The Theological Method of Anselm of Canterbury in Cur Deus Homo

Vladyslav Nazarchuk

From an Orthodox Christian perspective, the theology of Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1099) possesses a special interest. Although Anselm’s life spanned the Great Schism of 1054, his activity places him squarely on the Latin side: Anselm supported papal power during the Investiture Controversy (1076–1122), helped compel the Greek bishops of southern Italy to adopt Roman beliefs and practices (papal supremacy, filioque, unleavened bread at the Eucharist) at the Council of Bari (1098), and wrote On the Procession of the Holy Spirit, which openly states, “We Latins profess that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son.”¹ In addition, Anselm is often described as “the father of scholasticism” in the West, being “the first to pursue the ideal of a theology whose dialectical rigor turned it into a kind of science.”² Thus, Anselm’s writings are important both as an early example of Latin theology that is wholly separated from the Orthodox patristic tradition, and as a foreshadowing of the even greater errors the Roman Catholic Church would develop over the course of the Middle Ages.

In particular, Anselm’s distinct theological method is the primary force which shapes his theory of atonement as found in Cur Deus Homo, and largely accounts for his deviations from Orthodox patristic tradition in this text. To show this, this essay will first present Anselm’s theological method on the basis of his own words, and summarize his “satisfaction theory of atonement”: Anselm’s precise understanding of the way in which the work of Christ’s Incarnation led to human salvation. Then, two characteristic and controversial features of Anselm’s argument will be discussed in relation to his overall method: human salvation through angelology, and the relationship between God’s mercy and justice. The arguments of Cur Deus Homo will be situated in the context of other treatises which Anselm wrote throughout his life, to show that the problematic aspects of the satisfaction theory of atonement can be traced back to issues in Anselm’s theological approach as a whole.

The following texts will be employed. The previously-mentioned Cur Deus Homo, written between 1095 and 1098, contains the core of Anselm’s account of atonement, and takes the form of a dialogue between Anselm and Boso—a monk at Bec Abbey where Anselm was abbot, and later Anselm’s philosophical companion when Anselm became Archbishop of Canterbury.³ Since the text of Cur Deus Homo is quite long, Anselm also composed the Meditation on Human Redemption, which summarizes the argument of Cur Deus Homo and presents it in a more devotional, poetic form.⁴ Finally, the Proslogion (1077–1078) is “a passionate address to God in the style of Anselm’s prayers and meditations,”⁵ containing a single “master” argument which Anselm uses to prove the existence of God and many of His attributes.

Faith Seeking Understanding

Anselm’s lifelong theological method, which is also clearly operative in Cur Deus Homo, is often associated with the phrase “faith seeking understanding.” This is the title Anselm originally gave to the Proslogion,⁶ and is explained in the beginning of that work as follows:

“I am not trying to scale your heights, Lord: my understanding is in no way equal to that. But I do long to understand your truth in some way, your truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to believe; I believe in order to understand. For I also believe that ‘unless I believe, I shall not understand.’”⁷

Williams notes that this last phrase is quoted by Anselm from Isaiah 7:9 in the Old Latin version of the Bible, and that “Anselm is here indebted to Augustine, who frequently appealed to this verse in explaining his views on the relationship between faith and reason,”⁸ which gives an idea of Anselm’s background. By “faith,” Anselm means specifically the words of Scripture and the teachings of the Church, or, as Gilson puts it, “the facts that [a Christian] is to understand and the realities that his reason shall have to interpret are given to him by revelation.”⁹ On the other hand, by “understanding” Anselm means the rational contemplation of these facts in the search for “the reason of faith,” which is “the intrinsically rational character of Christian doctrines in virtue of which they form a coherent and rationally defensible system.”¹⁰ Since God himself is supreme Reason, all His acts are supremely rational and wise, and thus humans, being rational by nature, can also understand the reason behind these acts. Gilson argues, however, that Anselm’s process of “understanding” was rather narrow in practice, being limited to “dialectics,” or pure logical argumentation. He writes that “in the eleventh century philosophy proper was reduced to Aristotle’s dialectic. No physics, no anthropology, no metaphysics, no purely rational ethics were known to the men of that period,” although Anselm “had an excellent knowledge of Augustine.”¹¹ Gilson’s statement must be understood as only referring to the conditions in the Latin West, since the full Greek philosophical tradition was never lost in the Byzantine East.

Anselm describes his theological approach in much the same way in Cur Deus Homo—which was written at least fifteen years after the Proslogion—demonstrating the lifelong consistency of his method. There, he again quotes the passage “unless you believe, you will not understand” from Isaiah 7:9, and argues, “I do not think we should find fault with anyone who is firmly established in faith and desires to expend his labor in investigating its reason.”¹² While acknowledging that “many of our holy fathers and teachers” have already spoken about the “reason of our faith” in a way that cannot be exceeded, Anselm still sees his pursuit as worthwhile because even these fathers “were not able to say everything they could have said had they lived longer; and the reason of truth is so abundant and so deep that mortals cannot come to the end of it.”¹³ More crucially, Anselm frames the rational understanding of faith as an essential part of Christian spirituality, writing that “since I take the understanding that we achieve in this life to be intermediate between faith and vision, I think that the more progress someone makes toward understanding, the closer he comes to that vision for which we all long.”¹⁴ Anselm’s argument that rational understanding is a precursor to the beatific vision seems to only make sense in the context of a strongly cataphatic view of God and His attributes, and of the beatific vision as specifically intellectual. From the Orthodox Christian perspective, as reflected in, for example, the Mystical Theology of St. Dionysius, the highest Christian spiritual state is instead a union with God that is beyond “the senses and the activities of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive,” in an experience of the “Ray of that divine Darkness which exceedeth all existence.”¹⁵ As such, it is difficult to see how intellectual exploration can approximate this union, or even bring a person close to it. In fact, St. Dionysius specifically censures a theological method like Anselm’s when he writes, “These things thou must not disclose to any of the uninitiated, by whom I mean those who cling to the objects of human thought … and fancy that they know by human understanding Him that has made Darkness His secret place.”¹⁶

In practice, when Anselm investigates a mystery like the Incarnation, he specifically seeks to find reasons why the Incarnation was necessary and could not have happened otherwise, rather than try to understand the actual mechanics of how God became man. In the preface to Cur Deus Homo, Anselm declares that the aim of the work is to demonstrate “that it is impossible for any human being to be saved apart from Christ,” that “blessed immortality” for human beings “should in fact be achieved, but only through the agency of a God-man, and that it was necessary that everything we believe about Christ should take place.”¹⁷ Gilson summarizes Anselm’s approach as follows: “Anselm proposed not to render the mysteries of faith intelligible in themselves, which would have been to suppress them, but to prove by what he called ‘necessary reasons’ that rational inquiry well-conducted necessarily ends in supporting them.”¹⁸ Still, Anselm has a particular standard for what he considers a “necessary reason.” For instance, at the beginning of Cur Deus Homo, Anselm proposes to Boso several arguments for why the work of the Incarnation was wise and praiseworthy:

“For it was fitting that just as death entered the human race through the disobedience of a human being, so too life should be restored by the obedience of a human being. It was fitting that just as the sin that was the cause of our damnation had its origin from a woman, so too the author of our justice and salvation should be born of a woman. And it was fitting that the devil, who through the tasting of a tree defeated the human being who he persuaded, should be defeated by a human being through the suffering on a tree that he inflicted.”¹⁹

Although all these sound like common tropes used by the Church Fathers to explain the Incarnation, Boso dismisses them as “painting on a cloud,” or “pictures” that do not provide a “sufficient explanation for why we ought to believe that God willed to undergo the things we say he underwent.”²⁰ By this, Boso does not necessarily mean that these statements are false, but simply that they are not philosophically rigorous enough to demonstrate the truth of the Christian faith. This gives the impetus for Anselm to present his own account of the Incarnation in the following chapters.

Summary of Anselm’s Argument

Having now a general understanding of Anselm’s theological method, it is reasonable to give a brief summary of Anselm’s main argument in Cur Deus Homo, before diving into a more focused discussion of some of its aspects. For Anselm, the main problem for human salvation is sin, or disobedience to God’s will, which he equates with a debt of honor that humans owe to God: “Someone who does not pay back to God the honor that is owed him takes from God what is rightly his and dishonors God; and this is what sinning is.”²¹ This debt comes from multiple sources. First, humans are by nature created in a state of debt to God, since “you owe everything you are, everything you have, and everything you can do to his command.”²² Second is actual sin done by individual humans, which in itself is “exceptionally serious and not commensurable with any loss.”²³ Anselm argues that even a single glance taken against God’s will is logically worth more than all of creation. Third is original sin, the guilt of which belongs to mankind as a whole; even though original sin made it impossible for humans not to sin in the future, “their inability is itself a fault, since it is not something they ought to have.”²⁴ Fourth is “interest” on the previously mentioned debt: because man’s sin caused God anguish, “it is not enough for him just to restore what he has taken,” but rather “he ought to pay back more than he took … as compensation for the harm he caused by dishonoring him.”²⁵ Since humans do not have the ability to pay off any of these debts to God, God has no other option to maintain his honor but to take it from them by force, through eternal punishment and depriving all humans of their happiness.

Under these conditions, the work of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion is the only possible solution to the problems of mankind. Since the debt of sin which humans owe to God requires a payment of “something greater than everything other than God,” only God can make this recompense; meanwhile, “no one other than a human being ought to make [this recompense], since otherwise human beings would not make recompense.”²⁶ This requires the same person to be both fully man and fully God, who is Christ. Since conceptually, killing Christ²⁷ is a worse sin than all other sins put together, it follows that Christ’s life “is an incomparably greater good than those sins are evils,” and thus “so great and so lovable a good can be sufficient to discharge the debt that is owed for the sins of the whole world.”²⁸ Although Christ lived a perfectly just life, and thus was not subject to death nor owed any debt to God, he “spontaneously offered the Father what he was never going to lose of necessity … his most precious life,”²⁹ as a free gift to God. Because Christ “bore with generous patience the things that were inflicted on him because he obediently preserved justice,” thereby also giving “an example to human beings that they ought not to turn aside from the justice that they owe to God, because of any suffering they might experience,”³⁰ Christ’s sacrifice paid honor to God. The resulting reward, which the Father justly gives to the Son, the Son passes on to all of mankind, fully satisfying the debt which humanity previously owed to God, and granting it redemption, salvation, and grace.

Human Salvation and Angels

One distinctive feature of Anselm’s explanation of atonement, which Anselm uses to bolster the line of argumentation given above, is his union of soteriology and angelology. Specifically, Anselm uses the angelic world to provide a justification for why God needs humans to be saved, and as the standard to which humans need to be raised in order to be saved. Anselm begins with the assumption that “God foreknew the number of rational creatures who either are or will be happy in the contemplation of God, a number so reasonable and complete that it is not fitting for it to be greater or smaller.”³¹ All angels were created by God to be within this perfect number, but the fall of some of these angels during the War in Heaven means that the number of rational creatures in this blessed state is now incomplete. Anselm argues that God cannot simply create new angels to replace those who fell, since “these two are not equally praiseworthy if they remain steadfast in the truth: one who has known no punishment for sin, and one who is always face to face with an eternal punishment.”³² In other words, unlike the original good angels, the new angels would have already witnessed Satan’s punishment before making their choice, so them choosing to be good would have less merit. Therefore, God has no other option except that the fallen angels “must be replaced with human nature, since there is no other nature by which they can be replaced,”³³ humans and angels being the only two rational natures in existence.

Anselm later loosens this argument somewhat, proposing that it is possible, and in fact more likely, that the angels were originally created to be fewer in number than God’s intended number of blessed rational creatures, “because God was … going to create human nature at the proper time, thereby either simply complementing the number that was not yet complete or else also restoring it, if it had been diminished.”³⁴ While some saints will thus take the places of fallen angels, others would merely rise to those places in heaven always intended for humans. Anselm admits that the words of Scripture are inconclusive on whether humans were created simultaneously with angels or not and their relative numbers, and thus “if in such matters we expound the divine writings in such a way that they seem to support different views, and we find no passage that settles what we must unhesitatingly hold, I do not think anyone ought to find fault with us.”³⁵ However, he argues that “if there will be more elect human beings than reprobate angels, it will be neither possible nor reasonable for any human being to know that he was exalted to heaven only because of another’s fall.” As a result of this arrangement, “no one will have any reason to rejoice over another’s downfall,”³⁶ which seems more fitting for God’s kingdom. Therefore, Anselm concludes that, rather than deriving its existence solely from the failures of angels, “human nature was made to take its own place in creation, and not merely to supply the place of individuals of another nature.”³⁷

Although the angelic world thus only forms part of the reason for mankind’s existence for Anselm, the inclusion of this argument within Cur Deus Homo still seems puzzling. If one fully accepts that God loves humankind and desires its salvation and happiness for its own sake, what need is there for an additional argument which would derive its justification from the affairs of a different species? Anselm certainly believes that this is so, starting Book II of Cur Deus Homo with the basic assumption that “it should not be doubted that God made rational nature just, in order that it might be happy in enjoying him.”³⁸ Anselm also agrees that God would never allow humanity to remain in its fallen state, writing that “since we know that God made nothing more precious than rational nature, which he created so that it might rejoice in him, it is utterly foreign to him that he should allow any rational nature to perish entirely.”³⁹ However, it seems that for Anselm, these seemingly foundational statements of the Christian faith are not by themselves sufficiently rigorous to be the “necessary reasons” for the Incarnation which he seeks throughout Cur Deus Homo. As a result, Anselm invents a secondary recourse to the doctrine of angels, which ultimately demeans human nature by making it subservient to angelic nature. Not to mention, it is simply inaccurate because of the unsubstantiated assumptions being made: first, that God desires the salvation of only some finite, preordained number of creatures, rather than wanting all to be saved; and second, that for God angelic and human nature is interchangeable.

Justice and Mercy

While the doctrine of saints taking the places of fallen angels is not strictly necessary within Anselm’s line of argument, Anselm’s understanding of God’s justice and mercy is a much more central issue. The factor of God’s mercy is conspicuously diminished in Anselm’s account of atonement. On one hand, Anselm certainly recognizes that the Incarnation itself was a great display of love and mercy by God, encouraging his soul in the Meditation on Human Redemption to “look upon your need and upon his goodness, / and see what thanks you should render him, / how much you owe to his love.”⁴⁰ Anselm also sees God’s mercy operating within the life of every Christian, writing that “you [God] took me into your care, / so that nothing would harm my soul against its will,”⁴¹ and that God remains merciful to repentant sinners after the Incarnation: “even when I no longer follow you in the way you have counseled me, / but go on committing many sins that you have forbidden, / you still look for the day when I will follow you / and you will give what you have promised.”⁴² However, Anselm does not believe that God can forgive sin in general without recompense, or at least without the Incarnation. This belief provides the basis for the necessity of Christ’s satisfactory atonement, and gives Anselm’s whole theory an overly austere, economic, and judicial character.

In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm addresses this point explicitly when discussing the question of “whether it is fitting for God to forgive sin by mercy alone, without any repayment of the honor that has been taken from him.”⁴³ Anselm begins with the definition that “forgiving sin in this way is the same as not punishing it,” and argues that “if sin is not punished, it is left unordered” and that “it is not fitting for God to leave anything unordered in his kingdom.”⁴⁴ He adds that not punishing sin is simply unjust, since as a result, “someone who sins will have the same standing before God as someone who does not sin.”⁴⁵ When Boso brings up that God “is so kind that nothing kinder can be conceived” and argues that, since God’s will is subject to no one’s judgment, Anselm is wrong for limiting God’s mercy in this way, Anselm replies that “what acts in a way that is unfitting for God should not be called kindness.”⁴⁶ For Anselm, God’s chief attribute—rather than His mercy—is His dignity, and “there is therefore nothing that God preserves more justly than the honor of his own dignity.”⁴⁷ As such, it would go against the very nature of God if His mercy were somehow to prevent the fullest execution of His justice (that is, punishment) in dealing with sin, since, as mentioned previously, sin takes away the honor that is due to God.

Essentially, because in Cur Deus Homo Anselm does not see another way that sin can be dealt with except through justice—whether by recompense or punishment—he ultimately concludes that God’s justice must be more extensive than His mercy, or that God’s mercy is limited by His justice. This, in turn, leaves Anselm completely free to follow the logical consequences of a purely judicial approach to sin, through which he derives his satisfaction view of atonement. However, in Anselm’s other writings, one can find a more nuanced view of the relationship between God’s justice and mercy, which Anselm evidently struggles to reconcile. In the Proslogion, written at least fifteen years before Anselm started working on Cur Deus Homo, Anselm wrestles with a similar question as above while working to rationally derive the attributes of God: “But how do you [God] spare the wicked if you are completely and supremely just? For how does the one who is completely and supremely just do something that is not just?”⁴⁸

Anselm’s solution here is different than in Cur Deus Homo. He argues that God’s mercy is actually downstream from His goodness, since “one who is good both to the good and to the wicked is better than one who is good only to the good … So it follows that you are merciful precisely because you are totally and supremely good.”⁴⁹ Also, Anselm expands the definition of what it means for God to be “just,” beyond merely punishing evil and rewarding good. Anselm posits that God’s justice is first of all towards Himself, “because it is just for you to be so good that you cannot be understood to be better, and to act so powerfully that you cannot be thought to act more powerfully”;⁵⁰ it is in this way that God can be said to be “just” while being merciful. Thus, “when you punish the wicked, this is just because it accords with their merits; but when you spare the wicked, this is just … because it is in keeping with your goodness… And so in this way you justly punish and justly pardon without any inconsistency.”⁵¹ Anselm’s paradoxical conclusion is that “if you are merciful because you are supremely good, and supremely good only because you are supremely just, then you are indeed merciful precisely because you are supremely just. Help me, O just and merciful God … to understand what I am saying.”⁵² It is evident that Anselm here recognizes the insufficiency of his reason in comprehending these attributes of God, writing that “we can see the source of your mercy, and yet we cannot discern it clearly. We know whence the river flows, but we do not see the spring from which it issues.”⁵³

Had Anselm carried over this understanding of God’s justice and mercy from the Proslogion into Cur Deus Homo, his theory of atonement would certainly have become much more nuanced. Perhaps, God had always been willing to extend His mercy to mankind, but humans in their fallen state would have been unable to receive it, since the mere forgiveness of sin would not by itself have healed the spiritual and bodily sicknesses which humans acquired after the Fall. The Incarnation then becomes primarily a therapeutic work done by God for humanity, rather than simply a mathematical solution of how to manage infinite quantities of debt to satisfy the strictest possible version of God’s justice. At some points in his writing, Anselm even seems to come close to this intuition. For example, Anselm asks of God’s Incarnation in the Meditation, “Did any necessity compel the Most High to stoop to such lowliness?”⁵⁴ No, he answers,

“God did not need to suffer such labors and pains,
    but human beings needed to be reconciled in this way.
God did not need to be brought so low,
    but human beings needed to be rescued in this way from the depths of hell.
The divine nature did not need to be brought low or to labor so hard;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But it was necessary for human nature to do all these things
    so that it might be restored to the state for which it was created.”⁵⁵

In other words, the focus here is placed not on God and satisfying His justice, but on man, and restoring him in a way that is fitting to his fallen state. In another passage, Anselm writes, “I was bent double, but you stood me upright so that I could look upon your face,”⁵⁶—a metaphor which seems to do more with healing than justice.

Another metaphor for the economy of salvation which allows an interpretation beyond Anselm’s purely judicial framework is found in Cur Deus Homo. In continuing to consider the question of whether it is possible for God to forgive human beings without them having made recompense for their sin, Anselm asks, “Should God promote them [sinful humans] in this way to any happiness, even the happiness they had before they sinned?”⁵⁷ He responds by giving the analogy of a rich man possessing an unblemished, precious pearl, which “he permits some envious person to grab that pearl out of his hand and cast it into the mud.”⁵⁸ Then, Anselm asks Boso if the man would be wise if “he takes it out of the mud and puts it away, still muddy and unwashed, in some clean and costly place, to be stored in that condition from then on.”⁵⁹ When Boso replies that the man should, of course, store the pearl in a clean state, Anselm concludes, “So wouldn’t God be acting in a similar way if he led human beings, stained with the grime of sin and without any washing (that is, without any recompense), even back into the paradise from which they had been cast out, to remain in that condition forever?”⁶⁰ Anselm’s “dirty pearl” would have been a perfect depiction of the uncleanness of human nature due to sin, and God’s “washing” of it as an image of repentance, forgiveness of sins, and healing from the consequences of sin which become possible for Christians through Christ’s Passion—all of which are, of course, necessary for humans to become worthy of Heaven. However, Anselm instead equates “washing” with “recompense,” thereby collapsing the complex phenomenon of human salvation into a simple economic exchange. Throughout the whole of Cur Deus Homo, Anselm never discusses these other aspects of salvation—even though, for example, merely paying back a debt would not heal a debtor of bodily sickness.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it was shown that the theological method of Anselm of Canterbury—“faith seeking understanding”—consists in starting from revealed facts about the mysteries of the faith, and rationally developing them in order to find the “necessary reasons” for why these mysteries should have happened in the way that they did. Anselm does not seek to comprehensively understand the mystery itself: as he admits after concluding his explanation of the Incarnation in Cur Deus Homo, “There are more and greater reasons for this matter than my mind, or any mortal mind, can grasp.”⁶¹ The understanding that a mystery like the Incarnation cannot be fully comprehended in words is correct, as confirmed by St. John of Damascus when he writes in On the Orthodox Faith, “The divine is therefore ineffable and incomprehensible.”⁶² However, St. John also adds that “no one has ever known God, unless he himself has revealed himself to them,” and that since God “revealed to us what it is profitable for us to know and remained silent about what we are unable to bear … we shall be satisfied with these things and confine ourselves to them, not ‘moving ancient boundaries’ or going beyond divine tradition.”⁶³ In other words, St. John believes that there is no new knowledge of the divine, beyond revelation and the tradition of the Church, that can be generated through philosophical contemplation, nor is this profitable to do. Being among the first of Western theologians outside the communion of the Orthodox Church, it is not surprising that Anselm also breaks himself off from the theological method of the Church Fathers.

When applied to the question of how Christ’s Incarnation brought about human salvation, the main issue with Anselm’s rationalistic approach is that, not being able to comprehend the totality of the mystery, it naturally gravitates to those aspects of the mystery that are most easily susceptible to dialectical reason. Ironically, these aspects tend to be the ones that are less important within the mystery as a whole, and exclusively focusing on them results in a skewed and demeaning theology of the Incarnation. For example, while it may be difficult to rationally understand how humans become like God in the process of deification, it seems more within reach to conceptualize the angelic state, and to imagine humans being raised to that state. As a result, Anselm invents the doctrine of saints taking the places of fallen angels, even though this idea is not found in Scripture or in the teachings of the Church. Similarly, it may be relatively straightforward to compute the demands of God’s justice—like some accountant with a theological balance sheet—but God’s mercy is limitless and incomprehensible, transcending human reason. Thus, Anselm builds his theory of atonement almost entirely on the satisfaction of God’s justice, and places limits on the operation of His mercy. To satisfy his own standards of logical rigor, Anselm is led to reject the traditional, patristic understanding of atonement—Christ’s death as a ransom paid for the sins of man, and Christ as victor over the Devil and death—and instead reduces the complexity of human salvation to a simple economic exchange of repaying a debt of honor. As a result, Anselm largely fails to capture the mystery of the Incarnation, and produces a theology that is ultimately unworthy of God.