Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology

Faith seeking understanding

For most of the first Christian millennium, theology in the West grew up in monasteries, where monks read Scripture and the Fathers slowly and prayerfully (Monks, missions and the parting of East and West). In the eleventh century, as towns grew and cathedral schools multiplied, a new question pressed: can what we believe also be understood? Can its reasonableness be shown to someone who does not yet believe? The theology that pursued these questions in the schools came to be called scholastic, from the Latin schola, ‘school’.

Anselm (1033–1109) was born at Aosta in northern Italy, entered the Norman abbey of Bec around 1060, became its abbot, and in 1093 was made archbishop of Canterbury. Twice he went into exile after clashing with English kings over the freedom of the church. He was a monk before he was a schoolman, and most of what he wrote is either prayer or dialogue with his students.

His first title for the Proslogion (1077–1078) was ‘Faith seeking understanding’ Anselm, Proslogion, the Latin motto, fides quaerens intellectum, that stands over this course. He did not seek to understand in order to believe, he said; he believed in order to understand. Faith comes first, and reason follows it, wanting to know more deeply and love more truly what faith already holds.

In the Proslogion Anselm calls God ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’. Even the fool of the psalm, who says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14:1), understands those words when he hears them, so this being exists at least in his mind. But if it existed only in the mind, we could conceive of it existing in reality as well, which would be greater. So that than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist not only in thought but in reality.

A monk named Gaunilo replied ‘on behalf of the fool’: by that logic, imagining the most excellent of islands would make it exist. Anselm answered that the argument holds only for the one being than which nothing greater can be conceived, not for islands, and, as the story is told, he had the two pieces copied with the Proslogion. Thomas Aquinas later rejected the argument, since we do not know God's essence; in the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant objected that ‘exists’ adds nothing to the concept of a thing; philosophers still debate it. For Anselm, though, the book was first of all a prayer: from its first page to its last it is addressed to God.

Why God became man

In 1098, in exile, Anselm finished Why God Became Man Anselm, Why God Became Man. Written as a dialogue with his pupil Boso, it answers those who said it was unworthy of almighty God to become man and suffer. Setting Christ aside for the sake of argument, Anselm sought reasons that even an unbeliever could follow.

His answer runs like this. Every rational creature owes God the whole submission of its will; this is the honour due to him. Sin is the failure to render it, and so a debt. God cannot simply overlook it: either satisfaction must be made, repaying more than was taken, or punishment must follow. But we cannot pay, for we already owe God everything, and a sin against God outweighs the whole world. Only man ought to pay, and only God can; so the one who pays must be both God and man. Christ, sinless and owing no death, freely gave his life, and the reward due to that infinite gift he passed on to his brothers and sisters. Anselm also set aside the older idea that the devil held rights over humanity which God had to buy out.

Anselm argued from reason, but the Scripture beneath his argument is plain. Hebrews explains why the Son took our flesh and blood:

Now since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not the angels He helps, but the descendants of Abraham. For this reason He had to be made like His brothers in every way, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, in order to make atonement for the sins of the people.

Hebrews 2:14-17

Wesley says that this was "highly fit and proper, yea, necessary, in order to his design of redeeming them" Wesley, which is just what Anselm asked: whether the incarnation was both fitting for God and necessary for us. Paul says the cross shows God acting "so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). God does not wave sin away; he forgives sinners at a cost to himself.

Anselm's account of satisfaction shaped Western theology for centuries. Thomas Aquinas took it up and refined it (Thomas Aquinas), and the Reformers taught that Christ bore in our place the very punishment our sins deserved. Where Anselm had said ‘either satisfaction or punishment’, the Reformers said, in effect, satisfaction through punishment: Christ satisfied God's justice by bearing the penalty. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) walks Anselm's road almost step by step:

What manner of mediator and redeemer, then, must we seek? One who is a true and sinless man, and yet more powerful than all creatures; that is, one who is at the same time true God.

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 15

Matthew Henry still reasons in the language of debt: "it would not agree with his justice to demand the debt, when the Surety has paid it, and he has accepted that payment in full satisfaction" Matthew Henry.

Anselm has his critics. Some find in his picture the honour codes of a feudal world, a God whose honour comes before his love, and too little room for Christ's life, his resurrection and his victory over evil. His defenders answer that the honour he meant is not divine vanity but the right order of creation, and that the book ends in wonder at a mercy greater and more just than anything that can be imagined. The doctrine course's lesson The cross and atonement sets the main pictures side by side; see also Why did God become human? and Why did Jesus have to die?.

The schools and their questions

A generation later the most famous teacher in Paris was Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a brilliant logician remembered also for his love for Héloïse and its painful end. Around the 1120s he compiled Sic et Non, ‘Yes and No’: more than 150 questions, each with sayings of Scripture and the Fathers that seem to contradict one another. He did not mean to discredit the Fathers. His preface teaches students to weigh the meaning of words, the context and whether a text is genuine, and so to resolve the tension; doubt, he said, leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth. Posing a question, hearing the authorities on both sides and then answering became the backbone of scholastic method.

In his Commentary on Romans Abelard stressed that the love Christ showed in dying for us kindles love in us, and that this love frees us from slavery to sin Abelard, Commentary on Romans. As John says, "We love because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Later writers called this the moral influence view. But in the same commentary Abelard also speaks of Christ bearing the punishment of our sins, and many scholars doubt that the label captures his whole thought.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the Cistercian abbot and the most powerful preacher of his age, opposed Abelard fiercely. He believed Abelard weighed the mysteries of God on the scales of reason and shrank Christ's redemption to an example of love. At Bernard's urging a council at Sens (in 1140 or 1141; historians differ) condemned a list of Abelard's propositions. On his way to appeal to Rome, Abelard stopped at the abbey of Cluny, was reconciled with Bernard, and died in 1142 at a priory of Cluny.

In the 1150s Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160), a master at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris and later bishop of Paris, published his Four Books of Sentences Peter Lombard, Sentences: sayings of the Fathers, above all Augustine, arranged by topic, from God and the Trinity through creation and sin and the incarnation and the virtues to the sacraments and the last things. On disputed points it set out the authorities and judged between them calmly, and its list of seven sacraments became the standard one in the West.

Around 1200 the masters and students of Paris and Oxford organised themselves into universities. From the thirteenth century a theologian had to lecture on the Sentences before becoming a master; Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham both wrote commentaries on it, and around 1510 the young Martin Luther lectured on it at Erfurt. For centuries it was the textbook of Western theology.

Reason in the service of faith

What did this age leave us? Anselm and the schoolmen showed that faith does not stop thinking. Peter tells believers, "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). Reason is God's gift: it helps us say clearly what we believe, answer objections and hold the many words of Scripture together. Whenever we learn the faith by question and answer, as in a catechism, we inherit something from the schools.

The danger showed itself too. When reason stops serving faith and stands over it, it becomes speculation that presses on where Scripture is silent. Paul told Timothy to "reject foolish and ignorant speculation" (2 Timothy 2:23) and warned the Corinthians that "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1). Bernard's fear was not groundless. The Reformers would later fault the scholastics for following philosophy's questions more than Scripture's, yet they too taught the Bible with the logic and method the schools had sharpened.

Anselm's own way remains the best: theology done on one's knees. Faith that seeks understanding ends not in cleverness but in love and worship. The story goes on with Thomas Aquinas in the next lesson.

Practice