Justified True Belief

(●) The monk who tried to prove God from the idea of God alone, and who asked why God became man in the book that changed how the West speaks of the cross. + Anselm was an Italian boy from a valley in the Alps who became a monk in Normandy, an unwilling archbishop in England, and among the first in the medieval West to work out Christian doctrine by sustained argument rather than by collecting what earlier teachers had said. He is usually called the father of scholasticism, the method of the medieval schools, and the title is fair: the questions he asked and the way he asked them set the shape of Christian thinking for the next four centuries. Two of his books are still argued about in university seminars. In the Proslogion he offered a single argument for God’s existence drawn from nothing but the idea of God, and nine hundred years later philosophers are still divided over whether it works. In Cur Deus Homo, Latin for "Why God Became Man," he asked what exactly the cross accomplished and why nothing less would do, and the answer he gave stands behind most of what Western Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, have said about the atonement ever since. Here is the signature fact. He did not find the argument of the Proslogion by hunting for it. He hunted for it, could not find it, decided the search was a temptation to be resisted, tried to put it out of his mind, and then, as he tells the story himself in the book’s preface, one day when he was worn out with resisting it the proof simply offered itself.

(●) 1033 AD: He was born at the foot of the Alps, a boy who thought God kept house on the mountaintop. + Anselm was born around 1033 in Aosta, a small town in the kingdom of Burgundy that sits on the Italian side of the Alps, where the mountains stand up out of the valley on every side. His father Gundulf was a Lombard landowner with expensive habits. His mother Ermenberga came from an old Burgundian family and was, by every account, the serious Christian of the household and the one who taught him. Almost everything known about his boyhood comes from Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury who lived alongside Anselm for twenty years and wrote his life, the Vita Anselmi, largely from what Anselm told him in conversation. Eadmer says the boy asked where God lived and was told that God lived in heaven, above; and since the mountains were also above, and their peaks seemed to touch the sky, he concluded that God’s court must be up there. One night he dreamed he climbed the mountain, was received at the court, and was given bread of the purest white to eat. At about fifteen he asked to be admitted to a monastery. The abbot, unwilling to offend Gundulf, refused him. Anselm then prayed for an illness on the theory that a sick boy might be let in out of pity, fell ill, and was refused again. After that, Eadmer says frankly, the fever cooled, and for some years the young man gave himself to other things.

(●) c. 1056 AD: His mother died, his father turned against him, and he crossed the mountains and did not come back. + Ermenberga’s death took the ballast out of the house. Eadmer records that relations with Gundulf grew so bitter that whatever Anselm did was taken badly, and that he decided he could not stay. So, at about twenty-three, he left home with a single servant, crossed the Alps by way of Mont Cenis, and spent roughly three years drifting through Burgundy and France with no settled plan. Eadmer keeps one detail from the crossing that is worth having: the young man was so worn out on the mountain that he tried to eat snow, and his servant, searching a bag they both believed to be empty, found bread in it. Eadmer tells it as a mercy, and it reads like something Anselm remembered and repeated rather than something a biographer invented. What drew him at last out of the drifting was not a place but a person. In Normandy, at a poor abbey called Bec, there was a teacher whose reputation had spread across northern Europe, and Anselm went to find him.

(●) 1060 AD: He became a monk at Bec at twenty-seven, stayed thirty-three years, and wrote both of his famous books while running the house. + Bec had been founded a generation earlier by Herluin, a knight who gave up his arms, learned his letters late, and built the house with his own hands. It would have stayed a small country abbey except that Lanfranc of Pavia, the finest schoolmaster of his generation, had joined it and made its school famous. Anselm arrived around 1059 to study under him and made his monastic profession in 1060, at twenty-seven. He did hesitate. Eadmer preserves the shape of the hesitation, and it is a very human one: at Bec, Anselm reasoned, Lanfranc was so brilliant that nothing he himself did would ever be noticed. He put the question to Lanfranc, who declined to decide it and sent them both to Maurilius, the archbishop of Rouen. The verdict was: be a monk, and be one at Bec. Three years later Lanfranc left to run William the Conqueror’s new abbey at Caen, and Anselm, barely three years a monk and about thirty years old, was made prior, second in command, over the heads of older monks. That is not a thing a community forgives quickly. Some of them resented it, and one in particular, a young man named Osbern, made his life difficult for a long while, until patience won him over. Then in 1078 Herluin died and the monks elected Anselm abbot, head of the house and answerable for every soul in it. Those Bec years are the ones everything else rests on. He taught. He governed. He wrote hundreds of letters warm enough that later readers have found them startling, more like love letters to his friends than the correspondence of an administrator. And in the middle of all of it he produced the two books on which his fame as a thinker rests.

(●) c. 1077 AD: The single argument for God he had given up hunting arrived while he was trying not to think about it, and became the Proslogion. + He had already written the Monologion, at his monks’ request, a chain of arguments reasoning up from the goods we meet every day to a supreme good. Reading it back, he was dissatisfied with the chain. A chain has links, and every link is a place where a reader can stop and object; what he wanted instead was one argument that needed nothing else to prop it up, an argument that would establish on its own both that God exists and that God is everything Christians believe him to be. His own account of what followed, in the preface to the Proslogion, is one of the most honest paragraphs any philosopher has written about his own work. Sometimes the thing he was after seemed to be within reach, and then it slipped away entirely. At last, in despair, he decided to stop, "as if from the search for a thing which could not be found." But when he tried to shut the question out, so that his mind could be useful elsewhere, it pressed on him harder than before, with what he calls a kind of importunity. Importunity is the old word for that sort of pressing, the beggar at the door who will not stop knocking, and anyone who has lain awake with a problem knows the feeling exactly. And then, "one day, when I was exceedingly wearied with resisting its importunity, in the very conflict of my thoughts, the proof of which I had despaired offered itself." He first called the little book Faith Seeking Understanding, and the Monologion he called An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith. He thought neither deserved the name of a book or an author, and gave them their present titles, and put his name on them, only because Hugh, the archbishop of Lyons, told him to.

(●) 1093 AD: A dying king’s bishops forced a pastoral staff into his closed fist and made him archbishop of Canterbury. + Lanfranc had gone on from Caen to become archbishop of Canterbury under William the Conqueror, and died in 1089. The Conqueror’s son, William II, called Rufus, then simply left the office empty and collected its revenues himself, which was profitable and not unusual. For four years England had no archbishop. In March 1093, at Gloucester, Rufus fell seriously ill and thought he was dying. Frightened men make promises, and he named Anselm, who happened to be in England on abbey business. Anselm refused. He was sixty, he was a monk, and he could see exactly what the job would cost. What happened next is the strangest scene in his life, and Eadmer gives it to us in detail. The bishops carried him bodily to the king’s bedside, bent back his clenched fingers, and pressed the pastoral staff against them while he protested. The pastoral staff is the shepherd’s crook a bishop carries, and putting it into a man’s hand was how the office itself was handed over, so the ceremony worked whether the hand wanted it or not. They held his fist shut around it, carried him off to a neighbouring church, and declared him invested, which is the word for the thing being done. Eadmer records the image Anselm used for the match: they were yoking an untamed bull and an old and feeble sheep to the same plough. He was consecrated on 4 December 1093. The king recovered, as kings frightened into piety generally do, and the trouble began almost at once.

(●) 1097 AD: Driven out of England, he finished the book on why God became man while an exile in Italy. + The quarrels came one after another, and underneath every one of them lay the same question: whether an archbishop of England answered first to his king or to Rome. The first was about a strip of cloth. Anselm wanted to travel to Rome for the pallium, the band of white wool a pope sends a new archbishop as the sign of his office, and to Anselm this was simply what a new archbishop went and fetched. Rufus, who had recognised no pope at all, heard a man announcing that he took his office from somewhere outside England, and treated the request as a challenge to the crown. At the council of Rockingham in February 1095 the English bishops sided with the king, and Anselm stood very nearly alone in a room that had been assembled to break him. After that came a quarrel over the money and the men Canterbury owed for a campaign in Wales, and after that Anselm’s wish for a reforming council, which Rufus would not allow. In October 1097 the king let him go, and seized the revenues of Canterbury the moment he was gone. The exile turned out to be productive. Pope Urban II summoned him to the council of Bari in October 1098, where the Greek bishops of southern Italy were disputing a clause the Latin church had added to the creed. The question was where the Holy Spirit has his eternal origin within God: the Latins said from the Father and the Son, the Greeks from the Father alone. Anselm was called on to answer for the Latin side. And it was in these years, in a hill village in the country near Capua, that he finished the book he had begun in England, "when an exile in Capua," as he puts it in the preface. He wrote it under strain, and says so. He was suffering, he tells the reader, under great anguish of heart, "the origin and reason of which are known to God." Worse, the first half had been copied and circulated without his knowledge before he had finished revising it, so he cut short what he had meant to say. The book that resulted is Cur Deus Homo, and it is shorter than he wanted it to be.

(●) 1109 AD: With a second exile and a hard-won settlement behind him, he died as dawn broke on the Wednesday of Holy Week, wanting one more question settled. + Rufus was killed by an arrow in the New Forest in August 1100, and his brother Henry I recalled Anselm immediately. The peace lasted about as long as it took Henry to ask for exactly what his brother had wanted. He wanted homage from the archbishop, which is the ceremony in which a man knelt, put his hands between his lord’s, and declared himself that lord’s man, and he wanted to go on handing bishops the ring and staff of their office himself, which is what investiture meant. Anselm had sat in Rome in 1099 and heard both practices condemned, and having heard it, he would not go back on it. A second exile ran from 1103 to 1106. The quarrel was settled at Westminster in 1107, and the settlement worked by pulling apart two things that had always travelled together. A bishop holds a spiritual office, and he also holds land. So the king gave up the ring and the staff, which stand for the office, and kept the homage, which was owed for the acres. It looks like a small compromise, and in one sense it was, since nobody lost much on the day. What went quietly across the table was the principle. And it settled in England, years before anyone settled it elsewhere, a dispute that convulsed the rest of Europe for another fifteen years. In between, in 1102, he presided over a council at Westminster that passed twenty-nine reforming canons, canon being the church’s word for a rule it makes for itself. One of them forbade the trade "in which hitherto in England men were usually sold like brute animals," aimed above all at the sale of English slaves overseas. The council had no power to make law without the king, and the church itself went on holding slaves, so it is a decree rather than an abolition; it is still one of the earliest official acts against the slave trade in English history. His strength failed through his last year, and for the final six months he had to be carried into church each day for Mass. Eadmer, who was in the room, records that he said he would gladly stay a while longer if he could settle a question about the origin of the soul, since he doubted anyone else would settle it once he was gone. By the Tuesday of Holy Week he could no longer speak, though he could still lift his right hand to bless. He died at daybreak on Wednesday 21 April 1109, in his seventy-sixth year.

What He Taught

(T1) Believing is not the opposite of thinking; it is where thinking about God begins. + A student who refuses to accept a single rule of grammar until he has proved it will never learn the language. He takes the rules on trust from a teacher, uses them, and somewhere in the middle of using them he starts to see why the rules are what they are. Trust came first, and understanding grew inside it. That is very close to what Anselm meant. His phrase for it is fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, and it was the original title of the Proslogion. He did not mean that a Christian should stop asking questions. He meant almost the reverse: that faith is restless, that a person who loves God will naturally want to understand what he has been given, and that the seeking is an act of love rather than an audit. He was echoing Augustine, who had said "believe so that you may understand," and behind Augustine the Old Latin text he read at Isaiah 7:9, which ran "unless you believe, you will not understand." (Modern translations render the Hebrew of that verse differently: the ESV has "If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all." The principle Anselm draws from it does not stand or fall with the wording, and Scripture teaches it in other places.) Now notice the discipline he put on himself, because it is the surprising part. When his monks asked him for the Monologion, they asked that nothing in it be urged on the authority of Scripture, and he agreed. He argued for God, and then for the Trinity, from reason alone. Faith seeking understanding, in his hands, was not a licence to assume the answer. It was a man who already knew the answer going back to see whether the road could be walked.

(Q) "For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand." + Source: Anselm, Proslogium I (Deane translation, 1903). The line comes at the end of the book’s opening prayer. Anselm has just said that he does not try to penetrate God’s height, and does not pretend his understanding is equal to it, but longs to understand in some degree the truth his heart already believes and loves.

(T2) Everything we call good is good through some one thing, and that one thing is good through itself. + Think how loosely we use the word. A good knife cuts. A good horse runs. A good day is one that went well, a good man is one you would trust with your children, and a burglar can be very good at burgling. The uses are so different that you might think the word is just a noise we make about things we happen to like. Anselm did not think so. His question in the Monologion is whether all these things are good through one and the same thing, or each of them through something different, and his answer starts from something we do without noticing: we compare them. Say that one man is more just than another. You are not reporting two facts side by side, the way you would report their heights and their weights. You are holding them both up against something, and if there were no one thing they were both being held up against, the comparison would not mean anything at all. So there is a standard. Now put the question to the standard itself and only two answers are available. Either the standard is good through something further, in which case you have climbed one rung and the same question is waiting on the next one, or it is good through itself and the climbing stops. It cannot go on forever, so somewhere there is one supreme good, good through itself, through which everything else that is good is good. Anselm goes on from there to argue that this one thing must also be supremely great and the highest of all existing beings. This is what philosophers call an a posteriori argument: it starts from what we actually meet in the world and reasons back to what must lie behind it. The Proslogion argument (T3) does the opposite, working from an idea alone, and Anselm was perfectly aware of the difference; it is precisely why he went looking for the second kind. Two centuries later Thomas Aquinas built the fourth of his five ways for God’s existence on this same road, reasoning from degrees of goodness up to something that is the maximum of them all.

(Q) "Since there are goods so innumerable, whose great diversity we experience by the bodily senses, and discern by our mental faculties, must we not believe that there is some one thing, through which all goods whatever are good?" + Source: Anselm, Monologium I (Deane translation, 1903). Anselm has just imagined a man who knows nothing of God and has only ordinary mental powers, and has claimed that such a man could convince himself of a good deal by reason alone. This is the first step he offers him, chosen because it starts where anybody already stands: we all want the things we think are good.

(T3) God is that than which nothing greater can be thought, and a being of that description cannot be thought not to exist. + Anselm’s own illustration is a painter. Before he paints, the picture is in his mind and nowhere else; he has it in his understanding without understanding that it exists. Afterwards it hangs on a wall, and now it is in both places at once, in his understanding and in reality. Anselm asks his reader to hold on to that distinction, because everything turns on it. Then he sets out the argument, addressed as a prayer to God and aimed at the fool of Psalm 14:1 who says in his heart that there is no God: - Even the fool understands the phrase "that than which nothing greater can be thought." Understanding the phrase is enough to put the thing in his understanding, exactly as the unpainted picture is in the painter’s. - Now suppose that is all it is, a thing in the understanding and nowhere else. Something that exists in reality as well as in the mind is greater than something that exists in the mind only, in just the way the finished picture on the wall is more than the picture the painter was carrying around in his head. - But in saying that, we have thought of something greater: the very same being, existing in reality and not only in the mind. So the thing than which nothing greater can be thought turns out to be a thing than which something greater can be thought, which is a flat contradiction. - Something in the supposition has to give, and the only thing we supposed was that it exists in the mind alone. Therefore it exists in reality and not in the understanding alone. The Proslogion then presses further, and this second step matters more than the first. A being that cannot even be thought not to exist is greater than one that can be. So the being than which nothing greater can be thought does not merely happen to exist; it exists in such a way that its non-existence cannot be coherently thought at all. Everything else there is, Anselm adds, can be thought not to exist. God alone exists most truly, and of all things most. Immanuel Kant, seven centuries later, gave this kind of reasoning the name it now carries, the ontological argument, from the Greek for "being": an argument that runs from what God is to the fact that God is, without looking at the world along the way. It has never had an easy reception, and the honest thing to say is that it convinces almost nobody on first hearing, including many who cannot say what is wrong with it. Anselm was not conjuring. He was a man at prayer, asking to understand what he already worshipped, and the argument sits inside a chapter that begins by asking God for help.

(Q) "And it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist." + Source: Anselm, Proslogium III (Deane translation, 1903). The definition itself comes a chapter earlier: "And indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" (Proslogium II). Chapter III is the step Anselm cared about most. Two of his twentieth-century readers, Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne, argued that it is a distinct and stronger argument than the one in chapter II, and the modern versions of the argument nearly all descend from it.

(T4) Sin is a debt no creature can pay and a debt no one but a creature owes, so the one who paid it had to be both God and man. + Break a neighbour’s window and you owe him a window. But you also owe him something the glazier cannot supply: you have to make it right with him, and the size of that second debt depends on who he is and what you took from him. The Latin word for making it right is satisfactio, satisfaction, and in Anselm’s world it was an ordinary word for what a wrongdoer does to restore what he has damaged, as distinct from the punishment he suffers if he does not. Cur Deus Homo is a conversation with Boso, a monk of Bec who later became its abbot, and Boso is given the unbelievers’ questions to ask at full strength. Why could God not simply forgive? Why the humiliation of a birth and a death? Anselm’s first move is to make the reader feel the size of the problem rather than argue about it. Suppose, he says, you were told to look somewhere, and God said he did not will you to look; what in all creation would make it right for you to give that one glance against the will of God? Boso can find nothing. "You have not as yet estimated the great burden of sin," Anselm tells him, and that sentence is the hinge of the book. From there the argument is a vice closing: - What is owed to God is the whole submission of a rational creature’s will. Give it today and you have merely paid today’s debt; there is nothing left over to cover yesterday’s theft. - The debt is measured by the one wronged, and he is infinite, so the payment must be worth more than everything that is not God. - So only God has anything of that value to give, and only man is the one who owes it. If God simply wrote the debt off from his own side, it would not be man making it right, which was the whole point of the exercise. And if man paid everything a man can pay, it would still not be enough. - Therefore the one who pays has to be a single person who is both God and man, and what he offers has to be something he did not already owe. Obedience will not do, since every man owes God that already. But a man who has never sinned does not owe death, and so a sinless man’s death is the one thing he holds that is genuinely his to give away. Two things Anselm swept away in the process. The first was the old preaching picture of the cross as a ransom paid to the devil, or a trick played on him: God, he says, owed the devil nothing but punishment. The second was the idea that the cross changed God’s mind about us. The mercy is not what the Son extracted from the Father; the mercy is that the Father provided the Son.

(Q) "If it be necessary, therefore, as it appears, that the heavenly kingdom be made up of men, and this cannot be effected unless the aforesaid satisfaction be made, which none but God can make and none but man ought to make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it." + Source: Anselm, Cur Deus Homo II.6 (Deane translation, 1903). This is the sentence the whole book has been walking toward, and Boso’s reply is the only shout of joy in a work of tight argument: "Now blessed be God! we have made a great discovery with regard to our question."

(Q) "For what compassion can excel these words of the Father, addressed to the sinner doomed to eternal torments and having no way of escape: 'Take my only begotten Son and make him an offering for yourself;' or these words of the Son: 'Take me, and ransom your souls.'" + Source: Anselm, Cur Deus Homo II.20 (Deane translation, 1903). Boso had objected early in the book that all this talk of debt and holiness seemed to leave no room for God’s compassion. Anselm answers him here, at the end, and the answer is that the mercy was never in doubt; it was in the arrangement all along, and it turns out to be greater than anything that can be conceived. Whatever else the argument does, it ends in worship, and that is how the church received it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His argument for God found its first critic inside his own lifetime, and has never been laid to rest since. + The first answer came from a fellow monk. Gaunilo of Marmoutiers wrote a short reply called On Behalf of the Fool, and his objection is the one every student still meets. Imagine an island somewhere in the ocean, richer and more excellent than any land there is, and so hard to find that it is called the lost island. You understand the description perfectly. Does it follow that the island is out there? Obviously not. Then why should understanding a description of the greatest conceivable being put that being into the world? Anselm answered, and his answer is confident and good-humoured: the reasoning applies to one thing and one thing only, because only one thing is such that its non-existence cannot be thought. Bring him anything else, in reality or in thought alone, to which the same argument can be fitted, and he will find that thing and give the man his island, "not to be lost again." What is striking is what he did next. He asked that Gaunilo’s objection and his own reply be copied together with the Proslogion, and for nine hundred years they have been. After that the argument keeps dying and getting up again. Thomas Aquinas rejected it, and his reason is worth having: that God exists is self-evident in itself, he said, but it is not self-evident to us, because we do not have the sort of grasp of God’s nature that would let us read his existence off it. Creatures like us have to reason from effects instead. Bonaventure, writing in the same century, was warmer to it. The early modern philosophers picked it up again. René Descartes revived it in his fifth Meditation. Gottfried Leibniz thought it needed one repair before it would run, since a definition guarantees nothing until you have shown that the thing defined is even possible, and no contradiction hides inside it. Then Immanuel Kant gave the argument the name it now carries and its most famous objection: existence is not a property a thing can have or lack the way it can be red or heavy, so adding it to a definition adds nothing. The twentieth century took it up once more. Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne pressed the case that Anselm’s third chapter is a separate argument, and one that survives Kant, because it turns on necessary existence rather than on bare existence. Alvin Plantinga restated it in modal logic, the logic of possibility and necessity, and was careful about what he claimed at the end: the argument does not compel belief, but it does show that believing in a necessarily existing God is rational. Nine hundred years, and the verdict is still out.

(†) After Cur Deus Homo the West talked about the cross in a different vocabulary. + Before Anselm, the picture Christians most often reached for was rescue: humanity was in the devil’s hands, and the cross was the price paid or the trap sprung to get us out. Anselm did not deny that the cross defeats the devil. He denied that the devil was ever owed anything, and he moved the whole transaction where he thought Scripture puts it, between the sinner and God. Thomas Aquinas took the framework up and softened its hardest edge. Satisfaction, he agreed, is what Christ made; but he denied that God could not have done it otherwise, holding instead that this way was supremely fitting. In the sixteenth century the Reformers built on Anselm’s ground and changed the load-bearing wall. John Calvin, above all, spoke less of a debt to God’s honour and more of the penalty of God’s law borne in the sinner’s place, which is penal substitution: not "he restored what I could not restore" but "he was condemned in my stead." The difference is real, and it is why Anselm is claimed as an ancestor by Catholics and Protestants who disagree with each other about a great deal. The oldest way of speaking never went away, and in 1931 the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén argued in Christus Victor that in tidying up the ransom language Anselm had lost something the New Testament and the Greek fathers keep: the cross as God’s own victory over sin, death and the powers. Aulén overstated his history, and most readers now think Anselm gets a fairer hearing than Aulén gave him. But the point behind the complaint stands, and Anselm would not have quarrelled with it: Scripture praises the cross with more than one voice, as a ransom (Mark 10:45), as a sacrifice that turns away wrath (Romans 3:25), and as a public triumph over the rulers and authorities (Colossians 2:15). Anselm carried one of those strands further than anyone before him.

(†) Faith seeking understanding became the working motto of the schools, and of theologians nine centuries later. + Anselm is called the father of scholasticism, and the word needs unpacking, since it is now mostly used as an insult. Scholasticism was simply the method of the medieval schools: pose a sharp question, state the objections at their strongest, answer them by argument, and let the conclusion stand or fall on the reasoning. Anselm did not invent the classroom, but he did more than anyone before him in the medieval West to take Christian doctrine and work it out that way at length, and everything that follows, from Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non to Peter Lombard’s Sentences to the great Summae of the thirteenth century, is downstream of him. The habit that unsettled Lanfranc when he first read the Monologion, refusing to rest a conclusion on a great name, is the habit the universities were built on. His prayers travelled even further than his arguments. The Orationes sive Meditationes are addressed to God and to the saints in the first person singular, in language of an intensity nobody had used in a book of private prayer before, and they were copied across Europe and imitated for four hundred years. Countess Matilda of Tuscany asked for a collection and got one. A reader who knows Anselm only as the man with the clever argument has met about half of him. In 1931 Karl Barth, the most influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, published a book on the Proslogion called Fides Quaerens Intellectum, and argued that Anselm had been misread for centuries as a natural theologian trying to prove God to unbelievers. What Anselm was really doing, Barth said, was theology proper: thinking from inside faith, in prayer, about the God who had already spoken. Not everyone accepted the reading. But it put Anselm back at the centre of the argument about what theology is for, where he has stayed.

(†) Christians who honour him still fault him for claiming too much for reason, for pressing a single picture of the cross, and for what his reforms cost the married clergy of England. + Anselm is admired across Christendom, and his sharpest critics have mostly been men who admired him. Their complaints are worth stating plainly. - Proving too much. In his own preface to Cur Deus Homo he says the book proves "by absolute reasons," leaving Christ out of view "as if nothing had ever been known of him," that no man can be saved without Christ. That is a very large claim. Scripture presents the cross as a gift given rather than a conclusion forced, and warns that the wisdom of God is not the sort of thing the world reasons its way into (1 Corinthians 1:21; Romans 11:33). Anselm’s defenders answer that he is only unfolding what faith already holds, which is fair, and which is also not quite what "absolute reasons" says. - A necessity he takes back. He argues that it was necessary for God to complete what he had begun, which is a strong word and he means it to be. Then, in the same book, he insists that God does nothing by compulsion, and that this necessity is nothing more than the unchangeableness of God’s own goodness. Readers ever since have complained that the argument gets its force from the first statement and its orthodoxy from the second, and that he cannot keep both. - One frame for the cross. His argument is built on honor, the honour owed to a superior, and however that word is best translated out of his century, a single frame is a single frame. Scripture praises the cross in several registers at once, and a reader who takes Anselm as the whole account will hear less of the New Testament than is there. - The married clergy of England. The council he presided over at Westminster in 1102 ordered priests to give up their wives, and enforcement in the following years fell hard on English clergy whose fathers and grandfathers had been married priests, and on the women and children turned out of their homes. Christians have never agreed about the underlying rule, and the Eastern churches never adopted it. The human cost of enforcing it in England is not in dispute. None of that touches what he is loved for. Anselm was a man who prayed his way into his arguments and argued his way back into prayer, and who thought that a mind God had made was safe to use on the God who made it.