Anselm on the Rectus Ordus of Creation

A consistent feature of the thought of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) is his appeal to the concepts "rectitude," "order," and "fittingness." Though common to most of his works, no systematic attention has been given to what these concepts mean and what metaphysical and theological work they do in Anselm's thought. In this paper, I seek to fill this lacuna by arguing that Anselm is committed to three views: 1) all things have rectitude (rectus), which is defined as a thing doing what it is supposed to do according to its given purpose; 2) when things displaying rectitude come together, they form a system of right order (ordo); and 3) the ability of a thing to display rectitude in a system of right order is its fittingness (convenientia). Taken together, these three commitments account for this persistent theme in Anselm and serve to contextualize his independent arguments. I conclude with some indications as to why these three commitments might be suggestive for Anselmian studies and systematic theology more broadly.

It is difficult to engage in even a cursory reading of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and fail to notice that the concepts "rectitude," "order," and "fittingness" are critical to his arguments. Thus, G.R. Evans notes: "Alongside of 'ought' . . . we consistently find reflections on 'right order'. This was a notion that seemed to Anselm cardinal to any understanding not only of the 'natural' order and of 'political' order, but also of the ordering of thought. It belongs with convenientia and decentia, harmony and fittingness, in his scheme of proving."¹ Frequent as these statements are, however, few have given them the time and attention needed to understanding their purchase in a systematic way. In an effort to rectify this, I shall argue in this paper for three views to which I think Anselm is committed. The first view is that all things have rectitude (rectus), which is defined as a thing doing what it is supposed to do according to its given purpose. The second view is that when things displaying rectitude come together, they form a system of right order (ordo). Thirdly, the ability of a thing to display rectitude in a system of right order is its fittingness (convenientia). Put differently, rectitude is a feature of particulars, order is a feature of sets of tokens and fittingness is a feature of the relation that obtains between a token and its set. Before I go on to substantiate my claims, however, I shall briefly outline some other interpretations of these positions.

The Rectus Ordo—An Aesthetic?

It is not uncommon to find general statements of this element in Anselm's thought in the secondary literature. Thus,

Anselm goes to great lengths to show how the specific concerns of a given question fit within the framework of Christian doctrine; something he is able to do only because of his broader understanding of the relation between God and creation and the implications that has on the nature of reality. Thus, whether it be the dry, uninteresting aspects of medieval Latin grammar and signification theory or the deeply emotive yet theologically laden Prayers and Meditations or the intensely personal Monologion and Proslogion, the same model of reality provides the foundation on which Anselm is able to make his claims and to which his conclusions always point.²

But what kind of ontological concepts are these, and what work do they do for Anselm's doctrine of creation?³

Some have argued, in Anselm's case in particular, that this cluster of concepts is primarily aesthetic.⁴ That is, they take it that when Anselm makes an argument from something's fittingness, he intends primarily to highlight some aesthetic value (say, proportion) in God's plan of salvation, justifying the way that redemption was carried out. In a generally helpful monograph on the role of these concepts in Anselm's theology, David Hogg at times appears to take this view. His main conviction is that "[i]t is the presupposition of beauty and fittingness as displayed in the proportion and harmony between the creator and creation that, to the medieval mind, provides the only basis on which any proposition or series of propositions can be made."⁵ Thus, a view will be persuasive if it displays those aesthetic values that are fitting. For this reason, Hogg thinks the "most pervasive constituent of Anselm's weltbild . . . is aesthetics."⁶ Though he does not say this outright, it seems to me that Hogg and others read Anselm as thinking that aesthetics, or beauty, grounds subsequent ontological and theological claims. That is, they see Anselm as saying that if something is beautiful, then it is fitting—or, fittingness is contingent upon beauty.

This, however, strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. It isn't beauty that grounds fittingness for Anselm, but the other way around: if something is fitting, then it is beautiful. To interpret him as arguing for the first conditional would first require importing ad hoc standards into aesthetic ideals, like proportion, that already lend themselves to a definition of fittingness. Moreover, it is neither obvious nor necessary to read Anselm as saying that beauty entails fittingness. If the argument and exposition of the remainder of this paper are successful, an alternative reading would in fact exist and accounts for these elements in Anselm's thought more neatly. The authors who associate beauty with fittingness and order make a correct observation with an incorrect conditional. It is true that fittingness is closely associated with beauty, but Anselm's view seems much friendlier to thinking that all things that are fitting are subsequently beautiful, not the other way around. It remains to be seen, however, what fittingness, order, and rectitude are for Anselm.

Rectitude, to Right Order, to Fittingness

At the outset of this paper I mentioned that I shall be arguing for three views to which I think Anselm is committed that make up his doctrine of creation. In this section, I shall set forward a reading of each of these and show their logical connections.

The first and probably most fundamental view is that all things have rectitude (rectus), which is defined as a thing doing what it is supposed to do according to its given purpose. Anselm's argument for this takes a few steps to trace, but if one were to systematize them, they might go something like this. First, Anselm, along with many medieval theologians of the 12th century,⁷ thinks that creation bears the marks of having been made by its creator. Hogg picks up nicely on this point, arguing that there "is a very a strong belief in Anselm that creation is derivative; it bears the imprint of God's communicable attributes."⁸ As an illustration, we might say that if I am a bad paper-writer, then the papers I produce will have that property. That is, they will be bad in such a manner that they will have my own particular badness. Someone can pick up my paper, read a few lines, and conclude, "Ah, this looks like one of Fellipe's! Look at traits x, y and z."

In some places, Anselm clearly asserts his belief that God's creation bears the marks of God's nature. Thus, in the mode of prayer and meditation, he confesses to God,

I know, Lord, that you have made all that exists from nothing; they are, they were not, and you have made them; but you, the very one who made them, have always been and there was never when you were [not]; you have always been truly good, and always omnipotent, and therefore everything whatsoever that you have made, you have made good. . . . The creature's essence, on the other hand, has not always been, but went from not being into being through you and from you who always was being, [and it] is not essentially identical to goodness and potency; but when it is good, when it is able to do good, it is good from you, and it is able to do good from you, who is essentially good and omnipotent. . . . Yet, that creature, which you have not gifted with intelligence, praises you when a rational creature beholds that it has been ordered [to be] good and beautiful . . . , understanding that you have made and ordered it to be good and beautiful.⁹

Anselm believed that when one creates, the resultant product is somewhat like the creator. In the case of God, everything he creates reflects him, and whatever good things they have, they have in virtue of being created by the Creator. Thus, because God is good and beautiful by essence, creation too will be good and beautiful in a derivative way.¹⁰

In the Monologion, however, Anselm gives us the theological and metaphysical warrants for holding such a view. One of the affirmations he makes there is that "the supreme substance first said within itself, as it were, everything that it was going to create, and then brought it about in accordance with, and through, that inner verbalization."¹¹ But because there is exactly one divine substance and because this Word is of the kind by which the mind visualizes the thing itself, the "supreme essence's verbalization is necessarily nothing other than the supreme essence."¹² But every word one utters in this way (for instance, when I utter "laptop" in verbalizing the computer on which I type) is true only when it bears resemblance to the thing about which it is uttered. But does this mean that God's Word bears resemblance to the Creation?

Anselm flips the conundrum on its head. He argues that God's Word

is the only thing that exists. Created things, by comparison, do not exist. Nevertheless, they are created through and according to the Word. The truth of what exists is in the Word, and imitation of the supreme essence in created things. Thus it is not the Word (and the Word of the supreme truth is the supreme truth) that suffers increase or decrease in accordance with the degree of its similarity to creation, but the other way round. Necessarily, for every creature, the degree of greatness of its existence and the degree of comparative excellence of its existence is the degree of its similarity to that which exists, and is supremely great.¹³

Anselm's argument is complex, but it can be disambiguated in the following way. The relation of my thinking "laptop" has with my computer is precisely the opposite relation God's Word has with creation. Whereas my utterance has truth only insofar as it bears resemblance to the computer, God's Word just is Truth (being consubstantial with the supreme essence) and whatever is created through this Word has truth derivatively, insofar as it is similar to it. So, because the Word is great, he utters great things. But things are only great insofar as they imitate the greatness of the Word, which is the only greatness that exists. Thus, creation is "a pale imitation"¹⁴ of the Word by which the supreme substance creates: "The likeness of creatures to the Word, however, is not a matter of pictorial resemblance, but of possessing a range of features that the Word also possesses."¹⁵ In short, God creates through the Word, the second Person of the Trinity, who has the fullness of the divine substance necessarily; the things created by that Word share a similarity with him, but whereas my utterance only has truth insofar as it imitates the product, the Word just is truth and existence, making the products he creates true and existing only insofar as they imitate him. But because both are uttered by/with Words, the imitation relation still obtains (albeit in different directions).

This does not mean, for Anselm, that creation is in any way necessary to what makes the Word a person in the Godhead. God's utterance just is his utterance of himself, but that utterance somehow also creates.¹⁶ Visser and Williams put it well: "In this way, Anselm argues, when the supreme wisdom understands itself, it generates its own likeness, which is consubstantial with itself. This likeness is the Word by which the supreme wisdom utters itself. But is there, in addition, a Word by which God utters creation as well? There is not. For as we have already seen, every word is the word—that is, the likeness—of something; and there is no word of creation in God."¹⁷ The knot is untangled once it is realized that the utterance in question is the subsistent relation that differentiates the second person of the Trinity, not a creative act. It would be absurd to think that it is this utterance that brings about creation, since the Word is not created nor is he creation. But in a different way, God does create through this utterance, for it is by the Word that he creates, not as a procession but as an external operation of the immanent Trinity. Thus, Anselm concludes, "So it follows, then, that it does not say what it creates by the word for what it creates. By what word, then, does it say what it creates? It can only be by the Word for itself. . . . Therefore it says whatever it says, by its Word for itself."¹⁸ I take this to be a simple distinction between immanent procession and an operation ad extra. Insofar as the term denotes a procession, the Word uttered is neither created nor creation. Insofar as the term denotes an operation ad extra (the operation by which God spoke all things into being), it says that the means by which whatever is created is that very Word, who was uttered via procession. Creation is not the result of an eternal procession, but made by the One eternally proceeding. Even more simply, I take the main claim of this section simply to assert that the primary, though not only, person by which God created all things was the Son.

Much of the theoretical heavy lifting is done by this point, so let us see where it has gotten us. The claim under consideration is that Anselm thinks that creation bears the marks of its Creator. This is so because God created all things through his uttered Word; words are typically true insofar as they imitate the things they are words of, but this Word is truth in itself by virtue of the divine substance, so the relation is flipped. Things are true, exist and have the divine similitudes that they have because they imitate the One by whom they exist, who alone has these properties.¹⁹ In short, because the Word created all things and words instantiate relations of imitation, creation bears the marks of its Creator through imitation.

Once this is seen, the remainder of the argument for the first view easily follows. Among the properties that are true of the divine substance is the property of having rectitude. This can be seen merely as an implication of Anselm's perfect being theology—whatever property is superlatively perfect belongs to the divine substance. Thus, the divine substance has superlatively perfect rectitude. But one need not rely on such deductions, for Anselm simply states that God, being "the highest truth," just "is rectitude."²⁰ But if the creation bears the marks of the Creator, and the Creator just is rectitude, then the creation also bears marks of rectitude.

It becomes important, then, to understand what it means for something to have rectitude, and with this we will arrive at Anselm's commitment to the first view. Ultimately, all things have a purpose for which they were made: "We have bodily members and five senses, each of which was equipped for its special purpose, and which we use as tools. For example, the hands are designed for seizing, the feet for walking, the tongue for speaking, and sight for seeing. So, too, the soul possesses certain powers which it employs like tools for appropriate functions."²¹ In his treatise on truth, moreover, Anselm defines rectitude as something properly doing that thing for which it was made, namely its purpose or function. Thus, a statement is true when it meets two criteria: first, it "does what it ought to" or "fulfills its function" according its "purpose";²² and second, it has as its function signifying "that what is is" by means of a properly-formed sentence.²³ This, Anselm will go on to argue, is the sentence's rectitude: "its truth is rectitude."²⁴ The upshot of this is that "rectitude (correctness) is a fundamentally teleological notion: statements are correct when they do what they were 'made for.'"²⁵

But if rectitude is something had by all things created by the Word and if it is defined as a thing doing what it is supposed to do according its purpose or function, then whence come purposes? Anselm's doctrine of creation comes in clearly here: "For just as fire when it heats exhibits the truth because it receives this from the one from whom it has existence, so too this utterance, namely 'It is day,' exhibits truth because it signifies that day is, whether or not it is day, since it is naturally fashioned to do so."²⁶ The answer to the question, "Fashioned by whom?" is implicitly, but clearly, "God": "Rectitude is a matter of natures or types, and it is God who makes natures and thus gives them their purpose. Creatures have no genuine power to confer purposes."²⁷ Because creatures are unable to establish purposes in creation,²⁸ God as their Creator is the one who confers on them their purposes. As the one who is himself the only perfect Truth (as we saw with the property "greatness" in the Monologion), it is only natural that he be the one to do so. So, "since there are, as it were, particular truths and rectitudes there must be a supreme truth and rectitude from which all others derive their existence."²⁹

In sum, then, it does seem that Anselm is committed to what I have called view one, namely, that all things have rectitude, defined as their proper function or what they are supposed to do. Visser and Williams summarize: "Something has rectitude because it accords with its purpose. Something receives its purpose from whatever caused it. God causes all things. So whatever is said to be true is true in virtue of being caused by God in accordance with his will, and God is Truth because he causes all things and establishes the standards by which they are to be evaluated."³⁰ My argument for thinking so has been that Anselm thinks (1) creation bears the marks of its Creator, (2) the Creator has or just is rectitude, and so (3) creation bears the marks of rectitude, entailing that everything has some purpose which, when fulfilled, means that it is acting in rectitude. Thus, Anselm is committed to the first view.

Having established this, it becomes easier to confirm the second view to which I think he is committed: When things displaying rectitude come together, they form a system of right order (ordo). Notice that what grounds his notion of order is not his feudal context, though that context might be complementary to this notion. Anselm gives fundamentally metaphysical and theological reasons for his notion of order, and so to ignore those dimensions in his thought is simply not being attentive enough to the subtleties of his thought. This is clear when we approach Anselm's work recognizing his "penchant to relate distinct aspects of reality to one another in a coherent whole."³¹ When we do so, we realize that Anselm thinks that the proper function of any given thing is supposed to relate to a matrix of other properly functioning things in complementary ways. Eugène Fairweather captured well this vision of reality: Anselm's "picture of the universe of things was dominated by the vision of ontological, intellectual and moral order, grounded in the nature of God himself, and expressed in the rectitude of creaturely being, thought and action."³² A picture of how this looks concretely might go like this:³³ vegetables have as one of their functions the nourishment of human beings, and when they do what they are supposed to do, they will accomplish that end. Dirt, however, has the purpose of being the kind of thing that nourishes vegetables in their growth. When it does what it is supposed to, it sustains the growth of vegetables, which is in turn the condition of possibility of human nourishment. Dirt, vegetables and humans thus form a system of right order insofar as they have come together as complementary beings whose proper functions are for one another.

Of course, things for Anselm are a bit more involved than dirt and veggies, for there are several levels of order about which he speaks. For instance, when asked whether it would be fitting for God to forgive sins on mercy alone (more on fittingness below), Anselm replies that God regulates sin by punishing it, so if "it is not punished, it is forgiven without having been regulated" and that "it is not fitting for God to allow anything in his kingdom to slip by unregulated."³⁴ He goes on to say that sin is the very thing in this kingdom whereby a creature takes away "honour from the creator" and does not "repay what he takes away"—nothing, in the end, "is more unjust to tolerate than the most intolerable thing in the universal order."³⁵ The picture we get here, and throughout the Cur Deus Homo, is that God as creator (and not necessarily as feudal lord) justly governs that which he has made. Part of that governance is that the rational beings that inhabit creation exercise their wills according to the purpose for which they were made, which is the preservation of justice.³⁶ When sinful beings fail to do so, they disrupt the proper functioning of the will with which they were made, and God, as ruler of the order in which these beings have sinned, must either punish them or atone for sin to rectify the order.

John Fortin has called this aspect of Anselm's atonement theology his "moral order," and goes on to identify two other kinds of order ("Salvific Order" and "Mystical Order"), all of which will be perfectly exemplified in heaven.³⁷ Whereas moral order indicates the sphere whereby all willing things uphold rectitude under God's rule, the salvific order describes the economy of salvation, which displays parallels of obedience and disobedience, trees and crosses, primordial mothers and virgins.³⁸ The mystical order, moreover, displays numerical propriety, best seen in Anselm's view, again inherited from Augustine, that the number of angels who fell will be replaced by a number of humans.³⁹ At each level, beings are displaying their rectitude (or their conspicuous lack of it) in relation to other beings according to their kinds. In this light, we can see that Anselm is indeed committed to the second view. Systems of right order include, for instance, the moral order in which rational beings uphold rectitude in their wills and will finally come together in the heavenly kingdom, where all order is perfectly displayed under the rule of the One is who perfectly orderly.⁴⁰

Finally we arrive at the third view to which I think Anselm is committed, namely, that the ability of a thing to display rectitude in a system of right order is its fittingness (convenientia).⁴¹ In one of the most illuminating articles on Anselm's notion of fittingness, Michael Root claims, in relation specifically to the moral order, that the "uprightness of the will is understood in relation to the ordo that structures all things. . . . In preserving an upright will, we take our place in an order that reflects and thus praises and honors God . . . the right order which fittingness expresses is a reflection of the being of God."⁴² Root's exposition nicely captures all three views we have described so far. That a will may be upright is the purpose or function for which it was made—this describes its rectitude. Wills come together in a moral order, and if they uphold their rectitude, this order will be a right order. And because God is the source of all rectitude and the Creator of all beings who have a purpose by which they uphold their rectitude, creation is right and fitting because of its having been created by him. We can now see, then, that fittingness is a consequence of all of the above considerations.

This must be inferred from Anselm's writings (as he has no explicit definition of fittingness), but it is seen most clearly when some of his claims in De Veritate are placed alongside his claims in the Cur Deus Homo. In DV, 9, 163, Anselm expands his considerations about rectitude, purpose and truth to "the essence of things." Doing so commits one to thinking that truth "is not only in those things which we are accustomed to call signs, but in all other things which we say there is true or false signification. Since one ought to do only what he ought to do, by the very fact someone does something, he says and signifies that he ought to do it. And if he ought to do what he does, he calls it true."⁴³ David Hogg glosses this argument in a suggestive way: "All things that have been created have been created for a purpose [rectitude]; they have been located within an intricate order; they have been assigned a place and a function, and they are required to act in accord with that order."⁴⁴ So far this gets us the first two views to which I've argued Anselm is committed; now, placing it alongside the CDH, we can see that this is sufficient to describe what makes something fitting. Root has noted how the "CDH can be typified as one large argument from unfittingness," and seeing how the rectitude and order are employed in the argument will go some way to defining what is fitting.⁴⁵

The key to understanding the argument of the CDH is that it would be unfitting for God to allow the order he has created in rectitude to persist in a state lacking rectitude—this is the necessity of the atonement. In other words, it is fitting that right order be restored through either punishment or atonement because right order is God's original intent. When right order is established and maintained, it yields fittingness, and something's being a part of such an order results in its fit within it. Thus, when speaking about the mystical order, Anselm asserts that rational beings "exist in a rationally calculated and perfect number known in advance by God, and that thus it would not be fitting for it to be greater or less."⁴⁶ The idea, of course, is that the mystical order is made up by classes of beings whose number displays rectitude. When that is achieved, the beings are fitting. Or again, in the salvific order, Anselm affirms that "it is necessary that God should accomplish what he has begun, in order that he may not appear, unfittingly, to be failing in his undertaking."⁴⁷ In the order of salvation, several agents and relations are involved (Eve/Mary, obedience) who must themselves display rectitude in this order. One of those agents is God, who acts with rectitude necessarily, and part of his doing so is that he fulfills the intentions had for creation at its outset. To do less would mean that God himself does not display the rectitude essentially his.⁴⁸ Thus, when God acts to fulfill his intentions for the salvific order, his actions are fitting. This is why Anselm can phrase the directive questions in the CDH in terms of fittingness⁴⁹—he is attempting to discern which acts properly display the intentions of God according to his rectitude in right order.⁵⁰ This is also why he can say in the midst of considering what the most fitting number of angels is that the goal of such considerations is to discern order and rectitude: "every created thing would be happy, each in its own way joining in eternal rejoicing in its Creator and in itself and in their mutual relation to one another, upon this final fulfillment of itself, so glorious and so amazing."⁵¹ It should be clear by now, I hope, that fittingness is beautiful! But it is beautiful precisely because of the metaphysical and theological structures Anselm has put into place to convince us of it.

Finally we have enough substance to assert Anselm's view of fittingness. From De Veritate, we saw that rectitude extends to the essences of all things, such that they all have some purpose that they must properly exercise in a particular kind of order. From Cur Deus Homo we've seen that when things display rectitude in their proper order, fittingness results. Thus, displaying rectitude in an order is sufficient for a being or order to be fitting.

So let us take stock. I've attempted to argue that Anselm is committed to three claims. To establish the first claim, that all things have rectitude defined as some purpose or function designating what it ought to do, I argued that Anselm thinks that creation bears the marks of its Creator, that the Creator has (or just is) rectitude and so all things the Creator has made bears the marks of rectitude. That led me to argue for the second view to which Anselm is committed, namely that when a system of things displaying rectitude comes together, it forms a system of right order. When such a system is formed, Anselm's third view results: A system with right order is fitting, and an individual's ability to display rectitude in that system is its fittingness. Another way to look at it, to which I have already alluded, is that rectitude is something ascribed to tokens or particulars, i.e., a carrot's purpose is to provide nourishment for a human being, and when it does so, it displays its rectitude. Right order, additionally, is something ascribed to sets of particulars, i.e., the set "carrot plus human being" is rightly ordered if its component particulars are displaying rectitude, namely the carrot nourishing a human being. Finally, fittingness is something ascribed to the right kind of relation obtaining between the particular and the set, i.e, a carrot nourishing a human being is a fitting thing for it to do given that it participates in a system of right order where its function is to do just that.

Conclusion

Such examples, however, are trivial, and their theological upshot is not yet obvious. In conclusion, then, what implications does Anselm's doctrine of creation have for theology today? I hope this systematic layout of his view will provide the grounds for such work, and here I can only make a couple of suggestions. On the one hand, my hope is that it contextualizes other dimensions of Anselm's theology and renders them somewhat more suggestive to contemporary theologians, which was my aim in mentioning the case of the atonement above. This may also apply to his ontological argument. One of its key premises is that there is a greatest being at the top of a gradually increasing line of great beings. This makes sense if all things were indeed created by the Word, who alone is great, and if all created beings derive that property from the Word. The degree of their imitation locates them on the line, but they could never be the greatest since their greatness is derivative. At this point, what is often considered a tendentious premise of Anselm's argument (due its seeming reliance on intuitions about which beings are greater than others) is given more robust philosophical and theological grounding.

On the other hand, this aspect of Anselm's theology may also be worthy of retrieval for contemporary theology. Historians have noted how a fundamental shift in the doctrine of creation occurred sometime in the 18th century wherein "all natural phenomena can be explained and understood by the mere mechanics of matter and motion."⁵² It seems to me that Anselm provides an alternative picture of reality that is at once metaphysically sophisticated and thoroughly theological, being able to explain key features of the world that are intuitive to many but unexplainable on a strictly naturalist metaphysical outlook. One such feature might be proper function. Philosophers have argued that proper function, if it exists objectively, cannot be accommodated by naturalism.⁵³ Anselm's doctrine of creation, by contrast, can accommodate proper function without any obvious incompatibilities with scientific inquiry. In point of fact, insofar as some kind of notion of proper function is required for scientific inquiry, Anselm's doctrine of creation may even provide a rich outlook in which to ground it. In a disenchanted world, then, Anselm may be a refreshing guide to properly orienting ourselves and our outlook of the world towards God and may be a reliable guide for faithfully seeking understanding in yet new contexts.