Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo)

An archbishop in exile

Anselm was born in 1033 at Aosta in northern Italy, entered the Norman abbey of Bec around 1060, became its abbot, and in 1093 was made archbishop of Canterbury. He had already written the Proslogion, the prayer in which faith seeks understanding. At Canterbury he clashed repeatedly with King William II over the freedom of the church, and late in 1097 he left England for Rome, the first of two exiles. See Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology.

He had begun Why God Became Man in England, at the request of others, and wrote it, the preface says, "while suffering under great anguish of heart, the origin and reason of which are known to God" Preface; many scholars think of his struggle with the king and the weight of his office. He finished it in exile in 1098; his biographer Eadmer places him then in a mountain village near Capua, in southern Italy (the preface's "Capra" in Vose).

The question is on the first page: "for what cause or necessity, in sooth, God became man" 1.1.1, and died to give the world life, when he might have done it another way. Unbelievers mocked it. Believers wanted the answer "not for the sake of attaining to faith by means of reason, but that they may be gladdened by understanding and meditating on those things which they believe" 1.1.1, and to give a reason for their hope.

Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you.

1 Peter 3:15

A dialogue in two books

Question and answer being plainer, Anselm takes as his partner the friend who pressed him hardest, "so that in this way Boso may question and Anselm reply" 1.1.1. Boso, a monk of Bec who later became its abbot, asks as a believer: it would be "a neglect if, after we are established in the faith, we do not seek to understand what we believe" 1.2.1. Yet he borrows "the words of infidels" 1.2.9, and at the end he claims the argument will "convince both Jews and Pagans by the mere force of reason" 2.22.1.

The preface sets out the method. Book I, "leaving Christ out of view (as if nothing had ever been known of him)" Preface, proves by absolute reasons that no one can be saved without him; Book II shows that we were made for a happy immortality in body and soul, which could not come "unless God became man" Preface. This setting aside of Christ, remoto Christo, is not doubt but a test: does the faith hold together even for someone who starts outside it?

The library holds the whole work in four parts, cut where the argument turns. The preface and Book I, 1–10 set the question and hear the objections; Book I, 11–25 asks what sin and satisfaction are, and shows that we cannot pay; Book II, 1–9 shows that the one who pays must be both God and man; and Book II, 10–22 explains his death and how it saves. Only the letter commending it to Pope Urban II, printed first in modern Latin editions, is not in this English.

Sin, satisfaction and the God-man

Anselm begins with the old harmonies of Adam and Christ, Eve and Mary, the tree of the fall and the tree of the cross 1.3.2. Paul sets Adam and Christ side by side in the same way:

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

Romans 5:19

Boso grants their beauty, but without solid ground unbelievers will think us "painting upon a cloud" 1.4.1. The dialogue also sets aside an idea many Fathers had used, that God had to respect the devil's rights over us: the devil owns nothing, Boso argues, and the bond Christ took away (Colossians 2:14) was God's decree, not the devil's 1.7.1.

Then Boso presses the sharpest objection: is it not "a strange thing if God so delights in, or requires, the blood of the innocent" 1.10.4? Anselm has already answered plainly: "God the Father did not treat that man as you seem to suppose, nor put to death the innocent for the guilty"; rather, "of his own accord he endured death for the salvation of men" 1.8.7. The Father asked for obedience, truth and justice kept in word and life; death came because the Son would not let them go 1.9.17.

No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.

John 10:18

Then comes the heart of the argument: "to sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due" 1.11.5. We owe a will wholly subject to God's, "the sole and complete debt of honor which we owe to God" 1.11.9; whoever withholds it robs God and must repay more than he took, for the insult, and this is satisfaction. Mercy alone would leave the guilty and the innocent alike before God 1.12.9, so "the honor taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow" 1.13.13. Yet this honour is not vanity, for "Nothing can be added to or taken from the honor of God"; what sin disturbs is the creature's own place in "the order and beauty of the universe" 1.15.2.

What can we pay? Boso offers repentance, self-denial, alms and obedience; all of it, Anselm answers, is owed already 1.20.7. When Boso supposes one repentant feeling would blot out a single look against God's will, Anselm replies, "You have not as yet estimated the great burden of sin" 1.21.3. Nor does our inability excuse us: like a slave who leapt into the ditch he was warned of, we brought it on ourselves 1.24.3.

Book II begins from our making: we were made to be happy in enjoying God 2.1.1, and God will finish what he began; that ‘necessity’ is only his unchanging goodness, "although the whole work which God does for man is of grace" 2.5.2. The payment must be greater than everything that is not God, yet it is man who owes it; so, since it is a satisfaction "which none but God can make and none but man ought to make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it" 2.6.9. Boso cries, "Now blessed be God!" 2.6.10 The two natures must be "united entire in one person" 2.7.1, as Chalcedon confessed (see Truly God and truly man), and it is most fitting that the Son become man 2.9.3.

Sinless, he owes no death, and his obedience is owed already; so he gives his life for God's honour, for "nothing can be more severe or difficult for man to do for God's honor, than to suffer death voluntarily when not bound by obligation" 2.11.35. Boso would bear every sin there is rather than do him the slightest injury 2.14.5; such a life, he agrees, "has even infinite value" 2.14.17. Since the Son needs nothing, the reward his gift has earned passes to his brothers, whose debt he remits 2.19.15. Here, Anselm says, is the mercy that seemed lost: the Father says to the sinner, "Take my only begotten Son and make him an offering for yourself"; the Son, "Take me, and ransom your souls" 2.20.1.

And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

1 John 4:10

How it has been received

The church has never fixed one account of how the cross saves, and Anselm's has been received very differently. Each tradition is best heard in its own terms.

A generation later Peter Abelard pressed Boso's question about the blood of the innocent, and stressed the love of Christ that kindles our love and frees us Abelard, Commentary on Romans; later writers called this the moral influence view, though many scholars doubt it was his whole thought. Thomas Aquinas kept satisfaction but loosened Anselm's necessity: God could have forgiven without satisfaction and done no injustice Summa III.46.2, yet the passion suited both his justice and his mercy III.46.1. The Catholic Church teaches that by his passion Christ made satisfaction for us to the Father Council of Trent, Decree on Justification.

The Reformers kept the word and joined what Anselm had set apart, satisfaction or punishment: Christ satisfied God's justice by bearing our punishment, the view called penal substitution. Calvin taught that to satisfy God's righteous judgment Christ had to feel the weight of divine vengeance Institutes 2.16. The Heidelberg Catechism walks Anselm's road, the same human nature that sinned must make satisfaction Q. 16, and then confesses that Christ bore "the burden of God's wrath" Q. 17. Many evangelicals hold this view central, reading that "the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him" (Isaiah 53:5).

In the twentieth century the Swedish Lutheran Gustaf Aulén called Anselm's the ‘Latin’ type, an offering made to God from the human side, and set against it the ‘classic’ view of the Fathers and Luther, in which God himself in Christ defeats sin, death and the devil Aulén, Christus Victor. Many historians think he drew the lines too sharply, but he recalled Christ's victory over "him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14). Orthodox theology has on the whole not made Anselm's framework its own. They sing at Easter that Christ has trampled down death by death, and speak of the cross and resurrection as the victory that heals our nature and brings us to share in God's life, as On the Incarnation does; many find Anselm's terms too legal.

Western critics, too, hear a feudal lord's honour in it and find little room for Christ's life and resurrection. Defenders answer that his honour is the right order of creation, that he speaks of Christ's example 2.18b.3 and victory over the devil 2.19.19, and that the book ends in praise of mercy. Many Christians hold these pictures together; see The cross and atonement and Why did Jesus have to die?

Reading it well

Read it as a dialogue: Boso is no straw man, and his objections are often ours. Anselm holds his conclusions humbly. Whatever higher authority does not confirm is only his view "until God in some way make a clearer revelation to me" 1.2.8, and "if I say anything which plainly opposes the Holy Scriptures, it is false" 1.18.31. His ‘must’ means no force above God, only that nothing unfitting can be said of him: "any reason, however small, if not overbalanced by a greater, has the force of necessity" 1.10.5.

Some pages may be read lightly at first. The digression on the angels (Book I, 16–18), whose places saved humanity is to fill, as Augustine had suggested, ends with Boso's "Now let us return from our digression" 1.18.32. The close arguments on power and necessity in Book II (chapters 10 and 17–18) can wait for a second reading. Christians weigh some asides differently: the Virgin cleansed beforehand by faith in her Son's death 2.16.12, or celibacy set above marriage 2.18b.7.

The English is J. G. Vose's, of 1854–55: ‘infidels’ are unbelievers, ‘viz.’ is namely and ‘in sooth’ truly. Vose often writes ‘holy’ where Anselm's Latin has iustus, just: upright, with a will that wants what God wants. Both his ‘satisfaction’ and his ‘atonement’ often render one Latin word, satisfactio. His numbering of Book II, 16–18, with an 18a and an 18b, differs a little from modern Latin editions.

The book ends not in a proof but in joy. Boso exclaims, "The universe can hear of nothing more reasonable, more sweet, more desirable" 2.19.16, and Anselm gives whatever is true in it to God, "who is blessed forever" 2.22.2. So Paul, after his long argument, ends in praise:

For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen.

Romans 11:36