-
6. Uniting God with Human Being and Human Being with God
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
245 6 Uniting God with Human Being and Human Being with God Anselm’s trilogy of works on the Incarnation are linked not just by their subject matter but also were linked in Anselm’s thinking. De conceptu virginali, Anselm carefully explains in his preface, was prompted by a thread of argument left untied in Cur Deus homo that he is certain Boso will want completed.1 The connection between De incarnatione Verbi and Cur Deus homo has only recently come to light. A text edited by Constant Mews, apparently an earlier draft of a section of De incarnatione, contains the mention of the author’s desire to discuss not just the logic of the Incarnation and union of divine and human natures but the question which was to become the focal point of Cur Deus homo: “why however or by what beautiful and necessary reason or rational necessity did the supreme majesty—since he is capable of everything by will alone—assume our nature with our weakness and mortality.”2 In the context of replying to Roscelin and reflecting further on the more traditional Christological problems he raised, Anselm seems to have come to a different question he wanted to consider. Besides their interlocking composition and related subject matter, these works are linked by Anselm’s reflection in all of them on his own methodology and project. Drawn in by Roscelin and criticism of his own account of the Trinity in the Monologion, Anselm is driven to describe and justify his foray into these topics with these methods. He makes not just one but three tries of tone and method in response to Roscelin in the 1. DCV Praef., S II, 139. 2. Mews’s translation, along with the Latin text is found in Constant J. Mews, “St. Anselm and Roscelin: Some New Texts and Their Implications I: The De incarnatione Verbi and the Disputatio inter Christianum et Gentilem,” in Reason and Belief in the Age of Roscelin and Abelard (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate , 2002), VI, 60. The edition of the whole fragment can be found on 82–85 of the same essay. 246 God with Human Being and Human Being with God Epistola. In Cur Deus homo he manages a more polished, literary, and unified approach, one he carries forward, less elegantly but with the same ambition, in De conceptu. Richard Southern has argued that in this period Anselm’s work changed in an important way. The Monologion and Proslogion are internal dialogues, combinations of prayer and meditation and unconnected to contemporary debate, but Cur Deus homo takes up questions prompted by external objections and discussions. Southern points to Anselm’s discussion and criticism of the soteriology of the school of Laon as well as Anselm’s stated attempt to counter objections of “infidels” to the Incarnation and in dialogue with a real rather than fictional interlocutor, Boso in Cur Deus homo.3 Similar engagement with contemporary issues outside the monastery also marks the other two works. The Epistola is composed in response to external objections raised by Roscelin. De conceptu, besides continuing discussion of issues raised in Cur Deus homo, also takes up many of the same questions appearing in sentence collections associated with Laon.4 Southern clearly prefers the earlier Anselm, finding that Anselm’s particular genius seems to have been muted by his move beyond the cloister, and Evans laments a kind of dilution in these middle years, observing , “Anselm’s powers [were] much stretched by the effort to do justice to the claims of other men’s views in these treatises of his middle years.”5 Evans is surely right that Anselm is struggling to synthesize his own train of thought with issues raised by others, but we shall see that his powers are not waning but shifting. The encounter with objectors and contemporary discussions taking place outside the monastic context prompts Anselm to reflect explicitly on his own method. Anselm does not merely tell us his thoughts in this regard but shows us something about his own process. In letters written about Roscelin, in the drafts of the Epistola, and within the final version itself, we see Anselm trying out different responses to Roscelin and what he represents. In Cur Deus homo, by contrast, we have a finished and polished literary product in which Anselm manages to synthesize his way of considering questions with the kinds of questions being raised by others . Moreover, like his earlier set of dialogues, Cur Deus homo combines intellectual...