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Anselmian apocatastasis: the fitting necessity of universal salvation in St Anselm's Cur Deus Homo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
Abstract
This article makes a case for universal salvation based on the soteriology of Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo. It argues that without an affirmation of universal salvation, Anselm's argument fails on the grounds of its own soteriological logic, which unites the fitting and the necessary for God, assumes the primary importance of divine aseity for understanding salvation history, and affirms the ontological unity of the human race as the object of God's redemptive love. Also detailed is the development of the relationship between mercy and justice in Anselm's thought from the Proslogion to Cur Deus Homo, and it is shown how Anselm's developed soteriology in the latter challenges major features of the Augustinianism he inherited. The article concludes that a robust theology of divine aseity like Anselm's will entail that creation be understood as a theatre for the manifestation of God's eternal love for his creatures.
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1 All English quotations are from Janet Fairweather's translation in Anselm: The Major Works (Oxford: OUP, 2008), though I have altered the translation where necessary. For two recent and good surveys of CDH and the scholarship it has provoked in the last century or so, see Pugh, Ben, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed: Anselm’, in Atonement Theories: A Way through the Maze (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2014), pp. 45–62Google Scholar (accessed http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1cgf45k.8); and Loewe, William P., ‘Anselm and the Turn to Theory: Why This Story as the Story of Salvation’, in Lex Crucis: Soteriology and the Stages of Meaning (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), pp. 71–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See the discussion in Southern, R. W., Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (New York: CUP, 1990), pp. 100–2Google Scholar; and Katherin A. Rogers’ comments in n. 20 below.
3 Holmes, Stephen R., ‘The Upholding of Beauty: A Reading of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’, Scottish Journal of Theology 54/2 (2011), p. 202Google Scholar.
4 Brown, Frank Burch, ‘The Beauty of Hell: Anselm on God's Eternal Design’, Journal of Religion 73/3 (1993), pp. 329–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here I build on Brown's work, but I also argue from portions and aspects of CDH which are not prominent in his text.
5 On the question of fides et ratio in CDH, let us not forget Anselm's opening proviso to Boso: ‘if I say something which is not confirmed by a source of greater authority – even if I seem to be proving it by means of logic (ratione) – it is to be accepted with only this degree of certainty: that it seems to be so provisionally (interim mihi ita videtur), until God shall in some way reveal to me something better’ (CDH 1.2). Though the conclusions Anselm draws in the course of his argument should be held in a provisional way (a formal concern), these conclusions are still the rationem and intellectum (material content) both believers and unbelievers seek from the Christian faith concerning the incarnation, whether from the perspective of faith or not. It is worth noting, however, that by the time he wrote De concordia, his final major work, Anselm's claims for the relationship between faith and reason were a bit bolder: ‘For if at times we assert by a process of reasoning a conclusion which we cannot explicitly cite from the sayings of Scripture or demonstrate from the bare wording, still it is by using Scripture that we know in the following way whether the affirmation should be accepted or rejected. If the conclusion is reached by straightforward reasoning and Scripture in no way contradicts it, then (since just as Scripture opposes no truth so too it abets no falsehood) by the very fact that it does not deny what is inferred on the basis of reason, that conclusion is accepted as authoritative’ (3.6). Cf. Hopkins, Jasper, A Companion to the Study of St Anselm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 47Google Scholar. I follow Stephen Holmes (‘Upholding of Beauty', p. 194) here in reading ratio in CDH as indicative of the logical coherence of the gospel story.
6 van Vreeswijk, Bernard J. D., ‘Interpreting Anselm's Thought about Divine Justice: Dealing with Loose Ends’, Scottish Journal of Theology 69/4 (2016), pp. 417–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 This is why, although rational nature is the most precious reality in the created universe (CDH 2.4), fallen instantiations of angelic rational nature remain incapable of salvation.
8 Root, Michael, ‘Necessity and Fittingness in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’, Scottish Journal of Theology 40/2 (1987), p. 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Discussions of ‘honour’ in Anselm have historically been bedevilled by questions of how much Anselm depends on medieval feudal conceptions of honour for his theory of the atonement. Much contemporary scholarship has questioned the weight of feudal imagery in the treatise, and I follow those scholars (e.g. John McIntyre, David Brown) who consider Anselm's argument conceptually extricable from whatever feudal context may be informing it. For a thorough recent treatment calling into serious question the applicability of ‘feudalism’ in CDH, see Whidden III, David L., ‘The Alleged Feudalism of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and the Benedictine Concepts of Obedience, Honor, and Order’, Nova et Vetera, English edn, 9/4 (2011), pp. 1055–87Google Scholar.
10 Today's readers may find such an interpretation far from self-evident and perhaps even arbitrary: why would it not be more fitting for God simply to absolve all in mercy instead of punishing at all? That such an objection could be raised tells us something both about the biblical and contemporary assumptions Anselm is importing into his argument here (Holmes, ‘Upholding of Beauty’, p. 191), and about the relative foundations of arguments from fittingness in the first place (e.g. the fact that the philosophical schools of antiquity could use the concept of divine fittingness in order to argue against each others’ theologies). Since I am broadly assuming an Anselmian soteriology for this argument, I will not (and lack the space to) offer a proper defence of the legitimacy of arguments from divine unfittingness. Still, it may be noted that our perceptions of divine fittingness in no way judge or determine who God is, since these perceptions themselves, when they are correct, derive from God in the first place, both in the inchoate, analogous moral-aesthetic sense we possess by virtue of creation and in that same sense's decisive – albeit still analogical – healing, clarification and illumination in the revelation of Christ. It is only from that revelation that we can incontestably ground Anselm's foundational claim that it would be unfitting for God to let human nature perish, for we definitively know that he desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:4).
11 Root, ‘Necessity and Fittingness’, pp. 218, 222. Hence the importance for Anselm of thinking through the fittingness of the incarnation, for here we discern the nature of the relationship between the Creator and his creation most vividly. ‘Reason is for Anselm the spirit's capacity for sight in a quite original way. To think means to make something visible spiritually.’ von Balthasar, Hans Urs, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh and Brian McNeil CRV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), p. 220Google Scholar.
12 Southern, Richard, Saint Anselm and his Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought ca. 1059-c.1130 (Cambridge: CUP, 1963), p. 100Google Scholar. Southern maintains in his discussion this tension between the broadness of redemption in the logic of CDH alongside Anselm's certainty that very few would be saved (see pp. 100–2).
13 Rogers, Katherin A., The Neoplatonic Metaphysics and Epistemology of Anselm of Canterbury (Lewiston, PA: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), esp. pp. 31–7Google Scholar. This is especially the case if (as Rogers discusses on pp. 32, 55–9 and passim), in speaking Himself in the divine Word, God has also spoken every finite word within that one Word – not only the finite words of general essences, but of particulars too (e.g. Monologion 30, 35).
14 Rogers, Katherin A., ‘Christ our Brother: Family Unity in Anselm's Theory of the Atonement’, Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86/2 (Spring 2012), pp. 233–6Google Scholar; see also p. 231, where Rogers discusses the importance of Adam's procreative nature.
15 Southern, Portrait, pp. 214–15.
16 Root, ‘Necessity and Fittingness’, p. 215. Root thinks that if we grant that this move plays a role in CDH, the argument of the text falls apart at major points, such as in CDH 1.4, where Boso rejects fitting ‘pictures’ as necessary rationales for the incarnation. But this misses the fact that Boso changes his mind concerning the necessity of such pictures in the course of the argument once he has found the ratio undergirding them (CDH 2.6–8). This point was already noted by Gray, Christopher, ‘Freedom and Necessity in Anselm's “Cur Deus Homo”’, Franciscan Studies 36 (1976), p. 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Holmes, ‘Upholding of Beauty’, p. 194, for some other examples of a move from fittingness to necessity in the text.
17 The line from here to later arguments for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is clear, as has been oft noted (e.g. Southern, Portrait, p. 202).
18 Pace Hopkins’ point (Companion to the Study of St Anselm, pp. 48–9) that in Anselm there are aspects of the incarnation which, not being ‘deductions from the moral and metaphysical nature of God’, therefore do not command the same apologetic force as ‘necessary reasons’ (rationes necessariae). This is true in the first part of the text, in book 1, but Anselm's conclusion at the end of CDH throws this distinction into question.
19 Frank Brown (‘Beauty of Hell’, p. 344) rightly points out that should Christ's payment of the debt not ultimately cancel out the debt of all sinners, there would be a ‘double-payment’ of the debt, one by Christ and the other by sinners in their eternal perdition. This would introduce a certain ugliness into the divine constitution of the world.
20 Thus Southern's explanation (Portrait, pp. 214–15) of Anselm's parable only highlights the logical problem inherent in Anselm's articulation of the ‘divine dilemma’ that informs his entire treatise. Southern rightly notes that the parable alone gives Anselm the ‘out’ necessary to avoid the universalist implications of his own theology. Rogers (‘Christ our Brother’, p. 230) responds to Southern's criticisms of the parable's ‘feudal background’, but what is significant for us in her critique is that she highlights the fact that Anselm does not conceive of Christ's sacrifice as changing our nature in any way, such that the benefits of Christ's repayment of the debt would automatically redound to us without our willing participation in the life of grace. This is a crucial point, but it does not affect our argument, since we are arguing primarily from what is fitting or unfitting for God. The question of how unrepentant sinners participate in Christ's repayment of our debt in a universalist scheme, though vital, remains outside the bounds of inquiry here.
21 I say ‘ultimately’ because if the patience of God towards sinners (2 Pet 3:9) were construed as an invalidation of Anselm's argument, then any injustice in the world would put into jeopardy God's character – a position no Christian can hold.
22 I owe this felicitous phrase to Jonathan S. McIntosh. ‘God, Creator of His Own Necessity: The Logic of Divine Action in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’. Paper delivered at the Sixth Saint Anselm Conference at Saint Anselm College, NH, 2017.
23 Cf. CDH 1.6 for another example of how the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo looms in the background of Anselm's definition of God's omnipotence.
24 This impossibility of God being caught ‘reacting’ is connected, in my estimation, to Anselm's teaching on wisdom in CDH. Wisdom is what preserves God's initiative in all his endeavors, both creative and salvific. See also n. 29 below.
25 Cf. DC 5, where Anselm, following Boethius, puts to use the latter's idea of the eternal present to illuminate how our temporal happenings are present to God and to show how this is implied in scriptural language (Rom 8): ‘For, temporally speaking, God has not already called, justified, and glorified those whom he foreknew were yet to be born. We can therefore understand that it was for want of a verb signifying the eternal present that St Paul used verbs of the past tense.’
26 Anselm will go so far as to write that ‘when someone voluntarily (sponte se) plans to do some good thing, and afterwards, in accordance with the same will, completes what he planned, it is not right to say of him that he is doing what he is doing out of necessity, even though, supposing that he were unwilling to fulfill his promise, it would be possible for him to be compelled to do so’ (CDH 2.17, emphasis added).
27 Anselm argues that we often misuse language about necessity and capability even on the human plane. Cf. Anselm's Philosophical Fragments (in Major Works) for more on modals, and Knuutilla, Simo’s helpful essay, ‘Anselm on Modality’, in Davies, Brian and Leftow, Brian (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Anselm (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 111–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 It is precisely for this reason that I hesitate to affirm without qualification David Bentley Hart's assessment (‘A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’, Pro Ecclesia 7/3 (1998), p. 343) that for Anselm the incarnate Word bridges the apparent gap (introduced to the human mind by finitude and sin) between justice and mercy in God. While Anselm – committed as he is to divine simplicity and to the fact of the divine Word has acted definitively on our behalf – believes ultimately in the identity of justice and mercy in God and their coordination on the cross of Christ, it is clear from the Proslogion and CDH that this identity never achieves a coherent eschatological manifestation in the economy of salvation, since all justly deserve to perish but only some are saved through mercy.
29 Space does not allow for a deeper treatment of the function of wisdom in this text, but suffice it to say that in CDH God's wisdom appears both as the structuring element of the universe which makes the universe accurately reflect the character of its creator (e.g. CDH 1.15, by turning sin into punishment (quoted in Brown, ‘Beauty of Hell’, p. 337)) and as that by which God acts so as to ensure his incarnate activity also reflects his divine character within the limits of fallen human contingency (e.g. CDH 2.13).
30 See n. 10 above.
31 Cf. Bernard J. D. van Vreeswijk's similar reading of this passage in ‘Interpreting Anselm's Thought’, pp. 420–1.
32 See Pugh, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’, p. 56.
33 Cf. Holmes (‘Upholding of Beauty’, p. 203), who speculates that Anselm would have answered the question ‘why are some individuals saved and others not’ by having recourse to a doctrine of predestination learned from Augustine and the controversies surrounding Gottschalk's theories. He is right that Anselm's purpose in CDH is not to answer this question about individuals, but leaving that line of enquiry unanswered is precisely what threatens the stability of the broader argument of the text.
34 The question of what texts of Augustine's Anselm had read is difficult to answer, and so my comparisons should be taken to be illustrative of the broad agreement between Anselm and Augustine on these points; that said, the parallels in some instances are striking. In any case, Augustine's evolving views on grace had settled by the final, anti-Pelagian phase of his life, and so by knowing De correptione et gratia, De peccatorum meritis, and the Enchiridion, Anselm would have had enough of Augustine to get the picture. For what texts were likely to have been in the Bec library in the eleventh century, see Gasper, Giles E. M., Anselm of Canterbury and his Theological Inheritance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 206–9Google Scholar.
35 Augustine, De gratia et libero arbitrio, ch. 45, in Answer to the Pelagians IV: To the Monks of Hadremetum and Provence, trans. Roland J. Teske (New York: New City Press, 1999). All translations of Augustine are taken from this series.
36 Augustine, De dono perseverentiae 16. Augustine ultimately affirmed that God elected some before the foundation of the world for beatitude while passing over others who would thereby be damned. God is just insofar as those who are not saved receive the just recompense for their sin inherited from Adam (and their own further sins), whereas God's mercy is demonstrated in his taking some out of the massa damnata and incorporating them into Christ. For Augustine there was no problem in reconciling God's justice and mercy here insofar as God's justice has priority. The only puzzle is why some are passed over while others are not. In some passages Augustine suggests that the reason why some were chosen and others not will be revealed in the eschaton (De gratia et libero arbitrio 45); in others he seems to suggest that God's justice is so far above ours that we cannot comprehend God's reasoning (e.g. Augustine, De peccatorum meritis 1.29); in others still he suggests that, without the damnation of some, the grace of God would not be able to be known by the elect as grace (De dono perseverentiae 16).
37 Southern, Portrait, p. 213.
38 Cf. von Balthasar, Hans Urs, Dare we Hope ‘That All Men Be Saved?’, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), ch. 11Google Scholar, for a brief but helpful discussion on how CDH takes up where the Proslogion leaves off.
39 David Bentley Hart (‘God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo’, Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 3/1 (2015), pp. 1–17) has inspired much of my final reflections here on Anselm and universalism.
40 ‘[T]he essence of God's honor lies in visibility (I. 14-15), i.e., primarily in Christ.’ Gray, ‘Freedom and Necessity’, p. 188.
41 My sincere thanks to Ann Astell and David Hart, as well as to my anonymous reviewers, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.