1. I. McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). There is no
david brown But, whether part of his historical position or not, it would certainly make greater sense in our modern context.
Moreover, the model would have one obvious advantage over Calvin, in that it would not just look to the negative effects of sin but also direct attention to what happens thereafter, the pursuance of a particular style of living, one that continued that pattern of making amends. The requirement that Christ be both God and man would also still be preserved. Christ must be human because only in that way can we identify with his offering as our own; but equally he must also be God because only in that way is it an offering that is in no sense required: God the Son only became human in virtue of becoming incarnate and was not unconditionally and by definition human as we are. Yet, though deeply embedded in so much of Christian theology, some may still recoil from the denial to humanity in general of any positive contribution of their own. I noted earlier one possible response from Anselm to the objection that God cannot claim to have granted us life as a gift if he insists on all the credit subsequently as well. But there is also another way of reacting, that to speak at all of "a credit balance" in the individual case is already to invite the temptation of pride and a lack of a proper sense of dependence on divine generosity and grace.66 Even as modern a philosopher as Kant thought it folly to pretend that we had ever done enough.67
In insisting therefore that only one person has ever performed that enough (satis-faction), Anselm ensures a particular way of looking at ourselves. Intriguingly, atonement figures in novels are almost invariably themselves flawed figures. Think, for instance, of Prince
Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, of Sydney Carton in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, or, more recently, of the whiskey priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory or the brawling McMurphy in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Anselm preserves the recognition of that flaw in his claim that only a God-man could offer an unqualified "enough."68 notes 1.
I. McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). There is no final resolution within this novel. For an exploration of some implicitly
Christian examples, see F. W. Dillistone, The Novelist and the Passion Story (London: Nelson, 1960).
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Anselm on atonement
"He made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin" (AV). Similarly, possibilities for ransom would include Mark 10:45; also, for example,
John 3:16; for victory over the Devil, Luke 10:18; for sacrifice, Hebrews 9:26, and so on.
The Apostles' Creed merely recites the outline of Christ's life, while the Nicene at least talks of that life being "for us and for our salvation" and "for our sake."
For discussion of the stages listed below, see my "Necessary and Fitting Reasons in Christian Theology," in W. J. Abraham and S. W. Holtzer
(eds.), The Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 211–30, esp. 212–14.
All the translations that follow are my own.
T. Gorringe, God's Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 85–103, esp. 100.
K. Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (New York: Meridian, 1962), 55–57.
E.g. several times in 1.9. In 1.18 he actually considers rival textual versions of Deut. 32:8 ("sons of Israel" versus "angels of God").
Cur Deus Homo 1.18 (388a).
10.
Epistle 72 describes how Anselm sent the Monologion to Lanfranc for approval, only for Lanfranc to complain of his failure to appeal to appropriate authorities.
11.
For Muslims, see Eadmer, Life of St. Anselm, ed. R. W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 111–12 (xxxiii); for Jews, R. W.
Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 198–202.
12.
1.1 (362c).
13.
1.1; cf. Prosl. 16.
14.
"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Gen. 18:25; AV). The sentiment catches Anselm's thinking well, even if the Vulgate translates the passage quite differently.
15.
1.25. A similar point is made in Mon. 44.
16.
For some helpful comments in this direction, see E. Fairweather, "Iustitia Dei as the Ratio of the Incarnation," in P. Grammont (ed.),
Spicilegium Beccense (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1959), 327–36.
17.
2.10; cf. 2.5; 2.17.
18.
Cf. Gorringe, God' Just Vengeance, 199–200.
19.
1.15: The Latin words are deformitas and ordinis pulchritudo.
20.
For the former point, On the Nature of the Good 3; for the latter, City of God 11.18.
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david brown 21.
1.3; 2.8. Cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies v,19.
22.
Exodus 20:5 (AV); Leviticus 16, esp. vv. 18ff. For a challenge to corporate thinking, Ezekiel 18:20.
23.
1 Cor. 12:12–30; Col. 1:15–20; in the later Paul Christ is treated as the head rather than identified with the whole body. See also John 15:1–11.
24.
S iii: 10; English available in The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. B. Ward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 100–101, esp. 101.
25.
Cf. Southern, Portrait, 330–47, esp. 332, 346.
26.
Epistle 452. His contemporary Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) exhibits similar attitudes: cf. M. Maccarone, "I fondamenti petrini del primato romano in Gregorio VII," Studi Gregoriani 13 (1989): 55–128, esp. 96ff.
27.
For a counter-example, see R. Harr´e, Personal Being (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 75–140, esp. 85–89.
28.
Although challenging Platonist influence, Iwakuma Yukio concedes that this has been the dominant view: "The Realism of Anselm and His Contemporaries," in D. E. Luscombe and G. R. Evans (eds.),
Anselm: Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 120–35, esp. 120, n. 3.
29.
R. W. Southern, Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 62; Southern, Portrait, 214.
30.
2.17 (424b): on the necessity of the future.
31.
For statistics, C. S. Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideas in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), 174.
32.
Cf. Southern, Portrait, 57.
33.
In responding to Roscelin: Southern, Portrait, 174–81.
34.
"Alarming" because it would seem to commit him to the view that God is an entity distinct from the three persons of the Trinity in much the same way as the Platonic Man is from men.
35.
Plato used his example of "bed" to argue that the work of artists is at a lower level than that of artisans, since what they create is only an imitation of an imitation: Republic 595–602.
36.
The Republic was not available at this time.
37.
Cf., e.g., De Trinitate 8.3.5.
38.
For exposition and some discussion, see D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 15–20, 85–93.
39.
This is to express disagreement with Jasper Hopkins in his A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 198–202, esp. 201.
40.
First introduced in the American Book of Common Prayer (1977) and then followed by the Church of England in its Common Worship
(2000).
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Anselm on atonement
41.
For references to grace, 1.20; 2.5; for example, 2.11; 2.18. Grace as aiding his critical acumen is also mentioned in 1.1.
42.
It is altogether too simplistic to reduce Abelard to an exemplarist and nothing more, since elsewhere in his Commentary on Romans he speaks of both cross and the mass in terms of satisfaction and sacrifice.
Anselm's concern with beauty means that comparisons with Bernard can also be given a certain plausibility: M. B. Pranger, "The Mirror of Dialectics," in Luscombe and Evans (eds.), Anselm: Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury, 136–47.
43.
This Meditation is available in Prayers, 230–37.
44.
A. von Harnack, History of Dogma (London: Williams & Norgate, 1899), vol. vi, 54–78, esp. 68.
45.
S iii: 76–79; toward the end of the First Meditation in Prayers, 221–24.
46.
Part of his Prayer to St Paul: Prayers, 153–54 (lines 397–415). He is developing Matt. 23:37.
47.
Harnack, Dogma, 76. Contrast John McIntyre's view that the concepts "undergo transformation in the new contexts in which he set them":
St. Anselm and His Critics: A Re-interpretation of the Cur Deus Homo (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1954), 203.
48.
From the end of 1.11 (377a).
49.
Matt. 6:12. The only difference is that the Gospel uses the plural debita and Anselm here the singular debitum.
50.
For a commentator taking such teleology seriously, see R. Campbell, "The Conceptual Roots of Anselm's Soteriology," in Luscombe and Evans (eds.), Anselm: Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury, 256–63.
51.
1.20 (392c).
52.
For death not required of the sinless, 1.9; for the infinite value of the offering, 2.6 and 2.14.
53.
Southern, Portrait, 228–307, esp. 234, 280–84, 305.
54.
For heaven, Revelation 4:9, 11; 5:12; 7:12. For ascriptions, e.g. 1 Tim.
1:17; 6:16. Christ receives "honor and glory" from the Father in 2 Peter 1.17.
55.
Rom. 2:7. For disputed interpretations, see C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1980), vol. i, 147.
56.
1.9; 2.13; cf. Luke 2:52 (AV).
57.
B. Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 324–32, esp. 327.
58.
Summa Theologiae 3a, 46, 2.
59.
For an exposition of similarities and differences, see R. Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 129–32.
60.
J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), vol. i, 464–67, esp. 464, 466
(Bk. ii, 12.1–3).
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