Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Anselm of Canterbury is one of the most important theologians in the history of the Western Church. That means that his ideas most likely have influenced the way you think about the world, whether you realize it or not. It also means that the ideas he taught have reached us in a very garbled form. Take his doctrine of the "atonement," for instance (you can read it in "Why God Became Man" in this volume). Anselm taught that by sinning humans have failed to give God the "honor" due him as our creator and as a supremely great and good and beautiful being. This creates a "debt" that must be paid back. We can't pay it, because even if we were perfectly good (which we can't be), that would only be our due anyway. It wouldn't pay back the original "debt" incurred by Adam and Eve. That debt is so great that only God himself could pay it. Yet the debt had to be paid by a human being. So God became human and paid the debt on our behalf.

This notion lies behind hundreds of evangelical and fundamentalist sermons which you can hear in churches throughout this country every Sunday. It also is partly responsible for the notion of God a lot of nonreligious people reject--a cosmic tyrant who demands perfect obedience and threatens us with punishment if we don't comply.

Yet Anselm actually _never_ taught that Jesus was "punished" on our behalf. On the contrary, the debt was paid precisely so that no punishment would be necessary. Jesus' death on the cross was not a sadistic punishment exacted by an angry God, but was the culmination of his absolute obedience to God's will. It was that obedience, completed in his sacrificial death, that paid "the debt we could not owe."

For Anselm, and for Christians generally, honoring God is the highest and most joyful thing we can do. It is the most truly human and humanizing activity imaginable. This is tied to Anselm's notion of God (expressed in his "Proslogion," also in this volume). For Anselm, God is the being than which nothing greater can be imagined. This isn't primarily about an omnipotent being who can make us do things. It's about a being so unimaginably glorious that the greatest happiness anyone can know is just to be in his presence. To turn away from a being like that (knowing what we're doing, which most of us don't) is to be something less than we could be. Obviously this is a bit of a modern interpretation of Anselm, but I don't think it contradicts him.

I do think, though, that there are better ways to think about the Atonement than Anselm's. Earlier Christians had spoken of Jesus' death and resurrection primarily as a victory over death and the devil--what the baptismal vows in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer call the "forces that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God." Anselm didn't like this notion, because he thought it limited God's power and gave the devil some sort of independent existence (and in some versions even legal "rights"). But I think that that understanding of Jesus' saving work is probably truer to the Bible and Christian tradition than Anselm's.

But even if--indeed especially if--you disagree with Anselm, he's worth reading. He and the "scholastic" theologians who followed him helped shape Christian thinking in the West for the past thousand years. They are partly responsible for the fact that Western Christians--Catholics and Protestants--think so differently from the Orthodox.

Anselm is most famously identified with his ontological arguments. This collection begins with the Monologian, a soliloquy (or meditation), and the Proslogian, an allocution, Anselm's go at a more robust ontology. It is true that classical ontology has not been highly regarded in the modern and post-modern academies; the "science of being" is metaphysical and not something that fits well with modern methods, or uses, of inquiry. This is so because classic ontology, as developed notably by Anaxagoras, Plato, Plotinus, etc, sees the central question of being (i.e. existence, essence, the-thing-in-itself) as transcending all sense-based inquiry (empiricism). In modern thought, 'pure reason' as such recoils from a ubiquitous relativism (please notice the self-contradiction) and broadly nihilistic presuppositions. An epistemologically and psychologically troubled mix! It is not the case that the modern thinker has 'refuted' ontological arguments so much as it is the case that he fancies them odd and tedious, presumes them useless, and conveniently pronounces them "meaningless". If, after surveying the problems of the modern/post-modern views, you think Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus might have been onto something, Anselm may interest you (although he may put you to sleep with his deliberate and repetitive arguments).
On First Philosophy:
"Supreme truth does not admit at all of the big and the small, the long and the short, which belong to spatial and temporal distension." From that which "time and space stipulate, I do not doubt that the supreme substance is exempt." (Mono. 22)
". . . the supreme spirit . . . is not like anything. It is the original." (M. 32)
On the Trinity (here Anselm hoped that Augustine would have concurred):
"Father [supreme essence, consciousness], Son [understanding, Word of the supreme essence], and Spirit [love, mutuality of supreme essence and the begotten Word], each on its own, as individual, knows and understands -- while all three taken together are not three knowers and understanders but one single knower, one single understander. . . one speaker and one thing spoken; one wisdom in them that speaks, one substance in them that is spoken. From which it follows that there is only one Word. . . A conclusion that has something of the wonderful and unaccountable about it!" (M. 63)
"Perhaps it is explicable -- and hence our conclusions true -- only up to a point, while being incomprehensible, and therefore ineffable, as a whole . . . the supreme essence is above and beyond all other natures. Thus when we talk about it, the words may be common . . . but not their meanings." (M. 65)
The Proslogian contains Anselm's famous ontological argument "that God truly exists." "That-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought" (alternately, that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought) either must be the highest/truest/purest thought that can exist or the highest/truest/purest reality. Since we readily discern that the highest reality must be greater than the highest thought short of such a reality, it follows that something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought must [supra]exist, and must be beyond containment by the greatest thought -- which must be less than itself. Although all human language is inadequate to the task of naming (i.e., defining) this "something", it is what we call God.

Like Augustine, whom he regarded highly, Anselm says that evil is nothing, as it is most rightly understood as being the privation of good. "So we should say that injustice is nothing but the privation of justice." He acknowledges that to speak of evil and injustice imparts upon them an apparent "thing" status, the words are, after all, nouns. But this is a problem of mere language, not reality. Nonetheless, given that we cannot even speak of evil and injustice without elevating them to being "something," Anselm says that in this sense they are "quasi-something."

Many works in this volume, De Grammatico (an essay on logic and linguistics), the treatises On Truth, On Free Will, and so forth, use the classic framework of teacher-student dialogs. The translation is quite readable although the material itself is mostly dense, deliberate, and redundant (which is why many avoid or reject metaphysics -- a curious circumstance given that the human mind can make no judgments without metaphysical suppositions). There are some lengthy discussions of the logic of Trinitarian monotheistic theology that are reminiscent of Plotinus and Augustine (also Paul, e.g., Gal. 4.6). De Concordia is Anselm's attempt to reconcile divine "foreknowledge" with the concepts of predestination and human freedom. He says, "It should also be understood that the word 'foreknowledge', as also the word 'predestine' are not used of God literally, for in him there is no before or after, but all things are present to him at once." Boethius argued the matter more directly (and enjoyably) five centuries earlier.
Anselm's treatment of the Atonement, 'Why God Became Man', explains the debt humanity has incurred by way of transgression (sin), a debt man must pay but cannot. Simply put, only God is capable of paying man's debt to God, yet man must pay it, because it is man's debt. Thus the logical necessity of the Incarnation and the Atonement (and of both mercy and justice). Anything less would amount to the Immutable abandoning His will for man, something that, being immutable, He cannot do (by reason of definition and logical mutual exclusion). For this reason Christ's crucifixion was not punishment for sin but was his willful alleviation of the ultimate necessity of punishment.
There are some interesting passages here, including a few gems, but the collection is slow-going and repetitive. You'll spend a lot of time in this book, encountering many ideas for the twentieth painstaking time. A prudent approach may be to skim through the texts topically, reading it 'surgically'.
While perhaps only his ontological argument was original -- although rather Platonic, Anselm's writings contain many important and influential examinations of Christian theology. Recommended for the tenacious theologian only.

Anselm was a very important author for Medieval Christianity. He contributed the Ontological argument for the existence (or should I say subsitence) of God, as well as formulating verbally the substitutionary atonement of Christ. This book provides these as well as a host of other rich classical Christian thoughts. It is difficult reading, but excellent in that it makes one think, believer or non-believer, in the metaphysical realities of life. I would have to say a must for anyone interested in the development of Christian thinking, as well as Philosophical development.