{"id":11098,"date":"2018-02-17T13:39:44","date_gmt":"2018-02-17T17:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=11098"},"modified":"2018-02-18T14:22:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-18T18:22:24","slug":"stripes-healed-re-reading-st-anselms-cur-deus-homo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2018\/02\/stripes-healed-re-reading-st-anselms-cur-deus-homo.html","title":{"rendered":"By His Stripes We Are Healed: Re-reading St Anselm’s “Cur Deus Homo”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Anselm,<\/a>>In my project of revisiting my past in prayer, I\u2019ve reached 1998, the year of my conversion. (And in certain ways a moral low point, which is a weird thing to recognize about the year you became a Christian.) I re-read St Anselm, probably for the first time since college and maybe for the first time ever. Not the \u201contological proof of God,\u201d which has never done much for me: Let\u2019s all do math on a rollercoaster, and at the end, we\u2019ve proved Platonic Forms. No thanks. But readers of Gay & Catholic<\/em><\/a> may remember that Cur Deus Homo<\/em><\/a>, Anselm\u2019s dialogue on the Incarnation and Crucifixion, was maybe the single most important book in my conversion.<\/p>\n

What would it be like on third (or second) reading? CDH<\/em> is the only piece of Scholastic theology I\u2019ve ever really loved\u2013would it still compel and startle me, or would it seem rigid and legalistic, even punitive?<\/p>\n

Oh gosh, you guys, St Anselm is so great. Here are some notes from the re-read.\u00a0I apologize if I get anything wrong here, & welcome correction. I\u2019m not going to try to summarize his central argument, although I was relieved to find that I did an okayish job of it in G&C<\/em> despite being too lazy to actually go and re-read it back then. (Work is a four-letter word.) I still find it compelling as well as consoling. A++++ would convert again.<\/p>\n

# What leapt out at me this time around is that Anselm consistently relies on aesthetics to explain or define his moral terms. In CDH<\/em> justice = balance = order = harmony = beauty<\/em>. Reason is an allied term: What is reasonable is also beautiful, even \u201csweet\u201d and \u201cdesirable.\u201d I think you could add \u201cpeace\u201d to this list of terms which refer to different aspects of the same thing, although Anselm\u2013or his translator, who for me was S.N. Deane\u2013doesn\u2019t throw that in.<\/p>\n

Aside from the forms of balance, justice, and beauty (or \u201cfittingness,\u201d another aesthetic term) which play a role in the central argument, Anselm also offers various curlicues along the sides. Some of these aren\u2019t so convincing but almost all rely on symmetries: traditional ones like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil as the wood of the Cross, or Mary as second Eve, as well as a few which I think are original to Anselm. He just really clearly thinks balance is beautiful and whenever he tries to figure out what God might do he assumes it would be beautiful and therefore<\/em> just. Even the weird stuff about the number of angels is about balance.<\/p>\n

# What the book is about, the beautiful and harmonious and fitting thing, is Jesus\u2019 death under torture on the Cross. But CDH<\/em> doesn\u2019t come across as prettifying the Crucifixion or distracting us from its lurid horror. Anselm assumes it is shocking to us and works to show that it may also be beautiful: a restoration of order that looks like<\/em> a disruption and defeat.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t do the thing other writers on the Crucifixion have done, of really rolling around in the humiliation of the Cross. That Saving Shame<\/em><\/a> book quotes Tertullian: \u201cWhy do you destroy the necessary disgrace of faith? Whatever is unworthy of God is helpful to me\u201d because it prompts me to confess all the more shamelessly that Christ e.g. was born, was cradled in a manger, died on a cross; this is the folly we preach & the source of our salvation. Both \u201cjustice as beauty, explored using reason\u201d and \u201chumiliation as sublimity, explored using shock and absurdity\u201d are true, and I\u2019m grateful that I was drawn to Anselm early on, since my personality overall is more uhhhh Tertullianish on this question.<\/p>\n

# We were made for happiness, and our happiness can only be complete or real when we are enjoying God. We owe God entire obedience<\/a>\u2013all our will and all our acts\u2013and in the payment of this \u201cdebt\u201d of obedience lies our happiness<\/em>. Meanwhile God does not desire our suffering or the suffering of His Son. What He wills is obedience, and in a broken world, this obedience leads Jesus through suffering and death. Our own obedience will lead us down the same hard path, in order that we may be restored to happiness.<\/p>\n

# Anselm is very clear that debts must be paid, and the debt metaphor recurs throughout the work (as it does in the Gospels). He\u2019s pro-punishment, but not the way I was back then. I was very much just old man Karamazov yelling that I must be hung from those hooks!!!<\/em><\/a>, and my G&C<\/em> summary is somewhat distorted because I think\/thought of punishment as suffering. Anselm\u2019s understanding of punishment is about balance and restoration. He often uses phrases like \u201cpaid for or punished,\u201d but he\u2019s always thinking about yielding up something owed, rather than about suffering pain. Punishment or satisfaction is essentially defined as restoring not only what was wrongfully taken from God (our obedience) but adding additionally on to it.<\/p>\n

# If that sounds like a thing you can\u2019t do, that is 100% Anselm\u2019s point. It\u2019s the first plank in his argument, in fact: our inability to pay our debts and do our duty. And the thing I noticed this time is that we are morally incapable because we are human\u2013because we participate in Man, to use Platonic language, because we participate in Adam\u2019s fall. If there is a particular part of your life where your helplessness has become noticeable to you, where it\u2019s inflamed or swollen and causing you shame and misery, that isn\u2019t because you\u2019re set apart from others. It\u2019s your experience of a universal incapacity. Whatever you feel sets you apart from the \u201cgood people\u201d (those creatures of myth), your addictions or your sexuality or your temper, the way you can\u2019t seem to stop yelling at your kids or screwing up at work\u2013all of that actually unites you to common human experience. You share that incapacity with the people you most admire, with children in the womb, with all the children of Eve.<\/p>\n

# Anselm is utterly confident that God wills our restoration, and will go to any lengths for us. He does gesture at some aesthetic arguments for that: How could a God Whose will is beauty leave us writhing in our ugliness? It\u2019s not fitting<\/em> that His creatures should never be able to enjoy the happiness for which He made them! But he mostly just assumes we all agree that God wills our rescue. This confidence is as bracing and encouraging as any of his specific arguments.<\/p>\n

# He\u2019s not a master of dialogue like Plato. I always champion dialogue over treatise, but the dialogue form does less work here than it does in e.g. Aelred\u2019s Spiritual Friendship<\/em>. The one thing it does do (other than letting us giggle when Anselm, who does not come across as even slightly vain or intellectually proud, makes his interlocutor reply with the equivalents of, \u201cIt is assuredly so, Socrates\u201d) is allow Anselm to clarify what he thinks he can and cannot do here. He states that he\u2019s not trying to convert or convince people\u2013although I was in fact converted and convinced! He\u2019s trying some things, to see if they can help us understand the faith we already hold. This modesty may be partly performative, but it\u2019s also a way of warning the reader. A couple times he notes explicitly that God\u2019s ways, including the specific questions under discussion, are beyond human reason.<\/p>\n

His theology avoids any hint that we could comprehend and thereby master God, and in fact recalls us to the littleness of our reason. He wants us to deepen our gratitude for our salvation by seeing its justice and beauty, but he doesn\u2019t ever want us to think we can fathom it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

>In my project of revisiting my past in prayer, I\u2019ve reached 1998, the year of my conversion. (And in certain ways a moral low point, which is a weird thing to recognize about the year you became a Christian.) 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