St. Anselm's atonement

I talked about St. Hildegard's atonement concept on another recent post. This post, I will focus more on St. Anselm's atonement theology. St. Anselm's atonement theology is famously considered "satisfaction" theory but the terminological use of satisfaction is highly problematic. Joseph Ratzinger introduces us to the atonement theology of St. Anselm. St. Anselm argues "[b]y man's sin, which was aimed against God, the order of justice was violated beyond measure and God infinitely offended." (Introduction to Christianity, 231-232) If one offends a beggar, they commit a less offense but if one offends an infinite deity, that demands an infinite reparation. Thus, man, being finite, cannot ever hope to repay that debt to God. Thus, God comes into to offer up himself as reparation. This act of sacrifice frees us from the guilt we once bore. The view captures the Gospel's intentions but runs the risk of creating a more sinister view of God (232-233).

St. Anselm further goes into detail that punishment is required for sin to be forgiven. "[I]f no satisfaction is given, the way to regulate sin correctly is none other than to punish it" (Cur Deus Homo, Bk1, ch12). "If...it is not punished, it is forgiven without its having been regulated. ... But it is not fitting for God to have anything in his kingdom to slip by unregulated" (ibid). St. Anselm uses further argumentation to prove the need for punishment in the act of reconciliation. This certainly does seem rather odd and how it fits in with the Gospel of Christ remains to be seen at this point. While Christ was being crucified, he did not seek punishment for those spitting on him but prayed, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." Likewise, in the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor, the servant was forgiven by the king without there being punishment. It was when the unforgiving servant then refused to forgive someone who owed him much less and had that man thrown in jail that the punishment was meted out to the unforgiving servant. We'll get back to the term punishment a little later.

The purpose for St. Anselm's reasoning is that if sin is not paid, "it remains subject to no law" and "is in a position of greater freedom, if it is forgiven by mercy alone, than righteousness...it makes sinfulness resemble God" (ibid). Still needed in all of this seeming lack of Gospel-oriented view of St. Anselm's is what constitutes as punishment. St. Anselm finally describes what punishment consists of. "Since, therefore, man was created in such a way as to be capable of possessing blessed happiness, if he were not to sin, when he is deprived of blessedness and of all that is good, on account of sin, he is paying back what he has violently seized from his own property" (ch14). Now we are getting to a better understanding of what kind of punishment we are reflecting on in the context of St. Anselm. He finally reaches the analogy of the pearly covered in mud. If a pearl is knocked out of someone's hand by a malignant other, should that man not clean the pearl before he places it in the chest with his most prized possessions (ch19)? Already, we now see the sharp distinction between Anselmian atonement theology and the Lutheran theology of the snow-covered dung.

Such the nature of the recompensation for sin in Anselmian theology, "in this mortal life, your love and your yearning--here prayer is of relevance--to reach the state of being for which you were created; your grief because you are not yet there and your fear that you may not arrive at it: these feelings should be so strong that you ought not to feel any happiness except in things which assist you to reach your journey's end and give you hope of arriving there. For you do not deserve to have something which you do not love and yearn for in a way proportional to its importance, and about which you are grieved, because you do not yet have it and are still in such jeopardy as to whether you will have it or not." (ch20) And now Anslemian theology moves even closer to the Gospel than previously. St. Anselm's explanation on why God became man is really much more a story of how God's incarnation finally culminates in the restoration of man. It starts off with something seemingly caked in legalistic terminology but as one progresses toward the end, they find that it becomes more Gospel centered. It starts off with man being the mud-covered pearl. If man is the snow-covered dung as in the Lutheran doctrine, then the punishment that needs to occur bears a much different legal significance. Whereas if man is mud-covered pearl, then the punishment that is meted is far different. The act of loving God is needed to obtain but if we must give this in proportion, then we are constantly sinning. We are not fully capable of giving an infinite being its full due. We were tossed in the mud!

St. Anselm asks the question to his correspondent as to what was it that man stole away 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 the human species?" (ch23) Man, by sinning, refused to allow himself to be transformed to the glory that God had intended his creation to be made into. Thus, man robbed God by sinning of man. And now we circle back to punishment. "If...God remits what he was about to take away from a person against his will, because of that person's incapacity to make payment--in that case he is making his punishment lax and making a person happy on account of his sin" (ch24). Thus, man is found in a state of either "wishing to repay or not wishing to do so. But in the event that he has a desire to do what he is incapable of doing, he will be a person in want: in the event that he does not have this desire, he will be a wrongdoer." (ibid) Man must seek happiness first but if he is in want or if he is a wrongdoer, he is not happy. Thus, punishment is the taking away of man's happiness. Hence, to leave a man in sin and forgive him without the repayment, the unrepentant man is left in a state of sin which turns sin into happiness. But sin is not happiness.

Thus, if even the unbelievers admit that there is some degree of happiness to be sought, then there must be a way to pay it back. This means that Christ must be the one to repay what man owes in that he will never owe (ch25). For it is already established that God is infinite and man is finite. Whatever man does will always fall short of the infinite. Whatever man does, whatever acts of man's desire toward God, whatever love man gives, will never be proportionate to bring union on his own power with the infinite God. So the first book St. Anselm spends giving and providing a rational basis for the incarnation. The second book, he seeks to prove from theology what he has already stated from the rational reasoning for the incarnation of God. St. Anselm never claims his theory of the atonement as infallible. He states at the culmination, "[i]f we have said anything that ought to be corrected, I do not refuse correction. But if it is corroborated by the Testimony of Truth, as we think we have means of logic discovered, we ought to attribute this not to ourselves but to God, who is blessed throughout all ages. Amen." (Bk2, ch22)

Reading past the legalistic tendencies and jargon of St. Anselm, we actually are revealed quite a beautiful understanding of the atonement and incarnation of Christ. It is difficult to get caught up in the legalistic jargon he uses but when understood what punishment he refers to, we do not end up with a God who is sinister at all. Instead, we arrive at a theology that "takes account of crucial biblical and human insights; anyone who studies it with a little patience will have no difficulty seeing this" (Ratzinger, 233). Even still, the logic and legalistic arguments can "make the image of God appear in a sinister light" (233). This is quite obvious for those who peruse the first few chapters of Cur Deus Homo? and then set it aside refusing to read even further. The medieval theology is actually quite resistant to the Protestant nature of the atonement. Where St. Anselm really begins to clear up his theology is with the analogy of the pearl thrown into the mud. It is this which shows the sharp distinction between the Catholic nature of the atonement and the Protestant nature of the atonement. Developing in the Reformers was the concept of total depravity. That theology is hotly rejected in Catholic anthropological theology. Man is not seen as dung-covered snow in which God is covering up. Man is seen as mud-covered pearly that God is cleaning off, showing it to be what it really is underneath. Beauty.