Christ’s death not commanded by God, yet willed by him–not necessary, but free

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 11.

For Anselm, then, Christ’s suffering and death were not commanded by God, but this does not mean that they were not willed by him. As has been said previously, because of his perfect obedience as a human being, there was nothing in Christ’s specifically human nature that required his sacrificial death for the human race, yet the latter was nevertheless something which Christ willed to undertake as an act that went “above and beyond,” as it were, his mere human obedience. And like all proper acts of will, Christ’s will to suffer and to die came from God. God gave Christ the will to suffer and to die, in other words, not in satisfaction of his created human nature per se (for his human nature needed no such will for its perfection or completion), but simply as an act of Christ’s free will unnecessitated or uncompelled by his or any other created nature. The resulting paradox is that only as a free, uncoerced choice, absent of all moral duty or divine command, could Christ’s suffering and death be (as Anselm shall explain more fully later) a sufficient or suitable repayment of humankind’s debt of sin, and so fulfill God’s own uncommanded wish that the human race should be saved.

Intending the Necessary

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 10.

If Anselm’s account of the merely hypothetical or conditional necessity of Christ’s death for his exaltation gets us a step closer to the much more comprehensive and unconditional necessity at the heart of the Christian account of salvation, it is only a step. For as Anselm’s further explanation of this conditional necessity reveals, an important and illuminating difference remains between it and the kind of necessity he will go on to identify with the Incarnation itself. Summarizing the general principle involved in Christ’s post-mortem exaltation, Anselm asks us to “Suppose that we intend to perform some action (intendimus facere aliquid) but that we decide to do beforehand another action by means of which the intended action will be done.” Under such a circumstance, Anselm avers, “the intended action (fit quod intendimus) is rightly said to be done because of the fact that the preceding action, on account of which the intended action was delayed, has occurred…” The situation, then, is one in which an agent, in a two-step process of deliberation, first decides to perform a particular action (in God’s case, the act of exalting Christ), and afterwards chooses a second, preceding action (for God, the death of Christ) by which, or at least after which, the originally intended action will be achieved. Anselm further illustrates the point with the example of a man who wants to cross a river, but who also decides that he will only cross it by boat, even though he could also cross it by horse. Thus, the man may truly be said to have crossed the river “because” a boat was made available, even though there were other means for crossing it at his disposal. What is important to note is that in none of these cases is it the originally intended action itself—the end—that necessitates or requires the means or occasion upon which the end is brought about, but merely the fact that the agent in question happened to decide that the end should be brought about by this means and no other. This is important because this is basically the situation Boso—mistakenly, it will turn out—believes to be the case with the Incarnation. As we have seen, the question raised by Boso, in effect, is why God, given his first-order intention of saving or forgiving the human race of their sin, did not choose a more economical or felicitous means for doing so, implying that, for Boso, the end of human salvation did not, in and of itself, require or necessitate the means of Christ’s Incarnation and death. Anselm’s initial response, as we saw, was to counter by saying that the Incarnation is not so much inefficient as it is costly, precious, and fitting. From this point forward, however, Anselm’s larger purpose in the Cur Deus Homo will effectively be to argue that the end of human salvation, properly understood, while temporally and conceptually distinct from the means of the Incarnation, is nevertheless so logically and metaphysically bound up with the Incarnation that there really is or was no other possible means for accomplishing it. It is as though the original intention of the man in Anselm’s above illustration was not merely the generic goal of crossing-the-river, only to be followed later by a subsequent intention to cross the river in a particular way, but from the very beginning comprehended the more determinate and complex action of crossing-the-river-by-boat, making the specific action of using a boat not incidental, or even a mere condition of, but in fact essential to the particular action or end in view. Anselm’s strategy in the remainder of the dialogue, accordingly, will be to show that, however differentiable and hence separable the Incarnation and human salvation may seem to the finite, human mind, careful attention to and exegesis of the inner logic and “hidden necessities” of the whole problem of human sin and condemnation reveal a different story: that the entire means-end structure of human salvation comprises on God’s part an inherently undivided, organically interconnected, complex and con-created divine intention in which the very meaning and possibility of the end is lies precisely in its means.

The Conditional Necessity of Christ’s Death for His Exaltation

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 9.

While Christ’s suffering and death may have been accidental to his obedience, they were not on that account accidental to his exaltation. Boso had previously cited the Apostle Paul’s statement in Philippians 2:8-9 about how Christ “humbled Himself and became obedient to the Father unto death, even unto death on the cross; for this reason God has also exalted Him” (ch. 8). In saying this, Anselm now explains, the apostle did not mean to imply that Christ could only have been exalted through his obedience unto death (for as Anselm had just argued, Christ’s obedience did not require his death), or, therefore, that his exaltation could only be awarded for his obedience unto death. As Anselm points out, even prior to his death there was already a kind of exaltation of and reward given to Christ, as when he says that all things had been given to Him by the Father (Luke 10:22) and that all the Father’s possessions were His (John 16:15). Just as Christ’s obedience without his death was possible, at least so far as his obedience alone was concerned, so also his exaltation without his death, so far as his exaltation alone was concerned, was also possible. Nevertheless, unlike Christ’s suffering and death, which remained entirely accidental and therefore extrinsic (albeit divinely ordained) to his human obedience, even while being necessary and intrinsic to human salvation, Anselm asserts that there was a hypothetical or conditional sense in which Christ’s death was necessary for his exaltation, namely insofar as God had freely determined that, of all the ways in which it was in fact possible for Christ to be exalted, his exaltation would principally be achieved through his death. As Anselm puts it, “the Son, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, had decreed (disposuerat) that He himself would manifest to the world, in no other way than by dying, the loftiness of His omnipotence.” It is in reference, finally, to this divine determination that Christ be exalted through his death, as opposed to all the other possible ways in which he might have been exalted instead, that Anselm says Christ’s death is “not unfittingly said to occur because of His death.” From the entirely accidental connection between Christ’s obedience and his death, to the merely hypothetical or conditional necessity of Christ’s death for his exaltation, Anselm has moved us a step closer to what he will show to be the much more comprehensive and unconditional necessity at the heart of the Christian account of salvation.

Christ’s obedience the per accidens cause and possibility of his death

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 8.

Even if we grant Anselm’s outsourcing of Christ’s labor and lowliness to his human nature, this comes with its own set of problems for Boso, principally how God could be just in commanding a good and innocent man to suffer and die. Much as he had previously denied that it was Christ’s divine nature that underwent his human suffering, Anselm now answers Boso by denying that Christ’s human suffering was in fact commanded or required by the Father, at least so far as Christ’s human obedience was concerned. As a human, what God required of Christ was nothing more than what he requires of every human being, namely their complete obedience and rectitude of will (ch. 9). As suffering and death are punishments for disobedience, because Christ himself was perfectly obedient, it follows that God did not and could not require suffering and death of him as a condition of his properly human obedience. Thus, while the ultimate argument of the Cur Deus Homo is that Christ’s suffering and death were necessary to accomplish humanity’s salvation, Anselm’s point here is that his suffering and death were nevertheless not necessary for, but were in fact the mere accidental consequence—even if divinely foreseen or ordained—of his obedience. His obedience, in other words, happened to lead, under the particular circumstances in which it was lived out, to his suffering and death, but these were not on that account at all logically required or necessitated by his obedience. (To use the distinction introduced by Aristotle and revived by later scholastics, Christ’s obedience, and prior to it, God’s command of that obedience, were only the per accidens rather than the per se causes of his suffering and death. Whereas a per se cause is one that has the production of a given effect as its proper intention, operation, or activity, a per accidens cause is one that does not normally, naturally, or necessarily produce a given effect, but just happens to do so in the course of producing those effects that are normally and per se attached to it.) Thus, as Anselm puts it, “God did not compel Christ to die, for in Christ there was no sin. Instead, Christ willingly underwent death—not by obeying a command to give up His life but by obeying the command to keep justice. For He persevered so steadfastly in justice that He incurred death as a result.” So far as his mere human obedience was concerned, therefore, Christ’s not dying was in fact possible, but so far as God’s purpose (and Christ’s purpose as the God-man) to save mankind was concerned, only here did Christ’s death become necessary. Not the Father’s prior command, accordingly, nor even the Son’s obedience in the abstract, but the Son’s actual obedience in a fallen world in which his perfect justice could and would lead to the jealousy, hatred, and reprisals of sinful men—this was the unique circumstance and possibility of the latter’s suffering and death.

Impassibility, or ‘Suprapassibility’? Christ’s Divine Nature as the Possibility of His Human Nature

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 7.

After an interlude in which Boso mounts an effective criticism of the Ransom Theory of Atonement (ch. 6-7), when Anselm presses him to state what it is precisely that people find in the doctrine of the Incarnation to be contrary to reason, Boso reiterates the earlier aesthetic objection with now an additional, economic twist: “that the Most High descends to such lowly things, that the Almighty does something so laboriously” (ch. 8). This time, surprisingly, instead of countering with an argument for the fittingness of God doing such things, Anselm responds by conceding the objection, all the while denying that it was the divine nature rather than the human nature of Christ that endured such labor and lowliness. According to Anselm, “For without doubt we maintain that the divine nature is impassible—that it cannot at all be brought down from its exaltation and cannot labor in what it wills to do… Therefore, when we state that God undergoes some lowliness or weakness, we understand this to be in accordance with the weakness of the human substance which He assumed, not in accordance with the sublimity of His impassible nature.” Anselm reprises here his position on divine impassibility from Proslogion 8, where he had argued that, because God has no passions and hence can have no “heart sorrowful out of compassion for the wretched—the very thing which being merciful is,” it follows that while God may be merciful “from our point of view” and in our experience of his “effects,” he is not merciful in himself or in his own “experience.” Yet Anselm’s argument may be set in contrast with his own discussion of divine sense perception only two chapters earlier in the Proslogion. Although God does not have a body, Anselm reasons, because sense perception is ordered towards knowledge, and “whatever in some ways knows is not unsuitably (non inconvenienter) said in some way to perceive,” and because God knows all things, God may be said not to lack sense perception so much as to be “supremely able to perceive” (Pros. 6). If so, then by the same reasoning we might conclude, contrary to Anselm, that insofar as creaturely passions such as mercy and vicarious suffering are ordered towards love, and God is love, neither should it “unsuitably be said” that God is merciful or that, in the Incarnation, there is a sense in which even the divine nature itself “undergoes some lowliness or weakness.” If it involved a created perfection, after all, for Christ’s human nature to experience these things, and if all created perfections preexist in the divine being (as Anselm argues, for example, in Monologion 9), then at some level we must affirm that all the goodness and sacrifice involved in the course of Christ’s human experience preexisted—albeit in an eminent and impassible, or as we prefer to say, superpassible fashion—there as well. On Anselm’s own theological metaphysics, in sum, it is what the divine nature of Christ is that is the foundation of every creaturely possibility, including the possibilities of Christ’s human nature.

Is Aesthetic Fittingness at Odds with Rational Necessity?

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 6.

To Anselm’s list of the ways in which the Incarnation is fitting, Boso responds by invoking once again Anselm’s theology-as-art metaphor, stating that Anselm’s account amounts only to so many “beautiful pictures, as it were” (pulchra et quasi quaedam picturae suscipienda sunt), but that without “a solid foundation upon which they rest, they do not seem to unbelievers to suffice for showing why we ought to believe that God was willing to suffer these things of which we are speaking” (ch. 4). Instead, Boso insists that “first of all we must exhibit the truth’s firm rational foundation, i.e., the cogent reasoning which proves that God should or could have humbled Himself to undergo those things which we proclaim,” and only this has been done should such “considerations of fittingness … be set forth as pictures of this body-of-truth.” According to Boso, showing the aesthetic fittingness of a belief is one thing whereas demonstrating its rational necessity is something else entirely, a view that some scholars have interpreted Anselm to share in and therefore as determining the structure of the subsequent argument of the dialogue.[1] As we have already seen, however, the aesthetic perspective of the Cur Deus Homo is one that Anselm commits himself to before the fictional framework of the dialogue even begins, and as I further argued, the whole criterion of aesthetic fittingness is one that is indissociably bound up with his view that such theological investigations can at best approximate an otherwise unfathomable truth and therefore only ever attain an at most provisional kind of necessity or certainty. Corroborating this interpretation, moreover, is that in his reply to Boso, Anselm says nothing that would concede to Boso the validity of his distinction between mere theological word-pictures on the one hand and putatively more “rational” considerations on the other. Instead, he merely reasserts his principle that fittingness comes with it its own form of necessity: “Do not the following considerations,” Anselm rejoins, “seem to constitute a very cogent argument for why God ought to have done those things about which we are speaking?: viz., that the human race—His very precious work—had utterly perished; and it was not fitting that God plan for man should be completely thwarted; and this plan of Gods’ could not be carried out unless the human race was set free by its very Creator.” In the following chapter, finally, it is not Anselm who yields to Boso’s distinction between necessity and fittingness, but in his plaintive question as to whether there was not a “much more tolerable” (multo tolerabilius) way in which this liberation might have been accomplished, it is Boso who yields to Anselm’s identify of necessity with fittingness (ch. 5).

[1] Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams express this view in their critique of Brian Leftow’s interpretation of the argument of the Cur Deus Homo along aesthetic lines when they argue that, for Anselm, “appeals to what is fitting are superfluous from a strictly philosophical point of view; Anselm does not use them to establish the truth of the Christian account of redemption, but to show the attractiveness of that truth once it has been established. Indeed, Boso insists from early on in Cur Deus Homo that Anselm not appeal to considerations of fittingness as though they could serve as independent philosophical considerations in favor of the Christian account of redemption. Anselm tries to use such considerations in response to Boso’s initial statemnt of unbelievers’ objections to the Christian account, but Boso immediately rejects them as unpersuasive… In deference to Boso’s complains, Anselm does not raise the ‘poetic parallels’ that Leftow cites from Cur Deus Homo until after he has established that it is necessary for God to become incarnate and lay down his life as recompense for human sin.” Visser and Williams, Anselm, 219. Counter to Visser and Williams’s latter claim, however, and in addition to the argument I make presently, Anselm continues to appeal to considerations of fittingness throughout the remainder of book one of the Cur Deus Homo.

Cur Deus Homo: A Tale of Two Aesthetics

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 5

Anselm’s stress on the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of the doctrines of the Incarnation and Atonement is fitting for a further reason, which is that, as Boso goes on to indicate, much of the case against these doctrines turns on a similarly aesthetic objection to them. In Boso’s words, “The unbelievers who scoff at our simplicity raise against us the following objection: that we dishonor and affront God when we maintain that He descended in to the womb of a woman, that He was born of a woman, that He grew, being nourished by milk and food for human beings, and—not to mention many other things which seem to be unsuitable for God (multa alia taceam quae deo non uidentur conuenire)—that He experienced weariness, hunger, thirst, scourging, and (in the midst of thieves) crucifixion and death” (ch. 3). Anselm’s response to Boso’s aesthetic objection to the Incarnation, however, is to posit an even more insistent counter-aesthetic, as he ticks off a litany of ways in which the salvation accomplished through the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ perfectly corresponds to the story of humankind’s original rebellion and fall. As Anselm protests, “We do not at all dishonor or affront God,” but instead praise him for his manifest mercy, goodness, love, and grace in saving us in a manner so “appropriate” (convenienter) and “proper” (oportebat), and concludes that what we have here is “manifest a certain inexpressible beauty (inenarrabilem pulchritudinem) in our redemption’s having been accomplished in this manner.” Fundamentally at issue in the Cur Deus Homo, in other words, is two conflicting and irreconcilable theological aesthetics or visions of what is and what is not fitting for God to do.

Bad Theologians as Bad Artists

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 4

In his argument for the necessity of the Incarnation in the Cur Deus Homo, Anselm describes the subject matter of the present inquiry as “Him who is beautiful in appearance above the sons of men” and so “adorned” with a divine “rationale which exceeds human understanding.” For this reason, he confesses to feeling a certain burden that the form of his own argument should appropriately approximate the beauty of God’s own reasoning manifested in his accomplishing so marvelous a salvation. Anselm’s “fear,” he says, is “that just as I am accustomed to become indignant with untalented artists when I see the Lord Himself portrayed with an uncomely countenance, so it may happen to me that I provoke indignation if I presume to explore such an elegant topic by an inelegant and contemptible discourse.” The incompetent theologian, in other words, is like an inept artist, depicting what is beautiful beyond compare as something ugly and base. Anselm’s interlocutor, Boso, building on Anselm’s metaphor, seeks to allay his concerns by noting that the latter has already given license to those who can “to say these things better,” and reminds him that neither has he forbidden anyone who “does not like your discourse from writing more beautifully” himself. It is at this point that Anselm makes his caveat, stated earlier, that although his purpose is to prove the Incarnation “rationally, it should be accepted as certain only in the sense that it appears to me for the time being to be thus, until God somehow reveals the matter to me more fully” (ch. 2). As the artist-theologian, in sum, Anselm’s task is to represent the beauty and intelligibility of the faith as best he can, all the while continuing to wait in humility and hope for an even greater—both logically and aesthetically—representation of the “deeper rationale” (altiores rationes) yet to be unveiled. For Anselm, the reason the “rational” necessity of the Incarnation is only ever at most an aesthetic or “fitting” necessity is that, given the finitude of human reason, it is for the present always at most a “provisional” or “possible” necessity.

Cur Deus Homo: Anselm’s Theological Sub-Creation

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 3

Connected with Anselm’s increased attention to the aesthetics of reason of the Cur Deus Homo is his choice of the dialogue form to convey the “fitting necessity” or “necessary fittingness” of the Incarnation. In the Monologion Anselm had represented his method of proceeding by “reason alone” (sola ratione) as sufficient to persuade even an unbeliever who was either ignorant or skeptical of what Christians believe about God (ch. 1). Yet in his prologue he had also indicated that the “unbeliever” from whose vantage point this meditation was conducted was in fact none other than his own self as he donned “the role (sub persona) of one who by reflection alone investigates, and disputes with himself about, points which he had previously not considered.” As Eileen Sweeney has aptly summarized the purpose behind Anselm’s pious dissimulation, in the Monologion we have an author who “crafts a persona in whose voice he writes… a voice not exactly the same as his own…. [but] of a somewhat naïve beginner as Anselm tries, by taking an unexpected perspective, to invigorate and enliven the meditation, making fresh insight possible.”[1] Not unlike the substitutionary model of the atonement Anselm will defend in the Cur Deus Homo, accordingly, in the Monologion it is as though Anselm presents us with an almost vicarious form of unbelief, one in which reason, conducted under the silent yet watchful tutelage of Anselm’s own faith, is defamiliarized so that it might be recovered again in its proper theological role as faith’s possibility. That having been said, in the Cur Deus Homo we find an Anselm even more conscious of, or at least more candid about, the artistry or sub-creation involved in his own theological reasoning. In contrast with the Monologion’s direct meditation on God, for example, in the Cur Deus Homo Anselm opts for the mediation of a “question-and-answer” (per interrogationem et responsio) dialogue which he condones for its being “clearer, and hence more acceptable, to many minds—especially to minds that are slower.” Aside from its pedagogical effectiveness, however, is the way in which the dialogue form allows Anselm to re-enact the kind of give-and-take of many of the real-life conversations upon which the fictional exchange in the Cur Deus Homo was no doubt based. Thus, after the commencement of the dialogue proper, when Anselm represents himself as fearful that the present undertaking will prove beyond his abilities, his interlocutor Boso encourages him by saying that “You ought not so much to have this fear as you ought to remember that in a discussion of some problem it often happens that God discloses what a first was hidden.” For Anselm, theological discourse—whether in the form of informal conversation with one’s friends or pupils, or in the later reconstructions of a carefully composed treatise or dialogue—involves far more than the communication of ideas or arguments one already holds to be true, but as a veritable art form can itself be the means for genuine theological disclosure and discovery. In keeping with this is Anselm’s concession to Boso in the following chapter that, “to the best of my ability, and assisted by God and by means of your prayers, I will attempt not so much to exhibit the solution you are seeking as to seek it with you” (ch. 2).

[1] Sweeney, Anselm of Canterbury, 116, 118. For a related discussion, see also Adams, “Anselm on Faith and Reason,” 51.

From Necessity to Fittingness: Anselm Goes Aesthetic

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 2

Another similarity to the Monologion is Anselm’s explanation in the opening chapter of the Cur Deus Homo that the impetus behind the present investigation was the request made by others that he should provide the “rational bases (rationes) of a particular problem of our faith,” viz., the problem of the necessity of the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ. Yet a subtle but important difference between the method of the Monologion and the approach he will take in the Cur Deus Homo quickly emerges. In the Monologion, the criterion for demonstrating what Christian’s believe about God was simply what “rational necessity (rationis necessitas) would tersely prove to be the case, and truth’s clarity (veritatis claritas) would openly manifest to be the case.” At the same time, Anselm had also conceded that, even if his conclusions followed as “a necessary consequence of reasons which will seem good to me, it is not thereby said to be absolutely necessary, but is said only to be able to appear necessary for the time being” (Monol. 1). Anselm reiterates precisely this point, moreover, in the Cur Deus Homo when he says that, “even though I seem to prove [the Incarnation] rationally, it should be accepted as certain only in the sense that it appears to me for the time being to be thus, until God somehow reveals the matter to me more fully.” New to the Cur Deus Homo, however, is the unprecedented way Anselm now casts this whole notion of a provisional, “possible” necessity in more overtly aesthetic terms. He mentions, for example, how his acquaintances, more than merely finding his arguments logically compelling, also “say that these rational considerations please (placere) them; and they regard them as satisfactory (satisfacere),” and that they “make their request not in order to approach faith by way of reason but in order to delight (delectentur) in the comprehension and contemplation of the doctrines which they believe” (ch. 1). As for the present topic concerning the necessity of the Incarnation and Atonement, Anselm deems that the solution, while difficult, is nevertheless one that is “intelligible to everyone and is commendable (amabilis) because of the utility and elegance of the reasoning (rationis pulchritudinem).” For Anselm, as it will turn out, inasmuch as God is the inventive creator of his own possibilities—and therefore also of his own necessities—so proving the truths about God will inevitably involve considerations of beauty and aesthetic “fittingness” (convenientia) as much as those of pure logic or rational necessity.

The Possibility of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo

Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, part 1

In his Cur Deus Homo, Anselm sets forth his argument for the necessity of Christian view of redemption. Yet the first question Anselm feels the need to answer concerns how it is even possible, after a full millennium of Christian reflection on this topic, to say anything that has not already been said before. To this end, in his prefatory “Commendation of This Work to Pope Urban II,” Anselm rehearses many of the methodological notes with which he began the Monologion and the Proslogion. While the present work, on the one hand, aims “to confound the foolishness of unbelievers and to break through their hardheartedness,” on the other hand he recognizes that this kind of undertaking is only really possible for those “who, having hearts already cleansed by faith, delight in the rational basis of our faith—a rational basis for which we ought to hunger once we have the certainty of faith.” But what is not possible, Anselm is eager to make clear, is that either now or in the future anyone should ever surpass those things already laid down by the holy Fathers. That having been said, it is equally clear, Anselm takes it for granted, that neither was it possible for these same Fathers to say everything that could have been said on any given subject, which is what makes it possible for us in the present to build upon their insights and extend their arguments into areas left unexamined or undeveloped by them. More than this, the nature of the truth itself is “so extensive and so deep” that no amount of expertise, time, or consideration could ever succeed in plumbing such depths anyway. Finally, it is the Lord himself who, through his gifts and his promise to be with his Church, and through his command in Scripture itself, has given both the ability and the divine sanction for our searching out by reason those things once and for all delivered to the saints.