A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Oakes on Girard, Balthasar, and Atonement

    Fr. Edward T. Oakes has a rumination on Rene Girard and the Atonement over at the First Things blog.

    I’ve only read Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, but found it very thought-provoking. However, I think Fr. Oakes is on to something when he points out that Girard can’t make sense of the traditional idea that God was at work in the Cross of Christ. I also can’t help but think that Girard’s scheme of mimesis-and-scapegoating offers a reductive understanding of (non-Christian) religions. Though my knowledge of his work is admittedly limited.

  • Children of Men

    Warning: spoilers ahoy!

    When I first read P.D. James’s Children of Men back in January I wondered how in the world they’d managed to make a Hollywood movie out of it. After all, here’s a book where the heroes are a band of Christian terrorists, the villain is an overweening government that subsidizes euthanasia, and in which a recurring theme is the possibility that the universal infertility that has stricken the human race is a punishment from God.

    Well, having seen the film version just last night, I now know the answer: they didn’t make a movie out of James’s book. Sure there are similar ideas and plot contrivances, and characters who at least have the same names as some of James’s characters, but that’s about it. The movie seems to aspire to being a thinly-veiled diatribe against the Bush/Blair axis of evil and evacuates virtually all of the Christian themes and imagery.

    Still present is the broad theme of Theo, the main character, learning to sacrifice for something bigger than himself, but while in the novel he’s a self-absorbed and despondent academic who becomes sensitized to the possibly transcendent mystery of the first human birth in eighteen years, the movie version has him as an ex-radical who rediscovers the joys of stickin’ it to the man (complete with an old pot smoking hippie mentor played by Michael Caine). The question of human infertility frankly almost seems like little more than a distraction with the real issue being the government’s treatment of refugees (‘fugees) and the police state that rounds them up like animals in the name of “fighting terrorism” (in case you don’t get the connection, a cell that the heroes are herded into is helpfully labeled “Department of Homeland Security”).

    James’s book, by contrast, explores the despair and futility that afflicts a world without children. This makes the first birth in a generation far more powerful. “The Five Fishes” – the band of somewhat hapless dissidents whose name seems to have a distinctly Christian reference, made completely inexplicable in the film – have a simple faith that if they can just protect the mother untill the baby is born somehow everything will be ok. In the film, by contrast, rather than trusting in any kind of providence, you have a shadowy cabal of scientists to act as the deus ex machina.

    All of which is not to say that Children of Men is a bad movie. It certainly has its moments, and the cinematography is top-notch. It’s just a shame when such rich and interesting source material gets wasted so someone can take shots at George Bush and Tony Blair.

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 8

    Anselm spends the balance of Book One trying to defend the following argument:

    [I]f it is unfitting for God to elevate man with any stain upon him, to that for which he made him free from all stain, lest it should seem that God had repented of his good intent, or was unable to accomplish his designs; far more is it impossible, on account of the same unfitness, that no man should be exalted to that state for which he was made. Therefore, a satisfaction such as we have above proved necessary for sin, must be found apart from the Christian faith, which no reason can show; or else we must accept the Christian doctrine. (Bk. One, Ch. XXV)

    Let’s put it in more prosaic terms:

    1. If God were to elevate man to eternal happiness with any “stain upon him,” then God would either have repented of his good intent (to make man free from stain of guilt or injustice) or God would be unable to accomplish his intention to make man free from stain.

    2. It is unfitting that God should repent of his intent or be unable to to accomplish his intentions.

    3. Therefore, God would not elevate main with any stain of guilt or injustice.

    4. The only way for man to be elevated to eternal happiness without guilt or injustice is if satisfaction of sin is made.

    5. Man is incapable of offering satisfaction for sin.

    Therefore God must make satisfaction for sin.

    Premise (1) receives support from the following considerations: Suppose, Anselm says, that God intended to bring some human beings to eternal happiness in order to populate his celestial kingdom. This is in order to replace those angels who fell and, perhaps, to make up a foreordained number of rational denizens of the kingdom. If God didn’t do this then “it will follow that God either could not accomplish the good which he begun, or he will repent of having undertaken it; either of which is absurd.”

    But, Anselm asks, “Can you think that man, who has sinned, and never made satisfaction to God for his sin, but only been suffered to go unpunished, may become the equal of an angel who has never sinned?” In other words, if human beings are truly to be co-equal citizens in the kingdom of heaven, they have to be of the same stature as the unfallen angels. But how can a human sinner, who was neither punished nor made satisfaction for his sin, be the equal of a good angel who never disobeyed God? For “truth will not suffer man thus to be raised to an equality with holy beings.” For God to treat sinners as equals with unfallen angels would be a kind of lie.

    Anselm goes on to argue by analogy that a man who had a precious pearl which fell into the mire wouldn’t replace it in its casket without first cleaning it from all defilement. Likewise, how can we say that God would elevate men to heavenly status without their first being cleansed from their guilt and sin?

    Therefore, consider it settled that, without satisfaction, that is, without voluntary payment of the debt, God can neither pass by the sin unpunished, nor can the sinner attain that happiness, or happiness like that, which he had before he sinned; for man cannot in this way be restored, or become such as he was before he sinned. (Bk. One, Ch. XIX)

    He later asserts that “no unjust person shall be admitted to happiness; for as that happiness is complete in which there is nothing wanting, so it can belong to no one who is not so pure as to have no injustice found in him.”

    Premise (2) is to be taken as something like a self-evident truth, I think. If God repents of his intentions then his is subject to change. If he is unable to acheive his purposes he isn’t omnipotent. Either of these Anselm would regard as inconsistent with the divine nature.

    (3) follows from (1) and (2).

    (4) is a consequence of (3) and of what it means to make satisfaction for sin.

    Anselm has three distinct, though related, arguments for (5). The first is that we already owe everything we have and are to God, so we have no “surplus” from which to draw in order to make satisfaction for sin. As Boso admits, “If in justice I owe God myself and all my powers, even when I do not sin, I have nothing left to render to him for my sin.”

    The second argument is that any sin, however small, is infinite in gravity, and so nothing a finite creature could do could possible make satisfaction for even a single sin. This is becuase our obligation to God is absolute and “you make no satisfaction unless you restore something greater than the amount of that obligation, which should restrain you from committing the sin.”

    The third argument is that since man’s original task in paradise was to overcome the power of the devil by resisting the devil’s temptations and blandishments, at which he failed. This is what man “stole” from God, threatening to frustrate God’s intentions for him. And the only way to undo this act of disobedience would be a perfect act of obedience in resisting the devils temptations. But no fallen human is capable of this since “a sinful man can by no means do this, for a sinner cannot justify a sinner.”

    Here Boso objects that it seems unjust to demand of someone something (e.g. satisfaction for sin) that he is unable to provide. As Kant later said, “ought implies can.” But Anselm’s reply is that mankinds predicament, its damaged nature which is unable not to sin, is its own fault:

    Therefore, as it is a crime in man not to have that power which he received to avoid sin, it is also a crime to have that inability by which he can neither do right and avoid sin, nor restore the debt which he owes on account of his sin. For it is by his own free action that he loses that power, and falls into this inability. For not to have the power which one ought to have, is the same thing as to have the inability which one ought not to have. (Bk. One, Ch. XXIV)

    Anselm seems to be following Augustine here in holding that the guilt of our first parents’ sin, which resulted in a human nature damaged and unable to avoid (much less make recompense for) sin, is imputed to all their descendents. I personally don’t find this any less problematic here than in Augustine. However, even if we hold people responsible only for the sins they voluntarily commit, Anselm’s other arguments about our inability to make satisfaction for our various sins don’t seem seem to depend on this kind of inherited guilt. That is, we could think of it as each one of us “recapitulating” the Fall individually.

    From all this it follows that (to quote again the conclusion to the argument above):

    a satisfaction such as we have above proved necessary for sin, must be found apart from the Christian faith, which no reason can show; or else we must accept the Christian doctrine.

    I think (1) is the premise most of us are likely to balk at. Especially in the Lutheran tradition the righteousness of God is held to be displayed precisely in the justifying of sinners. This God who descends to have fellowship with sinners and outcasts is taken to be the very essence of the Gospel. Anselm’s insistence that no one can enjoy the presence of God without first being cleansed of sin and guilt seems to put conditions on God’s salvific will.

    However, it can be said in Anselm’s defense that God’s holiness can’t abide the presence of sin and that God won’t let his purposes for creation be thwarted by sin. Also, we do seem to sense the need for a cleansing of some sort. C.S. Lewis writes in defense of the idea of purgatory that we would feel a ceratin “unfittingness” being admitted to our Father’s house covered in filth and clothed with rags. Moreover, the Lutheran and Reformed traditions do emphasize the idea that there is an expiatory aspect to Christ’s work; God loves us while we were yet sinners in that Christ died for us. There is a cost to God’s saving work, but the cost is borne by God himself.

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 7

    The first time I read this I thought that chapters XVI to XVIII of Book One were kind of a weird tangent. There Anselm discusses at some length whether there was a specific number of rational beings God intended to bring to eternal happiness, and, if so, whether God’s purpose in saving human beings was to replace the number of angels who fell. But I now think there’s more to be gotten out of this line of thought than I’d originally thought.

    Anselm considers two possible views. The first is that there was a specific number of angels that God intended to live in heaven with him, and that his only reason for elevating some human beings to eternal life was to replace the number of angels who defected. The other possibility is that God had always intended to bring a certain number of angels and a certain number of human beings to blessedness, but that, after the fall of some angels, he had to save more human beings in order to make up the deficit. It’s axiomatic for Anselm that God has some specific number in mind: “There is no question that intelligent nature, which finds its happiness, both now and forever, in the contemplation of God, was foreseen by him in a certain reasonable and complete number, so that there would be an unfitness in its being either less or greater.”

    Anselm favors the view that God had always intended to save some humans, but that more than originally forseen will be saved in order to make up the deficit of angels:

    [I]f the perfection of the created universe is to be understood as consisting, not so much in the number of beings, as in the number of natures; it follows that human nature was either made to consummate this perfection, or that it was superfluous, which we should not dare affirm of the nature of the smallest reptile. Wherefore, then, it was made for itself, and not merely to restore the number of beings possessing another nature. From which it is plain that, even had no angel fallen, men would yet have had their place in the celestial kingdom. And hence it follows that there was not a perfect number of angels, even before a part fell; otherwise, of necessity some men or angels must fall, because it would be impossible that any should continue beyond the perfect number. (Bk. One, Chapter XVIII)

    God’s celestial kingdom would not be complete, Anselm argues, unless each nature, or at least each rational nature, was represented. Again we see that God’s purposes for creation are the context in which we need to understand Atonement according to Anselm. Leaving aside whether there is a specific number of beings that must populate heaven (though Anselm’s reasons for holding this are better than might be suspected), it shows that he conceives God as having purposes for (at least some of) his (rational) creatures: to bring them into a life of eternal communion with the divine Self. Rational nature, whether human or angelic, “finds its happiness, both now and forever, in the contemplation of God.”

    This suggests why God can’t be satisfied, so to speak, with merely punishing sin. God, on Anselm’s account, is not simply about balancing the books. He is about bringing creatures to the proper fulfillment; anything less would be a frustration of his purposes for creation. Admittedly Anselm’s juridical language can at times obscure this point. But seen in the larger context of his understanding of God and creation, I think we start to get a picture that has more continuity with certain patristic motifs such as “recapitulation.” God is interested in getting the human project back on track so that human nature can be elevated to its proper end.

  • Look for the label

    The last couple of posts got a bit bogged down in philosophical abstraction (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so I thought I’d offer an example of what I see as a good concrete proposal for changing our treatment of animals.

    The “Certified Humane” label is a program of Humane Farm Animal Care, a non-profit “created to offer a certification and labeling program for meat, eggs, dairy and poultry products from animals raised according to Humane Farm Animal Care’s Animal Care Standards.” Go here for a more deatiled description of what the Certified Humane label means. Go here for a list of participating producers. I’m a fan of Nellie’s Nest Eggs, produced in nearby New Hampshire (giving you a animal-friendly and localist twofer if you live round these parts). See the “Eco-Labels” report card for Certified Humane here.

    Part of the idea with something like this is that given enough demand for humanely-raised animal products, producers will respond with more options like this. This won’t please hard-core animal liberationists who argue that any use of animals, particularly for food, is immoral – and I’m not going to deny that I have some sympathy for that argument – but I think that the widespread adoption of these kinds of humane practices would be a vast improvement over industrial farming. And I think just about anybody can be brought to agree that humane treatment of farm animals is a worthy goal even if they hadn’t previously given much thought to the matter. It’s also impeccably free-market if you’re worried about the heavy hand of state intrusion.

  • God, animals, and rights

    Brandon has a very good post in response to the post below on animal rights. He argues for a view of rights that is grounded in justice and explicitly connected with our status as creatures of God (all of us, that is). He notes that this can be done in a quasi-Lockean manner, seeing all rights as ultimately derived from God, or in terms of natural piety based on relationship and benefits received:

    It is along these two lines, I think, that we can establish the claim that animals have at least a weak form of right. They have rights in virtue of being good creatures of God, and in virtue of being our benefactors, in however weak a sense. The problem with basing animal rights on interests is that the only interests that can establish rights are just rights, so an interest-based account, if it is to work at all, simply reduces to a justice-based one.

    I agree with pretty much all of this. In fact, it’s similar in significant ways to the case that Andrew Linzey has made for animal rights in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel. Linzey taks about “theos-rights” – that is, the rights of God with respect to his creatures. “When we speak of animal rights we conceptualise what is objectively owed to animals as a matter of justice by virtue of their Creator’s right.”

    I think Brandon may be right that an interst-based account, as an account of why some creatures are in the “moral club” so to speak, reduces to a justice based one as he’s laid it out. Interests by themselves don’t show that they must be respected. You need some principles of justice such as equality and desert. Still, having interests – that is, having the capacity for one’s experiential welfare to be affected – seems like a sufficient indication that a creature deserves to be given some moral consideration (I agree with Brandon that it may not be necessary, and that it’s possible, and indeed likely, that inanimate creation has moral claims). It’s often, if not primarily, with respect to experiential welfare that we apply our principles of justice. I think this is why some kind of interest-based account can play a role in filling out the contents of rights. Given that animals are good creations of God, wouldn’t some description of their vital interests be necessary in order to give content to what it means to respect them as creatures of God? An animal has a vital interest in, say, not being confined or killed in virtue of the kind of creature that it is and what it means for that creature’s life to go better or worse for it. And respecting that creature’s nature strikes me as an essential component of what it means to treat it as a good creature of God.

  • No rights without duties?

    A surprisingly common argument against animal rights goes like this: only beings capable of exercising moral choice and reasoning have rights. Animals don’t exercise moral choice and reasoning (i.e. they aren’t “moral agents”). Therefore animals don’t have rights.

    I say that the frequency with which this argument is made is surprising because it implicitly denies something that most of us, I think, believe, namely that there are certain human beings who have moral rights who aren’t necessarily moral agents. Infants, children, the severely mentally handicapped, the brain damaged and comatose, and people with severe Alzheimer’s are, almost certainly in some cases and quite probably in others, incapable of moral reasoning and choice, and yet no one (or hardly anyone) is willing to bite the bullet and say that these classes of human beings have no moral rights. In fact, I suspect that most of us would find the denial of moral rights to any or all of these classes of people to be morally monstrous.

    So, it’s hard to see why being a moral agent should be taken to be a necessary condition for being a moral patient, or an object of moral concern. No one proposes that we can treat, say, an infant any way we wish simply because he or she isn’t capable of moral reasoning and choice. It may be that being a moral agent is a sufficient condition for being a moral patient, but I’m hard pressed to see any reason why it should be necessary.

    I wonder if the roots of this argument lie in a kind of “contractualist” way of thinking about morality. That is, morality is seen as a kind of contract or bargain into which people enter in order to establish mutually beneficial rules of conduct. If that’s what morality was, then you could see the plausibility of holding that only moral agents had moral rights, since they’d be the only ones capable of entering into such a contract.

    But it’s pretty clear that’s not what morality is like, at least if we don’t want to abandon deeply held beliefs about the duties owed to infants, children, the mentally handicapped, etc. Contractualism has a very hard time making sense of moral duties that go beyond what self-interested rational agents have, or would agree to.

    A better criterion of who counts morally, far more plausible than the capacity for moral agency, is the capacity for experience. That is, the possibility that one’s life can go better or worse for oneself. Rocks don’t count morally because things can’t go better or worse for a rock. But things can certainly go better or worse for a chimpanzee, a pig, a chicken, a trout, and quite possibly a grasshopper. There’s no particular reason why the pain of an adult human being considered simply in itself should count for more than the the pain of an infant, or an animal, other things being equal. And there’s certainly no good reason why the fact that a being lacks the capacity for moral reasoning should entail that we can treat it in any way whatsoever, that anything goes.

    It doesn’t follow from this that animals would have all the same rights as human beings (a right to education, say, or health care, or subsidized museums). This is because, as philosopher Mark Rowlands has pointed out, they have no interests in such things. But they do have interests in things like not suffering, not being killed, and so on, and it’s not at all clear why those interests should be utterly disregarded for the mere convenience of human beings, as they often are.

  • From the road…

    I mentioned in my last post that I had lost an earlier draft. The reason for that was a squirrely internet connection in my hotel room here in Minneapolis, where I’ve been attending the Organization of American Historians conference. Part of my job is to represent the publisher I work for by at academic conferences, which largely entails chatting with professors and browsing the books of our competitors. Also we typically go out for dinners at very nice restaurants on the company dime. Not a bad way to spend a couple of days really.

    So, I blog to you, dear readers, from a hotel in downtown Minneapolis, sipping an Iron Range Amber Lager, which they tell me is brewed by James Page Brewing Co. in Stevens Point, WI, apparently close enough to here to count as a “local” beer according to the room service menu. Happily I fly back to Boston tomorrow and will be able to spend at least part of the weekend with my wife.

    I’ve never been to Minneapolis before, but what I’ve seen of it seems pretty nice. I feel like I should’ve made some kind of pilgrimage while I was here since this is a a veritable Mecca of Lutheranism. Of course, I haven’t set foot in a Lutheran church in almost a year, so my credentials may be in danger of expiring. I did stop into a lovely Presbyterian Church near the convention center, though.

    I really am fond of the Midwest, at least those parts of it I’ve spent time in. I lived in Indiana for a couple of years and, even though we’ve lived for the past six years on the West and East coasts, we still talk about moving back to the Midwest “someday.” I grew up in Western Pennsylvania among farmers and factory workers and fill more cultural kinship in a lot of ways with the Midwest, even though I may not technically be from the Midwest in the geographic sense. On the other hand, one gets a little spoiled living in cultural hubs where there’s a lot going on. I do sometimes fear that I’ve become some sort of horrible East Coast yuppie snob and that I would actually find living anywhere else intolerable, though I hope that’s not true! (Of course, if I was really a yuppie you’d think I’d make a little more money…) For what it’s worth, Minneapolis – at least what I’ve seen of it – seems pretty cosmopolitan with lots of nice restaurants, shops, and all the other amenities of modern globalized cities. Whether that’s a good or bad things depends on your point of view, of course.

    Oh, and on the corner of the street my hotel’s on there’s a statue of Mary Tyler Moore. How cool is that?

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 6 (the brief version)

    I just lost a long post on the next couple of chapters of Cur Deus Homo, so this is the abridged version…

    The concept of God’s honor is central to Anselm’s scheme, but it has also been severely criticized and (I would argue) often misunderstood. Anselm himself may be partly responsible for some of the confusion in that he seems to say both that sin robs God of his honor and that God’s honor can’t in any way be diminished.

    In Book One, Chapter XV he addresses this directly:

    Nothing can be added to or taken from the honor of God. For this honor which belongs to him is in no way subject to injury or change. But as the individual creature preserves, naturally or by reason, the condition belonging, and, as it were, allotted to him, he is said to obey and honor God; and to this, rational nature, which possesses intelligence, is especially bound. And when the being chooses what he ought, he honors God; not by bestowing anything upon him, but because he brings himself freely under God’s will and disposal, and maintains his own condition in the universe, and the beauty of the universe itself, as far as in him lies. But when he does not choose what he ought, he dishonors God, as far as the being himself is concerned, because he does not submit himself freely to God’s disposal. And he disturbs the order and beauty of the universe, as relates to himself, although he cannot injure nor tarnish the power and majesty of God. … And so, though man or evil angel refuse to submit to the Divine will and appointment, yet he cannot escape it; for if he wishes to fly from a will that commands, he falls into the power of a will that punishes. And if you ask whither he goes, it is only under the permission of that will; and even this wayward choice or action of his becomes subservient, under infinite wisdom, to the order and beauty of the universe before spoken of. For when it is understood that God brings good out of many forms of evil, then the satisfaction for sin freely given, or if this be not given, the exaction of punishment, hold their own place and orderly beauty in the same universe. For if Divine wisdom were not to insist upon things, when wickedness tries to disturb the right appointment, there would be, in the very universe which God ought to control, an unseemliness springing from the violation of the beauty of arrangement, and God would appear to be deficient in his management. And these two things are not only unfitting, but consequently impossible; so that satisfaction or punishment must needs follow every sin.

    God’s honor is intergrally related to his creation and ordering of the universe. Considered in himself, God can’t be harmed or benefited by anything we do. This is the much-disputed doctrine of divine impassibility. Nothing can add to or take away from God’s perfection and blessedness.

    But – sin can and does deface creation. Sin is ugly in that it disrupts the order and beauty of the universe. The beauty of creation consists of each being fulfilling its purpose and contributing to the harmony of the whole. To reject that purpose is to disrupt that harmony. We might also say that sin is a lie – it speaks untruth about creation. If I sin against a fellow creature I am saying something untrue about its worth.

    So, if God were to let sin go unpunished or without satisfaction being made, he would be letting his intentions for creation be frustrated. He would be letting sin have the last word. But God can’t do this because of his goodness. Like what a feudal lord is supposed to do, God upholds the order and beauty of his realm. If he were to let his intentions for creation be frustrated by sin he would be less than fully good or less than fully powerful. To counteract sin God must do something so beautiful that it blots out the ugliness of sin. He must speak the truth about sin and about creation that contradicts the lie.

    Anselm points out that one way or another God’s will prevails. Either creatures render their due obedience to God, or make satisfaction for their sin, or are punished for their sin. But under no circumstances does sin get the last word. However, given that there is sin, Anselm thinks that there are good reasons for God to prefer satisfaction to punishment. This sets Anselm’s account of atonement apart from later views which understand Jesus as having taken our punishment on himself. In fact, he’ll go on to argue that God must make satisfaction rather than extract punishment if his purposes for creation are to be fulfilled, which, I think, has interesting implications.

  • Notes on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo: 5

    In Book One, chapter XII the question is posed “whether it were proper for God to put away sins by compassion alone, without any payment of the honor taken from him.” On the face of it, this seems quite a reasonable question. After all, the Heavenly Father portrayed in, say, the teachings and parables of Jesus seems willing to forgive sins without any satisfaction being made for them. Think of the Parable of the Prodigal Son: the father not only forgives his son’s disloyalty and squandering of his inheritance, he runs out to greet him after spying him from afar, not even making penitence and contrition a condition of forgiveness. If this is, as most Christians believe, intended to be a picture of the way God deals with us, doesn’t it fly in the face of Jesus’ teaching to say that God demands satisfaction for sin before we can be forgiven? Moreover, Jesus himself freely forgives people’s sins throughout his ministry without suggesting that it’s conditional upon his sacrificial life and death, much less that they must believe that those events have saving significance in order for their sins to be forgiven. Is the idea of a God who demands satisfaction as a condition for grace not a distortion of the God revealed by Jesus?

    Anselm says that to “remit sin in this manner is nothing else than not to punish; and since it is not right to cancel sin without compensation or punishment; if it be not punished, then is it passed by undischarged” and it “is not fitting for God to pass over anything in his kingdom undischarged,” therefore it is “not proper for God thus to pass over sin unpunished.”

    What does he mean by saying that it’s not fitting for anything in God’s kingdom to be undischarged? Here we’re starting to get into the notion of God’s honor a little more deeply. Following this argument, Anselm goes on to say that “if sin be passed by unpunished, viz., that with God there will be no difference between the guilty and the not guilty; and this is unbecoming to God” and “Injustice, therefore, if it is cancelled by compassion alone, is more free than justice, which seems very inconsistent. And to these is also added a further incongruity, viz., that it makes injustice like God. For as God is subject to no law, so neither is injustice.”

    I think that Anselm is pointing to two important ideas that will help us make better sense of his argument (I hope!). The first is a proper understanding of freedom and goodness as they pertain to God, the second is the order and beauty of creation. I’ll discuss the first here and the second in the next post.

    Boso asks why God isn’t free simply to put away the apparent demands of justice that would require that sin be punished. After all,

    God is so free as to be subject to no law, and to the judgment of no one, and is so merciful as that nothing more merciful can be conceived; and nothing is right or fit save as he wills; it seems a strange thing for us to say that be is wholly unwilling or unable to put away an injury done to himself, when we are wont to apply to him for indulgence with regard to those offences which we commit against others.

    Anselm replies:

    What you say of God’s liberty and choice and compassion is true; but we ought so to interpret these things as that they may not seem to interfere with His dignity. For there is no liberty except as regards what is best or fitting; nor should that be called mercy which does anything improper for the Divine character. Moreover, when it is said that what God wishes is just, and that what He does not wish is unjust, we must not understand that if God wished anything improper it would be just, simply because he wished it. For if God wishes to lie, we must not conclude that it is right to lie, but rather that he is not God. For no will can ever wish to lie, unless truth in it is impaired, nay, unless the will itself be impaired by forsaking truth. When, then, it is said: “If God wishes to lie,” the meaning is simply this: “If the nature of God is such as that he wishes to lie;” and, therefore, it does not follow that falsehood is right, except it be understood in the same manner as when we speak of two impossible things: “If this be true, then that follows; because neither this nor that is true;” as if a man should say: “Supposing water to be dry, and fire to be moist;” for neither is the case. Therefore, with regard to these things, to speak the whole truth: If God desires a thing, it is right that he should desire that which involves no unfitness. For if God chooses that it should rain, it is right that it should rain; and if he desires that any man should die, then is it right that he should die. Wherefore, if it be not fitting for God to do anything unjustly, or out of course, it does not belong to his liberty or compassion or will to let the sinner go unpunished who makes no return to God of what the sinner has defrauded him.

    Anselm is taking one side of the debate going back at least to Plato’s Euthyphro, namely, whether God (or the gods) will things because they’re good, or are they good because God wills them? In the terminology of a later debate this is the question of voluntarism vs. non-voluntarism. Anselm is clearly a non-voluntarist: God is not free to will what is evil or unjust. Not because God is constrained by something “external” to himself, but becuase the divine nature is such that it is identical with goodness, and that nature, being necessary, can’t be otherwise than it is. This is the classic Christian solution to Plato’s dilemma. So, for God to ignore the dictates of justice would be contrary to the divine nature itself and therefore not just wrong but impossible in the strongest sense.