The relationship between book 1 and book 2 of Anselm's Cur Deus homo is not immediately clear. Commentators on Anselm's text rarely discuss the two parts of Anselm's argument with respect to each other, and the primary reflection on the work as a whole tends to focus upon Anselm's discussion of satisfaction and punishment in the first book, leaving the second book as ancillary to the main thrust of the argument in book 1. This confusion is not helped by Anselm's somewhat cryptic remarks in his preface to the work as a whole.
Though Anselm is clear that there is something distinct about each argument in the two books, those who have given extensive expositions of the Cur Deus homo usually provide detailed descriptions of the entire argument while only providing a limited explanation of the relation of the first book to the second. Richard Southern, for instance, gives no account of any relationship between the two books, while G. R. Evans only describes book 2 as turning ‘to the positive side of the dark story of man's hopeless debt’.Footnote 1
More recently, Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams have argued that book 1 offers a defence of the premise that ‘necessarily, if God does not become incarnate and die, God does not offer reconciliation to human beings’, and book 2 offers a defence of another premise, that ‘necessarily, if human beings sin, God offers them reconciliation’.Footnote 2 The combination of the two premises leads to the conclusion that ‘necessarily, if human beings sin, God becomes incarnate and dies’.Footnote 3
In Eileen Sweeney's recent book, Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word, she does take up the relationship between the books, claiming that in book 1, Anselm argues primarily for the incarnation, that humans owe something to make up for dishonouring God, and that the book ends without any hope for happiness. Book 2, Sweeney argues, describes how God perfects what he began, discusses suffering and the divine will and provides further detail for the incarnation.Footnote 4 David Mahfood, on the other hand, argues that Anselm's argument works in ‘two steps that correspond to the two books that comprise the work: (1) without Christ, the salvation of humanity would be impossible, and (2) salvation is indeed possible through an agent who is both human and divine’.Footnote 5 When attended to, then, there are a variety of ways that the relationship between the two books is explained.
Despite the relative lack of attention to the relationship between the first and second books of the Cur Deus homo, there are embedded within its text additional clues that can help clarify the relationship between the two books in a way that both explains their relationship and deepens our understanding of Anselm's account of the satisfaction offered by Christ. Briefly put, the hypothesis of this article is that sin has two consequences for humanity, and these two consequences structure Anselm's account of human salvation in the Cur Deus homo. First, sin causes us to deserve punishment for injustice and, second, sin removes the grace by which humans were able to attain the goal of their creation, which is the happiness of heaven. Book 1, then, deals with the need for satisfaction in the face of punishment and to restore justice, while book 2 addresses the need for a supererogatory gift that elevates human nature and restores it to its heavenly end of eternal happiness.
The structure of the rational will
To sharpen our understanding of the Cur Deus homo, however, we must begin with an investigation of how Anselm understands the structure of the will in rational creatures, since he presupposes this in his account of salvation in the Cur Deus homo, where the consequences of sin map onto this structure so that satisfaction must restore the will to its original status. Anselm gives his account of the will of angels and humans in his short treatise, De casu diaboli, in which he explores whether the fallen angels were morally responsible for their fall. The central problem he addresses is that it seems that, if the fallen angels did not receive the gift of perseverance, then they were not responsible for their fall, a claim based on 1 Corinthians 4:7 (‘What do you have that you did not receive?’), which is quoted at the beginning of the treatise, and which is used to make a fundamental distinction between Creator and creatures. Anselm assumes that even the general objects of the will are given to us by God.Footnote 6
While the primary emphasis of De casu diaboli is to explore moral responsibility, the giving of gifts and the structure of the rational will in the fallen angels, in several places Anselm remarks that all of this applies to human willing as well.Footnote 7 As Anselm thinks about the structure of the rational will, he argues that rational wills need to have two objects in order for there to be the possibility of moral responsibility, a will for justice and a will for something advantageous (commodum).Footnote 8 As Anselm develops his argument, by chapter 12 he has shifted the emphasis of his language from advantage to that of happiness/beatitude (beatitudo), which, given the context of a discussion of the fallen angels, suggests more than just happiness, but points to a stronger sense of the beatific vision for which Anselm understands angels and humans were made.
As Anselm introduces the objects of the two wills, he offers a thought experiment in which we are to imagine that the rational creature is only given a will for happiness. Anselm argues that, if rational creatures could only will happiness, they would not be able to move themselves to will anything else, and that the only thing they could really will would to be like God. If we only willed happiness, then even willing the lesser things of the world would not be morally blameworthy, since the creature was only acting on the will that it received – the willing would be neither just nor unjust. The problem in this thought experiment, as Anselm sees it, is that in this case there is no moral responsibility for what one wills and that creatures should not be blessed if they do not have a will that is just. We have no moral responsibility if we will happiness by necessity. For Anselm, then, a will that was only directed to happiness would lack the ability to move itself to any moral action and would not merit happiness without the possibility of having a just will.
In the following chapter, Anselm reverses the thought experiment and considers what it would be like if the rational creature were only to will justice.Footnote 9 In this case Anselm sees a different problem, which is that if we only had the ability to will justice we would will it by necessity, which would not really be justice. His point here is that the willing of justice requires the possibility of willing injustice in order for the will to be morally responsible for its willing. While the will to happiness seems to have no possibility of an opposite – we just are unable to will unhappiness – the will to justice does require the possibility of willing its opposite. Given this situation, Anselm concludes that we need two wills, one for happiness and one for justice, in order for us to will various goods and evils, which is the root of moral responsibility. Anselm argues that the rational creature is created with a will to blessedness and then the will to justice is added to the creature. We will always will happiness, even if we misidentify what will make us actually happy, but are prone to acts of injustice, and the fundamental injustice is when we disobey God, thus indicating our desire to be God for ourselves.Footnote 10 It is in this moment of fundamental disobedience that angels and humans lost their justice, leaving behind only a will for happiness and a debt of justice. Because our obligation to justice is a natural dignity to humans, and in losing it we have brought dishonour upon ourselves, humans need to pay off the debt of justice and restore their will for justice, which will also allow them to properly direct their will to happiness, that is, God.
Anselm reaffirms this basic point in De concordia:
Now God so ordered these two wills or affections in such a way that the will that is the instrument would use the will that is justice to command and govern under the instruction of the spirit, which is also called mind and reason; and it would use the other disposition for obedience without any disadvantage. Indeed, he gave happiness to human beings (to say nothing of angels) for their advantage, whereas he gave them justice for his own honor. But he gave justice to them in such a way that they were able to abandon it, so that if they did not abandon it, but instead preserved it with perseverance, they would merit exaltation to fellowship with the angels.Footnote 11
Here the will for happiness allows us to pursue goods that benefit us, while the will for justice brings glory to God, and humans who preserve this justice and so honour God will eventually join the angels in the beatific vision. All of this suggests that if human sin has brought disorder into the human will, it would impact both wills – for happiness and for justice – so that reconciliation between humans and God would require healing of both wills, allowing the human to justly will a happiness that would allow for obedience to God that would be rewarded in heaven.
The impact of sin on the will and human nature
Across his theological career, Anselm is quite clear about the twofold impact of sin on human nature and the twofold object of the will. Starting in the Proslogion, Anselm's opening prayer points to the two consequences of sin:
How wretched human beings are! They have lost the very thing for which they were created. Hard and terrible was their fall! Alas! Think what they have lost and what they have found; think what they left behind and what they kept. They have lost the happiness (beatitudinem) for which they were created and found an unhappiness (miseriam) for which they were not created. They left behind the only source of happiness and kept what brings nothing but misery.Footnote 12
Sin, then, does two things to humans. We have lost something for which we were made – the beatific vision, and we gained something through God's justice for which we were not made – punishment, misery and servitude to the devil.Footnote 13 In the Proslogion, it is that fall that makes God so seemingly obscure and distant to Anselm, for it is precisely the vision of God that he says he longs for in Proslogion 1 that he can no longer achieve in even a secondary way as a consequence of the fall. We are made for more than just punishment, we desire God, but we are not able to even think about God clearly without some gift of divine illumination.
For Anselm, the impact of the fall on human willing is devastating. The will that is ordered to justice is not only no longer able to will justly, it is also justly punished by being handed over to serve the devil. The will that is ordered to the perfect happiness and advantage of the beatific vision, which is received as a gift from God, is no longer able to receive that gift and instead vainly pursues earthly happiness. The will is trapped in this twofold consequence of sin, so that in one of his early published prayers, Anselm begs in prayer for St Peter, through the authority given him by God, to rescue him from his chains, crying out for Peter to ‘free me from the misery of the kingdom of sin, and lead me into the bliss of the kingdom of heaven’.Footnote 14
The theme of the twofold consequence of sin appears across Anselm's corpus, so it is no surprise that it features heavily in both the Cur Deus homo and its sequel, the De conceptu virginali. In the Cur Deus homo, as Anselm defends the doxological purpose of the work, he breaks out in praise for God's salvation and love and exclaims:
For the more wondrously and unexpectedly he [God] has rescued us from the great and well-deserved evils in which we once were, and restored us to the great and undeserved goods that we had lost, the greater is the love and generosity that he has shown toward us.Footnote 15
And in the De conceptu virginali, he describes the consequences of sin the same way:
Adam was created just, free from sin and its much-discussed debt and from punishment for sin, happy, and capable of always preserving the justice that he had received and thereby also preserving the freedom and happiness of which I have spoken. Therefore since he did not preserve for himself these good things, even though he could have preserved them forever without any difficulty, he robbed himself of them and subjected himself to their opposites. And so he was made a slave to sin or injustice, and to a debt that he could not repay, and to that unhappiness that consists in his powerlessness to recover the good things that he had lost.Footnote 16
Incarnation and the healing of the human will
If the consequences of sin are that we are now subject to the slavery of sin and of the devil, which is a form of punishment, and we no longer have the possibility of receiving the greatest good for which we were created, then it would make sense that Anselm's soteriology and christology would be shaped to address the impact on human nature of both consequences of sin. If the will has two objects, and it cannot will either justice or perfect happiness, both must be addressed to heal human nature, which Anselm addresses from the beginning of his exposition of the incarnation. Cur Deus homo, book 1, chapters 4–10, function as a kind of prolegomena to the rest of the argument, with Anselm and Boso clarifying several concepts prior to embarking on the larger argument of why the God-man. In several places of chapters 4–10 Anselm speaks of a reciprocal pattern of salvation that mirrors the pattern of sin and its impact on the will.
When Anselm talks about salvation in general, he has these two consequences of sin in mind, sometimes speaking of one, or of the other, or both. The twofold pattern of sin, therefore, should be matched by a twofold pattern of salvation – both logically and aesthetically – and that is just what we see in chapters 4–10 of the first book of Cur Deus homo. Logically it should match, because if only one consequence of sin is healed, that still leaves the other lacking. Additionally, there is an order to the pattern of salvation, because humans must first be forgiven for their sins and made righteous, and only then can be elevated to heaven. Aesthetically, salvation should match the twofold pattern of sin because the disorder of sin should be mirrored by a restoration of order by those who brought the disorder in the first place.
In chapter 6, in response to a question from unbelievers about what it is humans are redeemed from, Anselm, through Boso, says that ‘(1) He redeemed us from our sins and from his own wrath and from hell and from the power of the devil, whom he himself came to conquer on our behalf, because we could not do so ourselves, and (2) he redeemed for us the kingdom of heaven’.Footnote 17 Boso continues to provide the objections of unbelievers, again referencing the twofold pattern of salvation, when the objectors note that God has power both over the various punishments and the devil, as well as the kingdom of heaven. From the perspective of Anselm's interlocutors, a God who reigns over both heaven and hell has no need to become incarnate to save humans from the punishment of hell and restore them to heaven when God could simply will it.
In chapter 7, in reference to God's mercy and the need for sinners to be punished, Boso mentions that (1) ‘mercy should spare the sinner and free him’, and (2) ‘restore him (reducat)’.Footnote 18 And in chapter 9, Anselm argues that human beings were created (1) ‘just’ and (2) ‘for the purpose of being blessed in the enjoyment of God’.Footnote 19
Finally, as Anselm and Boso conclude their opening remarks in chapter 10, Anselm spells out some of the major premises of his argument, expanding on the remoto Christo methodology mentioned in the preface to Cur Deus homo:
So let's suppose that God's Incarnation and the things we say about that human being had never happened, and let's agree that human beings were made for a happiness that cannot be possessed in this life, that no one can attain such happiness unless his sins are forgiven, and that no human being passes through this life without sin. And let's assume the other things in which we must have faith in order to attain eternal salvation … It follows that remission of sins is necessary for human beings if they are to attain happiness.Footnote 20
Here the pattern of sin and salvation is offered in reverse order: we are made for heaven, we cannot get there if we sin and all humans sin, so humans cannot arrive at heaven without the forgiveness of sins.
The twofold impact of sin on the will as the central problem of satisfaction disappears until toward the end of Cur Deus homo, where Anselm begins to wrap up his argument in 2.19. Here Anselm speaks of the fittingness of the Son assigning the reward for his death to ‘his own parents and brothers whom he sees wasting away in poverty and in profound misery bound by their many and great debts, so that what they owe for their sins [i.e. punishment] he dismisses and what they lack on account of their sin [i.e. beatitude] may be given to them’.Footnote 21 That is, Christ's death on the cross has solved the central problem of human nature.
Sin, salvation and the structure of the Cur Deus homo
This twofold pattern of sin and salvation helps us better understand the structure of the Cur Deus homo, although Anselm only gives us guidance about its structure with respect to the two books in his preface. There he explains that the first book deals both with the objections of unbelievers and the Christian response and with the impossibility of humans being saved without Christ. The second book, he says, shows that humans were made for blessed immortality and that the only way they can become what they were made for is through the man-God.Footnote 22 Both books seek necessary reasons and operate through a remoto Christo theological method, the only method that would work for interlocutors who deny the truth of the New Testament. Additionally, the search for necessary reasons provides the understanding of the faith that Anselm seeks.
If the first book is about salvation and the second book is about achieving the beatific vision, we can begin to see how Anselm's argument is broadly conceived along the lines of the twofold problem of sin. In the case of the first book, if humans are going to be saved, they must be saved from something, which is punishment. The great majority of book 1, chapters 11–25, deals with the question of the consequences of human sin and the necessity for a just God to not allow sin to go unpunished. Anselm does not think that human punishment for disobedience will achieve God's ultimate aims for human beings, but Anselm is also clear that God would not be doing his job of universal governance if sin goes unchecked, as to do so would subtract from the beauty and order of God's creation.Footnote 23 This is not to say that the first book completely disregards the ultimate purpose of human nature, as both the discussion of the role of humans vis-à-vis the fall of the angels and the later discussions in chapters 24 and 25 mention the need for humans to achieve their goal, which cannot be done without the forgiveness of sin. Nevertheless, Anselm is clear that to first escape punishment for having an unjust will, sin must somehow be either punished or made right through satisfaction, and he ends book 1 with Boso in a state of despair that God's justice seems to make God's mercy disappear.Footnote 24 Punishment, it would seem, is the only option. But because it is necessary for some humans to reach their ordained end, yet they cannot do so with any sin, so ‘some satisfaction for sin … must be found outside of the Christian faith … or else one must believe in that faith without doubting it’.Footnote 25 That is, punishment of all human beings will not work, so some must be saved from punishment and restored to justice.
By the end of book 1, all of this only gets us clarity that humans owe something to God that they cannot pay, but must pay if they are to be forgiven for sin. Humans must be saved from the punishment they incurred from the fall – the first consequence of sin – yet at this point all we know is that the God-man must do so, but we are not quite sure how. Anselm ends book 1 only with an explanation that he wants to separate out his previous discussion with a fresh start in the next section.Footnote 26
Given the time he has spent on his excursus of humans and angels in chapters 16–18 of the first book, the beginning of book 2 seems rather curious. Without so much as a preamble, Anselm launches into an explanation of how human beings were created to be just so they could enjoy the vision of God. Boso does not even make an appearance until the third chapter. But it is the twofold consequence of sin that best helps us make sense of Anselm's sudden discussion of how humans were made for the beatific vision. If the first book is about the salvation from the first consequence of sin, which is punishment, then the second book, as Anselm tells us in the preface, argues that humans were made for blessed immortality which must also be restored through the God-man. Thus, the second consequence of sin, that we have lost the ability to delight in the vision of God, is treated in the second book while the restoration to justice and escape from punishment is the primary emphasis of the first book. If humans are to be restored to heaven, Anselm must begin by establishing that is their created purpose.
Anselm develops this line of argument throughout the second book. In chapter 2 Anselm briefly argues that human beings were not made for death, but rather for eternal life, since God made human beings ‘just for the sake of eternal happiness’ and so could not die except in the case where they were guilty.Footnote 27 In chapter 3 he argues that if humans are ‘to be perfectly restored’ they must be remade as they were initially intended before sin, which was with bodies that could be incorruptible, so that ‘if human beings had persevered in justice, their whole being – that is, soul and body – would be eternally happy’.Footnote 28 In the sixth chapter Anselm continues by arguing that it is necessary that ‘the heavenly city be made complete by human beings, and that cannot be the case unless this satisfaction is made – a satisfaction that only God can make and only human beings owe – then it is necessary that a God-man make this satisfaction’.Footnote 29
If the restoration of humanity to beatitude requires satisfaction by the God-man, Anselm consequently spends the next several chapters, 2.7–9, on the metaphysics of the God-man and a discussion of which divine person assumes human nature. Having established the necessity and reality of the God-man, Anselm then describes how the incarnate one will be sinless and thus just (2.10), yet will die under his own power even though he did not sin (2.11), and even in his suffering will be happy (2.12).Footnote 30 In these three chapters, then, Anselm shows how Christ perfects in his own will the twofold objects of the will for justice and happiness. Chapters 14 and 15 show how his death outweighs the sins of all humans, including those who killed him out of ignorance, which finally solves the famous passage about the weight of sin from 1.21.
The argument for how the God-man restores human beings to heaven, with little discussion of the punishment of book 1, is mostly completed by book 2.16, where Anselm argues that the power of Christ's death is such that it extends across space and time, because if it did not, then ‘not enough people could be present at his death as are necessary to build up the heavenly city’, since there were more fallen angels than humans at that time.Footnote 31 In fact, Anselm goes so far as to argue that because of the power of Christ's death across time there was never a time when there was not a human being who had attained the purpose which God had originally intended, and that even Adam and Eve were restored to their original purpose, which was heaven.
To reiterate, the boundaries between the two books are rather permeable, as sometimes Anselm mentions punishment for sin in book 2 and the goal of human life in book 1. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, it is the twofold structure of sin that best helps us make sense of his description of the work in his preface.
A complete satisfaction
The implications for this in Anselm's overall theory of satisfaction are important. The twofold consequences of sin require a twofold structure of satisfaction in response, which is what Anselm gives us in the Cur Deus homo in general, and specifically in his christology. While Anselm does not say so explicitly, it would seem to be the case, hypothetically, that if humans were only made for obedience in this life, and not for delighting in God in the next, then it might have been possible for another human being to restore human nature to the possibility of obedience, notwithstanding Anselm's arguments in book 1.5 to the contrary. That is, if all that humans needed to avoid punishment and service to the devil was to restore our will to justice by a restoration of obedience, then it should have been possible for only a man to do so, albeit one who had preserved justice. But the reality is that humans were created for something that they did not merit by nature – the enjoyment of God – and as Anselm argues in 1.5, this is why a human could not save us, because then we would owe our worship and obedience to the one who saved us and would no longer be capable of enjoying the vision of God. Therefore, this divine blessedness is something to which only God can restore us.
Satisfaction, then, must do two things for human nature and the will. First, it must restore human nature to obedience and justice, which had been impossible after the fall. Second, it must elevate human nature to the possibility of enjoying God. Thus, the restoration effected by the incarnation is one by which humans make satisfaction that allows them to be restored to their proper place in the universal order along with the sinless angels in heaven. The satisfaction has essentially two levels – what we already owe to God and an additional payment above what we owe. The God-man, as Anselm argues in 2.11, by living a life of perfect obedience, makes the first part of the satisfaction and at the same time serves as an example for us of how we too should offer up our obedience in the face of difficulties. But while this obedience may spare us the punishment that comes from our prior service to the devil, it is not sufficient to restore us to heaven, since we already owe pure obedience.Footnote 32 The satisfaction needed to restore us to heaven requires that the one making satisfaction ‘have something greater than everything that is less than God, and that he gives this to God of his own accord and not out of obligation’.Footnote 33 This, of course, is nothing other than the life of the God-man, which is of greater worth than all of creation, and so the additional payment is offered up by the God-man in the form of his life, a freely bestowed divine gift that is of such value that God rewards it by allowing for the salvation of all and the restoration to the beatific vision.
Following the internal logic of Anselm's thought we can see how the consequences of sin necessitate the God-man – perfectly human and perfectly divine united in one person. For it is only a human who should restore humanity to obedience and overthrow the devil, and yet it is only God who can elevate human nature to the heavenly enjoyment of God. Only the finite owes an infinite debt and yet it is only the infinite who can pay it with enough left over to elevate the finite to the infinite. The gift of the God-man, because his satisfaction is an act of supererogation, since he died of no necessity, solves the problem of sin once and for all, restoring humanity to the possibility of obedience and to its place in heaven.
Likewise, when Anselm dealt with the relationship between God's justice and mercy in the Proslogion, the result is less than satisfying, and at the end of book 1 of the Cur Deus homo God's mercy seems to be completely absent, even though the purpose of the whole text is to praise God's mercy and wise benevolence in the face of human sin.Footnote 34 For Anselm, however, only the God-man can unite justice and mercy in the face of human sin – the cross is the place where God's perfect justice and mercy are made visible to all. In his humanity he restores the justice by which humans can preserve the rectitude of the will for its own sake and in his divinity he offers the mercy and grace by which the restored sinner can enjoy God. A human will that has been incapable of a disposition for justice is now restored to a just obedience before God, while the will for advantage and beatitude that was capable of only willing for earthly advantage is now restored to the possibility of the greatest good for humans in the beatific vision. For Anselm, a God-man who can do this is surely that which none greater can be conceived and worthy of the highest praise.
