The Radiance of Freedom

Anselm's soteriology

... This furthur sheds light on the central concept of debere. God is simply free; he owes no man anything. The redemption of the sinner by Christ is not a ransom, as if the devil had any rights over man which he could assert against God. Not the least necessity saddles God's freedom if he decides freely (sponte) to save lost mankind. And the whole obedience of the incarnate Son depends entirely on the spontaneity of his love and simply unfolds the inner necessities of this free love, in including the very mystery of Gethsemane, the heavy bearing of the guilt of the world and the death.

The whole trinitarian mystery between the Father and the Son -- that the Son obeys really and to the end, and on the other side that the Father compels nothing but allows the Son's way of sacrifice however one contemplates it, is such a mystery of spontaneous, unforced love.

And just this absolute, because divine, spontaneity in the sacrifice of the Son determines its utmost costliness, which outweighs infinitely all the guilt of the world. The sacrifice consists, however, in the fact that God of his free love really enters worldly destiny, really humbles himself to be included in the lineage of Adam, in that he becomes the son of Mary, and yet thereby, because all depends on freedom, does not fall under the sway of Adam, as did all the others who are included in his seed as members of his lineage .

This assumption of worldly necessities into the free will of God which is not inwardly affected by them, that is, the assumption of worldly necessities into the necessities of intra-divine love, now raises the question: how far is God's plan of creation affected by the sin brought about by man's free will? If God owes nothing to any creature, does he owe it to himself, in view of his responsibility for the consequences of the world he has undertaken, to intervene and redeem, and indeed in just such a manner as is demanded by the linking of the necessities of the world order with those of his divine freedom?

Man has violated God's glory in that 'he has taken away from God whatever he has planned to make out of human nature.' 'For the wisdom of the artist is praised and declared according to the success of his work. As human nature, then, the precious work of God, on account of which he is to be glorified, diminishes or soils itself, so does it by its own fault dishonour God. There has then been withheld (subtrahitur) from God what is 'justly owed' him.

But this withholding of honor must first be made good in the right measure: 'When the creature wills what it ought to will, it honors God -- not because it bestows something on him, but because it willingly submits itself to God's will and direction, and keeps its own place in the universe of things, and maintains the beauty of that same universe, as far as in it lies.'

But if it does not do this, then it 'disturbs the universitatis ordinem et pulchritudinem, as far as lies in it, although of course it cannot injure or diminish the power and dignity of God.' For, Anselm continues in the working out of an Augustinian meditation, the beauty of the world-order and therefore the glory of God are in any case intact, because God's distributive justice sees to it that order is preserved even in the event of an insurrection, so that no ex violate ordinis pulchritudine deformitas can develop; as little as any creature can escape any part of the canopy of heaven, except by approaching it at another point.'

However, this aesthetic justification of evil, which has eschatological significance for Augustine, has only a limited place in Anselm's scheme of thought, and he will attempt to pass beyond it from various directions. The reflections immediately following on the 'perfect number' of the elect, that is, of the eschatological civitas Dei with its constitution of angels and men, attempt to take him beyond Augustine in a subtle chain of reasoning: if the purpose in of the elect human beings were to fill up the number of the fallen angels, then each one of them would have to rejoice over the fall of the angel whose place he was taking -- but this would be unbearable in Christian terms. So the full number of the angels can in no way have made up the full, eschatological number of the elect, and men were elected for their own sake and not simply as stop-gaps; and further, the material creation is not simply a replacement for the spiritual, but was originally created with a view to the perfected cosmos, which should consist of both spirit and matter.'

So Anselm does not stop, in what concerns the injured honour of God, at a consideration of the ordo congruus universitatis rerum: no matter how intact God's honour remains because of his punitive Justice, his love still suffers loss which dishonours it and which must ultimately be made good. The insubordinate will deprives God of his own most proper good: ipsi Deo aufert quod proprie et singulariter debet habere.

And as all the angels and just men, as the whole civitas Dei and God himself are grateful (gratiosi) to the lover who helps to build up the city of God, so contrariwise are they all wounded by the fact that the wicked banish (extorres) themselves from the holy city.

'Just as any man sorrows and mourns if he in any way loses what he has acquired for his needs and his advancement, so, as it were, does God sorrow and mourn too, when he sees how man, whom he created for himself, has been abducted by the devil and is to be lost to him for ever. So indeed are the damned designated lost, because they are lost to God, for whose kingdom and glorification they were created.'

And so the tender thought can find expression, that the just man confers a benefit on God himself (beneficium praestabit), is in a certain way profitable to him (quadam rations prodesse videtur), that God himself is grateful to the lover for his love (Deus ei scit gratias).

Love indeed is conceivable only as a mutual occurrence, and that rectitudo, which Anselm erected into the supreme concept embracing the whole of logic, ethics and aesthetics, ends in this mutuality: 'God must be loved... from rectitude (rectitudine), because he gives us everything that we have, even our very being. And so must we love him all the more than ourselves, the greater he is who gave himself for us and himself wills to keep us for himself.'

So much may lead us to suspect, indeed to see, that Anselm's doctrine of redemption, his so-called doctrine of satisfaction, will have about it nothing of the juristic. On the contrary, he is at pains to defend himself against any idea of a God of justice, who would so delight in or stand in need of the blood of the innocent that apart from his death he would not pardon the guilty.

But this would be the clear implication if God were to let himself be reconciled through the sacrifice of his Son in such a way that he 'reckoned' the merit of this death to the guilty and therefore let them off their punishment.

It is not a matter of reckoning, but of inner, ontological union: no one will willingly add a blemished pearl to his treasure. If God were therefore to forgive man, because man, in the powerlessness he brought on himself by his sin, cannot pay his debt, 'surely that is to say that God remits what he cannot get; but it is mockery to ascribe such mercy to God'; and besides, man would be in heaven eternally one who could not pay and therefore one who is needy (egens) and thus deprived of blessedness.

'Therefore Anselm used to say, to the astonishment of many, that he would prefer to be free from sin and to bear hell innocently than to go to the kingdom of heaven polluted with the stain of sin.' (Eadmer, Vita II: 22)

The moment of 'rectitude' in the Christian explanation lies therefore not so much abstractly in the fact that guilt must be expiated, that for an infinite guilt an infinitely valuable penance must be made, as in the fact that it only happens justly (juste), when man, on whose side the guilt lies, can pay for himself, which means on a deeper level: 'when of himself he rises and again lifts himself up'.

If the accent were placed only on the divinity of the Son, then the whole would remain an inner-trinitarian concern, and man, who is meant to be the object of the whole business, would remain outside. But the accent is placed on the covenant between God and man and on the obligation God has placed on himself by his decision that man should remain an authentic partner. That is the undertaking of grace, which 'he undertook for our sake and not for his own, since he is in need of nothing. For what man was going to do was not concealed from him when he made him, but despite this, in creating man of his own goodness, he freely bound himself, as it were (sponte se ... quasi obligavit), to complete the good work once begun.'

For this reason nothing less costly is required than a God-man as redeemer -- man had indeed to become free for the covenant with God, that is, free for absolute freedom. A merely sinless man would not have sufficed here, for 'if any other person had redeemed man from eternal death, man would rightly be reckoned eternally as his servant. But in that case man would in no sense have been restored to the dignity he would have had if he had not sinned, that is, to be the servant of God alone, and equal in everything to the good angels.' Christ is not an (Arian) instance of mediation, but rather the effectiveness of the covenant itself (pacti efficacia"); on him, therefore, the whole human race founded in Adam can converge as its center.

On the level of debt (debere), the reckoning cannot be settled, and therefore Anselm's theory cannot be understood juristically. For in what way is man not 'indebted' to God? 'When you pay what you owe to God, even if you have not sinned, you must not count this as part of the debt you owe for sin'; the highest exertion of love would be demanded to meet God's covenantal promise, and in this highest exertion it would always have to be weighed 'that you do not possess what you give of yourself, but from him whose servants both you and he to whom you give are.... As for obedience, what do you give to God that you do not owe him, to whose command you owe all that you are and have and can do?'

From this point it becomes only negatively clear that the freedom of the sinner, despoiled as it is of its capacity to act, restores to God nothing of what he owes him -- but has even Christ in his work of redemption not simply done what was owing? For if his work was well-pleasing to God, then 'he had to do what was better, especially since the creature owes to God all that it is and knows and can do.'

The answer to this can only be to point to the impetus of ever-greater love, how, beyond all calculable proportions, it is carried towards the ever-greater God.