4. An earlier version of this essay benefited from the criticism of Brian
william e. mann namely, that people routinely see the Nile, not just a fragment of it. And, finally, it provides Anselm, I think, with a way of rejecting modalism. If the whole of God is the Father, the whole of God is the Son, and the whole of God is the Holy Spirit, then it follows that the Father is the whole of God, the Son is the whole of God, and the Holy Spirit is the whole of God. Where there is wholeness, there is no room for apportioning roles or functions.
Anselm is fond of the Nile analogy. He suggests that it can help us to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation (De Inc. Verbi 14) and he uses it to argue for the appropriateness of the filioque doctrine
(De Proc. 9). Yet we should bear in mind that when he introduces the analogy, it is designed simply to show how even among spatiotemporal things composed of parts, it is possible to find that "three can be said of one and one of three." If the analogy helps to forestall a charge of modalism, that is to its credit. Anselm hastens to remind us, however, that the analogy, like the other analogies on which he has relied, is just that – an analogy, his best attempt to explicate what must remain inexplicable. The mystery of the Trinity remains a mystery. For now we see in a mirror dimly (Mon. 67), a mirror whose act of reflecting is itself a dim reflection of its maker.4 notes 1.
Excellent overviews of On the Incarnation of the Word and On the Procession of the Holy Spirit can be found in Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1972), chap. 4. All translations of Latin texts in this essay are my own.
See the sources mentioned in William E. Mann, "Augustine on Evil and Original Sin," in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40–48.
For another analysis of Anselm's Nile analogy, see Christopher Hughes, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1989), chap. 5.
An earlier version of this essay benefited from the criticism of Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, hereby gratefully acknowledged.
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Anselm on atonement Although among philosophers and in the wider world generally
Anselm is undoubtedly best known for his ontological argument, this is not where he has exercised most influence. Rather, it is in the field of Christian doctrine, and particularly in his account of the Christian doctrine of atonement or redemption. This influence has been displayed in both positive and negative forms: positive in the way ideas of his were taken up and developed by some later theologians; negative in the way yet others sought to put their own views at as great a distance as possible from those of Anselm. The result is that, though he is sometimes praised, he has more often been savagely criticized, particularly in the modern period. Not all of those criticisms are fair. The problem is that historical context is either ignored or, if acknowledged, explored at an insufficiently deep level.
In what follows, therefore, I want to present his position as clearly as possible, noting where misunderstandings have arisen and where potential developments have occurred, or could occur.
Atonement means simply at-one-ment, and so is concerned with the issue of how in general, despite fault on one side, reconciliation is achievable between the two or more parties involved. The word can thus be used with a purely secular meaning as in the title of a recent work by the British novelist, Ian McEwan.1 More commonly, though, and by origin, the word has an explicitly religious connotation and then the question focuses on how, despite the presence of sin, human beings can be reconciled to God. The sacrificial system in the Old Testament, and indeed in the ancient world more generally, indicates one way in which this might be conceived; the transformation of the ritual of the Day of Atonement in the Temple at Jerusalem into modern Jewish practice of a special day of penitence
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david brown (Yom Kippur) another. However, so central is Christ to Christian self-understanding that Christianity has almost invariably insisted that no such reconciliation with God is possible except through the mediation of Christ.
That mediation has been expounded in a number of different ways: ransom, victory, example, penal substitution, sacrifice, and so forth.
Theologians have often described these various approaches as rival "theories" or "models" but it is not clear that this is always how such talk was intended. Thus, although it is easy to identify particular verses in the New Testament that seem to support one approach or other (for example, 2 Corinthians 5:21 might be used for penal substitution),2 there is little in the evangelists or even Paul that suggests the development of a systematic account. Rather, the often incidental way in which the images are introduced hints at something rather different: the ransacking of a treasure-trove of potential metaphors, employed to highlight, now in one way, now in another, what the authors saw as the indispensable role of Christ in human salvation. Because the Old Testament was seen as fulfilled in Christ, whatever images of reconciliation and new life were available were applied to this new perception of faith and used to complement one another. Nor did this change much in the early history of the Church.
Its preoccupation during the first millennium with how the Incarnation was to be understood (Christ as simultaneously God and man) meant that no attempts were made at formal definition in this area, so only one of the two principal creeds of the Christian church insists that Christ acted "for us," and even then offers no guidance as to how exactly this was so.3
All this helps to explain why Anselm's late work Cur Deus Homo (written between 1094 and 1098) constitutes such a major landmark in the history of Christian thought. For what is incontestably now offered is a fully developed and carefully articulated theory of how atonement is achievable only through the work of Christ. In brief, only someone who is both God and man can save us because, while it is human beings who owe recompense to God for sin, it is only God who has the power and ability to make such recompense. Anselm elaborates that basic structure into what turns out to be quite a complex, multi-staged argument.4 A brief analysis of its form is provided in my first section below. More important in my view, though, is appreciation of Anselm's underlying strategy and terminology.
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Rather, therefore, than using the initial analysis as a basis for the discussion which follows, I have chosen to examine issues under a number of alternative headings: Anselm on the relation between reason and revelation; the key terms and their appropriate translation; finally, subsequent developments and responses by others to Anselm's position. the argument As I mentioned above, I do not wish to lay much stress on the analysis that now follows, but it will give the reader some indication of how much more complicated Anselm's position is than it is commonly characterized to be.
(1) All human beings have sinned: passim.
(2) Eternal salvation and reconciliation with God is not possible without freedom from the effects of sin.
(3) These effects cannot be eliminated by an act of divine forgiveness: 1.11 (cf. also 1.15; 1.24; 2.5).
(4) So either punishment must follow, or else compensation/satisfaction be paid: 1.13.
(5) But God does wish some human beings to be saved: 1.16–18.
(6) So compensation must sometimes be the chosen alternative.
(7) But "to sin is nothing other than not to render God his due":
1.11.5
(8) So, compensation must consist in giving to God what is not his due: 1.11.
(9) But, "if in justice I owe to God myself and all my powers even when I do not sin, I have nothing left to render to him for my sin": 1.20.
(10) Therefore, compensation must be paid by an act, not owed to God, performed by a person other than one of whom (9) is true.
(11) But, given what we owe to God, any sin is of infinite extent:
1.21.
(12) So compensation "cannot be achieved, except the compensation paid to God for human sin be something greater than all that is beside God . . . Therefore, none but God can make this satisfaction": 2.6.
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david brown (13) But it is necessary that the person paying the compensation be also a man: 2.8 ("Otherwise, neither Adam nor his race would make satisfaction for themselves").
(14) "If, as is certain, it is therefore necessary that the heavenly community be made up of human beings and this cannot be effected unless the aforesaid satisfaction be made, which none but God can make and none but a human being ought to make, it is necessary for a God-man to make it": 2.6.
(15) But it is not fitting for the Father or the Holy Spirit to be incarnated: 2.9.
(16) Therefore, the requisite compensation must be achieved by the incarnation of God the Son, and, from (8), such compensation will involve that "he somehow gives up himself, or something of his, to the honour of God, which he does not owe as a debtor": 2.11.
(17) But "every reasonable being owes his obedience to God":
2.11, cf. (9).
(18) "Therefore, it must be in some other way that he give himself, or something belonging to him, to God": 2.11.
(19) But mortality is not an essential attribute of human nature "since, had man never sinned, and had his immortality been unchangeably confirmed, he would have been as really man":
2.11.
(20) "Therefore, one who wishes to make atonement/satisfaction for human sin should be such a one who can die if he chooses": 2.11.
(21) So compensation/satisfaction/ atonement will be made by the innocent death of God the Son. reason and revelation Anselm opens by saying that his intention is to offer an argument for nonbelievers that makes no assumptions initially regarding the historical Christ. For some theologians this has been enough to mean that Anselm sets off on quite the wrong track, a suspicion that is only intensified by Anselm's own choice of words in his preface –
"removing Christ from view" (remoto Christo). Christ, it is said, can only be properly known through revelation, so distortion must be the inevitable result of any such approach. As one recent commentator
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observes, "the attempt to 'prove' the necessity and possibility of redemption without any reference to the gospel story strikes us as perverse."6 Although Karl Barth goes too far in his defence of Anselm when he asserts that Anselm's premises were all in any case implicitly derived from revelation,7 there are a number of more limited observations that may be made by way of response. First, though
Anselm largely obeys his own ordinance, Scripture is in fact often seen lying just beneath the surface, and sometimes explicit quotations do actually emerge.8 More importantly, Anselm is insistent that nothing he asserts should be inconsistent with Scripture, which continues to be given supreme authority: "I am certain that if I say anything which indubitably contradicts sacred Scripture, it is false; and I do not wish to hold it, if I should become aware of this."9 So it is not as though he ever subscribes to the view that the Bible could in theory be made to yield to the discoveries of reason, a distinctly modern notion. Nor is it ever the case that other texts are quoted in place of Scripture, for, in marked contrast to the theology of the time, all appeal to authority in fact disappears, a feature of Anselm's writing which deeply troubled his former teacher and predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc.10
Anselm seems to have been motivated in part by apologetic reasons. As we have seen, he opens by specifying "nonbelievers"
(infideles) by which he probably meant not atheists but Jews and Muslims. Both faiths believe that atonement is possible without an incarnation, and it may well be the case that Anselm had met intellectually plausible representatives of both groups. His biographer,
Eadmer, tells us that while at Capua (where he completed the work) Anselm gained the respect of Muslims for his kind treatment of them, while his fellow Benedictine, Gilbert Crispin, had drawn his attention to the challenge presented by Jews.11 Nonetheless, close attention to Anselm's text actually reveals a much more deeply seated concern to explicate belief more clearly for the Christian believer as such. So, for instance, he makes Boso, his conversation partner, reaffirm what Anselm himself had already asserted a couple of sentences earlier: "it seems to me an act of negligence if, after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe."12 Mystery, he concedes, will at some stage take over as the divine recedes from our limited human capacity to comprehend,13 but before that happens it makes sense to ask what
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david brown is entailed by assuming that God does all things appropriately and well, and for that assumption he could well have quoted the authority of Scripture.14
Already in the preface Anselm had announced his intention to proceed by "necessary reasons." "What is inferred to be true by a necessary reason," he tells us, "ought not to be called into doubt, even if the reason why it is true is not understood."15 That insistence on the limits of human understanding matches well with his repeated insistence throughout this work that in offering "necessary" reasons he does not mean to imply any constraint on God. It is not a case of reason somehow imposing limits on God; rather, it is a matter of human beings coming to comprehend what follows from the fact that God remains consistent with his nature or else, putting it another way, is self-consistent.16 So in the absence of any external
"compulsion" or "constraint," we should not think of God as governed by "necessity" but rather by His own "eternal constancy."17
One example of this is how divine mercy is understood. Anselm insists that it must be explicated in a way that is made consistent with justice, for God is both merciful and just. Simply to forgive without recompense would result in a "God inconsistent with Himself" (1.24), something external to God which He can choose, now to apply, now to reject; He is after all Justice itself (1.13). So it is not that Anselm is committed to a narrow theory of retribution, what some have called "rationalized vengeance,"18 but that for Anselm God cannot be portrayed as acting now in one way, now in another: punishing, according to the Bible, fallen angels and human beings who are irredeemably wicked, yet allowing others (the forgiven) apparently to escape all consequences of their sins. For "no unfitness, however small, is possible with God" (1.20). That may sound like an unyielding God requiring either punishment or compensation where wrong has been done, but for Anselm the issue as much concerns human attitudes; for we need to admit that we already owe everything to God. There would thus be an "unfitness" in us accepting forgiveness without compensation being paid, no less than in God offering such forgiveness unconditionally (1.21). The result would be an "unseemliness" that violated "beauty of arrangement."19
That last reference illustrates a feature of Anselm's argument that is often found rather strange in our contemporary context, and that is the extent to which Anselm appeals not only to requirements of Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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logical consistency but also to what might now be more naturally termed aesthetic considerations: what is fitting or appropriate (conveniens/decens). Here we need to think ourselves back into a world in which God was identified not only with Justice, Truth, and Goodness but also with Beauty. Although the inclusion of beauty has been revived in the voluminous writings of the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1988), it is not an idea that comes naturally to the modern mind. It was mediated to the Western tradition particularly through the thought of St. Augustine, who finds measure and form intrinsic to goodness and argues that the search for balance can help to explain the presence of evil in the world, much as a beautiful poem is set off by its antitheses.20 Building on an emphasis found as early as in Irenaeus, Anselm speaks of "the indescribable beauty" in the arrangement whereby salvation comes through a woman (Mary) and a cross, for the fall was through another woman (Eve) and wood's source – a tree, in the Garden of Eden.21 But he also uses the notion much more widely. It would, for example, he suggests, not be fitting for the number of humans saved simply to substitute for the number of lost angels, for then any human being saved would have grounds to rejoice over an angel's fall, and that would not be "appropriate" (1.18).
To the modern reader that may sound like a rather weak moral consideration, but for Anselm it is decisive. In that chapter as a whole, morality merges naturally into aesthetics, as attention is given to such topics as perfect numbers and an appropriate balance between the two natures (angelic and human). Again, it would be unseemly for there to be two sons in the Trinity, which is what would happen if any other than God the Son became incarnate (2.9). Indeed, so far as God's actions are concerned, "not fitting" is taken to imply our entitlement to draw the conclusion "necessarily not the case" (1.10;
1.19). For would not God create a beautifully ordered world?
Although it is possible to argue that the notion of beauty is central to both Testaments with their many references to the divine "glory" or "splendour," it is clear that the idea of beauty in balance and proportion which Anselm employs here is more strongly part of Christianity's inheritance from Platonism, though the Bible is not without its own examples. Paul is surely arguing in similar vein when he declares that "as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience many will be made righteous" (Romans
5:19; JB). The aesthetic delight in the careful Greek phrasing suggests Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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david brown that more than just a parallel is being drawn. Estimating the relative weight of such influences, however, is not always an easy matter.
This becomes particularly difficult and controversial in respect of another key element in Anselm's strategy, the question of how one man's actions, even those of a God-man, are supposed inevitably to have an impact for the whole of humanity. On first reflection, somebody else paying the penalty or offering compensation seems a poor substitute for the guilty individual's own action.
The next section which is devoted to consideration of Anselm's terminology is the best place to examine one commonly proposed explanation, namely, that in terms of Anselm's reliance on feudal imagery. As we shall see, such a grounding is much less plausible than is usually claimed. Here, though, I want to look at two other possible sources, in the Bible and in Platonism. The methodology of Cur Deus Homo precludes explicit reference to either; so we must argue more indirectly and tentatively.
On the Bible, it should not be forgotten that Anselm was a Benedictine monk, so his reading would have been first and foremost the Scriptures. In the Old Testament, law and prophets address the people primarily not as individuals but as a corporate entity (Israel), and interdependence for both good and bad is a frequently reiterated notion. Although occasionally challenged, the Second Commandment's "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" might be used to illustrate the interconnection in one direction, the high priest's action on the Day of Atonement the presumed connection in the other.22 Although stress on individual responsibility is more marked in the New Testament, much of its imagery and theology continues to be corporate. For Paul we are all potentially "in Christ" just as we were once "in Adam," and in his letters two competing but related images of the Church as "the body of Christ" are developed, by which something rather more than just metaphor is surely intended. The Evangelist John too offers a not dissimilar notion in his picture of Christ as the vine and ourselves as its branches.23
Although Cur Deus Homo avoids any supporting biblical quotation of the above sort, more than once Anselm insists that Christ had to be "of the same kind" (genus) as ourselves (e.g. 2.8). Not only would an angel not do, Christ's atonement can have no impact for good on fallen angels, precisely because they are not the same kind
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of thing (2.21). In the second passage, if not in the first, it is clear that "race" is the better translation, inasmuch as Anselm claims that it would not even have been enough for Christ to have had the same "nature": there must also have been a genetic connection.
But while such a connection can be used to help to explain transmission of Adam's tendency toward sin ("original sin") to successive generations, it is rather harder to see how this helps in the case of Christ's action. Yet Anselm does use positive corporate language elsewhere in his writings, especially in his devotional works. So, for instance, in a eucharistic prayer he asks of Christ that he may be
"worthy to be incorporated into your body which is the Church, so that I may be your member and you my head."24 One notes too his own strong sense of acting in a corporate role, both on behalf of his monastery and at Canterbury on behalf of the particular saints with whom the see was identified. Thus for him Augustine of Canterbury was anything but a distant historical figure, merely the first to hold the see. He was a living presence, whose mantle he had now in some sense adopted, and whose rights he was required to defend.25 As one pope of the time put it, "we behold in you the venerable persona of St. Augustine."26
Sadly, this whole notion of "corporate personality" is one to which little philosophical attention has been devoted in modern times.27 In part the worry seems to be that, if taken seriously, clear and valuable distinctions will thereby be undermined. Platonism would, however, seem to offer the possibility of a different view, and that is no doubt one reason why until fairly recently almost all commentators have assumed a Platonic background to the argument of Cur
Deus Homo.28 So, for instance, Sir Richard Southern observes of Anselm that "there can be no doubt that his essential philosophical ideas are Platonic" and that "his general tendency is to think of the species as more real than its individual components."29 Once again, though, there is no direct quotation, and indeed it is only
Aristotle who is mentioned (once) in the course of Anselm's text.30
So we must rely on indirect evidence. Chalcidius' version of Plato's Timaeus did become increasingly available throughout the eleventh century; so it is just possible that Anselm knew directly one of Plato's works.31 More certain is that he was well acquainted with Platonism as mediated through the writings of St. Augustine, for Lanfranc's stocking of the monastic library is on record.32 We also
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david brown know that in contemporary discussion of approaches to what modern philosophers call the theory of universals Platonist versions were being canvassed, and indeed according to one reading of the evidence
Anselm was forced to defend himself against the charge of veering altogether too strongly in that particular direction.33 There are even occasional passages in Anselm's works which taken on their own can sound alarmingly Platonic.34 So, for example in the opening chapter of his rather technical work On the Incarnation of the Word he observes that "anyone who does not understand how many men are one man in species cannot understand how . . . several persons . . . can be one God."
Platonism has had a long and complex history, so all I can do here is briefly indicate how such a philosophical background might have provided further underpinning to ideas already current in Anselm's mind from Scripture. In trying to resolve the question of universals, the issue of what it is that justifies the application of common or "universal" names as descriptions shared across unique, particular objects, Plato responds that the particulars only have intelligibility or reality insofar as they "imitate" or "participate in" the perfect exemplar of their kind.35 The point is easily appreciated if we consider the term "circle." No matter how careful we are with our compass, any circle we draw on a piece of paper will only ever approximate to the perfect one that unqualifiedly fulfills the definition of a circle – as a figure, all points on the circumference of which are equidistant from the centre. The most real circle, as it were, lies elsewhere, so other circles are only struggling approximations. Equally, then, with Plato's own examples of knives and beds: particular knives will only be to varying degrees successful at their function of cutting well, beds to varying degrees successful at aiding a good night's sleep, and so on, and it is the ideal or "form" that remains the appropriate standard by which to measure the goodness of the particular.
While it is true that Anselm could not have read that particular discussion of Plato's, there is much that is similar in Augustine.36 If the ideal "form" has moved into the mind of God, there is the same notion of degrees of participation, with lesser goods only good by participation in higher, unchangeable goods,37 and Anselm seems to repeat that pattern of thinking in his Monologion (36). So far as atonement itself is concerned, the thought would then be that this is secured through us "participating" in the perfect exemplar or Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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"universal" human nature that Christ came to offer. It was partly to defend that possibility that Cyril of Alexandria not long before the Council of Chalcedon (451) insisted that in the Incarnation God assumed an impersonal human nature, not the characteristics that would make Him a distinct human personality. Known technically as the doctrine of anhypostasia and much attacked in the twentieth century, it is found reflected even as late as the nineteenth in Newman's declaration of Christ that "though Man, he is not, strictly speaking, a Man."38 To my mind this means that translating the title of Anselm's work is not as simple as it may initially appear. If "Why
God Became Humanity" is altogether too strong, "Why God Became a Human Being" is also not without its difficulties.39 Such problems are not unknown in the Church of our own day. In contemporary
Anglican translations of the Nicene Creed "men" is now excluded as unnecessarily sexist from the clause "for us men and for our salvation," whereas "man" has been retained in "he became man" despite that problem, because it is thought that otherwise something important could be lost.40 Neither Plato nor Paul nor Anselm thought that identifying the ideal or corporate reality told the whole story, but all three presupposed a strong connection which to modern minds is not so immediately apparent, so modern readers need to be made aware of how differently Anselm's text would have been heard in his own day.
If I am anywhere near right about the biblical and Platonic background to the thought-world of Anselm and at least some of his contemporaries, then his arguments might well have carried greater weight than they do in our day. Because connections were assumed,
Anselm felt no need to go on in Cur Deus Homo to consider how a particular individual might appropriate Christ's act: in a sense, it was already his own. Even so, the need for grace is mentioned, and the force of Christ's example stressed.41 The latter is especially worth noting, not least because Anselm is so often sharply contrasted with his younger contemporary Abelard (d. 1142), who is often portrayed as the great exponent of an exemplarist theory, the view that salvation is secured through following Christ's moral example. In fact they are less far apart than is commonly supposed. Not only does Abelard take up some of Anselm's themes,42 Anselm himself in a later work of 1099, his short Meditation on Human Redemption, uses powerful imagery to ram home the need for deep meditation on the extent
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david brown of divine love shown in Christ's act. Concluding with a prayer that Christ's love should seize his whole being, he twice urges his readers to "feed," "chew," "suck," and "swallow" not only in the eucharist but whenever and wherever the story of Christ's love is retold.43 In his influential History of Dogma Adolf von Harnack complained of the "unevangelical character" of Anselm's theory,44 but if one turns to Anselm's devotional writings, one finds a stress on dependence on Christ as powerful as anyone might desire: "Sweet name! Name full of delights! Name to comfort sinners and bring them blessed hope. For what is Jesus if not saviour?"45 Even tender, "feminist" imagery finds its place, as in his familiar description of Jesus as a mother, like a hen gathering her chicks under its wings.46 I mention this not to turn Anselm into a modern thinker, but rather as a way of insisting that his position must be seen as a rounded whole. He was no cold rationalist imposing purely external criteria on God but a devout monk concerned to explore his faith in a God, the internal logic of whose nature, he believed, entailed His never failing to act beautifully and well. the key terms Hitherto I have largely avoided the term "satisfaction," so often presented as the core of Anselm's theory. Instead in the introduction I used the more neutral "recompense," for, despite the centrality of the term, the dangers of misrepresentation in this word are considerable, as also in Anselm's use of the related notions of "debt" and "honor." None are concepts that contemporary Christians customarily employ to describe their relationship with God, and that very strangeness is intensified by the decision of so many commentators to find an explanation for this way of speaking in the feudal system of the time, within which Anselm was of course firmly ensconced as Archbishop of Canterbury. Medieval society was a system of reciprocal rights and obligations and very strictly hierarchical within that framework. One owed certain obligations to one's lord and in return he provided protection. Violate those obligations, and some recompense was required to the lord's offended honor either from oneself or from one's family before normal relations could be restored. "Satisfaction" was the usual term used to indicate such recompense.
For an application nearer our own times one might think of what Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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used to happen in sword or pistol duels. The offended party might even utter "I demand satisfaction," as he issued his challenge to recover his own offended honor (or that of his king or lady). Still nearer to our own times would be prosecution in the civil courts for "damages" for honor or character besmirched through libel or slander. I offer these examples not because I think Anselm would have approved, but partly to indicate that even today we sometimes think in such terms and partly (and more importantly) to indicate some of the reasons why, however expressed, such an approach might not have particularly appealed to Anselm. The analogy simply fails to take sin with sufficient seriousness (after all criminal courts and not civil deal with the greater crimes) and, as we know from his prayers, Anselm was acutely conscious of his own sinfulness, never mind that of humanity in general. Yet it can scarcely be denied that Anselm must have been influenced to some degree by this way of thinking, given how deep such notions ran in the world about him.
But, recalling my earlier insistence on his desire to avoid any external restraint on God, it would not seem likely that Anselm would ever have allowed such an obviously artificial and external pattern to become central to what he had to say. That is why we need to treat with extreme caution Harnack and the many others who venture down this track. For him "the worst thing in Anselm's theory" is its "mythological conception of God as the mighty private man who is incensed at the injury done to his honor and does not forego his wrath till he has received an at least adequately great equivalent."47
Put that bluntly, and it becomes clear that Anselm could never have thought of matters in such crude terms. Recall that for Anselm God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," the source of all that is and not in any sense a reflection of our own petty acts.
With so many readers relying on the English alone, it is all too easy for them to be unaware of how translations can manipulate us into particular ways of perceiving Anselm's position. To illustrate, let me offer two contrasting translations of the same sentence, the first more literal, but the second equally loyal to the meaning.48
(1) "Everyone who sins ought to pay back the honour of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God." (2) "Anyone who sins should return to God the respect and worship that he has denied him; in doing this he makes up for the sin." Contemporary Christians are unlikely to take exception to the Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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david brown second version, whereas many may well recoil from the first, as it sounds like an excessively formal and external relationship. That Anselm in fact intended something quite different I want now to demonstrate by considering carefully each of the three key terms.
Take first the word "debt." "To sin is nothing other than not to render God his due" (1.11), writes Anselm, and that may seem to confirm a very formal view of sin that could easily legitimate some sort of crude payback system. But the reader needs to recall that exactly this definition of sin is given at the very heart of Christianity in the Lord's Prayer. For modern versions that speak of "forgive us our sins" or "forgive us our trespasses" stem from the more literal
"forgive us our debts" (AV), or, more literal still, "forgive us what is owed." Exactly the same word is used in the Latin Bible as Anselm uses here.49 So Anselm is picking up on notions that run deep within the New Testament itself. For him, as for the New Testament, everything in the world should be seen in essentially teleological terms, as created with a divine purpose to be fulfilled, and it is really into this context that so much of his vocabulary of "debt" and of what is
"owed" should be set. It is not, then, that God has laid down some rules which inferiors have violated and so needs satisfaction for such infringements, but rather that human beings have been so made that they can only be fulfilled, only realise their capacity for happiness, if they fulfill or satisfy what is owed to God because of how He has made their natures. God made human beings for eternal bliss through their loving God for His own sake, which means that it is only when their natures are ordered aright in this way that salvation becomes possible for them.
It thus will not do to object that our obligation to God is limited, and so it is not impossible to pay back whatever is missing. This is a tactic which is sometimes tried, through drawing a parallel with our limited debts to our parents which are clearly finite in extent, despite their gift of life. Such a parallel will not work because for Anselm the point is not about externally acquired duties but about the direction in which our natures are already ordered internally. But if that allows a general context for Anselm's talk of "debt" and "what is owed" which does not require the specifics of his own society, it also explains why he is not as far distant from justification by faith as Protestant commentators so commonly assume. For what this internal teleological ordering suggests is that there is nothing that Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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human beings can now do that can make up to God for the wrong they have done, for any good that they might achieve is itself a matter of divine grace, of fulfilling the way in which their natures have already been teleologically ordered by God.50 As Anselm observes,
"whatever you give you have not of yourself but from Him to whom you give."51
That is why for Anselm even the God-man Christ is in no sense compensating for human misconduct in the perfect life he leads. He is merely fulfilling the destiny of human nature which God made possible in creating it that way. Compensation or recompense must therefore, Anselm contends, lie elsewhere, and this he believes he has found in Christ's death. According to traditional Christian teaching, human nature is intended for eternal life and human beings die only because of the fall. Therefore a life voluntarily surrendered to death has nothing to do with the teleology of human nature. It is something returned to God that is not owed, a purely gratuitous act, and, because it is the life of a human being who is also God, an offering of infinite worth.52
That may seem to return us to feudal notions once more, for, as was noted earlier, feudal law did allow another, such as a parent or relative, under appropriate circumstances to make satisfaction on behalf of the person who had actually done the wrong. But, if that were really the point, the exception would now have become the norm, and that seems unlikely. Earlier I drew attention to an alternative explanation, to how biblical and Platonist assumptions could be used to help to make this notion of one acting on behalf of all more readily intelligible. In denying any alleged major role to the feudal analogy, added to this should now be the various other ways in which Anselm seeks to distance what is happening from standard feudal practice. The act is entirely voluntary: it is not part of an established pattern where such conduct is expected, and where satisfaction is in one form or other simply assumed. Again, there is no gain on the part of the person receiving the satisfaction; God, Anselm insists, cannot be benefited in any way because divine impassibility means that God cannot have been hurt or harmed in the first place by human sin, the majesty of God requiring that nothing be outside
His power (1.14–15). To suggest otherwise would be for Anselm to impugn the very meaning of the word "God." Finally, human beings as the recipients of the benefit cannot receive it purely passively
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david brown as in the feudal situation without any further action required on their part because salvation only becomes activated, as it were, by their actively pleading Christ's act in their own cause, as we saw with Anselm's injunction to his readers to absorb Christ's story by "chewing," and so forth.
But all this has still not yet really brought us to the heart of the issue of terminology, which is the question whether the language of "honor" and "satisfaction" can, like "debt," be liberated from its medieval context. One reason for thinking that this might indeed be so is because, despite the eminence of his position in society, Anselm does not seem to have committed himself deeply to the formal structures of the time. This period marked the beginnings of the investiture controversy during which Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) and his successors sought to wrest some of the powers of the monarchy over the Church back into their own hands. Anselm was an uncompromising opponent of the two kings under whom he served (William II and Henry I), but the surprise from the available historical evidence is that he was not at all interested in investiture issues as such, and only really acted because he believed himself bound by an oath of obedience to proceed in the way he did.53 This surely suggests that his focus in Cur Deus Homo may also have been elsewhere than in the details of medieval legalism. Anselm saw himself primarily as a monk rather than as a feudal lord.
The suspicion that feudalism does not provide the key to his meaning is confirmed when we turn to Scripture. Although many, if asked, might well declare "honor" not to be a biblical word, this misleading impression is created only because so often its use is yoked with others, especially "glory." So, significantly, God is repeatedly offered
"glory and honor" in the worship of heaven, and that is also seen as an appropriate ascription to God here on earth.54 More puzzlingly, it is not inconceivable that Paul may have thought "honor" a legitimate human aspiration also.55 Whether so or not, more relevant to note here is the implication of all of this, that Anselm would have already found a context for "honor" in his daily reading of Scripture as a monk. That surely radically changes the nature of his question: the issue was not how to pacify God, like some offended potentate, but rather how to show proper respect and worship toward the Being to whom one owes everything but whom one has nonetheless let down. If of the three key terms it is "satisfaction" which remains
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the most difficult to extricate from its medieval context, even here one should note that its root meaning would have been consciously at the forefront of Anselm's mind in a way that is no longer so even for the classicists of our day. It was a matter of when one had "done enough," a question that remains independent of the specifics of any particular penitential or feudal system. Indeed, it may have been that basic sense of "making up enough" that initially set Anselm on the track of realizing that there could never be "enough" (satis) on our part, so that is why the act of the God-man was required. later developments In dispensing with any inescapable dependence on feudal ways of thinking, however, all problems are scarcely at an end for Anselm's approach. One obvious difficulty that remains is that few of us now read the story of the fall as literally as Anselm clearly did. To him death was a consequence of sin, so a perfect life would necessarily be exempt from death, and that is what made Christ's offering so gratuitous. But evolution suggests that humanity is naturally destined to die, whatever may happen to us thereafter. If that is so, then simply in virtue of taking on human nature, the God-man must have committed his humanity to die, whether or not he led a perfect life.
That is a characteristically modern objection. So too would be the complaint that his Christ is too unlike us to make any meaningful identification possible, for Anselm insists on a Christ who was never without full and perfect knowledge even as a child; so Luke's comment about the young boy growing in "wisdom and stature, and favor with God and man" needed reinterpretation.56 That, however, is not where his immediate successors found difficulty, so it will be as well to look first at earlier objections before seeing how his theory might be defended today.
It was only gradually that his approach gained wide acceptance, but by the century following his death we find that Aquinas, for example, "comes very close to Anselm's position."57 The major difference is in the former's insistence that there are a number of other ways that God could have acted to achieve the same end, for "nothing is impossible with God."58 It is worth noting that where Anselm and Aquinas differ is in their understanding of the divine nature. For, as we have seen, Anselm agrees that that there can be no external
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david brown restraints on God, but his view is that there is nonetheless an internal constraint on the divine nature (something owed to himself) which means that God not only always acts consistently but also
"fittingly." Even Anselm, though, has problems with this kind of approach when it comes to identifying the sense in which Christ
"owed" or "ought" to have done what he did: he was bound by what he wished, Anselm suggests, not by the fact of the debt (2.18). A little later Duns Scotus (d. 1308), while retaining the language of satisfaction, is much more radical in his critique.59 He wants to sweep away all talk of infinite debt and satisfaction which Aquinas had retained, and in its place put a system of merit supervening even in the case of ordinary human beings. The principal way of gaining merit, though, remains for him also in identification with the death of Christ.
Although Calvin rejected any talk of merit on our part, what comes as a surprise to many is the extent to which his views were continuous with those of Anselm, even to the extent of frequently using the language of "satisfaction." Admittedly, Calvin prefers to talk of "a heavenly decree" rather than any "absolute necessity"; nonetheless, it requires a "God-man" "to present our flesh as the price of satisfaction to God's righteous judgment."60 Although a life of obedience is also now part of that price, there is little doubt that for Calvin the death remains the main focus, but with its gruesome character stressed in a way that would have been quite foreign to Anselm. For Anselm it was enough that Christ had given up what he did not owe (his life), whereas for Calvin the satisfaction borne is the punishment that might otherwise have been imposed on us.
"Making up enough" can thus for Calvin no longer be compensatory and so potentially different in kind; instead, it must be exactly the same sort of thing: punishment exactly matched by punishment.
The effect is particularly conspicuous in the treatment he accords the reference to Christ's descent into hell in the Apostles' Creed. For, rejecting the traditional interpretation, which found in the phrase an allusion to the liberating effect of Christ's death on those who died before him, he transformed the meaning of "hell" from "the place of departed spirits" to a hell of suffering that Christ had endured on humanity's behalf in order "to bear and suffer all the punishments that they ought to have sustained."61 That is why Calvin can be seen as in some ways more truly medieval than Anselm. For, despite the accusation that is sometimes made that it is Anselm who sets the Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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trend for the medieval literary and artistic obsession with the horrors of Christ's death,62 nowhere does Anselm dwell on such details or characterize them as a divinely imposed punishment.
The most commonly raised objection against Calvin is the difficulty of comprehending the justice of an innocent man paying the price for the guilty in complete violation of any plausible theory of retributive justice. Although I earlier rejected the analogy, it is certainly very much easier to understand how "damages" might be paid by another, and indeed modern states sometimes do just that, for example in cases of negligence in hospitals where the hospital board pays on behalf of the offending doctor. In speaking of crime rather than debt it is thus far from clear that Calvin has improved the argument. Of course, where he thought he scored was in underlining the seriousness of sin. Anselm, though, as we have seen, never denied the seriousness, only that further punishment was the remedy. Yet the way in which Calvin tries to extricate himself from the retributivist objection can perhaps be allowed to provide an indication of how Anselm's own position could be adapted for continuing use.
Calvin frequently reminds us that, though "we shall behold the person of a sinner and evildoer represented in Christ, yet from his shining innocence it will at the same time be obvious that he was burdened with another's sin rather than his own."63 Taking up such hints, modern followers such as Barth in effect transform Calvin's theory into a way of seeing ourselves.64 The punishment is not something required of Christ or of us by God, but rather how we need to see ourselves (as totally undeserving of God's love) before change can begin to be effected in us. Anselm could also be read with a similar transformation. The important point is our identification with a life of making amends, of seeing ourselves at one with that life and death.
Anselm of course thought that only death fulfilled this role because it was the giving up of something that was not due, but one could question his argument by observing at this point that God the Son's taking up of a human life was also a gratuitous act. For it is far from clear that, simply in virtue of being a human life, all he did was owed to the Father, since it was not a human life that emerged as part of the natural course of things but rather one by special divine decision and action. Indeed, even Anselm himself on occasion seems to come close to identifying the life as well as part of the atonement.65
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