34. I presented earlier versions of this chapter at Purdue University,
jeffrey e. brower (1992). Engstrom argues that "the primary focus of attention in Kant's moral theory is not, as is often thought, on isolated instances of choice and action, but rather on a person's disposition or character" (748). For more extended treatments of the same issue, see F. G. Munzel, Kant's
Conception of Moral Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue (New York,
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
31.
Though, of course, medieval eudaimonists will explain what is involved in "choosing what is right for the right reason" differently than Anselm.
32.
Sheets ("Justice in the Moral Thought of St. Anselm") emphasizes the supernatural origin of the will's rectitude, though he is skeptical (for reasons I find unconvincing) that Anselm could have possessed the notion of a virtue in the standard Aristotelian sense. See esp. 136–37.
33.
The same point also emerges from the passage quoted above from De Casu Diab. 12, if we restore its original context: "He cannot be called just or unjust for willing only happiness or for willing only what is appropriate, when he wills in that way out of necessity. Again, he neither can nor ought to be happy unless he wills to be happy and wills it justly. For both of these reasons, therefore, God must create both wills in him in such a way that he both wills to be happy and wills it justly.
This added justice governs his will for happiness in such a way as to restrain its excess without eliminating its power to exceed."
34.
I presented earlier versions of this chapter at Purdue University, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the Cornell Summer
Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy, and Marquette University's Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. I am grateful to the audiences on those occasions for stimulating discussion and comments. I am also grateful to Michael Bergmann, John Boler, Jeff Hause,
Patrick Kain, Brian Leftow, Scott MacDonald, Dan Maloney, Michael Rea, Paul Studtmann, and especially Susan Brower-Toland for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.
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william e. mann
Anselm on the Trinity One of the central mysteries of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the Trinity. According to it, there is but one God, yet that one God is threefold in nature: there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
That God is triune in nature is a "mystery" in a special, theological sense of the term: it is communicated to humans by divine revelation, it is beyond the powers of natural human reason to demonstrate, and so if it is to be accepted, it must be accepted as an item of religious faith. Skeptics in their polite moments might call the doctrine a "mystery" in the more usual sense of the term. They will claim that the doctrine flouts elementary principles of counting, confusing one with three. For skeptics the only mystery to be explained is how Christians can think they remain faithful to monotheism while courting polytheism.
Anselm investigates the doctrine of the Trinity extensively in three of his treatises. Roughly two-fifths of the Monologion is devoted to it, and it is the sole center of attention in On the Incarnation of the Word (De Inc. Verbi) and On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (De Proc.). Despite operating under a number of constraints that may appear to us to preclude successful completion of his project, he proceeds self-assuredly, confident that reason can demonstrate, not that the doctrine is true (for then it would not be a mystery) but that it is free from contradiction – more than that, that It All Makes Sense. I shall begin by describing briefly some of the constraints by which Anselm takes his investigation to be governed.
I shall then examine selectively and in more detail the more noteworthy features of his investigations. Most of my attention will be devoted to the Monologion, which lays the foundation for Anselm's
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william e. mann position. On the Incarnation of the Word and On the Procession of the Holy Spirit amplify but do not deviate from the Monologion.1 authority Most importantly, because the doctrine of the Trinity is in the domain of revealed theology, Anselm takes his enterprise to be guided necessarily by authority, the authority of Scripture (the revealed word of God), the authority of confessional creeds formulated by Church councils (in particular, the Nicene Creed), and the authority of the Church Fathers (in particular, Augustine). It would require a book to document all these influences. Here are examples of each of these kinds of authority, however, that figure prominently in Anselm's writings.
The first three verses of the first chapter of the Gospel according to John say that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made." The passage anchors Anselm's identification of the Son with the Word (Mon. 29–48), while simultaneously raising the question of what the point could be of saying, given that the Word was God, that the Word was also with God.
Here are excerpts from the Nicene Creed, as Anselm understood it:
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the onlybegotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made . . . And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified . . .
A significant bone of contention during Anselm's lifetime was the claim that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son
(filioque). Although the Western or Latin church affirmed the language of filioque, the Eastern or Greek church denied it, maintaining that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father through the Son. In 1098 Anselm attended the Council of Bari to defend the filioque
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conception of procession before delegates of both Latin and Greek churches. On the Procession of the Holy Spirit is Anselm's record of the views he expounded at the council.
Anselm was familiar with Augustine's monumental work On the Trinity. In it Augustine had argued that among created things we can find images of the Trinity, traces, as it were, of the triune nature of their creator. Star examples are provided by the human mind: one is the mind itself, its self-love, and its self-knowledge (Book 9); another is the mental faculties of memory, understanding, and will (Book 10).
Anselm reworks these Augustinian images in Monologion 46–67. simplicity Augustine also bequeathed to Anselm a remarkable metaphysical doctrine, the doctrine of God's simplicity. Augustine gives partial expression to the doctrine in On the Trinity:
God indeed is truly spoken of in many ways as great, good, wise, blessed, true, and whatever else is seen as not unworthily said [of Him]. But He is the same as His greatness, which is wisdom (for He is not great by means of bulk, but by means of power) and the same as goodness, which is wisdom and greatness, and the same as truth, which is all these. And in Him it is not one thing to be blessed and another to be great, or wise, or true, or to be good, or to be altogether Himself. (6.7.8)
To say of a person that she is good and wise is to say two different things about her, and the two things thus said are distinct from the thing about whom they are said. A person is one thing, her goodness another, and her wisdom a third. She might have been good without being wise, or wise without being good, and in any event, her goodness and wisdom are accidental to her: she was born without them and, having acquired them, she might still lose them. But to say that God is good and wise is not to identify three things, or rather, it is to identify three things, for God just is goodness itself and wisdom itself (see also On the Trinity 15.5.7). To put it in the formal mode, the terms, "God," "goodness itself," and "wisdom itself" necessarily refer to the same thing, just as, on theories of direct reference,
"Hesperus," "Phosphorus," and "Venus" are rigid designators necessarily referring to the same heavenly body. Thus even though "Gloria is good" and "God is good" have the same surface grammar, their
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william e. mann deep structure is different. The "is" in "Gloria is good" is the "is" of predication. The sentence picks out a subject, Gloria, and predicates the property of goodness of that subject. In the case of "God is good," however, the "is" signifies identity; the sentence is to be understood as "God is identical to goodness itself." Although Gloria is good, Gloria is not goodness itself.
As so far put forward by Augustine, the doctrine of divine simplicity seems to supply a way of regimenting all predicates that apply necessarily or essentially to God, such as "is good," "is wise," and the like: convert the predicate, "is F," into "is identical to F-ness itself," and reconstruct the sentence according to the form "It is necessarily the case that God is identical to F-ness itself." In the first twenty-five chapters of the Monologion Anselm presents a remarkable discussion of the doctrine of divine simplicity and extends it to cover other cases of predication. I shall concentrate on the aspects of Anselm's discussion that are directly relevant to the doctrine of the Trinity.
It turns out to be crucial to Anselm's discussion that we pay attention to a principle that he enunciates early on, a principle called
Aseity (from the Latin a se, in or of itself):
Aseity:
God is the only being that exists and is what He is entirely through Himself. (Mon. 3. I use the term "God" where
Anselm uses terms like "supreme essence.") The intuitive idea behind Aseity is that while every other being is a dependent being (dependent at a minimum, as Anselm argues in the same chapter, on God), God depends on nothing other than himself.
Aseity will resurface shortly in this discussion.
Now one kind of claim that one can make about God that need not be a claim about God's essence or nature is a relational claim. One can say, for example, that God is greater than all creatures (Mon.
15). Anselm has no quarrel with the claim; he regards it as true.
But, Anselm insists, its truth says nothing about God's essence. In order for "God is greater than all creatures" to be true, there have to be creatures to which the comparison is made. But if those creatures were to cease to exist, nothing would thereby have changed in God essentially. (Note that Anselm's argument does not rely on the claim that God might not have created anything. Consistent with this argument, Anselm could maintain that God's nature is such that Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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He must create something.) An earthly parallel may help. "Homer is taller than all Arians" presupposes that there are some Arians. Upon the death of the last Arian the sentence would become false, but nothing need change regarding Homer's height. Thus the existence or nonexistence of Arians tells us nothing about how tall Homer is, or even what kind of thing Homer is. ("Homer" might be the name of a radio tower.) The following general principle seems to be at work here:
No-rel.: No relational term ascribed to any being refers to that being's essence. (Mon. 15.) Anselm agrees with Augustine that subject–predicate sentences that specify what God is essentially, such as "God is just," must be recast. In fact, the Monologion has been crafted to supply a theoretical justification for the recasting. If Gloria is just and God is just, then they are just "through" justice. Gloria is just in virtue of her participating in the quality of justice. But if God is just through justice and if, by Aseity, God is whatever He is through Himself, then
God does not participate in justice, as if justice were a quality apart from God; God Himself is justice. The identities entailed by Augustine's remarks on divine simplicity receive, in Anselm's hands, their theoretical underpinning by way of Aseity.
Anselm presses on further with the doctrine of divine simplicity. In Monologion 17 he enunciates this principle about composite things:
Comp.: If x is a composite thing, then x has its existence and nature through its components, and x's components do not have their existence and nature through x.
Comp. and Aseity entail there being no composition in God. Anselm apparently thinks that Comp. is too obvious to require justification.
How obvious it is may depend on what is covered by the notion of a component. The context and subsequent discussion indicate that Anselm means to claim that God has no physical or metaphysical components whatsoever. Thus Monologion 18–24 are given over to a discussion about how God exists everywhere and always even though he lacks spatial and temporal parts. On analogy to the principle that any spatially extended thing has spatial parts (for example, a left side and a right side), and is thereby composite, Anselm thinks that any
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william e. mann temporally extended thing has temporal parts (for example, a past or a future), and is thus similarly composite.
We have seen Anselm argue that God's essential "properties" are not components or parts of God, but just different ways of specifying what God is. But heretofore Anselm has not ruled out explicitly the claim that God has accidental properties. It is not obvious that Aseity and Comp. rule out divine accidental properties, for it does not appear that an accidental property must affect its bearer's very existence or nature. Yet if God has accidental properties, then it would seem that to that extent, God is metaphysically complex, not simple.
In Monologion 25 Anselm tackles the issue of accidental properties. Properly speaking, an accidental property is always an indicator of a thing's mutability: something a thing acquires after not having it, or loses after having it, or has modified over time by augmentation or diminishment. These processes occur only in beings that have a temporal career, divisible into temporal parts. But if God has no temporal parts, then He is not the subject of accidents properly speaking.
But we do not always speak properly. Sometimes we describe individuals in ways that appear to imply change in them but really do not. Anselm notes that he is presently neither taller than, shorter than, nor the same height as someone who will be born next year.
After that person, Gloria, is born, it may be true at different stages in Gloria's growth that Anselm is taller than, subsequently the same height as, and finally shorter than Gloria. We can say, if we like, that Anselm has become shorter than Gloria. But we can at the same time suppose that this change is grounded entirely in Gloria, not Anselm.
Similarly, Anselm maintains, whenever we use language that suggests a change in God, we will find that the locus of change is really in mutable creatures.
The example that Anselm supplies is relational. If all putative cases of accidental properties in God are relational in character, it might appear that they are ruled out by No-rel. But No-rel. requires only that no relations refer to God's essence. No-rel. does not pronounce on whether God has relational properties that would be candidates for the status of accidental attributes. Moreover, No-rel. would not help Anselm in the event that some putative cases of accidental properties in God are nonrelational in character. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, Anselm's case against accidental properties in God is based on Aseity and Comp., along with a Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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thesis that emerged in the Monologion 18–24 discussion, namely, the thesis that beings with temporal careers are thereby composite.
This thesis, Aseity, and Comp. entail God's being essentially nontemporal. Together with the Monologion 25 claim that accidental properties can belong only to temporal beings, they yield the result that God has no accidental properties. triplicity One can be pardoned for wondering whether and how the doctrine of God's simplicity is consistent with the doctrine of the Trinity. How can God have no parts or composition of any kind yet be threefold in nature? The wonderment might increase when one sees that in the Monologion Anselm begins his delineation of the doctrine of the Trinity almost immediately after his defense of simplicity.
One might think that at a minimum, the doctrine of the Trinity must maintain that for some interpretation of "P" and "Q," God is three Ps but only one Q. Anselm follows the Latin church in saying that God is three persons in one substance. He acknowledges that the Greek church uses a formulation that can be translated as three substances in one person, but he is inclined to regard the difference as merely terminological; although the Greek church does differ from the Latin church in doctrine, the doctrinal difference is not located here. (See Mon. Prologue and De Inc. Verbi 16.) His toleration here may be brought about by his own perplexity about how to fill in the "P" place in the above schema. Speaking of the Father and the Son, he says that although they are two, he cannot say what they are two of. They are not "two equal spirits or two equal creators or two of anything that signifies either their essence or their relation to creation." (That is, they are not two supreme beings or two omnipotent beings, or two beings who said "Let there be light.") Nor are they two Words: only one of them is the Word; the other is the one who utters the Word (Mon. 38; see also Mon. 79).
Anselm realizes that there is deeper philosophical puzzlement than this. The most pressing challenge can be illustrated in the following way. Arianism had been identified by the formulators of the Nicene Creed as a heretical view, maintaining, among other things, that the Son (and perhaps also the Holy Spirit) is an impressive but nonetheless subordinate being created by the Father. The creed's
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william e. mann language describing the Son, for instance, as "very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father," was directed against Arianism. In insisting on the radical ontological equality of the three persons, however, the creed can be (mistakenly) interpreted as an endorsement of tritheism, the position that if there really are three coequal divine persons, then there are three Gods, not one. Modalism, on the other hand, maintains that there is only one God, but unlike Arianism, does not discriminate in favor of the Father against the Son and the Holy Spirit. "Person" comes from the Latin persona, whose root meanings include a mask or a character in a play. Modalism can exploit the etymology by maintaining that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three roles that the one God assumes or three functions – for example, creation, redemption, inspiration – that the one God discharges. A modalist might supplement such an account with an explanation of how humans can understandably come to think that there must be three agencies behind these different types of divine activity when in reality there is but one, just as early stargazers thought there must be three celestial bodies, the planet Venus, the morning star, and the evening star. Here is the challenge: from Anselm's point of view, tritheism and modalism are both heretical positions, as heretical as Arianism. But is there a possible interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity that avoids Arianism, tritheism, and modalism and that is also consistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity?
Father and Son. Let us begin by examining the Monologion.
Recall, first, that the opening verses of John had identified the Son with the Word, or the logos. Harking back to a preliminary discussion in Monologion 10–12 – a discussion interrupted by the digression on divine simplicity – Anselm describes the Son as God's locutio, through which all things are made. The choice of locutio is initially curious; one might have expected verbum for logos. In fact,
Anselm also uses verbum. But locutio conveys more clearly than does verbum an aspect of the Son that is important to Anselm. A locutio – henceforward, I will use the English "locution" – is a speech act. But Anselm includes in the notion of a speech act something that may be surprising to modern sensibilities. Thinking is a kind of speaking, an inner speaking: concepts function as inner words in the language of thought (Mon. 10). Thus there are mental locutions.
Some of them take the form of plans for action. A craftsman first Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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conceives of what he will produce and how he will produce it. The craftsman's conception is a mental locution. Similarly, the world is the result of God's locution.
The craftsman's locution is merely an idea or a concept. Anselm confidently identifies God's locution with the second person of the Trinity. Surely the Son cannot be merely an idea or concept in the divine mind; the very suggestion would make an Arian blush. That suggestion is based, however, on an illegitimate extension of the craftsman's way of formulating locutions to God's way. To illustrate the points that I believe Anselm wants to make, let us suppose that our craftsman is a violin maker who wishes to replicate an Amati. The violin maker's plan or locution is an amalgam of images of Amatis that he has acquired from experience. Success in his execution is determined by two measures of likeness. How accurately does the violin maker's locution represent a genuine Amati? How closely does the finished violin resemble the violin maker's locution? Failure of match between the genuine article and the locution is primarily a kind of cognitive failure. Perhaps the violin maker has not done enough research on Amatis or has paid insufficient attention to their details. Slippage between the locution and the violin produced is more likely due to a failure of power. Perhaps the violin maker's skill is insufficient, or perhaps he was unable to obtain the right raw materials.
Anselm insists that neither sort of liability can affect God's act of creation. Let us take the second one first. Qua omniscient and omnipotent, God does not lack the skill required to realize the content of His locution. Nor is His creative activity confined, as the violin maker's is, to acquiring and rearranging pre-existing material; in creating, God brings that material into existence (Mon. 11).
Anselm's dismissal of the applicability of the first sort of liability to God sheds some light on the notion of God's locution. To suppose that God's locution could fall short of some ideal of created reality is to put things precisely backwards. Return, for the sake of contrast, to the violin maker. There were two resemblance relations involving locution and objects here. The locution should resemble the archetypal object, and the object produced should resemble the locution. If both resemblances are sufficiently high, then the object produced resembles the archetype. The images constituting the violin maker's locution represent and thus are measured by a Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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william e. mann preexisting archetype, namely, the family of Amati violins. But there is no archetype against which God's locution is to be compared. On the contrary, God's locution is the archetype against which created things are compared. Whereas the violin-maker case involves two resemblance relations, the case of divine creation involves just one, and even it is a one-way resemblance. Created things are good to the degree to which they resemble this supremely excellent locution, not the other way around (Mon. 31). Thus for Anselm, "x resembles y" need not entail "y resembles x." Although he does not elaborate on why or when this is so, a plausible hypothesis is that he thinks that y need not resemble x in cases in which x is causally parasitic on y. Two peas in a pod can resemble each other, because neither is causally dependent on the other. But on the hypothesis
I am attributing to Anselm, a person does not resemble her mirror image or portrait even if her mirror image and portrait resemble her.
This reversal of normal expectations concerning locution, archetype, and object produced is intimately connected with another reversal. In the normal course of events a concept or a mental word depends for its intelligibility on its bearing a resemblance to that for which it is a concept or word. In the beginning was the thing; the word comes later. There would still be a divine locution, however, even if God had decided not to create anything. In the absence of a created world there would be no created world for God to understand. Even so, supremely wise God would be aware of and understand something, namely, Himself. The doctrine of divine simplicity allows Anselm to infer that God's eternal self-awareness and self-understanding just is God's eternal locution. Thus the Word is coeternal with the Word's source (Mon. 32). But Anselm is not content to leave matters here. To put it in Johannine terms, he has shown that the Word was with God, but he has not shown – at least not to his obvious satisfaction – that the Word was God. A second appeal to divine simplicity might appear to be all that is required. If, however, the doctrine of divine simplicity converts essential predications about God into necessarily true identity statements, then it is exactly the wrong thing for Anselm to use for the present task. Anselm does not want to conclude that it is necessarily the case that the Father is identical to the Son; that leads to modalism. To borrow a term from discussions of the Nicene Creed, Anselm presents the following
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argument to show that the Father and the Son are consubstantial, not identical.
Whenever a mind tries to understand something, it forms a conception of that thing. The more accurate the conception, the better the understanding. Consider now the special case of a mind trying to understand itself. If it succeeds, the conception it forms not only perfectly matches itself, it is itself: in understanding itself it understands itself as understanding itself. There is no room in this case for a distinction between ontologically superior subject and ontologically inferior image. The distinction here between subject and object of understanding is not ontological but rather a distinction discernible solely by reason (Mon. 33).
Because God is eternally omniscient, God cannot fail to have perfect, eternal self-understanding. This self-understanding is His locution. But we have just seen Anselm argue that in the case of perfect self-understanding, there can be no ontological difference between the self that understands and the vehicle that delivers selfunderstanding. That is, God's Word is consubstantial with God. And yet the Word is also what God understands about Himself. The English verb, "to conceive," which means both to become pregnant and to understand, would suit Anselm's purposes quite well. The Word is the act, object, and offspring of God's conceiving. The relation that holds between the Father and the Son, as the language of the Nicene Creed specifies, is the relation of begetting (Mon. 41–42).
A relation is asymmetric if and only if for everything, x, and everything, y, if x bears the relation to y, then y does not bear the relation to x. The relation of being taller than is asymmetric: if x is taller than y then y is not taller than x. Anselm regards the begetting relation as asymmetric. The clearest evidence is provided in On the Procession of the Holy Spirit l: "It is impossible for a father to be a son of him whose father he is, and for a son to be a father of him whose son he is."
One can show that if a relation is asymmetric, then it is irreflexive, that is, that nothing bears that relation to itself. Consider, for example, the asymmetric being taller than relation. Suppose now that for some x, the being taller than relation were not irreflexive. In that case x would be taller than x. But since the relation is asymmetric, it would follow that x is not taller than x. Thus the supposition leads to its own denial. To apply this result to the case of begetting, the asymmetry of the relation entails the result, that Anselm certainly
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william e. mann accepts, that nothing begets itself. "Indeed, nature does not permit, nor does the intellect grasp, that something existing from something is the being from whom it exists, or that the being from whom it exists exists from itself" (De Proc. 1). The Father, then, begets the Son, but the Son does not beget the Father. Moreover, the Father does not beget Himself. Nor, as it turns out, does the Holy Spirit beget the Father. Since no other being is apt to beget the Father – that would be a violation of Aseity – it follows that the Father is unbegotten.
Perhaps because Augustine had used the notion in one of his images of the Trinity, Anselm introduces memoria in Monologion
48, immediately before beginning his discussion of the third person of the Trinity. If we translate memoria and meminisse as "memory" and "to remember," respectively, we are saddled with some puzzling
Anselmian assertions, chief among which is the claim that "Since a human mind is not always thinking of itself, as it is always remembering itself, it is clear that when it is thinking of itself, its word is born from memory." Anselm infers from this that if a mind were always thinking of itself, its word would always be born from its memory. But God always thinks of Himself, so His word or locution, that is, the Word, is born from His eternal memory. The stumblingblock is the first premise. It is hard to know what Anselm means when he says that the human mind always remembers itself, especially when he has just granted that it does not always think of itself.
And even if we get clarification on this issue, there is a further problem of seeing how the results would apply to God's mind. Inasmuch as there are no temporal stages to God's existence – in particular, nothing is past to God – it would seem that God has no need of nor capacity for memory.
I suggest the following way of understanding what Anselm intends. Like the English "memory," memoria can refer to the mental faculty of recollection or the content retained therein. Meminisse can mean to recall actively, but it can also mean simply to retain in mind, not to have forgotten. We can interpolate various of these elements into a gloss on Anselm's claim: "Since a human mind is not always thinking of itself, as it is always remembering itself [that is, always retaining its capacity to focus its attention on itself], it is clear that when it is thinking of itself, its word [in this case, its concept of itself] is born from memory [that is, is brought to consciousness by its faculty of recollection accessing its storehouse
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of concepts]." The rest of Anselm's argument now goes smoothly enough. We can ascribe memoria to God as a faculty presupposed by self-reflection, even divine self-reflection. Divine memoria differs from human memory in these respects. In humans memory is an onagain, off-again sort of faculty, always present but finite in its capacity, sometimes dormant, sometimes active, and sometimes, when active, faulty at retrieving what it seeks. One source of its spotty retrieval record is the gradual decay or distortion of memory traces over time. Another source is internal to the metaphysics of human memory. The contents of human memory are likenesses or images of the things (Mon. 36 and 62), caused, one presumes, by the things of which they are the likenesses. But the process of causal transmission can result in distorted images, due, perhaps, to imperfections in the medium of transmission or in the human recipient. In contrast, divine memoria is infinite in its capacity, never dormant, and never faulty. Nor is it timebound. If Anselm is right, memory is prior to self-reflection, but in the divine case the priority is only logical, not temporal. The Father, or memoria, is that from which the Son, the Word, or perfect image of the Father (an image in which the relation of resemblance is symmetric), is coeternally begotten. Finally, divine memoria does not contain images of created things, but rather, through the activity of the Word, the perfect essences of those things
(Mon. 36), of which the things themselves are images.
Holy Spirit. In Monologion 49 and 50 Anselm lays the foundation of an argument for the third person of the Trinity. The argument proceeds in two stages, each stage depending on a principle connecting memory and understanding to love. In Monologion 49 the principle is this:
Utility:
An agent's memory and understanding of a thing are useless unless the thing itself is loved or rejected to the degree required by reason.
If we apply Utility reflexively, to the agent himself, we get the result that an agent's self-memory and self-understanding are of no use if the agent does not love or reject himself to the right degree.
Anselm does not expatiate on the notion of loving something "to the degree required by reason." He could – and perhaps did – find ample authority for the notion in the writings of Augustine.2
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william e. mann everything that exists either is perfectly good God or was created by perfectly good God. But not everything is equally good; some things are more excellent than others (see Mon. 4 and 15), and their excellence resides in their being better images of God. So, for example, rational, perceptive, animate beings are better than nonrational, perceptive, animate beings, which in turn are better than nonperceptive animate beings, which are better than inanimate beings (Mon. 31).
In light of these Augustinian considerations I shall risk imputing to Anselm a principle according to which love should track excellence:
Track:
A thing deserves to be loved to the extent to which it is excellent.
(I have chosen to phrase Track in this way rather than, for example, "One's love for a thing should be proportionate to the thing's excellence," because Track leaves open the possibility of grace, understood as the notion of love that exceeds the merits of the beloved.)
Now I can expand, on Anselm's behalf, the compressed argument in Monologion 49. Utility requires that God's memory and understanding are useless if He does not love Himself to the degree that reason requires. Divine simplicity requires that God is His memory and understanding. Thus, God would be useless were He not to love
Himself to the degree that reason requires. Anselm would regard that conclusion as absurd. Therefore, God loves Himself. This is the conclusion that ends Monologion 49, but we can extend the argument to capture a claim that Anselm makes in a subsequent chapter. Track entails God's deserving to be loved to the extent to which He is excellent. But God is supremely excellent. Thus God would be remiss if He failed to love himself to a degree equal to His supreme excellence.
Since God cannot be remiss in anything, it follows, as Anselm puts it, that "His love is as great as He Himself is" (Mon. 52).
The second of the two principles connecting memory and understanding to love appears in Monologion 50:
Prior:
Any rational being that loves itself does so because and only because it remembers and understands itself; it does not remember and understand itself because it loves itself.
Prior makes a claim about the explanatory priority of self-memory and self-understanding over self-love. Prior gives us a conception of rational love, a kind of love that presupposes memory and Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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understanding at a minimum. Yet memory and understanding are not sufficient. Anselm observes that there are many things we remember and understand but do not love. Prior is restricted in two ways, dealing only with self-love and only with rational beings who love themselves. Anselm immediately endorses, however, a less restricted principle, one that applies to all cases of love, namely, that nothing is loved without its being an item of (the lover's) memory and understanding. But even the less restricted principle does not imply that every rational being loves itself. For all that Prior says, there may be rational beings whose self-memory and self-understanding are such that they do not love themselves. Borrowing an idea from Track, we can say that it may be that such beings recognize their own conspicuous lack of excellence.
Because divine self-love must be coeternal with God – indeed, must turn out, for Anselm, to be consubstantial with the Father and the Son – it is important for Anselm's purposes that explanatory priority need not involve temporal priority. Even among timebound creatures explanatory priority is compatible with simultaneity: a pendulum's length explains its period, not vice versa. So Anselm has grounds for holding that God's self-love follows from His selfmemory and self-understanding, even though the "following" cannot imply a temporal sequence.
Anselm relies on the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son to establish to his satisfaction that this divine love proceeds equally from both, who love each other and themselves to the same extent – an extent compatible with their supreme excellence and independent of their creating anything – with one love that proceeds as a whole from each of them (Mon. 50–54).
In Monologion 55 Anselm stakes out a major claim, for which he offers two arguments. The claim is that divine love is not the offspring of the Father or the Son. That is, the asymmetric, irreflexive begetting relation that holds between the Father and the Son does not hold between them, singly or collectively, and divine love. Here
Anselm is conforming to the demands of the Nicene Creed, which specifies that the Son is "only-begotten." The second of the two arguments consists of an attempt to reduce to absurdity the offspring hypothesis by ringing the changes on which of the first two members of the Trinity would be the mother. It cannot be that one is the father and the other the mother, since love proceeds from both the Father
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william e. mann and the Son in exactly the same way. And it cannot be that both are father and mother; no nature could be both. The argument is less than overwhelming. Anselm has already conceded that there are no sexual distinctions to be found between the first two members of the Trinity. We regard them as male because of the gender of the nouns in Latin (pater and filius) and on the basis of sexist biology
(Mon. 42). So to utilize generalizations about sexual reproduction in creatures is out of place. Moreover, if those generalizations are loosened up enough so that the Son can be begotten by the Father parthenogenetically, so to speak, without benefit of a mother, then it would seem not to be much more of a feat to have love begotten by both.
The first of the two arguments is more intriguing. Although the Son is the perfect image of the Father, Anselm asserts that divine love resembles neither the Father nor the Son. From this premise we are to conclude that divine love is not begotten. I presume that we are to fill in the argument by supposing that if divine love were begotten, as the Son is, it would resemble its parent(s). Therefore it must proceed from its source in some different way. What is intriguing about the argument is the lack-of-resemblance assertion. What could justify it?
There was the pressure of authority from Augustine, who had pronounced that "The Son alone is the image of the Father" (On the Trinity 6.2.3). But that confers a pedigree, not a justification. I suggest that the reason why Augustine and Anselm converge on this assertion is grounded in the analogy of Trinity to memory, understanding, and will. Memory and understanding are essential to cognition or contemplation (liberally construed). We are entitled to impute the following picture to Anselm. Understanding is an intellective process or state, represented in thought by mental locutions. The possibility of forming these locutions, and thus the possibility of understanding itself, depends on the understanding agent having in memory the relevant concepts, or inner words, from which the mental locutions are formed. A necessary condition for the agent's understanding is that the agent's mental locutions correctly image the connections that exist among the relevant concepts. The transfer of this picture to the first two members of the Trinity is reasonably straightforward. The Father is the primordial memory, as it were, that is perfectly imaged by the Son's locution.
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If, however, the third member of the Trinity is analogously identified with will, then we shift from the realm of cognition and contemplation to the arena of desire and action. It can seem natural to say that the process of coming to understand something resembles the process of recalling something, natural enough to lead Plato to assimilate all cases of genuine learning to recollection of what one already knows. But there is no similar obvious affinity between recalling or understanding something and desiring or doing something. In particular, love and love-motivated actions do not immediately resemble cognitive states and feats. I suspect that it is considerations like these that lead Anselm to assert the lack-of-resemblance thesis. Anselm never puts it this way, but it can be said on his behalf that if he had confined himself solely to a consideration of the first two members of the Trinity, without the dimension of divine love, he would have been left with a conception of God as a purely contemplative being, unconcerned about creation, unconcerned about Himself, unconcerned even about contemplation.
Divine love, then, is not the offspring of the Father or the Son but nevertheless proceeds from both of them. Although proceeding from them, it is uncreated, coeternal, and consubstantial with them. In traditional trinitarian terminology, the relation that describes this mode of proceeding is spiration, a kind of divine exhaling or sighing that produces – and is – the Spirit (identification of divine love by that term is postponed by Anselm until Mon. 57). Like the begetting relation, spiration is an asymmetric and irreflexive relation.
Following Augustine, Anselm models his conception of the Trinity on memory, understanding, and will. The model is fueled by the thought that among the created things that we ordinarily encounter, the human mind bears the clearest traces of its creator.
Yet in the human mind, memory, understanding, and will are three separate faculties, each responsible for a separate domain of human competence and each operating semi-autonomously from the others.
In Monologion 57–61 Anselm argues, in effect, that this feature of human mental life cannot be ascribed to God. Divine memory, understanding, and will are not encapsulated. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are "equally in one another," in such a way that, for example, the Father does not understand solely through the instrumentality of the Son and love solely through the Spirit. Each person of the Trinity is fully endowed with all the abilities of the others.
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william e. mann Yet it is not as if each were a separate, free-standing module backed up with the capacities of the others. That would be tritheism. taking stock We have, then, the following results. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are associated, respectively, with memory, understanding, and will. Each of these mental functions was introduced by means of its self-reflective capacities, self-memory (adjusted to extend to a being for whom nothing is past), self-understanding, and self-love. In humans memory, understanding, and will are encapsulated or modular. In God they are not: the doctrine of God's simplicity entails there being no separate "components," mental or otherwise, in God. Anselm is thus insulated against a charge of tritheism. In order to avoid lapsing into modalism Anselm must find a way in which God is threefold that does not collapse into merely ascribing three different roles or functions to God. In service of that goal,
Anselm relies on the two relations, begetting and spiration. The Son is distinguished from the Father by being begotten; the Holy Spirit is distinguished from the Father and the Son by being spirated from both.
But recall No-rel., the principle that no relational term ascribed to any being refers to that being's essence. Anselm invoked No-rel. to support his thesis that no relational term ascribed to God refers to God's essence. But the terms, "begets" and "spirates," are relational and ascribed to God. Now Anselm faces a dilemma. Take the case of begetting; analogous remarks apply to spiration. Either the Father begets the Son essentially or not. If the former, then No-rel. is false.
If the latter, that is, if the Father does not beget the Son essentially, then it would seem that the Son's existence is as contingent as the existence of any creature. But that consequence flies in the face of everything that Anselm has said about the Father and the Son, in particular, that the Father's existence is necessary and that the Father and the Son are coeternal, coequal, and consubstantial. Anselm is in danger here of capitulating to Arianism.
If Anselm cannot have No-rel. along with essentially existing, coequal members of the Trinity, then perhaps he should jettison
No-rel. The principle seems false for independent reasons. The proposition that the number 4 is even specifies part of 4's essence. But that Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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proposition is irreducibly relational: to be even is to be divisible by 2.
We have already seen that Aseity and Comp. suffice without No-rel. to ground an argument against ascribing accidental properties to God. My conjecture is that Aseity and Comp. are sufficient to allow
Anselm to argue for a robust doctrine of God's simplicity.
Still, we are left with the question whether Anselm's doctrine of the Trinity falls prey to a charge of modalism, a question made all the more poignant by Anselm's candid admission that he cannot say what the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three of. In On the Incarnation of the Word Anselm presents an arresting analogy that sheds light on this issue. An analogy like it had originally been employed by Augustine in On Faith and Creed. I shall first discuss
Augustine's version of it, then Anselm's.
How is it possible, Augustine asks, that the Son is not the Father, and neither the Father nor the Son is the Holy Spirit, yet the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, without there being three Gods (On Faith and Creed 9.16)? It will help to dispel a sense of logical impropriety if we can find similar patterns of claims made about things found in nature. Think of a spring, the headwaters of a river. The spring is not the river itself. Nor is drinking water obtained from the spring or the river identical to the spring or the river. But the spring is water, the river is water, and the drink is water. We do not say that there are three waters; there is only one water (On Faith and Creed 9.17). Augustine is quick to point out that the analogy is not perfect; for the same water might at one time be in the spring, later in the river, and still later in the drink.
God, is not, however, at one time the Father, at another the Son, and at still another the Holy Spirit. But that kind of slippage can be attributed to the difference between temporal and eternal entities.
Augustine suggests a second analogy involving the roots, trunk, and branches of a tree all being simultaneously the same wood, not three woods.
"Water" and "wood" are mass nouns, nouns whose paradigm cases refer to stuffs. Mass nouns resist pluralization, numerical modifiers, the indefinite article, and the degree determinatives, "many" and "few." In some obvious ways, assimilating "God" to a mass noun should be attractive to monotheists. Even so, Augustine's analogies ignore a distinction that is critical in this context. Consider the two claims:
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william e. mann (1) The spring is water.
(2) The river is water.
Set aside worries about temporal successiveness. Focus instead on the copula, "is," and ask the question, What is the logical structure of (1) and (2)? Since "water" is a noun, the sentences cannot have a subject–predicate structure. Nor can the "is" express identity, for if it did, then (1) and (2) would be represented as:
(1′) The spring = water.
(2′) The river = water.
(1′) and (2′) entail the falsehood that the spring = the river. Moreover, if the spring is supposed to be the analogue to the Father, the river the analogue to the Son, and water the analogue to God, we get the result, inimical to the doctrine of the Trinity, that the Father = the Son.
A more promising approach to (1) and (2) is to view them as elliptical for sentences that include a non-count quantificational noun applicable to water:
(1∗) The spring is a portion of water.
(2∗) The river is a portion of water.
Since the portion of water constituting the spring need not be identical to the portion constituting the river, the analogy gives no reason to think that the Father is identical to the Son. Nevertheless, the analogy implies that the Father and the Son are portions of God, which, insofar as it is intelligible at all, probably implies tritheism and certainly contravenes divine simplicity.
At first glance Anselm's reworking of the Augustinian analogy appears to be a trivially different variation of it.3 We are to envision the Nile, flowing from spring into river and from river into lake.
(Ignore your knowledge of actual African geography.) The spring is not the river and neither the spring nor the river is the lake. Yet spring, river, and lake are all called the Nile; there are not three Niles but only one (De Inc. Verbi 13). One may be inclined to object that the analogy is more obviously inept than that of Augustine. The spring, river, and lake are parts of the Nile; thus Anselm's analogy even more overtly leads to tritheism or the denial of divine simplicity.
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Anselm anticipates this objection: his response to it takes us well beyond the resources proposed by Augustine. We are to suppose that "the Nile" names something that exists from where it begins to where it ends and from when it begins to when it ends. It appears as though Anselm is advocating a view according to which "the Nile" names a four-dimensional entity, occupying a certain region, not just of space, but of the spatio-temporal continuum. (It is not too farfetched to think of this use of "the Nile" applying to the Nile as perceived by God, sub specie aeternitatis.) Now Anselm claims that if we think of the Nile in this way, we will realize that "the whole
Nile is the spring, the whole Nile is the river, the whole Nile is the lake," even though the spring, river, and lake are not identical with each other. Anselm's move from supposition to conclusion is not brokered by any intermediary steps, so, in addition to trying to decipher what the conclusion means, we need to understand why
Anselm believes it to be a consequence of his four-dimensionalistic premise about the Nile.
Let us suppose that Anselm would agree that what holds for "the Nile" holds for all proper names. In that case, for example, "Anselm" names a seventy-six-year-old continuant stretching through years of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and regions of Italy, France, and England. Now suppose that in the late eleventh century Gloria says that she just saw Anselm yesterday. Boso, an acquaintance of Gloria's, seeks to correct her, pointing out that she did not see
Anselm; strictly speaking, what she saw was just a "time-slice" of Anselm. Boso assures Gloria that her describing her encounter with the time-slice as an encounter with Anselm is a case of synecdoche.
It occurs to Gloria that were she to acquiesce in Boso's diagnosis, she would have to acknowledge that she never sees any threedimensional object: all that she really sees are "space-slices," or surfaces of objects. But why should Gloria accept Boso's diagnosis?
She can cling to four-dimensionalism and reject Boso's diagnosis by maintaining that she did see the four-dimensional Anselm yesterday. This feat of perception is no stranger than the phenomenon of apprehending a felon by grabbing the felon's ankle.
Anselm may have something like this in mind when he claims that the whole Nile is the spring, the whole Nile is the river, and the whole Nile is the lake. The expression is dramatic, to be sure. But it allows Anselm to preserve an important item of common sense,
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