On Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, Book I
Text of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?
Anselm endowed his apologia[1]
for the doctrine of the incarnation with a playful, tongue-in-cheek character. In a manner reminiscent of Paul’s
sophisticated rant against sophistry in 2 Cor. 11-12, Anselm offers a very
reasonable defence of the necessity of God becoming man and dying in order to
restore life to the world, all the while poking fun at those who would attempt
to base their faith on reason.[2] Anselm’s approach to theology is fides quaerens
intellectum (cf. chapters I-II). For
Anselm, faith is not the conclusion of a syllogism[3],
but rather a gift of God[4],
the understanding of which is to be pursued by the believer’s use of reason;
faith, however, remains a gift which, although not altogether opaque to reason,
nevertheless remains beyond the tethers of human rationality.
To achieve
his rhetorical ends, Anselm writes his defence in a form approximating a
Socratic dialogue, which, he insists, is conducive to “less quick minds”. And so, Anselm takes as his interlocutor one
“Boso” (=a “bozo”?).[5] At the end of chapter II, Boso points out
that he is not to be counted among “the learned”, but rather among those who
are ridiculed for their simplicity.[6] For his part, “Anselm”, the theological
“expert” of this dialogue, demurs to respond to Boso’s eager inquiries into the
mysteries of the faith, but finally relents, while offering the caveat that he
is unworthy of the task and will most probably fail to do justice to “the
question”[7]
(of the necessity, for mankind’s salvation, of the incarnation).[8] This dialogue seems to be set up to facilitate
two rhetorical stratagems. Firstly, the
arguments are presented in such a way that even a “Boso” can grasp them and
perceive their reasonableness[9],
and secondly, the baked-in humorous dimension of the dialogue serves to
undermine the arrogance of those who would purport to understand God “simply”
through reason, and thus reject the “unreasonable” revelation of Christianity.[10]
There is
somewhat of an Ariadne’s thread running through the “Book First” of Anselm’s
work in that he often responds to the objections of “infidels” that
this-or-that element of the faith is “unpalatable”. Chapter III opens with Boso setting forth the
objection that Christians dishonor God by positing that he became incarnate and
experienced those “marks of humanity” exhibited in the life of Christ. The tension, obvious in Anselm’s apologia,
between the Deity as portrayed in classical philosophy and the depiction of God
found in the Hebrew Scriptures was something that the earliest (Gentile)
Christian thinkers[11]
had to contend with. Anselm responds
with a triple-typological argument from Scripture – he draws a parallel between
Adam and Christ (cf. Rom. 5), Eve and Mary, and the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, on the one hand, and the “tree” of the cross, on the other. Anselm marvels at the “indescribable beauty”
of the biblical foreshadowing of the events of redemption as narrated in the Gospels.
Beginning in chapter IV, Anselm argues
that mankind plays an essential and irreplaceable role in the cosmic designs of
God,[12]
and that the need to ensure the success of that divine plan necessitated the
incarnation/death of Christ. The next
“objectionable” aspect of the faith that Anselm seeks to elucidate is the
perception that God the Father compelled Jesus to die for the sins of the
world. Beginning in chapter VIII, Anselm
(finally) draws the distinction between the impassible divine nature (of
God/Christ), on the one hand, and the suffering humanity of Jesus, on the
other. In stating things this way,
Anselm is demonstrating the constraints of a classical philosophical
understanding of God, an understanding that is foreign to the Bible. This becomes apparent as Anselm wrestles with
how to reconcile the will of Jesus and the will of the Father, as exemplified
in the Gethsemane narrative. The
argumentation gets a bit tangled as Anselm tries to demonstrate both that Jesus
went to the cross in obedience to the Father’s will, all the while doing so
freely and motivated by his own (human?) desire to save humanity and was
therefore not compelled in any way to suffer and give up his life. Not surprisingly, Anselm draws his scriptural
proofs at this point from the Gospel of John, where Jesus demonstrates his
utter self-mastery and controls the situation to the point that he is obliged
to “help” the temple guards arrest him (cf. Jn. 18.1-12).[13] However, while Anselm, constrained as he is
by his scholastic theology, must maintain a distinction – even in Gethsemane –
between the human will of Jesus and that of the Father, some contemporary
theologians read the Gospel passion narratives – the cry of dereliction
notwithstanding – as demonstrating the absolute unity of Jesus and
Yahweh.[14]
Anselm is quite adept at employing
analogies to illustrate his arguments.
In chapter XI,[15]
he introduces the notion of sin as that which gives offence to God’s honour,
drawing a parallel between God and a medieval Lord, against whose honour crimes
could be committed by his subjects. In
light of this definition of sin, the argument for the incarnation runs as
follows – we have all offended God’s honour, and therefore we must be punished
in order for God’s honour to be “satisfied”; however, we are unable to make
restitution for our offence; only someone who can perfectly render to God his
due – i.e. God himself – can satisfy the debt incurred against the divine
honour. Ergo, the incarnation,
through which the divine nature satisfies itself through the willing
self-offering of the man Jesus. Jesus’
death satisfies the divine honour and defeats the devil, to whom mankind had
willingly surrendered by its initial failure to offer obedience to God. Thus saved by the death of Christ, mankind is
restored and can fulfill its God-given destiny (cf. chapters XIX—XXV).
Despite his raucous rhetoric, perhaps, at
the end of the day, the joke is on Anselm.
While attempting to demonstrate (philosophically) the reasonableness of
the doctrine of the incarnation, has Anselm acquiesced to the skeptics’ agenda?[16] Or has his “proof” of the incarnation simply
revealed the foolishness inherent in any attempt to explain the mysteries of
salvation (history) in the idiom of philosophy?
Tertullian (in)famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”[17] Perhaps what all Christian apologists from
the third to the eleventh century (and beyond) were facing are simply the
challenges common to all practitioners of contextual theology? How to make the faith intelligible to your
audience without sacrificing the inherent strangeness of the message? Put another way, how do you radically alter
someone’s worldview (with the gospel) while using the very language that
articulates that worldview? As must by
now be clear, I find the form of Anselm’s argumentation to be more intriguing
than the content of his argument. Cur
Deus Homo is one instance of that which all theology may be – i.e. an
attempt to articulate in the idioms of human language/logic the content of
divine revelation.[18] Anselm invites us to ponder where the limits
of correlational theology may lie…
[1] He quotes
1 Peter 3.15 in Book First, chapter I.
[2] Cf. 1 Cor.
1.18-31. Indeed, it seems that Anselm’s
rhetoric amounts to a hearty Amen! to Paul’s insistence that “the foolishness
of God (!) is wiser than men’s wisdom” and that “the preaching of the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is
the wisdom and power of God”.
[3] Nor indeed
can it be the result of having been convinced by Anselm’s arguments!
[4] I.e. the
incarnation of the Word of God, as well as the apostolic/scriptural witness to
it.
[5] Cf.
Galileo’s “Simplicio” in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
(1632). Boso’s remarks begin to get
downright farcical in chapter XII, as he praises Anselm’s lucidity and his
logic which is beyond contradiction.
[6] Cf. Chapter III.
[7] À la Socrates.
[8] Cf. the
Nicene Creed: “…for us men, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven
and…was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man…”
[9] There is a
possible cynical undertone here – perhaps only a “Boso” would ask for rational
proof of the incarnation in the first place…
[10] I.e.
doctrinal “proofs” are ultimately comic in light of the grandeur of the
mysteries they attempt to elucidate. Cf.
C.S. Lewis’ remarks about how a doctrine never seemed less convincing to him
then the moment after he had successfully defended it. Also, in Mere Christianity, as he
exposits Anselm’s view of the Atonement in terms of Jesus being the “perfect
penitent”, Lewis insists that if the reader doesn’t find this particular theory
helpful, they should simply “drop it” and find one that is. Lewis was keen to stress that the events of
the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection were imbued with inherent
meaning, a meaning that existed independently of believers’ attempts to
understand and explain their significance.
(cf. also how Lewis, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
narrated the argument from chapter VII (in the mouth of Boso) according to
which if the devil should kill an innocent being who was God, the devil would
lose his power over sinners, i.e. akin to the ransom theory of atonement). At the end of the day, Anselm seems to say,
“If you need ‘proof’ of the necessity of the incarnation, here it is. But, he would quickly add, we don’t believe
in the incarnation because we’ve ‘proved’ it.
We believe it because it is part of our faith (which cannot be
irrational due to God’s nature; cf. chapter VIII). We ‘prove’ the incarnation in order to better
understand it rationally, but our understanding adds nothing to the truth or
efficacy of God’s action in Christ.”
[11]
Interestingly, though he was well versed in Greek thought, Paul seems never to
have attempted a synthesis of Classical notions of (the ultimate) God and the
biblical portrayal of Yahweh (cf. 1 Cor. 1.18-21; Pascal’s desire for “the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; not the God of the philosophers”). The recent “narrative turn” in theology has
many exegetes/theologians returning to the Bible as they formulate their
thought, as opposed to the standard philosophical categories which have been
the hallmark of Christian theology since (perhaps as early as) the time of
Origen. Of course, a common strategy
deployed by both Jews and Christians engaged in “public” biblical
interpretation in the Greco-Roman world was that of allegorizing the
anthropomorphic language of the Bible (or anything “unpleasant” in the text;
e.g. Philo, Origen, Augustine, etc.).
[12] His
“digression”, in chapters XVI-XVIII, according to which a certain number of
humans must be saved in order to replenish the ranks of the angelic host
following Satan’s rebellion (cf. a certain interpretation of Rev. 12 and other
texts; cf. Milton’s Paradise Lost), takes away somewhat from the early
emphasis in the apology on the love/compassion of God that is said to be showered
on humanity.
[13]
Interestingly, though it is common for exegetes to affirm that John portrays a
Jesus who is more “divine” compared to the synoptics, Anselm, while drawing on
John, tries to make the case that in Gethsemane, Jesus is demonstrating his human
will to give his life for the salvation of the world (cf. Jn. 10.17-18).
[14] E.g. Rowan Williams, Meeting God in Mark (2015); cf. N.T.
Wright, while discussing the Gethsemane narrative during an address which can
be found on YouTube, wished theologians “Good luck!” when approaching these
texts with the typical categories of dogmatic theology. In his 1996 work on the historical Jesus, Jesus
and the Victory of God, Wright calls for a new metaphysics for theology (it
is a commonplace in his works on Paul that Protestant dogmatics have ever been
on somewhat of a fool’s errand precisely because they interpret the apostle’s
thought through the lens of the loci of medieval theology).
[15] The
argument runs to chapter XV.
[16] As noted
previously, this may be the heart of Anselm’s rhetorical ploy; one would have
to examine the rest of Cur Deus Homo to formulate an informed
opinion. Does “the father of
scholasticism” take his own methodology seriously? Alas, I now find myself in deep waters,
wanting a navigational chart…
[17] Ironically
perhaps, he introduced the Latin term trinitas into western theological
discourse.
[18] Itself
disclosed in human language. Each of the
NT authors provides an answer to Anselm’s question, though each one of their answers
involves “Israel”. Cf. Tertullian…
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