A Beginner’s Guide to “Why God Became Man” (Part 1)

Martin Thornton said of St. Anselm of Canterbury that he “occupies a place in English spirituality not unlike that of Chaucer in English letters. He is the father-founder who first brought all the essential elements together, who gave the school its clear character and stamp. In Anselm, English spiritual theology is embodied and potentially formed; formed as a young man who still needs to mature but who is no longer a child…” (English Spirituality, 156). Anselm was a Benedictine monk who occupied the Archbishopric of Canterbury during the tumultuous period following the Norman Conquest at the end of the 11th Century. Like many in the English school of Catholic theology, his writings were imaginative if not always precise. His critics often cited his poetic flourishes as harboring error. Even so, Anselm’s long career as a writer provided the theological motifs that would characterize English spirituality for centuries, well into the Reformation. His work, “Why God Became Man,” explores an argument for why God alone could save mankind from the debt of sin, and yet why it was necessary to become a man to do so. As with our posts on Athanasius, the following is presented as an introduction to Anselm in the hopes of making his work more approachable. 

For Anselm, the question of why God became man is not one of idle speculation but rather an exercise in faith seeking understanding. Of the occasion and audience for his treatise he specifically addresses those who have asked, “[...] not with a view to arriving at faith through reason, but in order that they may take delight in the understanding and contemplation of the things which they believe, and may be, as far as they are able, ready always to give satisfaction to all who ask the reason for the hope that is in us.” Significant, too, is the context within which he couches his argument: “I wish to be understood to apply to all that I say, namely, that if I say something which is not confirmed by a source of greater authority--even if I seem to be proving it by means of logic--it is to be accepted with only this degree of certainty: that it seems to be so provisionally, until God shall in some way reveal to me something better.” Essentially, Anselm defines his treatise as a meditation by the faithful and for the faithful, and one entirely submitted to the tradition of the Fathers. This is why writers like Thornton celebrate Anselm: to read him is to participate in a method of theological thinking that stabilizes the reader’s own method. To read this treatise is to learn how to think prayerfully and to rely on those who have gone before. 

The primary thrust of Anselm’s argument arises not immediately out of a vision of sin, but out of a vision of God’s intention for creating the “human race, clearly his most precious piece of workmanship.” Of this most precious work of God, Anselm is unequivocal in his assertion, “that rational nature was created to the end that it should love and choose, above all, the highest good, and that it should do this, not because of something else, but because of the highest good itself.” Moreover, “hence rational nature was created righteous to the end that it might be made happy by rejoicing in the highest good, that is, in God.” Anselm prohibits the notion that there was anything lacking in the creation of humanity, anticipating the notion that humanity’s fall was somehow justified. Further, he affirms the exalted goodness to which humankind was originally destined, which assertion rhetorically heightens the scandal of mankind’s rebellion and augments his sense of outrage at the failure of man to render proper honor to God in light of such beneficence. In short, the goodness and intention with which God originally destines the human creature establishes the rhetorical backdrop before which the deeper problem of sin emerges.

With Anselm’s argumentative shift to the problem of sin, one observes a rhetorical inversion of humankind’s original purpose in the problem he terms “dishonor.” He explains: “[...]to sin is nothing other than not to give God what is owed to him[...]No one sins through paying it, and everyone who does not pay it, sins [...] This is the sole honor, the complete honor, which we owe to God and which God demands from us.” The expression of sin as such obliges one immediately to regard one’s relationship to God in binary terms of the master-servant contract. The servant owes honor to the master, and a failure to do so incurs a relational debt in accordance with this contract. Moreover, Anselm continues, “As long as he does not repay what he has taken away, he remains in a state of guilt. And it is not sufficient merely to repay what has been taken away: rather, he ought to pay back more than he took, in proportion to the insult which he has inflicted.” This is why the problem of sin is insurmountable for mankind: they owe a tremendous debt that only they owe and yet they alone cannot repay.

More than just marring the relationship, the dual effect of sin amounts to a substantial withholding of what is God’s and a slight against the very relationship that obliges the initial gift of self. In this sense, mankind may be said to have robbed God of what is his own and offended him in his contract role of master, as such. Thus, sin engenders the problematic condition in which “[...]everyone who sins is under an obligation to repay to God the honor which he has violently taken from him, and this is the satisfaction which every sinner is obliged to give to God.” Anselm further nuances the problem of sin in terms of this twofold debt that must be repaid to God: “When you are rendering to God something which you owe him, even if you have not sinned, you ought not to reckon this to be recompense for what you owe him for sin. For you owe to God all the things to which you refer. Moreover, “you do not therefore give recompense if you do not give something greater than the entity on account of which you ought not to have committed the sin.” As such, any given human is incapable of repaying this debt, being unable to give greater than what is required so as to remediate the honor-offense to God. The problem of sin, then, is that of an unsatisfied debt.

How can mankind be rescued from the weight of this debt? That is the answer Anselm goes on to explore in the second half of his treatise, and which we will explore in our next post.