3. Faith And Reason in the Cur Deus Homo
INTRODUCTION
where faith is prior and reason secondary, and the realm of philosophy, where reason is prior; and a little later Simon of Tournai (c. 1 1 90) echoes the same idea by saying : 'The teach ing of Aristotle concerns those things about which understand ing leads to faith ("ratio facit fidem") ; but the teaching of Christ concerns those things about which faith leads to under standing ("fides facit rationem") .' 1
Even though these twelfth-century thinkers were later than St. Anselm, and were able to draw upon Aristotelian concepts that helped them to make a fairly precise distinction between the realms of faith and reason, they were, as we have just said, nevertheless simply prolonging and developing ideas that had been in the air some eighty years before, in St. Anselm's time.
This, then, was the tradition of thought about faith and reason that formed the context of St. Anselm's thinking on this question. We must now examine St. Anselm's own position.
3. Faith and Reason in the Cur Deus Homo The best way to understand St. Anselm's position on faith and reason is to see how he himself used reason in matters of faith in his theological writings. Anselm's fundamental treatise, the Cur Deus Homo, is recognized by all to be the best example of his theological method, and it will be worth while examining that book in a little detail to see what, for him, is the office of reason in relation to faith. We might remark in parenthesis that, even though the Cur Deus Homo was written some seven teen years after the Proslogion, there is no reason to think that Anselm's position on faith and reason had changed or developed in any radical way in that period of time. Anselm did not begin writing his formal treatises until he was forty-three, and the
1 Expositio in Symbolum Quicumque, cited by M. D. Chenu, La Theologie comme science au XIII• siecle, Paris, 1 957, pp. 35-36. For Gilbert de la Porree see In Librum
Boitii de praedicatione trium personarum, P.L. !xiv. 1303-4. See also Alan of Lille
(d. 1 203), De Planctu Naturae, P.L. ccx. 446; 'Nature' is comparing herself with 'Theology' : 'Ego ratione fidem, ilia (Theologia) fide comparat rationem; ego
(Natura) scio ut credam, illa (Theologia) credit ut sciat: ego consentio sciens, ilia sen tit consentiens.' On Alan see Alain de Lille: Poete du XII• siecle by G. Raynaud de Lage, Paris, 1951, p. 168: It is 'an essential tendency of Alan of Lille's mind . . . to appeal to philosophical authorities owing nothing to Christianity in order to support a proof and to convince non-Christians'.
FAITH A N D REASON IN THE C UR DEUS HOMO
3 1 main lines of his thought seem to have been well and truly
laid by then and to have remained constant.1
The Cur Deus Homo is concerned to show that man needs to be saved, and that salvation can only be effected by God's be coming man, so as to satisfy the 'debt' owed to God because of mankind's sin. As Boso, Anselm's partner in the dialogue, puts it, the question that the book is concerned with is 'why God
became man in order to save mankind by His death, when it would appear that He could have effected this in some other way' . 2 St. Anselm begins by saying that he is addressing him self not only to Christian believers but also to unbelievers
('infideles') who hold that the Christian faith is 'repugnant to reason'. Because of this, he goes on, his discussion will abstract altogether from what we know about Christ by faith and through the scriptures, and will appeal only to 'necessary reasons' ('rationes necessariae') to prove that man can be saved only by Christ : 'Leaving Christ aside, just as though He never was, we shall prove by necessary arguments that it is impossible to be saved without Him.'3
The Christian, of course, will not need to be convinced by reason of the truth of the Incarnation and Redemption since he already believes this by faith. All the same, however, the rational explanation of this truth will be useful to the believer in that it will enable him to penetrate more deeply into what he believes and, in addition, will give him a means to defend his faith against others.4 Both believers and unbelievers, then, want an explanation of why God became man, but for different reasons. And Anselm clearly thinks that the same explanation will suffice for both; it will confirm the believer in his faith, on the one hand, and rationally convince the unbeliever of the truth of the Christian faith and of the necessity of believing in it. The unbelievers, he says, 'look for rational explanation because they do not believe, while we for our part do so because
' The Cur Deus Homo is in Schmitt, ii, and page references are to this edition.
Another edition of the work, together with a translation into French and an excellent introduction, has recently been published by R. Roques, Anselme de
Cantorbery: Pourquoi Dieu s' est fait homme, in the series Sources chretiennes, Paris, 1 963.
Roques's long introduction is by far the best available discussion of the Cur Deus
Homa. See also J. Mcintyre, St. Anselm and his Critics: A Re-interpretation of the 'Cur
Deus Homa', Edinburgh, 1954.
2 Bk. 1 1, ch. xviii ; p. 1 26.
3 Preface; 42.
4 1. i; 47.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
we believe ; but the object of our search is one and the same' .1
However, it remains true that it is primarily the needs of the unbeliever which dictate the supposedly purely rational method of investigation of the Cur Deus Homo, and that it is the un believer who is in view in most of the book. So, in the conclusion to the whole work, Boso does not mention the believer, but says instead that Anselm has satisfied 'by reason alone not only the Jews but also the pagans' that the Old and New Testaments are true.2
Who, may we ask, are these 'unbelievers' ('infidcles') and 'pagans' ('pagani') ? From what Anselm says, we may infer that the 'unbelievers' are those who do not accept all the assump tions that the Christian believer makes. In this sense the Jews are 'unbelievers', in that while accepting the Old Testament they do not accept the New Testament. The 'pagans', however, are unbelievers in a more radical sense in that they accept neither the Old nor the New Testament. In other words, they are those, atheists and others, who do not accept any of the articles of Christian revelation. They are those who have to be ap pealed to by reason alone ('sola ratione') and against whom we cannot appeal to any scriptural authority. St. Anselm certainly was aware of the objections of the atheist or religious sceptic, and it seems certain that in the Cur Deus Homo he had the sceptic in mind as well as the Jews.J The point is an important
1 1. iii ; 50. See also Epist. 1 36 ; Schmitt, iii. 280-1 : 'Our faith ought to be defended by reason against those who ridicule it, but not against those who glory in the name of Christian. Regarding the latter, we may justly demand that they stand by the promise made in baptism; as for the former, they should be shown by rational means how irrationally they spurn us. However, the Christian ought to come to understanding through faith and not to faith through understanding, otherwise if he lacked understanding he would lose his faith.'
2 II. xxii; 1 33. This conclusion of Boso seems to refute Roques's contention that Anselm's main purpose is to justify the hope of the believer: Pourquoi Dieu •
, p. 96.
3 J. de Ghellinck, Le Mouvement theologique . .
. , p. 289, notes that in the com mentary of Marius Victorinus on Cicero's De lnventione (written before Marius' conversion) there are sceptical attacks on the Virgin Birth of Christ and on the doctrine of the Resurrection. This commentary was widely used in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and must have been known to St. Anselm. Roques claims,
Pourquoi Dieu .
. . , p. 72, that 'the "pagani" represent rather the Muslims', and, p. g r , that St. Anselm does not have in view 'the pagan pure and simple, nor the atheist'. Certainly there is evidence that in the twelfth century 'pagani' is used to signify the Muslims. Eadmer, for example, uses the term to describe the Arab troops of Count Roger of Sicily ( Vita, ii, xxxiii; Southern, p. III), and later writers such as Alan of Lille identify the 'pagani' and the 'Sarraceni' (see Raynaud de Lage,
Alain de Lille • • • , pp. 1 2, 28) . However, St. Anselm himself nowhere mentions the
FAITH AND REASON IN THE CUR DEUS HOMO
one, for upon it depends how we are to appreciate Anselm's whole purpose in the Cur Deus Homo; that is, whether the ex planations offered in the Cur Deus Homo are to be seen as
'necessary' only for those who already accept some or all of the religious (supra-rational) assumptions that the Christian makes,
or whether they are to be seen as rationally 'necessary' or compelling in the strict sense. If, as we believe, St. Anselm intends his arguments to be convincing to those who do not accept any supernatural revelation at all, then this obviously
implies that he did not think that the only office of reason regarding faith was to make explicit what was already known by
faith, but that reason had a function anterior to and indepen dent of faith.1
However, if St. Anselm wishes to reserve a place for reason
independent of faith, he is at the same time equally concerned to emphasize the autonomy of faith. In other words, he wishes
to say that faith is possible without any kind of prior rational
preparation or justification. The Christian believer, as he constantly says, can (indeed must) believe before he under stands. So, Boso says at the beginning of the Cur Deus Homo that 'right order' demands that we should believe first in the Christian mysteries before presuming to discuss them ration ally, and he goes on to say, 'Even were I unable in any way to
understand what I believe, still nothing could shake my con· stancy' . Here, then, far from being the basis of belief, reason
seems to be relegated to a merely secondary role. If you believe,
then reason can show that your belief is rational ; but it is not Muslims or identifies them with the 'pagani' or suggests that the latter, like the Jews, share some at least of the Christian's assumptions. Anselm mentions the 'pa gani' in only two other places, in the Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi (Schmitt, ii; 1 0) and in the Epistola de Sacrificio de Azymi .
(Schmitt, ii; 237). In both references the 'Iudaei' and the 'pagani' are mentioned as distinct categories of unbelievers·, the inference being that while the Jews share part of Christian belief, namely that contained in the Old Testament, the 'pagani' share nothing and so must be approached by 'reason alone'. Anselm's use of 'pagan us' is in fact quite traditional
(see Dictionnaire d'arch!ologie chretienne et de liturgie, Paris, 1937, xiii, 375-80), and his general position coincides with that proposed later by Aquinas in his Summa Contra
Gentiles (I, ii).
1 Roques, op. cit., p. 96, claims that St. Anselm is concerned principally to justify the faith of the believer, and then by showing 'the internal coherence of his
faith' he persuades the unbeliever. However, St. Anselm is obviously concerned to show more than that the Christian faith is coherent or self-consistent; what he claims to prove is that it is true and necessarily so; see 1. iv; 52. 1. xxiv; 94. u. xvi ;
1 2 I .
826610 D
I N TR O D U C T I O N
formally because i t is rational that you believe. A s Boso puts it again, 'I have come not that you should remove doubts from my faith, but that you should show me the reasons for my certainty (of faith) .'1
Within this context St. Anselm is concerned to emphasize the limits of reason in matters of faith. So he remarks, for instance, that though by reason we can know the necessity of the fact of the Incarnation, we do not know 'how' ('quomodo' ) i t i s necessary.2 Again, i n such a theological inquiry, Anselm says, 'Whatever a man might be able to say, the deeper reasons
('altiores rationes' ) of so important a fact are still hidden.'3
Here, then, we have the two sides to St. Anselm's thought. On the one hand, reason is allowed an independent function prior to faith, and, in some sense, reason can bring us to assent to the
truths of faith. On the other hand, St. Anselm clearly acknow ledges that faith is possible without any kind of prior rational preparation or justification, and that for the believer the only function of reason is to understand what is already believed.
Clearly, as they stand, these two sides to St. Anselm's thought are not consistent, and some kind of distinction between the function of reason which brings us to faith and the function of reason which operates within faith would have to be made to make them consistent. However, like Augustine, St. Anselm does not have the categories with which to make this distinction clearly and unequivocally, and the two strains in his thought exist in an unresolved, uncrystallized state.
This ambiguity in Anselm's position is very strikingly brought out by an examination of his use of 'rationes necessariae' in the Cur Deus Homo. At times Anselm uses the expression to denote
a strict, logically necessary, demonstration, that is to say, an argument whose premisses are certainly and indubitably true and whose conclusion follows with syllogistic necessity from them. 'Necessary reasons' in this sense leave no room for any doubts, and one would be a 'fool' ('insipiens') to deny such demonstrations.4 Though Aristotle' s treatises, Prior Ana!Jtics and Posterior Ana!Jtics, were not available to St. Anselm, he had,
nevertheless, a clear idea of the notion of logical necessitys 1 I. i ; 48.
2 r. xxv; 96.
3 I. ii ; 50.
4 r. xxv; 95· s See, for example, u. xvii ; 23, 'If something exists necessarily it is impossible for it not to exist, and if it is necessary for something not to exist it is impossible for it to exist, and conversely.'
FAITH AND REASON I N THE C UR DEUS HOMO
and, as we have remarked, there seems to be no doubt that, on occasions at least, Anselm uses the notion of 'necessary reasons'
in this strict sense to mean logically necessary arguments, in contrast with arguments of 'fittingness' ( 'convenientia') or
probable arguments based upon analogy, which Boso says in the Cur Deus Homo are mere 'paintings upon clouds' . 1 One might say perhaps that it is when St. Anselm is anxious to stress the
claims of reason that he thinks of 'necessary reasons' in this sense.
But Anselm also uses 'necessary reasons' in a much more
general and looser sense than this. The notion of 'rationes necessariae' was probably known to St.
Anselm through
Cassiodorus, who distinguishes between an 'argumentum necessarium' and an 'argumentum probabile' . For Cassiodorus the main difference between the two is that a 'necessary argu
ment' attains to the actual truth about a thing, so that one can say 'that is how the thing is', while a 'probable argument' is one
which is neither true nor false but only likely or probable.2 In
this sense any true explanation of any fact will be 'necessary' .
And Anselm, in fact, at times seems to use 'necessary reasons' in this sense, so that to ascribe a true rational justification of any
kind to any thing or event is to show its 'necessity' .3 As he makes clear in the opening passages of the Cur Deus Homo, what he is
attempting to do is to show that there is a rational justification
for the Incarnation and Redemption, as against those 'volun tarists' , as we might call them, who argue that God could have saved man by a simple arbitrary act of the will. For Anselm
God does nothing arbitrarily, but there is a reason for all His
acts which we can find by rational investigation. We can never be satisfied with 'God so wills it' as a final explanation. One
might, in fact, almost think that St. Anselm had someone like St. Peter Damian in mind, that is, a theologian who held that no limits could be set to the omnipotent will of God, with the consequence that the acts of God could never be really subject
to rational inquiry.4
I I. iv; 52.
2 Cassiodorus, De Artibus et disciplinis liberalium artium, P.L. !xx. 1 177. See the discussion of Cassiodorus' distinction by A. M. Jacquin, 'Les "Rationes necessariae" de saint Anselme', in Melanges Mandonnet, Paris, 1 930, ii. 67-78. There is also a reference to 'certas necessariasque rationes' in Augustine's De duabus animabus contra Manichaeos, xiv. 23. P.L. xiii. I I O.
3 I. i ; 48, 'ratione vel necessitate'.
4 I. viii; 59, 'The will of God is never irrational'; see also I. xii; 70, 'It does not
INTRODUCT I O N
Used in this loose sense 'necessary reasons' are no longer
distinguished sharply from arguments of 'fittingness' , and in certain passages in the Cur Deus Homo St. Anselm seems to suggest that an argument of 'fittingness' or an argument by
analogy can in fact function as a 'necessary reason'. 1 Once
again one might say that perhaps it is when St. Anselm is con
cerned to stress the supra-rationality of the articles of faith, and the autonomy of the order of faith in general, that he tends to use 'necessary reasons' in this loose or weak sense.2
These, then, are the two sides to St. Anselm's thought on
faith and reason. If we stress the one side of his thought we can
easily make St. Anselm into a rationalist for whom not only the 'preambles' or presuppositions of faith are rationally demon strable, but also the mysteries of faith themselves.3 On the follow that if God wishes to lie, it is just to lie ; rather it follows that that being is
not God.'
1 So, r. iv; 52, St. Anselm uses 'necessaria ratio' and 'decebat' as equivalents.
Again, II. viii; 104, Anselm says that the virgin birth of the God-Man is 'eminently fitting' ('valde convenit'), and Boso replies 'valde pulchrae et rationabiles sunt istae picturae'. See also the interesting discussion of 'convenientia' and 'necessitas' by Roques, op. cit., pp. 78 ff.
2 After St. Anselm the notion of 'rationes necessariae' continues to be used.
So Richard of St. Victor holds that we can have 'necessary reasons' for what we believe by faith: De Trinitate, i. 4 ; P.L. cxcvi. 892 ; and two hundred years after Anselm Duns Scotus cites both Anselm and Richard as 'authorities' for the posi
tion that we can have 'necessary reasons' about God. Scotus, however, distinguishes between what he calls 'evidently necessary' reasons, that is logically necessary truths whose denial would involve self-contradiction, and 'non-evidently neces sary' propositions, that is propositions necessary in themselves but not logically necessary to us. And it is only in this latter sense that we can speak of 'ra ti ones necessariae' applying to God. On Scotus see E. Gilson, Jean Duns Scot, pp. 340-1, and by the same author, 'Les Seize premiers theoremata et la pensee de Duns
Scot', in Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age, xii, 1 937, 61.
J Dom Cyprien Vagaggini in his magisterial 'La Hantise des "Rationes Neces sariae" de saint Anselme dans la theologie des processions trinitaires de saint
Thomas,' in Spic. Bee., pp. 1 1 1-12, seems to suggest that, on the theoretical level at least, St. Anselm's categories do not allow him to differentiate between the mysteries of faith and what we know about God by reason. After noting that Anselm distinguishes between knowing that ('quia sint') there are three persons in God (provable by 'necessary reasons') , and knowing how ('quomodo sint') there are three persons in the divine nature (inaccessible to reason), Dom Vagaggini goes on to say: 'But when we try to find out what Anselm means by quomodo sit it is seen that for him this consists simply in the fact that the human intelligence never comes to have an exhaustive and direct knowledge of the Trinity, in the same way that it never comes to have a direct and exhaustive knowledge of the divine wisdom or the divine being. Thus one cannot prove that for St. Anselm the mystery of the Trinity is essentially greater than the mystery of the divine wisdom or being.'
FAITH AND REASON I N THE C UR DEUS HOMO
other hand, if we stress the other side of Anselm's thought we can equally easily make him into a quasi-fideist maintaining
that nothing can be known about God save on the basis offaith.1
However, as we have suggested above, St. Anselm does not
want to exaggerate either the rationalistic side of his thought or the fideist side to the exclusion of the other. Like Bossuet in another connexion he wishes to hold 'les deux bouts de la
chaine' and to maintain both that reason has a role to play prior to faith and within the realm of faith, and also that faith
transcends reason so that it cannot be on purely rational grounds that we believe in the mysteries of faith. After all,
Anselm had extravagant examples of both rationalism (Berengar) and quasi-fideism (St. Peter Damian) before him to serve as a
warning, and there is no doubt that he knew the dangers of exaggerating reason vis-a-vis faith, and faith vis-a-vis reason.
But it is also true that St. Anselm does not formally and explicitly distinguish the objects and methods of the two spheres of faith and reason, and there is no doubt that this lack of explicit formulation does lead him at times into confusion.
Later on, the thirteenth-century Aristotelians will make a clear distinction between the role of reason prior to the act of faith, whose function it is to justify the 'preambles' of faith, and the
role of reason in explicating the content of the theological mysteries. So, according to Aquinas, 'sacred doctrine makes a threefold use of philosophy. The first is to demonstrate those truths that are preambles of faith and that have a necessary
place in the science of faith.' The second is 'to give a clearer
notion, by certain similitudes, of the truths of faith . . .'. The third is 'to resist those who speak against the truth, either by 1 See, for example, G. Leff, Medieval Thought, London, 1 958, p. 99 : 'St. Anselm's entire position rests upon the primacy of faith. We must recognize that, like St.
Augustine, he allowed reason no independent validity. For both, reason was an instrument in demonstrating wh<>t was already believed : of itself it could not add to certitude, although it could give additional evidences of its truth.' R. McKeon,
Selections from Medieval Thinkers, New York, 1929, i. 142, goes even further and quite fancifully makes faith, for Anselm, a prerequisite for any kind of knowledge at all. For Anselm he says, 'It is important that faith precedes understanding, since of the two sources of human knowledge, reason and faith, faith can exist without reason, but reason cannot exist without faith. In rational enquiry there must be a foundation of faith in the principles of the enquiry, and in the principles
of the understanding itself.' See also E. Brehier, La Philosophic du moyen age, Paris, pp. 122-3 ; for St. Anselm, 'Holy Scripture is the authority on which all rational truths are based.'
INTRODUCTI ON
showing that these statements are false, or by showing that they are not necessarily true'.1 Here, on the one hand, the
'rationes necessariae' are confined to the sphere of the pre ambles of faith ; and, on the other hand, the ' crede ut intel
ligas' formula is confined to the sphere of the mysteries of
faith.
Anselm himself does not make such an explicit distinction
between the two spheres, but all the same it is not too much to
say that he is groping his way confusedly towards such a
distinction. In fact, though we should not wish to make Anselm into a precocious Thomist, there are some interesting passages
in his writings that hint at the kind of position Aquinas was
later to adopt. In the Cur Deus Homo, for instance, St. Anselm
admits that the theological mystery of the Incarnation goes beyond the powers of the human mind, but, he says, we can nevertheless show that 'higher reasons' are hidden in the
mystery. Even though we do not know them, there are 'reasons'
explaining the Incarnation, so that the Incarnation is not a
wholly arbitrary and irrational action on the part of God. We
can in this sense give 'some reason' for the Incarnation, so that the appropriate attitude before a theological mystery is not one of reasonless silence ; or, in other words, if the Incarnation is supra-rational, it is not thereby irrational. 'You will' , says St.
Anselm, 'be more able to prove that higher reasons are implicit in this (mystery of the Incarnation) if you show some reason for
it than if, by saying nothing, you prove that there is no reason in it to comprehend.'2 He seems to be making very much the same point in the Monologion,3 where, apropos the Trinity, he
says, 'Though this truth is inexplicable it demands belief.' And,
he goes on, 'One who is investigating an incomprehensible object ought to be satisfied if his reasoning shall have brought
him far enough to recognize that this object most certainly exists', even though he cannot explain it. In other words, we can explain that there are three persons in God even if we cannot explain how this can be.4 Then in the next chapter of the Monologion Anselm raises the important question as to how we
1 In Boiftium de Trinitate, IX. ii. 4. See Chcnu, La TMologie comme science au XIII• siecle, on pre-Thomist positions; and Y. Congar, art. 'Theologie', 382 ff.
2 n. xvi ; u 7.
3 !xiv; 75.
' • • • etiamsi penetrare nequeat intellectu quomodo ita sit'.
FAI TH AND REASON IN THE C UR D E US HO M O
may speak about God at all. If I use words in their ordinary everyday sense-as I must if I am to be understood-how can they adequately express anything about God (who is, by definition, above and beyond anything within our everyday experience) ? How, in other words, can ordinary language be
used to describe an extraordinary being such as God is?
Anselm answers that we cannot speak of God directly and as He is in Himself, but we can speak of Him by way of analogies and images ('per aliquam similitudinem aut imaginem') . This knowledge of God is indirect since we know Him through some thing other than Him and we do not see Him as He is in Him self. But, for all that, this knowledge is of some value. If this knowledge is not the whole truth it is not therefore false. As Anselm puts it, 'This (divine) nature is ineffable since it is inexpressible by words or any other means; but any indirect knowledge of it based on reasoning and having, as it were, the character of a reflection is not therefore false'. 1
Incomplete and confused and undeveloped as his ideas are then, Anselm is feeling his way tentatively towards the theory of analogy that plays a central role in Aquinas's theology, and in general towards the distinction between the proper spheres of faith and reason which Aquinas and the other thirteenth century Aristotelians were to make so clearly. But unfortunately
Anselm simply did not have the concepts and distinctions
available to make his intentions clear. He was thinking at a time before the introduction of the whole Aristotelian philosophical corpus and he did not have a complete conception of what
'natural reason' or philosophy was capable of, what it com prehended, and what its boundaries were. 'Reason' for Anselm could not have precisely the same meaning and the same resonances as it had for the thirteenth-century philosophers.
For Anselm, again, it was difficult to make a precise distinction between the sphere of theology and that of philosophy because he was not acquainted with the Aristotelian conception of 'science' ('scientia') with all its elements-material and formal objects, the role of 'principles', the notion of 'subalternation',
&c.-which was to be such a potent instrument of clarification (and sometimes of mystification !) in the hands of the thirteenth century thinkers.z
I Ibid. ; 77.
2 On this see Chenu, La TMologie comme science .