The years got away from me, but I finally resolve to finish this commentary on St. Anselm’s masterpiece. It’s a bit rough getting back into the swing of things but here we go!
I began this series with the provocation that St. Anselm is not particularly interested in the mechanics of how God saves us. Book One of Cur Deus Homo supports that claim pretty nicely; Anselm leaves Boso in a state of perplexity having given him only a theory of justice and a series of negations that at best suggest a future solution. Hard to speak of a theory of salvation when there’s essentially no positive content about Christ in the entire book! Anselm flirts with some assumptions about Christ’s death in his Patristic excursus in CDH I.6-10 but there he is explicitly concerned with God’s justice and the meaning of the death is left quite open-ended.
Standing amidst the rubble left by Anselm’s proof by contradiction, Boso requests some sort of positive content. How does Jesus Christ resolve the apparent impossibility of restoring order to the universe? The first volume merely destroyed the position of Boso and the secular critique of Christianity he brought to his master. In doing so, Anselm appears to have created a situation in which no solution is possible in any way at all. What’s the argumentative key to move from the impossibility of satisfaction in CDH I.20-21 to the claim in CDH II.6 that the necessity of satisfaction establishes the necessity of the Incarnation?
Now is the time to remember the opening chapters of Cur Deus Homo, where Anselm warned the reader that this discussion would require an extensive understanding of necessity and possibility. All the basic elements of the answer to Boso’s question exist in a tangled conflict of necessities and impossibilities in the first volume. There Anselm exploited the mess to show the necessity of Christ by negation. Now Anselm tries to find the path forward through the mess by taking a second pass through the material. All the ideas should be pretty familiar from the first volume.
In the first chapter we begin by walking our way back through the claim about what God cannot do or allow. The restarting argument of Book Two, hearkening back to the opening moves of I.4, is an absolute marvel fully deserving a deep dive of its own–a post for another day! To keep things simple for the moment we are only interested in how this argument gets us to the famous Deus-homo conclusion of II.6, so a sketch will suffice:
God created the rational nature so that it could discern between just and unjust, good and evil, more good and less good. Further, the rational nature is rational so that it can will in accord with this discernment: hating and avoiding the evil, loving and choosing the good, and loving and choosing the greater good more. As an intermediary conclusion this means that the rational nature was created to love and choose the highest good (God) above all things for its own sake. This is a pretty neat conclusion by itself, but we are interested in the next steps which are already hinted in the first few.
Two critical ideas grow together through this argument and culminate in a kind of double conclusion. The first and more immediately pressing idea is that God does nothing in vain and so could not have created the rational nature such that it could never attain this end. He can no more allow the rational nature to be wholly lost than He can create it that way to begin with. This idea serves as Anselm’s new foundation for why God cannot simply send all humans to hell to resolve the problem of sin. The second idea which grows with and within the first is that the rational nature must have been created in a state of justice because only in such a state could the rational nature actually love and choose the highest good above all things. Why this is the case and how we are going to avoid an Anselmian Pelagianism is something to save for the deep dive. What should hold our attention here is that Anselm has reintroduced the essential threads from Book One in a much more compact form: God must do something about the problem of sin and it must involve making us just. As Boso concedes in the summarizing fourth chapter, “a rational heart cannot think otherwise.” I think we should consider these two conclusions to be the iron necessities, the necessary necessarys (with reverb!) that trump all other concerns raised in the book so far. Never mind the fact that Anselm has already argued quite forcefully that satisfaction is impossible for us, and even grounded the necessity of Christ on this very impossibility! The divine intentions exposed by the argument of II.1 mean that somehow or another satisfaction must be made to work.
Now in these first four chapters it may first seem that the original justice of the human race plays the role of mere scaffolding for Anselm’s drive toward this conclusion that God must save us by means of satisfaction. The rational nature must be restored, body and soul, in a way consistent with its original dignity and this includes restoring us to a state of justice. Remember our equality with the angels, even if Anselm has dropped that bit for now! Since the first volume already established that this justice is impossible without humans making satisfaction for sin, this line of thought clearly brings us to II.6 and the famous “little answer” to the problem. However, the justice point of chapter one and more precisely the first consequence of it, so briefly mentioned in chapter two as if in passing, will return with dramatic effect later in the second volume. It turns out to be massively important that, in our original state of justice, humans did not owe the penalty of death–not only to explain that our future restoration must involve immortality (the relatively tangential point of chapter three, echoing Anselm’s earlier version of the argument in Monologion 68-72) but also how it will be possible for the Deus-homo to make satisfaction. Let the careful reader of I.20 understand! Anselm loves these little traps and foreshadowings in this book.
It is the collision of “restoration must be in perfect justice” and “satisfaction is impossible for us” that forces Anselm to the solution that may only be easy to see in hindsight and perhaps only comes to us as a mystery of revelation. I’ve already stated it in the wrap-up to volume one, but it deserves a full and proper announcement here too. The only one who can make satisfaction is someone who is one of us but also capable of giving something infinitely greater than all that is not God (the gist of I.21). If the answer cannot be found in a human who can never give enough nor in God who is not one of us then it must be found in someone who is both–the Deus-homo, the God-man, from the title of the work. This, one of the most famous short answers in the Catholic tradition, praised by Boso as a “great something,” is the only way to restore us in the original justice of our first creation.
Anselm expresses this conclusion as necesse est, but it is hard to be sure if this is rhetorical flourish or if he thinks he has successfully run a true natural theology of the necessity of the incarnation. There is no question that his goal is to establish the necessity of the Incarnation, going even further than St. Augustine did in de Trinitate 13. But does the argument as given actually establish this necessity? The untangling of the constraints–the necessary and the impossible, the ought and the cannot–is unexpressed in the text so that, here as elsewhere in his work, we are left to wonder if this is a meditative exercise for the reader or if there is a hand-waving slip in the argument that undermines the conclusion. The beginning of an answer is given in chapter five when Boso, echoing their previous discussion in I.6-10, presses Anselm on how “necessity” can ever be said of anything God does. The long answer Anselm gives there does not resolve our question, and so we’ll pass over it as interesting but ultimately unhelpful for the moment.
And with that, Anselm moves ahead to the next step: the investigation of how. No, not how Christ saves us. I told you, Anselm doesn’t care about that very much. The next question: how the Deus-homo can come to exist in the first place.
Teaching Boys Badly 