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The Upholding of Beauty: A Reading of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Stephen R. Holmes
Stephen R. Holmes
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religious StudiesKing's College LondonStrand London WC2R 2LS
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Extract

St Anselm of Canterbury is famous on two counts: he is the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and he is the source of the satisfaction theory of the atonement. These positions do not exhaust his theological contribution; he also wrote works defending and defining Western Trinitarian doctrine, against Sabellianism and tritheism, and arguing for the filioque; he wrote on the Incarnation; and was influential in modifying Augustine's account of the transmission of original sin. There is also a collection of meditations and prayers, traditionally attributed to St Anselm, which at their best rank alongside almost any devotional literature of the medieval period. His memory, however, is firmly attached today to just the two points with which I began. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that on both he has been fundamentally misunderstood by the popular accounts of his thought given in theological and philosophical introductions and histories; these misreadings have been pointed out often enough, but are still regularly repeated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , May 2001 , pp. 189 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2001

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References

2 For a reasonably up-to-date list of critical editions and translations of Anselm's writings see Evans, G. R.Anselm (Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series) (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989) p. xi.Google Scholar

3 McIntyre, John, St Anselm and His Critics: A Re-Interpretation of the Cur Deus Homo (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1954), pp. 15–38.Google Scholar

4 Hart, D. B., ‘A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’ Pro Ecdesia Vll/3 (1998), pp. 333–349Google Scholar. On Lossky see particularly p. 340.

5 Mclntyre, pp. 47–8.

6 So Mclntyre, ibid.; see Monologium VII.

7 References to Anselm's works will be by chapter division; English quotations will be taken from St Anselm: Basic Writings (trans. Deane, S. N.) (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1962 2)Google Scholar; Latin from the corrected Nutt edition of the Cur Deus Homo of 1895.

8 I owe this point to Gunton, Colin, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study in Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 89.Google Scholar

9 See Root, Michael, ‘Necessity and Unfittingness in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’, Scottish Journal of Theology 40 (1987), pp. 211–230, and particularly p. 215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 The two initial arguments of 1.19, for instance, one made by Anselm and one by Boso, seem to contradict this assertion.

11 ‘… quoniam recte ordinare peccatum sine salisfactione non est nisi punire’ (1.12).

12 For instance, Hart, art. cit., p. 340.

13 Anselm expresses this in semi-feudal terms which are perhaps misleading today, as he talks about the Father rewarding the Son, but the Son already calling all that the Father has his own, and so offering his deserved reward as satisfaction for the sins of many. The sense of the re-ordering of the beauty of the world is clear, however, in all that Anselm says.