal degree of perfections distinctive to this: maximal knowledge, and if rationality carries will and freedom with it, maximal perfection of these, which includes maximal power.
We can view the Proslogion 2 argument for God's existence as an application of (12a) that selects "exists in reality." This supposes
(as the argument seems to) that we can compare God as existing in reality with God as He would be if He existed (only in the mind and) not in reality.14 The argument includes a claim that if we think God to exist, we think Him greater than we would think Him to be if we thought Him not to exist. This is so only if we think of existence as a perfection. As Anselm would presumably not rest an argument to God's existence on an opinion of ours he thought false, it seems to follow that Anselm thinks of existence as a perfection. If he does, we must ask whether he is on his own terms right to do so.
Being F is "in every respect better than" being not-F if anything would if F be greater than it would be if not-F. If a thing does not exist, it has no attributes at all, and so no greatness at all.15 So it seems to follow that if existent it is greater than it would be if not existent. It might seem that we cannot say that a thing if existent is greater than it would be if non-existent, because if a thing does not exist, there is no "it" to which to refer, to be less great: we cannot compare existing and nonexisting things for greatness. Anselm might reply that we can at least compare things existing in reality with themselves as existing in intellectu. But also, we can say of this very existing thing before us that it would have no greatness if it did not exist – with "it" referring only to the existing thing before us. And having some greatness entails having more than no greatness. So it seems that being existent is an improving attribute for every kind: cats and dogs, for example, are greater cats and dogs if they exist than they would be if they did not exist. There is, however, another problem. Anselm explicates the idea of "something . . . in every respect better than its negation" by saying that "whatever is not wise is, insofar as it is not Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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wise, unqualifiedly inferior to what is wise." I have not shown being existent to meet this condition. For I have not shown that existence is, as such, a source of greatness: I have not shown that existing things are great precisely qua existing. I have shown only that a thing must exist to have any other attribute that confers a degree of greatness. Anselm gives two tests for being a "something . . . in every respect better than its negation," a "greater with or without?" test and one involving qua. Whatever meets the second meets the first, but perhaps not vice-versa. If Anselm would say that meeting just one of these tests is enough to make existing a perfection, then on his terms, he is correct to call existing a perfection.
If meeting the "greater with or without?" test is enough to make existing a perfection, it also grants the title "perfection" to every attribute that no existing thing could fail to have. No existing thing could fail to be such that 2 + 2 = 4. So nothing exists unless it is such that 2 + 2 = 4. So being such that 2 + 2 = 4 is a perfection if existing is, on Anselm's terms. For something fails to have it only if it fails to exist, and if it fails to exist, it lacks something it is "in every respect better" to have. some explanations Anselm gives rather more attention to some of these attributes than to others. William Mann's piece in this volume explicates Anselm's doctrine of divine simplicity: that doctrine is, in a nutshell, that every sentence ascribing something purely intrinsic to God is made true by precisely the same thing, which is identical with all of God
Himself. Anselm does not develop the doctrine as elaborately as (say) Aquinas was to, and in particular does not consider its application to God's thinking, knowing, and willing in any great detail, save insofar as it affects the way these figure in the doctrine of the Trinity. Divine simplicity entails that, in all purely intrinsic respects, God must be as He is: He must be identical with Himself, and that which makes all purely intrinsic claims about Him true is identical with Himself, with what He must be identical with. But this does not rule out God's having done or known other things than He in fact has. Differences in these respects are not purely intrinsic. For instance, God's act of creating is not indifferent to what else exists. If God has created,
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brian leftow there exists what God has created. Similar points apply to God's knowledge and many noncreative volitions.
As Anselm sees it, God's being simple entails His being atemporal, that is, His life's having no temporal location. Per (4), God has an everlasting or eternal life, temporal or atemporal. God is identical with His eternity (Prosl. 18). Being simple, God has no parts (Prosl.
18). If God is identical with His eternity and God has no parts, His eternity has no parts (Prosl. 18). So it has no past or future parts (Prosl.
18–19). But any everlasting life in time always has past or future parts.
So God's life, Anselm concludes, is atemporal. Anselm's argument fails. What is in danger of having past or future parts is not in fact the same entity that the doctrine of divine simplicity would identify with God. The simplicity doctrine, again, concerns what is purely intrinsic to God. What is purely intrinsic is God's attribute of being eternal. What is in danger of past or future parts is not an attribute.
It is the concrete span of life God lives – the set of events making up His life. If these events include His knowing and willing what He does, their content is not purely intrinsic to God. For if things were different beyond God, it would follow that God knew and had done different things in these events. So divine simplicity does not entail the events of God's life being identical with God, since it entails this only for what is purely intrinsic in God.
Though he does not manage to show that God is atemporal, Anselm has an interesting way to explain the claim that He is.
Anselm's key claim comes in the late De Concordia:
In eternity there is only a present, which is not a temporal present like ours, but an eternal present, in which all of time is contained. As the present time contains every place and the things which are in any place, so the eternal present contains at once the whole of time and whatever exists at any time . . .
Eternity has its own simultaneity, in which exist all things which exist at the same place or time and all things which are diverse in place or time.16
No part of God's life ever was or will be (Mon. 24; Prosl. 19): in God's life, there is only a present. But then in God's life nothing else ever was or will be either. Now, I was once an infant. But if for God I was an infant, this lies in His past, and so He has a past. I will be dead one day. But if for God I will be dead, this lies in His future, and so He has a future. So for God, every event is present, all at once: in His present I am at once an infant, an adult and a corpse. But obviously
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there is no single temporal present at which all events occur. So all events occur at once in God's nontemporal present – while still being at various different presents in time. Anselm's view is that events are present not just while they occur in time but also while they cooccur with the life of God. So at any time, some events are present in God's time-series, the sequence (or lack thereof) of events making up His life, but not present in another time-series. On some readings of Special Relativity, there is nothing particularly odd about this: some events are present in my proper time, but not in the proper time of someone in my present who is in motion relative to me.
Another part of Anselm's view will be controversial to many. If we take him at his word when he says that eternity is to time as time is to space, Anselm's view requires that every temporal event also occurs in eternity, as every spatial event also occurs in time.
Like Boethius before him, Anselm uses the metaphysics of eternity to explain how divine foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible. They seem not to be. A standard way to show this asks us to suppose of some truth about future free human acts that God believes it, for example that 13. Yesterday God infallibly believed that (P) I will write to my mother tomorrow.
If so, 14. It is now necessary that God infallibly believed that P.
15. Necessarily, if God infallibly believed that P, then P. So 16. It is now necessary that P. So 17. I cannot do otherwise than write to my mother tomorrow.
So 18. I will not do so freely.
(13) incorporates the idea that God is temporal.17 Given (13), (14) is true because of the unalterability of the past: it is not a logical or metaphysical necessity that God believed P, but "necessary" expresses the idea of being beyond the power of any present agent to affect. (15) simply draws a consequence of being infallible. (14) and (15) entail (16) in accord with a standard thesis of modal logic. Anselm blocks the argument by denying (13): God believed this not yesterday but at no time at all, that is, atemporally. So (Anselm notes) the only necessity (14) can involve is the necessity of eternity. In raising the Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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brian leftow specter of the necessity of eternity, Anselm takes a step beyond anything Boethius considered. This is a specter if we have this thought: if what is past is beyond our power to affect, surely what is timelessly the case is even more so. But the necessity of eternity, Anselm writes, is just "subsequent" necessity, the necessity that a thing be so given that it is so (De Conc. 1. 5) – like the necessity that I am writing if I am in fact writing, which is just the necessity that I not be writing and not writing at once. The very event that has this kind of necessity given that it is happening can also have been avoidable: given that I am writing, I cannot now simultaneously not be writing, but before now, it was entirely in my power not to be writing now. So if it is now necessary in eternity that God believes that I write to my mother tomorrow, this necessity merely reflects the fact in eternity that I do write to my mother on that day. It is in fact contingent that I write, therefore contingent that this is what God "sees" in eternity, therefore contingent that this is what God "fore"knows me to do. compatibility problems Anselm spends some of the Proslogion resolving apparent incompatibilities between attributes (12) or (12a) ascribed to God. There are many more questions of this sort than he thought. Many wonder, for instance, whether a timeless being can be alive, or have powers.
I will speak only about the resolutions Anselm actually offers.
God is omnipotent (Prosl. 7). According to Anselm, He is also impeccable, unable to sin (Prosl. 7). There can seem to be a problem here: I am strong enough to sin, so why is not an omnipotent God?
Anselm replies that impeccability is not a lack of some power to sin.
Rather, "power" to sin, "ability" to do wrong, is really a case of lack of power (Prosl. 7). We can explicate Anselm's thought this way, at least for the case of a perfect being. A perfect being desires to do no wrong. If so, any ability to do wrong would be one to fail to do what it wants, and do something it does not want to do. But one fails to do what one wants and instead does what one does not want only by being in some way unable to do what one wants: by a simple lack of power, by lack of appropriate knowledge, by being in a circumstance that forces one to act against one's desires, and so on. So, given what a perfect being can be presumed to want, ability to do evil would be or rest on some deeper inability. More generally, Anselm argues, if Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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there is anything that omnipotent God is "unable" to do, a deeper analysis will reveal that it would actually be not power but a lack of power to be able to do it.
Anselm also takes a second tack here. Being impeccable is being such as necessarily not to sin. But he finds it troubling that we say that something (e.g. to lie) is impossible to God or that God is something (e.g. just) by necessity. For impossibility suggests powerlessness, and necessity suggests compulsion.18
Anselm resolves this by noting:
We often say "necessary to be" of what is not compelled to be by any force, and "necessary not to be" of what is not excluded by any preventing factor.
For example, we say . . . "it is necessary for God not to be unjust" . . . not because some force . . . prohibits Him from being unjust, but because nothing can . . . cause Him to be unjust.19
The last is not the most obvious way to parse a necessity-claim. But Anselm's modal metaphysic makes some sense of this. His Philosophical Fragments raises it as a puzzle:
We sometimes speak of there being an ability in a thing in which there is no ability. For everyone grants that whatever can, can by virtue of an ability. So when we say "what does not exist can exist," we say that there is an ability in that which does not exist . . . But I cannot comprehend this. For there is no ability in what does not exist.20
This and his unease about talk of God necessarily not sinning suggest that for Anselm the primary sense of "can" is or rests on powerascription, and so "cannot" primarily or properly expresses lack of power. Anselm's parsing of God's necessity of being just depends on this: he parses "necessarily" as "not possibly not," the latter as "there is no ability to bring it about that not," and then locates the lack of ability in things other than God.
This leads to a surprising fact: even metaphysical necessities do not constitute an external boundary on the power of Anselm's God.
Anselm argues that whatever is necessary is so because God wills that it be so.21 We might think it a conceptual or a metaphysical necessity that there is no undoing what is past: Anselm asserts that this is so only because God wills that the past be unchangeable.22
God has disposal over all necessity, for Anselm, because as Anselm Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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brian leftow sees it, things are possible or not according as powers exist to bring them about. All power other than God's is His gift to creatures. So what powers there are other than God's is under God's control. If this is so, all necessity save that imposed by God's very nature is likewise under the control of God's will, since on Anselm's terms it is necessary that P just if no power can bring it about that notP. (Perhaps God's nature imposes boundaries on God's power, but if so, these are not external boundaries. They come from within God.)
You might ask, "what about God's necessary existence? Surely it is not in His power whether He exists necessarily?" It is not up to God whether He ever exists, of course. But recall Anselm's parsing of necessity in divine contexts: God exists necessarily just if "nothing can cause Him not to be immortal" (De Conc. 1. 2). Now, God cannot cause Himself not to be immortal. This would be willing the supreme good not to exist, a supremely evil willing (since it would remove all good from the universe). An impeccable being cannot will this. That is, He is not inclined to it Himself, and nothing can force Him to. So God can not be immortal only if something else can force Him not to be immortal, despite His not willing not to be immortal. It is not implausible that nothing can force an omnipotent being to die if He wishes to live. Beyond this, as nothing else exists unless God causes it to do so, and nothing has any power unless God grants it, nothing exists with the power to cause God not to be immortal unless He brings this about. God would simply be irrational if He willed there to be something that could force His hand in this direction, given that it is not one He wants to go in and there is no need to create something with this power. So there is nothing able to make this happen. This lack of anything able to force God to will Himself not to exist, or directly cause Him not to exist, is all "God necessarily exists" asserts – according to Anselm.
Anselm thinks God both merciful and impassible (Prosl. 8). The former will appeal to us as a primary moral perfection (and of course in harmony with Scripture). The latter implies a lack of (literal) compassion: impassibility is immunity to all negative affect, including having "a heart sorrowful out of compassion for the wretched."
Anselm can reconcile mercy and lack of compassion because while compassion is a matter of what we feel, being merciful is an inner state manifested in what we do. While God feels no sorrow, His inner state, whatever it is in terms of feeling, issues in an effect we
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Anselm's perfect-being theology
correctly identify as mercy, and this is reason to say that God's inner state is one of mercy. A tougher nut to crack is the reconciliation of justice and mercy. For (again) presumably a perfectly just being would punish all who deserve it, as fully as they deserve, while a perfectly merciful being would presumably remit some punishment somewhere. Anselm attempts some moves on this in the Proslogion, but they are at best inconclusive: God's mercy is "just to Himself" – appropriate to His own character – but Anselm in the end cannot explain how it can be just for God to save some sinners and let others equally evil be damned. Anselm's best thoughts on the subject, not surprisingly, come in Cur Deus Homo, explicating the distinctively Christian reconciliation of justice and mercy. God's justice and mercy, he argues there, are both fully expressed in the Incarnation and atonement. There is justice, in that punishment appropriate to sin is meted out. There is also mercy, in that God takes the punishment on Himself rather than applying it to us. We may wonder whether punishing someone else for a crime really counts as justice, but consider the analogy of a monetary fine: if you pay with money that is in your possession, you still have been fined, even if the money came to you by a benefactor's gift. On Anselm's account,
Adam's race paid a fine with resources loaned to it by having God incarnate in one of its members. We can add that perhaps neither
God's justice nor God's mercy is really at stake in the saving of some and the damning of others – given what God has done toward the saving of all, that is in the end the others' responsibility. notes 1.
For quotations and discussion, see my "Concepts of God," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1998), vol. iv, 93–102.
This is of course roughly the Lewis/Langton definition (Rae Langton and David Lewis, "Defining 'intrinsic'," Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 58 (1998): 333–45. See also Dean Zimmerman, "Immanent Causation," in James Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, vol. xi (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1997), 462–63). This is not ideal, but we need not seek a better for present purposes.
Boethius used "substantial" in the same way. See his De Trinitate.
Translation by Thomas Williams. All other translations are my own.
On a less obvious reading, this does not follow: if there are no good things other than God, there are none He did not create, and for this
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