Anselm and Cur Deus Homo

Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo (1094–1098) is the text on which the Western doctrine of satisfaction rests, and it is routinely misreported. Anselm’s category is not punishment but honour and the restoration of the order of the universe; he explicitly denies that the devil has any rights over man; and he does not teach that the Father punishes the Son. This file reports the argument from Anselm’s own text, at its strongest, before Section 07 states the Orthodox objection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (reporting a Latin source in its own terms, per METHODOLOGY §4.1)

Why Accuracy Here Is Not a Concession

The companion collection on Chalcedon established a discipline this file applies to a different interlocutor: a caricature of an opponent is not only unjust but weak, because it is refutable, and when the false premise falls the real objection appears to fall with it (see Why Precision Strengthens the Case).

The caricature in this domain is the collapse of Anselm into penal substitution — the claim that Anselm taught that God the Father, in wrath, punished the Son in the place of sinners. He did not. Penal substitution proper is a Reformation development, and is treated where it belongs, in The Reformers and Penal Substitution. To attribute it to Anselm is to make an argument that an interlocutor can dismantle by reading Book I, chapters 12–15 aloud. The Orthodox objection to Anselm is real, it is stated in Section 07, and it survives an accurate reading of him; it does not survive a false one.

The Work and Its Method

Cur Deus Homo — “Why God Became Man” — was begun in England around 1094 and completed in 1098 at Schiavi in southern Italy, during Anselm’s first exile as Archbishop of Canterbury. It is a dialogue between Anselm and his pupil Boso, and it was written, Anselm says in the preface, against unbelievers who object that the Incarnation is unworthy of God, and for believers who wish to understand what they already hold.

Its method is the feature to notice first. Anselm proposes to argue remoto Christo — “leaving Christ out of view, as if nothing had ever been known of him” — proving by necessary reasons that a God-man was required. This is not rationalism in the later sense; Anselm’s prayers and his own account of faith seeking understanding stand behind it. But it does mean that the argument is designed to run without appeal to authority, and that it therefore stands or falls as an argument. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the source of both the work’s power and its vulnerability.

Step One: Sin Is the Withholding of Honour

Anselm defines sin without reference to law-codes or penalties:

“If man or angel always rendered to God his due, he would never sin… Therefore to sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due… This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits sin… He who does not render this honour which is due to God, robs God of his own and dishonours him; and this is sin. Moreover, so long as he does not restore what he has taken away, he remains in fault; and it will not suffice merely to restore what has been taken away, but, considering the contempt offered, he ought to restore more than he took away.”
(Anselm, Cur Deus Homo I.11; trans. Deane)

Two things follow that are usually missed. First, the “debt” is not a quantity of suffering owed but the submission of the rational creature’s will to God’s — “every wish of a rational creature should be subject to the will of God” (I.11). Second, “satisfaction” here has its Roman-law and penitential sense: making good, restoring, with an added compensation for the insult. It is not punishment. Anselm keeps the two rigorously apart, as the next step shows.

Step Two: Satisfaction or Punishment — the Disjunction

This is the hinge of the whole book, and it is the single point at which Anselm most differs from what came after him.

Anselm asks whether God might simply forgive out of compassion, without any payment. He answers that to remit sin in that manner “is nothing else than not to punish,” and that this would leave sin “subject to no law,” erasing the difference between the guilty and the innocent (I.12). Then:

“Therefore the honour taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow; otherwise, either God will not be just to himself, or he will be weak in respect to both parties; and this it is impious even to think of.”
(Cur Deus Homo I.13; trans. Deane)

And again, closing the argument of Book I’s first movement:

“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… so that satisfaction or punishment must needs follow every sin.”
(Cur Deus Homo I.15; trans. Deane)

Aut satisfactio aut poena. Satisfaction and punishment are alternatives, and Christ’s work is the first, which is why it is not the second. This is the precise sense in which Anselm does not teach that the Father punishes the Son: on his own logic, if Christ’s death were punishment it would not be satisfaction, and the whole argument would fail. When the Reformers turn the disjunction into a conjunction — satisfaction by means of punishment — they are not extending Anselm but reversing him at the decisive joint.

Step Three: What “Honour” Means

The word invites misunderstanding, and Anselm anticipates it. Boso objects: if God must maintain his honour, why does he allow it to be violated at all? Anselm’s reply is the most important paragraph in the book for understanding what he is actually claiming:

“Nothing can be added to or taken from the honour of God. For this honour which belongs to him is in no way subject to injury or change… And when the being chooses what he ought, he honours 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 dishonours God, as far as the being himself is concerned… 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.”
(Cur Deus Homo I.15; trans. Deane)

God’s honour, then, is not a psychological state that has been wounded and requires soothing. It is the right ordering of the universe — ordo and pulchritudo universitatis, order and beauty — of which the creature’s free submission is a constituent part. God cannot be diminished; what is disordered is the creature and the cosmos. Anselm’s God is not offended in the sense of being angry. He is just, and justice here means that the order of things is not permitted to be a lie.

This is why the frequently repeated claim that Anselm’s model is “feudal” — that he transposed the honour of a Norman lord into theology — has to be handled with care. [Disputed: the “feudal” reading of Anselm. R. W. Southern argued influentially that Anselm’s categories of honour, satisfaction, and lordship reflect the social and legal world of eleventh-century Normandy and England (Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; earlier in Saint Anselm and His Biographer, Cambridge, 1963). Against this, John McIntyre argued that the argument is governed by Anselm’s metaphysics of rectitude and order rather than by feudal law (McIntyre, St. Anselm and His Critics: A Re-interpretation of the Cur Deus Homo, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1954), and later readers have pointed to the Roman-law and monastic-penitential senses of satisfactio as nearer sources. This repository records the dispute and does not settle it.]

Step Four: The Devil Has No Rights

Anselm devotes I.7 to demolishing the ransom-to-the-devil account, and the demolition is unqualified:

“Since neither the devil nor man belong to any but God, and neither can exist without the exertion of Divine power, what cause ought God to try with his own creature… In fine, as there is never any injustice in a good angel, so in an evil angel there can be no justice at all. There was no reason, therefore, as respects the devil, why God should not make use of his own power against him for the liberation of man.”
(Cur Deus Homo I.7; trans. Deane)

He returns to it at the end: “God owed nothing to the devil but punishment” (II.19). On this point Anselm and the Orthodox tradition stand together against St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Oration 22–26, and the coincidence is worth stating plainly rather than passing over (see To Whom Was the Ransom Paid?).

Step Five: Why It Must Be the God-Man

The remainder of Book I establishes that the satisfaction owed exceeds anything a creature can render: man owes God everything already, so he has no surplus with which to pay (I.20); the debt is proportionate to the dignity of the one dishonoured, and so is beyond measure (I.21). Book II then supplies the famous two-sided conclusion:

“Therefore none but God can make this satisfaction… But none but a man ought to do this, otherwise man does not make the satisfaction… it is necessary for the God-man to make it.”
(Cur Deus Homo II.6; trans. Deane)

Anselm insists that this requires a single person in two complete and unmixed natures — “it is necessary that the same being should be perfect God and perfect man” and that “these two natures be united entire in one person” (II.7). His Christology is Chalcedonian and he knows it.

The sinless Christ owed God his life as man, but did not owe death, since death is the wage of sin and he had none. He therefore gives what he does not owe, and the gift is of infinite value: “if, then, to lay down life is the same as to suffer death, as the gift of his life surpasses all the sins of men, so will also the suffering of death” (II.14).

Step Six: The Reward, and the Voice of the Father

The final move is the one most often omitted in Orthodox summaries, and it changes the picture. Since the Son gave what he did not owe, a reward is due to him; but he needs nothing, and the Father can give him nothing he does not have. The reward must therefore be assigned to someone else — and to whom more fittingly than “his parents and brethren,” those for whose sake he became man? “What more proper than that, when he beholds so many of them weighed down by so heavy a debt, and wasting through poverty, in the depth of their miseries, he should remit the debt incurred by their sins, and give them what their transgressions had forfeited?” (II.19).

Anselm’s last word on the subject is not judicial at all:

“Now we have found the compassion of God which appeared lost to you when we were considering God’s holiness and man’s sin; we have found it, I say, so great and so consistent with his holiness, as to be incomparably above anything that can be conceived. 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.’”
(Cur Deus Homo II.20; trans. Deane)

The Father in Anselm’s closing paragraph is not extracting a payment. He is offering his Son to the condemned, as a gift they may take. Any account of Anselm that cannot accommodate II.20 is an account of someone else.

What Anselm Does Not Say

Set out flatly, so that the objections of Section 07 land on the right target:

He does not say that God the Father is angry with the Son, or that the Son bears the Father’s wrath. The words “wrath” and “punishment” are systematically applied to what Christ’s work makes unnecessary.
He does not say the devil had a right that had to be honoured; he says the opposite.
He does not say that the Cross alone saves without the Incarnation; his whole argument is that the union of natures in one person is what makes the offering possible.
He does not say God’s honour is injured in himself; he says explicitly that it cannot be.
He does not deny the resurrection or treat it as an appendix; but it is also true that his argument does not require it, and that is a substantive difference, taken up in Section 07.

What the Argument Nevertheless Commits Him To

Accuracy cuts both ways, and this is the discipline that keeps precision from becoming concession.

Anselm’s argument is built on a necessity: it is not fitting for God to leave the disorder unrepaired, and therefore satisfaction or punishment must follow every sin (I.12–15). The economy of salvation is thereby made intelligible as the resolution of a difficulty internal to God’s own justice — a difficulty which the Incarnation exists to solve. It is a further commitment of the argument that the quantum of the offering can be weighed against the quantum of the debt (II.14), that merit can be transferred from the one who earned it to those who did not (II.19), and that the human problem is best described as an unpaid obligation.

None of these is penal substitution. All of them are the frame within which penal substitution later became sayable. The Orthodox objection is to the frame, and it is stated in The Orthodox Assessment. Whether that objection has always been fairly directed at Anselm himself is a live scholarly question, treated at The Scholarly Question and a Sober Assessment.

References

Anselm of Canterbury. Cur Deus Homo, I.7, I.11–15, I.20–21, II.6–7, II.14, II.19–20. Translated by Sidney Norton Deane in St. Anselm: Proslogium; Monologium; An Appendix in Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon; and Cur Deus Homo. Chicago: Open Court, 1903. (Latin: S. Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, vol. 2. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1946.)
Southern, R. W. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Southern, R. W. Saint Anselm and His Biographer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
McIntyre, John. St. Anselm and His Critics: A Re-interpretation of the Cur Deus Homo. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1954.
Hart, David Bentley. “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.” Pro Ecclesia 7 (1998): 333–349.