Anselm of Canterbury

Anselm was born at Aosta, in the Burgundian Alps, in 1033 or 1034. After a wandering youth he crossed into Normandy to study under Lanfranc at the abbey of Bec, took the habit there, and rose to be prior and then abbot, making Bec one of the intellectual centers of Europe. At Bec he wrote the works that made his name: the Monologion, which argues from the degrees of goodness in things to a single supreme good, and the Proslogion, which compresses everything into one famous stroke, the ontological argument, reasoning that that than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone. The argument has been attacked from Anselm's own lifetime to the present, defended by thinkers from Descartes to modern modal logicians, and never quite killed; it remains the most discussed single argument in philosophical theology.

His program he stated in a phrase that named medieval thought's whole method: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. In 1093 he was dragged, genuinely protesting, to the see of Canterbury, and spent much of his episcopate in exile, contesting the rights of the church against Kings William Rufus and Henry I in the investiture quarrels. He died at Canterbury in 1109, was canonized, and in 1720 was declared a Doctor of the Church.

Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, Why God Became Man, finished in exile around 1098, asked the question its title states and answered it with a new account of the atonement. The older ransom theory had pictured the crucifixion as a price paid to the devil, who held humanity captive by right of conquest. Anselm dismissed the devil's rights entirely. Sin, he argued in the feudal vocabulary of honor and obligation, is the creature's failure to render God what is owed; it leaves a debt that justice cannot simply waive. Humanity owes the debt but cannot pay it; God can pay it but does not owe it; therefore only one who is both God and man can make the satisfaction, which is why God became man, and why the cross is neither a trick played on the devil nor an arbitrary display, but the necessary repair of a moral order.

The argument, restated and modified, became the trunk of Western atonement theology. Aquinas softened its necessity, the Reformers sharpened satisfaction into penal substitution, Abelard's moral influence account defined itself against it, and modern theology still stakes positions by their distance from Anselm. The atlas records the satisfaction theory as a doctrine in its own right, attributed to this book; few works of eight hundred pages have organized a field the way this short dialogue organized centuries of thought on why, in Christian terms, the death of Christ saves.