The Scholarly Question and a Sober Assessment

This is the collection’s one §4.2 file. Three questions bearing on the doctrine of the Cross are genuinely open, and none of them is settled by the Church: whether “Christus Victor” is a sound historical description or an artefact of Gustaf Aulén’s 1931 taxonomy; whether the “Western captivity” narrative fairly describes the Russian and post-Byzantine sources; and whether Anselm has been fairly read in Orthodox polemic. The positions are named and sourced and left unadjudicated. The dogmatic content of this collection is in Section 07 and does not depend on any of them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox — §4.2 both-sides treatment throughout

The Scope of This File

METHODOLOGY §4.2 permits both-sides treatment for disputes the Church has not settled and for questions of historical fact where evidence rather than confession decides. It does not permit neutrality between Orthodox dogma and its denials, and nothing in this file is neutral about what Section 07 confesses.

The three questions below are all of the permitted kind. Two are historiographical; the third is a question about the quality of a body of Orthodox polemical writing. All three concern descriptions of the tradition rather than the tradition’s content, and the answer to none of them changes what the Church confesses about the Cross.

The reader who wants the doctrine should go to The Orthodox Assessment and stop there. The reader who wants to know where the scholarly ground is soft is in the right place.

Question One: Is “Christus Victor” a Patristic Theory or a Swedish Lutheran Taxonomy?

The provenance of the term

“Christus Victor” as the name of an atonement type comes from Gustaf Aulén (1879–1977), Lutheran Bishop of Strängnäs and professor at Lund. The book was delivered as lectures and published in Swedish as Den kristna försoningstanken (1930), and appeared in English as Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, translated by A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1931).

Aulén’s argument is a three-type scheme:

The “classic” or dramatic type — God in Christ does battle with and triumphs over the powers of sin, death, and the devil; the atonement is a divine victory, continuous from the New Testament through Irenaeus and the Greek Fathers, obscured in the medieval West, and recovered by Luther.
The “Latin” or objective type — Anselm’s satisfaction and its Protestant scholastic descendants, in which the work is offered by Christ as man to God.
The “subjective” or humanistic type — Abelard and liberal Protestantism, in which the Cross works by moral influence.

The polemical target is the third type and the Protestant orthodoxy of the second; the constructive aim is to show that Luther belongs with the Fathers rather than with the schoolmen. Aulén was writing Lutheran dogmatics in the form of a history.

Why this matters for Orthodox usage

Orthodox writers use “Christus Victor” constantly, including the hub essay this collection expands (see Soteriology), and the usage is not innocent. It borrows a Lutheran theologian’s category, built for a Lutheran argument, to describe the Greek patristic material — and then, frequently, cites Aulén as though he were a neutral historian who discovered that the Fathers held the Orthodox view.

The content the term points to is not in question. Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Paschal troparion, the anaphora of St. Basil, and the icon of the Anastasis are not artefacts of 1931 (see The Patristic Core). What is in question is the typology: whether the patristic material forms a single coherent “theory” distinguishable from and opposed to a “Latin” one, or whether that opposition is an imposition.

[Disputed: the historical adequacy of Aulén's three-type scheme. (a) In its favour: the scheme drew attention to a genuine and under-read stratum of patristic and New Testament material — the language of victory, of the powers, of ransom and liberation — which nineteenth-century Protestant dogmatics had largely lost; and no critic denies that this material is there. (b) Against it: patristics scholars have criticized the typology as too clean, arguing that the Fathers do not hold a "theory" of any type but combine victory, sacrifice, recapitulation, illumination and exchange without system, and that Aulén's "classic type" is a construct assembled to make Luther a Father. J. N. D. Kelly, *Early Christian Doctrines* (5th ed., London: A. & C. Black, 1977), treats the patristic material without the typology and finds it irreducibly plural. The sharper form of the objection is that Aulén's history is driven by his dogmatics: the "Latin type" is defined so as to be defective and the "classic type" so as to be Lutheran. This repository records the dispute and does not settle it.]

The honest position for an Orthodox writer

Two things can be said without adjudicating.

First, the label is convenient shorthand and there is no dishonesty in using it, provided it is not attributed to the Fathers. They did not have it. What they had was the thing.

Second, an Orthodox account that leans on Aulén for its historical claims has borrowed a Lutheran taxonomy and inherited its liabilities — including the assumption that atonement doctrines come in types at all, which is precisely the assumption Section 04 of this collection resists when it observes that the Fathers pile the images up rather than choosing among them.

Question Two: Does the “Western Captivity” Narrative Fairly Describe the Sources?

The evidence of juridical language in Orthodox sources is set out in Juridical Language in Orthodox Sources, together with Florovsky’s pseudomorphosis account of it and the standing dispute about that account. That treatment is not repeated here; what belongs here is the specific bearing of the dispute on the doctrine of the Cross.

[Disputed: whether the pseudomorphosis narrative adequately explains the juridical soteriology of the post-Byzantine and Russian sources. (a) For: the documentary base is real and unrefuted — Latin-language instruction in Russian seminaries, demonstrable structural dependence of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuals on Western models, the Latinizing of Mogila's *Confession* — and the juridical soteriology of Macarius Bulgakov's dogmatics tracks the Latin manuals point by point (Florovsky, *Ways of Russian Theology*, Paris, 1937). (b) Against: the narrative is structurally a corruption-history of Harnackian shape; it presupposes a reified East/West opposition that the evidence of Byzantine engagement with Latin theology does not support (Marcus Plested, *Orthodox Readings of Aquinas*, Oxford, 2012); it offers no consistent criterion distinguishing legitimate patristic borrowing from illegitimate modern borrowing (Cyril Hovorun, "Is Scholasticism a Pseudomorphosis?"); and its verdicts on particular figures have been extensively revised (Paul Gavrilyuk, *Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance*, Oxford, 2013). This repository records the dispute and does not settle it; see [Pseudomorphosis and the "Western Captivity"](../../georges-florovsky/03-ways-of-russian-theology/pseudomorphosis-and-the-western-captivity.md) and [The Post-Patristic Challenge and the Historiography](../../georges-florovsky/08-the-critique/the-post-patristic-challenge-and-the-historiography.md).]

Two data specific to the atonement press on the narrative, and they are recorded here rather than argued.

St. Nicholas Cabasilas. A fourteenth-century Byzantine layman, a Palamite, canonized in 1983, writing satisfaction and merit language in the Life in Christ IV §4 — “make satisfaction for that which had been taken away… the debt of honour which we owed for our sins.” No account of Slavic or post-Byzantine Latin captivity reaches him. Either the register has deeper Greek roots than the narrative allows, or fourteenth-century Byzantium was reading Latin theology more attentively than the narrative allows.

Scripture. Romans 3:25, Galatians 3:13, Hebrews 9–10, and 1 John 2:2 do not require a Latin manual to produce forensic language in a careful reader. Some part of what the captivity narrative explains by importation may be explained by exegesis.

Neither observation refutes the narrative; both are things the narrative has to accommodate.

Question Three: Has Anselm Been Fairly Read in Orthodox Polemic?

This is the sharpest of the three, because it is a question about the honesty of a body of Orthodox writing rather than about a foreign author.

The charge

A recognizable Orthodox polemical literature of the twentieth century — much of it popular, some of it academic — treats Anselm as the author of a doctrine in which an offended God demands blood, the Father punishes the Son, and the whole subsequent misdirection of Western Christianity follows. The most widely circulated single statement of this reading in English is Alexandre Kalomiros’s “The River of Fire” (1980), whose reception is itself a contested matter in this repository (see The River of Fire and Its Reception).

Judged against Cur Deus Homo, that reading is not sustainable. Anselm holds that satisfaction and punishment are alternatives (I.13, I.15); that God’s honour cannot be injured in itself (I.15); that the devil has no rights (I.7); and he closes with the Father saying to the condemned sinner, “Take my only begotten Son and make him an offering for yourself” (II.20). The evidence is set out at Anselm and Cur Deus Homo.

The scholarship that presses the point

The indispensable reference is David Bentley Hart, “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo,” Pro Ecclesia 7 (1998): 333–349. Hart, an Orthodox theologian, argues that the standard Orthodox reading of Anselm is a caricature; that Anselm’s argument is governed by the logic of gift and of the restoration of the creation’s beauty rather than by juridical exaction; and that the “feudal” reading which makes honour a matter of injured lordly dignity misreads what Anselm says honour is. He does not thereby endorse the satisfaction doctrine as adequate; the argument is that if it is to be refused, it must first be read.

Alongside this stand the reappraisals of Anselm in Western scholarship — John McIntyre’s re-interpretation against the feudal reading (St. Anselm and His Critics, Edinburgh, 1954), and the debate around R. W. Southern’s social-historical reading (Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge, 1990) — and, in the Orthodox literature, Paul Ladouceur’s survey of modern Orthodox theology, which treats the polemical anti-Western strand as a datum to be assessed rather than a settled achievement (Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: “Behold, I Make All Things New”, London: T&T Clark, 2019).

The counter-position

[Disputed: whether accurate reading of Anselm materially weakens the Orthodox objection. (a) One position holds that it does not: whatever Anselm's own restraint, the *frame* he established — divine justice as the difficulty the Incarnation resolves, sin as unpaid obligation, the Cross as the discharge of that obligation — is what the Orthodox objection targets, and it is present in Anselm in full; the later development into penal substitution is a natural extension of that frame rather than a betrayal of it, and Anselm's personal moderation does not immunize the structure. (b) A second position holds that it does weaken it substantially: on this view (Hart's) the objection as usually stated attacks a doctrine of divine retribution that Anselm does not hold, the genuine Orthodox difference with him is narrower and more metaphysical than the polemic supposes, and the wholesale opposition of "Eastern ontological" to "Western juridical" soteriology is a twentieth-century construction rather than a description of the sources. (c) A third position, held by some Orthodox writers, keeps the objection to the frame but concedes that the polemical literature has been careless enough to have damaged the Orthodox case in scholarly settings. This repository records the dispute and does not settle it.]

What Is Not Open

A boundary, because the point of a §4.2 file is that it has one.

The dogmatic content of Section 07 does not rest on any of the three questions above.

That the sacrifice is offered to the whole Trinity and not by one divine Person to another is a conciliar definition of 1156–1157 inscribed in the Synodikon, and it stands whether or not Aulén’s typology is good history.
That the Father “neither asked for Him nor demanded Him” is St. Gregory the Theologian’s, preached at Pascha in the fourth century, and it stands whether or not the pseudomorphosis narrative is good historiography.
That the wage of sin is death and that the term of the movement is the resurrection is the Creed’s own ordering and the Church’s liturgical year, and it stands whether or not Anselm has been fairly read.

Correspondingly, if all three questions were resolved in the direction least favourable to the polemical Orthodox literature — Aulén’s taxonomy discarded, the captivity narrative abandoned, Anselm exonerated of everything he has been charged with — the Church’s confession about the Cross would be unchanged. That is the test of whether a dogma was ever resting on a historiography, and this one is not.

A Sober Assessment

Three closing judgments, offered as judgments and not as findings.

The Orthodox case has been weakened by its advocates more than by its opponents. The strongest form of the Orthodox position on the Cross is patristic, conciliar, and liturgical, and it needs no caricature of Anselm, no borrowed Lutheran taxonomy, and no total civilizational contrast between East and West. Every one of those props is a liability, and this collection has tried to build without them.

Conceding the record does not cost anything. Juridical language in Cabasilas, in Dositheus, in Philaret; Chrysostom’s substitutionary preaching; Nyssa’s fishhook; the fact that Calvin explicitly denies the Father’s anger at the Son — all of it can be conceded, and the objection of Section 07 survives intact, because it was never a claim about vocabulary.

The remaining difference is real and is not a misunderstanding. When the accuracy is done and the caricatures are cleared away, a difference remains: whether the human problem is best described as an unpaid obligation before divine justice or as death, corruption, and enslavement; and whether the Cross is the point at which the obligation is discharged or the point at which the Author of life enters death and destroys it. That is not a verbal difference, and it is not resolved by good will. It is what the Church confesses, and Section 07 states it.

References

Aulén, Gustaf. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement. Trans. A. G. Hebert. London: SPCK, 1931. (Swedish original Den kristna försoningstanken, Stockholm, 1930.)
Hart, David Bentley. “A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox Appreciation of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.” Pro Ecclesia 7 (1998): 333–349.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. 5th ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1977.
McIntyre, John. St. Anselm and His Critics: A Re-interpretation of the Cur Deus Homo. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1954.
Southern, R. W. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: “Behold, I Make All Things New”. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Paris, 1937. English trans. Robert L. Nichols, Collected Works, vols. 5–6.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Gavrilyuk, Paul L. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hovorun, Cyril. “Is Scholasticism a Pseudomorphosis? A Polemical Note on Georges Florovsky’s Political Theology.” In Politics, Society and Culture in Orthodox Theology in a Global Age. Paderborn: Brill/Schöningh.
Kalomiros, Alexandre. The River of Fire. Seattle: St Nectarios Press, 1980.
METHODOLOGY.md of this repository, §4.1 (confessional standpoint) and §4.2 (scope of both-sides treatment).