In this brief article I wish to set forth an argument for universal salvation drawn from the soteriology of Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo (CDH).Footnote ¹ I am not claiming that Anselm of Canterbury was a universalist; he decidedly was not.Footnote ² Instead, I develop this argument based on Anselm's soteriological logic, which, as Stephen Holmes has said, has a ‘strong tendency to universalism’.Footnote ³ My own proposal works with Anselm's arguments about divine fittingness and unfittingness, and in this way it is similar to the work of Frank Burch Brown, who has teased out various logical incoherences in CDH based on Anselm's arguments from beauty and proffered his own universalist vision therefrom.Footnote ⁴ But this particular exercise is meant to prove a point stronger than either CDH’s tendency towards universalism or even various logical problems inherent at points in the text: instead, I wish to show that Anselm's basic argument for a ratio for the incarnation fails barring a universalist conclusion to history.Footnote ⁵ This is because Anselm's logic is based on God's creative intentions, which would remain unfulfilled should any portion of creation not reach its intended beatitude. An affirmation of universalism, therefore, strengthens a distinctly Anselmian soteriology and theology – it ties up those ‘loose ends’ of Anselm's concept of justice, which Bernard J. D. van Vreeswijk has detailed.Footnote ⁶ This is especially so, as we shall see, with regard to Anselm's insistence on divine aseity as the foundation for understanding the plan of redemption.

We begin at the beginning – not at the beginning of Anselm's text, however, but instead at the divine origins of creation. Anselm explains that God created human nature to achieve beatitude, to take its place in the heavenly number of the elect eternally foreknown by God (CDH 1.18). ‘[G]od has made nothing more precious than rational nature (rationalem naturam), whose intended purpose is that it should rejoice in him’ (CDH 2.4). And so when Adam and Eve sinned, they not only ruined themselves, but they also stole from God their entire progeny (omni propagine sua), which would have been confirmed along with them, had they not fallen. These further human beings, arising from human procreation, would have then filled up the divine number of the elect (CDH 1.18). We can gather from Anselm's ‘angelic digression’ in chapters 16–18 of book 1 that God did not intend any of his creatures to fall, either angelic or human. There he explains that either God knows the perfect number of rationally created beings who will exist in beatific contemplation of him, and so he created angels with that particular number in mind; or God created them so as to fall from necessity so that others could take their place in the number of the elect – an ‘absurd notion’, Anselm concludes (CDH 1.16). He applies the same reasoning to humans a little later on, explaining that though human beings fulfil the number of the fallen angels, they were nonetheless created for their own intrinsic end of contemplation of God. They complete the heavenly ‘complement’ or divine number of the elect and only extrinsically fulfil the number of the fallen angels who left that number; otherwise ‘it would have been a matter of necessity that either some humans or some angels should fall, since no one could remain in either place in excess of the complete number’ (CDH 1.18).

So far it is apparent that Anselm diverges here in CDH from the traditional late Augustinian scheme in which some human beings were predestined for damnation due to God's inscrutable judgement. Indeed, Anselm's ‘angelic digression’ is precisely a development and subtle critique of Augustine's thinking on the same question in the Enchiridion 9 and De civitate Dei 22. He sees in Augustine's idea the possibility for a ‘perverse joy’ should any elect human have the occasion to wonder whether his place in the divine number is secured through the fall of an angel (CDH 1.18). Anselm is arguing obliquely here for the unfittingness of a necessary fall. This same sort of moral unfittingness will be central to my argument for universalism. Let us briefly look more closely at Anselm's conception of this intrinsic end of beatitude for humanity before moving on to this argument from unfittingness. As we have already noted, Anselm considers the sin of our first parents to have taken something from God that he desired for all of humanity: ‘What did man steal from God when he allowed himself to be conquered by the devil . . . Did he not steal from God whatever he planned to do with regard to human nature (de natura humana)?’ (CDH 1.23). This theft could only have occurred, says Anselm, because of the unique constitution of humanity as a race (genum). This both enables Adam's sin to pass on to us and allows Christ to represent us and offer satisfaction to God for our sins on our behalf – a privilege the angels cannot share. ‘Moreover, just as it was not right that man should be restored by another man who was not of the same race (eiusdem generis), even if he were of the same nature (quamvis eiusdem esset naturae), similarly it is not right that an angel should be saved by another angel, even if he were of the same nature, since angels are not of one race as human beings are’ (CDH 2.21).Footnote ⁷ With this particular unity of all the hypostases in the one race we can move on to Anselm's particular argument for the redemption, an argument which Michael Root has called ‘one large argument from unfittingness’.Footnote ⁸

Anselm explains God's salvific condescension on our behalf as a response to the unfittingness of allowing the divine handiwork to go to waste. And if it was unfitting, it was impossible for God to allow this to be so: ‘in the case of God, what follows from any unfittingness – however small – is impossibility (in Deo quantumlibet parvum inconveniens sequitur impossibilitas)’ (CDH 1.10). It is worth pausing here for a moment to ask why unfittingness implies impossibility. Boso, too, is perplexed by this question, and he worries that Anselm's argument that God cannot do the unfitting makes God dependent on our estimations of what is fitting or not. Is God not free to act how he pleases? For God, Anselm replies, ‘“freedom” relates only to the freedom to perform what is advantageous (quod expedit) or fitting (quod decet), and one should not give the name of “benevolence” (benignitas) to something which brings about a result unfitting (indecens) for God’ (CDH 1.12). Anselm explicates this most vividly when it comes to the question of the justice of divine punishment; it is why the mercy of God cannot be played as a trump card against what appears unseemly for the God of justice to do. To put it starkly: for a creature to take honour from God through sin is the ‘greatest injustice in the universe’, as Anselm says, and thus God ought not to tolerate this injustice (CDH 1.13).Footnote ⁹ ‘If the divine Wisdom did not impose these forms of recompense in cases where wrongdoing is endeavouring to upset the right order of things, there would be in the universe, which God ought to be regulating (debet ordinare), a certain ugliness (deformitas), resulting from the violation of the beauty of order, and God would appear to be failing in his governance (videtur deficere)’ (CDH 1.14). It appears then that our sense of injustice in sin not receiving recompense bears some analogy to the reality of justice in God, and it is precisely for this reason that God acts in a way that is fitting.Footnote ¹⁰ ‘[C]reation reflect[s] the divine life’, as Root puts it; ‘What Boso does not see is that the right order which fittingness expresses is a reflection of the being of God.’Footnote ¹¹ Because the world subsists in divine wisdom and reveals God's glory, it is necessary that God be seen to be acting in it in a fitting manner. This is simply one consequence of what it means to call God Creator.

But we have already seen another possibility of divine unfittingness in the text, namely that God should allow his creation to perish. It is this unfittingness which makes divine punishment an insufficient return on God's honour. ‘It is easy to recognize, that with regard to human nature (de natura humana), there are two alternatives: either God will complete what he has begun, or it was to no avail (in vanum) that he created so sublime a nature for so great a good. But if it is recognized that God has made nothing more precious than rational nature (rationalem naturam), whose intended purpose is that it should rejoice in him, it is totally foreign to him to allow any rational type of creature to perish utterly’ (CDH 2.4). The claim carries significant universalist implications, especially when it is coupled with the ontological unity of the human race as Anselm conceives of it: ‘the human race (humanum genum), clearly his most precious piece of workmanship, had been completely ruined; it was not fitting that what God has planned for mankind (de homine) should be utterly nullified, and the plan in question could not be brought into effect unless the human race were set free by its Creator in person’ (CDH 1.4). Nonetheless, Anselm can equally say that ‘nothing more just (iustus) or fitting (convenientius) can be conceived of than that, just as a human being, if he had persevered in righteousness, would have enjoyed eternal blessedness as an entirety, that is, with body and soul, similarly, if he perseveres in unrighteousness, he should, as an entirety, be eternally miserable’ (CDH 2.3). The tension between these two claims by Anselm is striking. Richard Southern's remarks on this tension are worth repeating:

There are several reasons to put into doubt Southern's contention that Anselm is only logically committed to the salvation of the ‘species Man’ in its instantiation in Christ. First, if Katherin Rogers is right that Anselm held to a belief in divine ideas not only for genera and species but also for individuals, then there is good reason to think that Anselm's system would commit him to a belief in the necessity of salvation for individual humans.Footnote ¹³ In addition, though the human nature of Christ does achieve the beatitude Anselm envisions as the telos for which humanity was created, Anselm makes it clear that the beatitude of one member of the human race is not enough to achieve God's designs for that nature, both because that nature exists as a genus (or a ‘race’) whose existence was meant to be multipleFootnote ¹⁴ and because the human race's beatitude is part of God's larger plan to fulfil the number of the elect, a goal which also includes filling in the number of the fallen angels. Furthermore, it is a recurrent confusion in both of Southern's discussions of the universalist implications of CDH that he refers to Jesus as being ‘saved’. Anselm never speaks of the result of Jesus’ obedience to the Father as salvation but rather as reward or recompense. This reward or recompense is of no use to the Son who already shares in the beatitude of the Trinity, and therefore it redounds to humanity as salvation. Even in his later analysis of Anselm's famous parable of the king and his reconciliation with his guilty citizens Southern speaks of the innocent man as ‘earning his own salvation’.Footnote ¹⁵ This makes no sense in the parable, for it is precisely through the man's innocence and good favour with the king that he is able to earn salvation for the guilty.

What is significant to remember about this parable is that it arises first and foremost in the context of a discussion of how Christ could have been born without sin, seeing as his humanity was taken from the flesh of corporate humanity – the flesh of Adam writ large – that is contaminated with sin. To maintain the sinlessness of Christ, one must maintain the sinlessness of his Virgin Mother, but to do that Anselm must make transtemporal the saving effects of Christ, who would be born after his mother could be made sinless. These chapters of Cur Deus Homo bear all the mental stress of time travel paradoxes, but we need not detain ourselves long with them, for our purpose is only to show that it is precisely here that Anselm tells us, through the mouth of the amazed Boso, that ‘since mankind was first created, there has never been any time devoid of some person connected with that reconciliation without which all mankind was created in vain. And we can conclude that this is not only fitting (conveniens), but a necessity (necessarium)’ (CDH 2.16).

This is a central passage in the text, one which overturns Michael Root's claim that Anselm only argues in CDH from unfittingness to necessity and never from fittingness to necessity.Footnote ¹⁶ Anselm continues by explaining that if God's intention in mankind was for humans to attain eternal beatitude, it is illogical for there ever to be a time in the course of history in which this intention is not being fulfilled. We may consider this an extension of Anselm's earlier argument that if God should refrain from saving humanity, he would appear weak. Now Anselm applies that logic transtemporally: God must always be saving some humans, or it seems as if God is not strong enough to save. And since God is always faithful to himself, that means God is always faithful to the intentions for which he made human nature. Though Anselm only makes this argument from fittingness to necessity explicit in this particular discussion of how Christ could be born sinless, we should nonetheless take it as a serious move in Anselm's broader argument in this treatise about how fittingness and necessity relate. Finally and vitally, Anselm claims that ‘if there is no obstacle to this logical state of affairs’ (nec est aliquid quod huic obviet rationi) it is therefore necessary that such a state of affairs has always obtained (CDH 2.16).Footnote ¹⁷ This is the great development of Anselm's earlier, more modest statement that, ‘in the case of God, what follows from any unfittingness – however small – is impossibility’ (CDH 1.10). Now, whatever is fitting, so long as there is no obstacle to its instantiation, is not only possible, but necessary.Footnote ¹⁸

We are already familiar with the obstacle to the rational natures of fallen angels achieving their intended ends. We may now ask the same question with respect to the human genum. Specifically, if it is the case that if God is not always saving some humans he appears weak, why is it not also true, a fortiori, that if he does not save all humans from all of history that this would not also appear unfitting? Indeed, Anselm near the end of CDH asks ‘whom is he [Christ] with greater justice to make heirs of the recompense due to him, and of the flowering of his bounty, than those who are parents and brothers to him, whom he sees, bound by so many and such enormous debts, wasting away with deprivation in the depths of misery?’ (CDH 2.19); and ‘What also could be juster than that the one to whom is given a reward greater than any debt should absolve all debt?’ (2.20).Footnote ¹⁹ The only answer to this question, on Anselmian terms, seems to be the obstacle of sinners’ unwilling rejection of Christ's satisfaction. This answer arises in the example of the parable in CDH 2.16, where only those who appear at the king's court receive the forgiveness of their guilt.Footnote ²⁰ As Boso says after Anselm explains how Christ's supererogatory sacrifice on our behalf wins him infinite merits to distribute to his human kin:

Essentially, then, we have here a free-will argument for hell.

The reason this argument fails in CDH, on Anselm's own terms, is that God's appearing weak with respect to creation cannot ultimately depend on the free choice of the human being. If that were the case, God's ability (in Root's helpful phrase) to have creation reflect the divine life would truly be constrained from without – an impossibility for Anselm due to his vision of divine aseity.Footnote ²¹ I will say more of this vision in a moment, but it is worth raising here a question provoked in Boso by this train of thought: does the necessity of this fitting action evacuate God's salvation of its gracious character? As Boso puts it, can we attribute to grace an action that is a function of necessity, or, what amounts to the same question, is God forced to save humanity in order to avoid unfittingness? The answer to this question will also be the answer to the same question in a universalist register. We note first that simply to raise these concerns together (as Anselm does through Boso) is to establish the mutually determinative character of the notions of grace and freedom, and so the answer will depend on our understanding of divine freedom and necessity. This is where Anselm's vision of divine aseity comes in, one which delineates carefully between external and internal necessity. The former ‘removes graciousness from someone who is acting beneficently, or diminishes it’, while the latter increases ‘the debt of gratitude owed for a benefaction’ (CDH 2.5).

God is free from any external necessity, but not from the internal necessity stemming from his character. Anselm offers an analogy: though someone who takes monastic vows is ‘constrained’ to maintain his form of life due to his vow, we do not consider this person less free if he fulfils this vow. The reason this is so is because the monk took his vows freely, without external compulsion. This analogy is key for how Anselm considers the freedom of God with respect to the necessary salvation of human nature. God is like a divine monkFootnote ²² who has ‘made a vow’ to humanity by creating it, and since he created us simply for our own sake, and not for his (since he lacks nothing in his divine fullness), for God to keep his vow is just as gratuitous as his first act of creation. The world is the monastery God has decided to ‘enter’ by the act of creation, and his vow of stability means he will not leave the world to waste away. From this we see how the centrality of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and its implicit affirmation of God's absolute freedom from the constraints of matter and external necessity shape Anselm's understanding of all subsequent necessity in salvation history.Footnote ²³ All history is framed by the sheer gratuity of creation (‘the whole of what he does is grace’, CDH 2.5), and thus any necessity in that history, however logical and real it is, cannot be understood as a limitation on God's freedom. If it appears that God must act in a certain way because of some external set of affairs, it must be remembered, first, that this external set of affairs exists only through God's original creative initiative, and, second, that God foreknew these states of affairs and is thus never caught in a reactive pose.Footnote ²⁴ Since, Anselm tells us, ‘it was no secret to God when he created him what man was going to do, nevertheless by creating him by his own goodness, freely (sponte), he put himself under a quasi-obligation (quasi obligavit) to bring his good beginning to fulfillment’ (CDH 2.5). God's vow of creation – once we understand God's intentions to bring humanity to its telos – is revealed to be the vow of the cross. And though Anselm could have no recourse to scripture at this point, we have here in this ‘free necessity of the fitting’ a distinctively Anselmian exegesis of Revelation's shocking depiction of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

Does this union of the fitting and the necessary undermine the gratuity of God's actions? Only if we abandon Anselm's vision of divine aseity, with its two important qualifications for our speech about divine action. The first of these is Anselm's insistence on God's transcendence of time, which renders each new development in salvation history a gracious surprise for us but for God only a further, temporal outworking of his initial Christoform donum of creation.Footnote ²⁵ The second is Anselm's qualification of the concepts of necessity and freedom when applied to God. Between the Scylla of an anthropomorphising, voluntaristic freedom and the Charybdis of equally anthropomorphising constraint on God's will, Anselm prefers here to risk sailing more closely to the latter.Footnote ²⁶ Though the very language of necessity applied to God is, as Anselm reminds us, inherently improper (improprie),Footnote ²⁷ he nevertheless continues to employ the language in this attenuated, analogical way, since it is the best we can do to express the fact that God's actions in history are actions in which God is true to himself. And it is at this moment in Anselm's argument that the language of ‘honour’ expands to include more than simply justice with respect to humanity. Whereas the upholding of justice is how God maintains his honour in the sight of humanity (hence the unfittingness of merciful forgiveness without restitution), God's keeping of his vow to the world is simply the outworking of God's goodness, his own honour with respect to himself. Honour, then, is not univocal in CDH. The upholding of justice is how God maintains his honour externally, with respect to us; the mercy of saving the human race is how God keeps his honour to himself, an honour which he ‘possesses of himself, and from no one apart from himself’ (CDH 2.5). The economic manifestation of mercy in Christ signifies supremely the aseity of God; the fact that this economic manifestation remains eschatologically incomplete in Anselm's theology indicates a failure of that same divine aseity.Footnote ²⁸

This, finally, is why Anselm's judgement in CDH 1.14 that the punishment of the sinner honours God is only a half-truth. It indeed honours God insofar as it re-establishes the proper hierarchy in the world by the sinner admitting under compulsion that God is Lord, thereby cancelling out the ugliness of sin; but on the other hand it prevents God from keeping honour to himself by bringing human nature – in all of its hypostases – to fulfilment through salvation. If punishment is God's only option for some of humanity with respect to restoring justice to the world after sin, it would appear that sin had caught God off guard, and that in his wisdom he had not foreseen the paths by which he could both create and eschatologically save all his creatures.Footnote ²⁹ Hence the aporia at the heart of Anselm's sophisticated soteriological meditation in CDH: God created the human race for beatitude; humanity has fallen; God would appear weak if he let the human race fail to reach its eschatological telos; yet some members of the human race will not attain that end. This contradiction can only be resolved with an affirmation of universal salvation for the entire human race.

This contradiction is brought into CDH from the earlier Proslogion where Anselm followed Augustine in finding it acceptable for God to be both just and merciful by damning some and saving others. As Anselm explains in Proslogion 9, ‘he who is good to the wicked by both punishing and sparing them is better than he who is good to the wicked only by punishing them. You are merciful, then, because you are all-good and supremely good.’ Though Anselm does not name it as such, let us not miss that this is implicitly an argument from fittingness, about what seems better for God to do in light of the particular moral consciousness of the beholder.Footnote ³⁰ Anselm goes on to say that God's mercy is derived from his goodness, and that God's goodness cannot be thought apart from his justice, indeed it ‘really coincides with this justice’. And so God's mercy must somehow be a manifestation of God's justice, though we cannot understand how this can be. ‘Help me, just and merciful God . . . so that I may understand what I am saying.’ He settles on some kind of answer at the end of Proslogion 9: it is just for God to act with so much power that nothing more powerful than God can be thought, and so God would not be as powerful as possible if he made only those not yet wicked to be good and not also those who are already wicked. Another kernel-sized argument from unfittingness: it is unseemly for God to be powerful only with respect to those already good, and so it is impossible for God to be powerful only to the good. ‘Thus it is just of you to have mercy on the wicked.’ But at this juncture another question arises naturally: would God not be even more powerful if he could make all sinners just? Yet, Anselm adds while staving off this riposte, God would not really be just if he did not punish at least some sinners. ‘For he is more just who rewards the merits of both good and bad than he who rewards the merits of good alone. Therefore it is just in relation to You, O just and benevolent God, both when You punish and when You pardon’ (Proslogion 11). The problem with this conclusion is that Anselm has in these paragraphs worked to redefine justice as goodness so as to allow mercy to be a manifestation of justice, only to turn around at the last moment and revert to his original definition of justice as retributive.Footnote ³¹ How can justice be both? Anselm's conclusion here remains unsatisfactory until the christological resolution of CDH, where he finds a way of making Christ's supererogatory justice bring forth from its own stores the bounties of mercy for sinful humanity (though even here God's justice is satisfied without any retribution towards sinnersFootnote ³²).

I have surveyed these passages in the Proslogion not only to show the conceptual difficulties Anselm is carrying with him into CDH, but also to demonstrate how much interference Anselm's Augustinianism is running against in these later arguments from fittingness in CDH.Footnote ³³ This goes some way towards explaining why Anselm's logic never leads him to the universalist conclusions implicit in his argument. Compare, for example, this definition of God's goodness found in Augustine's De gratia et libero arbitrio.Footnote ³⁴ The definition comes in course of Augustine's explanation of how God can be just in sparing some but allowing others to receive their just recompense for their sins. Can God be just in this inequality of outcomes?

This progression from ‘just’ to ‘good’ and to ‘good and just’ in Augustine appears in Anselm as the ultimately mysterious coincidence of goodness, justice, and justice-in-God-Himself, as we saw above: God's goodness ‘really coincides with his justice’ (Pros. 9).

The question becomes even more confounding, however, when we ask how God's justice and mercy, coincident as they are, can issue divergent eternal divine decrees for the particular individuals God chooses to save or not save. This is the other side of the problem Anselm inherited from Augustine, as seen in this passage from the latter's De dono perseverantiae: ‘But “why,” he asks, “is the grace of God not given accord with human merits?” I answer: Because God is merciful.“Why, then,” he asks, “is it not given to all?” And here I answer: Because God is Judge.’Footnote ³⁶ Anselm in the Proslogion agrees: though there is some intelligibility in God's forgiving some of the wicked, nevertheless the rationale for God saving some instead of others remains inaccessible for human knowledge: ‘But if it can in some way be grasped why You can will to save the wicked, it certainly cannot be understood by any reason why from those who are alike in wickedness You save some rather than others through Your supreme goodness, and damn some rather than others through Your supreme justice’ (Proslogion 11). So there is no conflict between justice and mercy per se here, only a mystery as to why mercy does not cover the entire sinful human race. Indeed, Anselm explains that the only inconsistency possible in the relationship of justice and mercy would be for those whom God wills to be damned to be saved, and for those God wills to be saved to be damned: ‘For that alone is just which you will, and that is not just which You do not will’ (Proslogion 11).

That the answer for this discrepancy in the distribution of justice and mercy lies in God's will is a claim that will receive further development in CDH, where the will of God is affirmed to be supremely rational (CDH 2.8). In fact, the entirety of CDH is an elaboration on the question of these chapters of the Proslogion: how God can be both just and merciful at once towards sinful humanity.Footnote ³⁷ As mentioned above, in CDH the answer finds a christological clarification not given in the Proslogion.Footnote ³⁸ But with respect to the former point, namely the unintelligibility of why God would extend mercy to some and not to others, we find that this mystery remains just as opaque to Anselm in the CDH as it does in his earlier work. In fact, it rather darkens in obscurity when put under the pressure of Anselm's argument for the fittingness and thus necessity of God bringing human nature to fulfilment through salvation. This creates the aporia we have seen in the text, since in CDH Anselm will challenge two building blocks of the Augustinianism operative in his Proslogion: the possibility of a divine will for damnation and the fittingness of divine failure in bringing human nature to its intended beatitude. Neither of these is any longer a possibility in CDH, and with Anselm's introduction of the major argument from unfittingness, he has necessarily rendered his soteriology universalist. Any other rendering of it dissolves into the incoherences we have detailed above.

From this core of Anselmian soteriology we glean an important insight. If we accept theological arguments from unfittingness, and if we agree along with Anselm that unfittingness implies logical impossibility (because the order of the world must, ultimately, manifest God's character), then all of creaturely history – with its original creation for beatitude and its cataclysmic fall and glorious redemption – can be nothing other than the theatre for theophany.Footnote ³⁹ This is why, too, in the final analysis fittingness and necessity cannot be separated in CDH. Just as we sense injustice in God's allowing humanity ‘off the hook’ for sin through an unjust mercy, the ultimately moral-aesthetic question of the fittingness of God allowing creation to perish also reflects our perception of the honour of God – revealed in Christ – which lies at the foundation of God's world.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unfittingness in this case is Anselm's way of speaking of a moral analogy between us and God: hence the theological brilliance in Anselm's continual insistence in CDH on divine appearances – whether God looks to be failing in his creative intent – and the concomitant demand for a public display of justice against sin. It is not that Anselm is slavishly bound to a feudal conception of honour that constrains his account of the incarnation and atonement. Rather, Anselm understood that God's eternal self-determination and self-sufficiency, his eternal life which does not depend in any way on us, entail that God's actions in the world will always be for our sake and thus always in accord with the sheer gratuity of creation. They are always, therefore, further revelations of that original act of love – grace upon grace. If they were anything else, they would be divine ‘responses’ undoing God's aseity, thereby reducing him indeed to the level of the feudal landlords Anselm's critics have so worried about. Under the logic of Anselm's soteriology, therefore, universal salvation would simply be the final revelation of that one movement by which God is eternally God for us in the fullness of his own divine life.

For all the power and vision of his soaring soteriology, however, without the affirmation of universal salvation Anselm was not able to grant coherence to the problematic of justice and mercy that stimulated his thought throughout his career. It would be most just and most merciful for God to save the tota humana natura through the repayment of the debt offered in Christ. Indeed, we can say – appropriating Boso's exclamation when Anselm tells him that Christ's saving benefits are for none other than those who are parents and brothers to him – ‘there can be nothing more logical, nothing sweeter, nothing more desirable’. Only universal salvation fulfils Anselm's soteriology, and it resolves too Anselm's confusion in the Proslogion as to why God's mercy can go only so far. By the time he wrote Cur Deus Homo, Anselm had, in fact, already answered his own questions; he simply could not recognise it.Footnote ⁴¹