Per Caritatem

Some Contemporary Reflections on Sin:
Matt Jenson’s use of St. Augustine in The Gravity of Sin

By Jason Ingalls, M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary

Matt Jenson’s recent book The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (London: T&T Clark, 2006) contributes to contemporary Augustinian scholarship and hamartiology.  Perhaps most interesting is that Jenson attempts to resuscitate contemporary use of Augustine’s theology for the purpose of talking about sin (a brave feat!).  In this post, I will summarize Jenson’s argument, describe how Jenson appropriates and critiques Augustine for his project, and trace the line through Jenson’s remaining interlocutors before briefly concluding with some thoughts on Jenson’s contribution to the way we talk about sin.

In brief, Jenson argues that the metaphor homo incurvatus in se (“humanity ‘curved in on itself’”), coupled with a relational anthropology, is the best way to construe the human person and sin (Jenson 2, 4).  He claims the coupling does not fall into the traps linked to substance and existential ontologies, is true to Scripture and tradition, and provides a way to appreciate and appropriate feminist theological critiques.  His argument starts with Augustine, moves through Luther, considers Hampson’s critique of Luther, and ends with Barth, to show that incurvatus in se can, in fact, do the theological work that he claims for it.

Jenson is quick to use Augustine for his project since Augustine already offers a relational account of sin.  Jenson explains that Augustine sees our prelapsarian state as necessarily relational and social in character, and that Augustine’s ideas of “participation” in God through Christ shows that this participation is basic to human beings qua human beings (Jenson 8).  Even Augustine’s explication of St. Paul’s “in Adam all sinned” is basically relational in character (16), the origin of evil is placed squarely in the human will (cf. 20), and evil is described as a privation of the will, a turning away from the will’s proper object, in other words, a break in relationship.  Jenson summarizes: “Self-love and love of God are simply incompatible” (15).

The problem for Jenson is that Augustine has not reflected on this account as systematically as Jenson would like, and Jenson is particularly worried about Augustine’s telos for humanity: the beatific vision of a fleshless God.  This is not yet “sufficiently Christian,” and Jenson will look to Luther (and eventually Barth) to fill in this gap.  Jenson’s treatment of Augustine seems tentative at points, as if he feels like he is addressing an audience that is predisposed against St. Augustine for any number of reasons.  In some ways, this account of Augustine’s doctrine of sin is meant to rescue the saint from theology’s dustbin.  This should be noted and applauded, I think.  But, for now, we will look at Jenson’s specific objections.

In the end, then, the Christian tradition seems to have been convinced that Jesus really does offer the best remedy for sin, the ‘medicine of immortality’, as many Fathers described the Eucharist.  If our sin involved us more than anything in a parasitic love affair with ourselves, what more fitting counter could there be than to look outside ourselves to one who is not ourselves?  Despite the legacy of his inward turn, Augustine was himself aware of this; and his call for humility suggests a move in this direction.  Nevertheless, while the features of a relational understanding of sin were set up by Augustine, he did not follow them through to a sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated account of the Christian life (Jenson 45-46, emphasis mine).

First, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently objectivist.  A sufficiently objectivist account would focus the human person outside of him- or herself on Christ, the unceasing advocate and Lord.  But, Augustine pushes the individual, especially in The Trinity, to look beyond Christ, even after all of Augustine’s stress on Christ’s mediatorial role.  “Christ’s humanity seems ultimately instrumental and of only temporary importance. . . . [O]ur hope is in the day when his office of mediator will cease and we will participate in the divine life directly” (Jenson 35; cf. The Trinity I.iii.20.80).  This bothers Jenson because to be insufficiently objectivist is to be insufficiently Christological and therefore insufficiently Christian.

Second, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently extrinsic.  While Augustine shows human beings to be relationally constituted, this is again a soteriologically-focused Christological problem.  Instead of asking the human person to look to Christ, the counsel of The Trinity is to look in, then up.  The problem lies in looking for the imago dei within when The Imago Dei already comes to meet us without in the pages of the apostolic witness and in the life of the Church.  “Instead, the fleshly Christ is merely the way to the ‘homeland of peace’ [Augustine] has caught a glimpse of from ‘a wooded summit’, a land also glimpsed by the Platonists” (43).  Augustine’s “ambiguous inwardness” (37) focuses attention within rather than without, and thereby misplaces emphasis which should be reserved for the Christ.

Third, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently materially mediated.  It is St. Augustine’s use of the humanity of Christ that causes Jenson’s worries.  City of God, Book XIV, according to Jenson, contains healthy reflection on humanity’s participation in God but holds back from talking about its “mechanics.”  Jenson is disappointed.  For him, “that Augustine can speak directly of deification without reference to Christ is indicative of a wider concern,” probably, an “insufficient Christology” (Jenson 11, cf. Jenson 11, n. 24).  The incarnation is a kind of “short-cut” to participation in Christ’s divine nature (Jenson 12; cf. Augustine, City of God, IX.xv).  Once the way is paved, then Christ’s humanity (and his office as mediator) is no longer eschatologically needed to mediate the glory of God.  Jenson: “But in the end, Christ remains a glorious via rather than the redefinition of Augustine’s God” (Jenson 43).  This Christological lack is sufficient reason to move on to Luther and, ultimately, Barth.

Martin Luther radicalized and reorganized Augustine’s insights Christologically around the guiding metaphor of homo incurvatus in se.  Accepting Augustine’s basic emphasis on pride and humility, Luther applies incurvature not only to the totus homo but also to homo religiosus, thereby rejecting any type of incremental growth in righteousness that remained in Augustine’s thought.  Luther also radicalizes Augustine’s ideas about the order of loves in which the soul climbs higher and higher through desire until it finds its rest in God.  Since even the religious person is curved in on itself, desire has no place.  Pride is the paradigmatic sin, as it was in Augustine, and the prideful person can desire nothing but themselves.  Our desires cannot take us to God. Only faith can do that.  In radicalizing incurvature, however, Luther retains the basic structure of ascent in Augustine’s thought while replacing desire with faith and grounding it in the mediation of Christ in a way that Augustine did not.  According to Jenson’s reading of Luther’s famous dictum simul iustus et peccator, we are all – even the most pious among us – completely trapped and curved in on ourselves while simultaneously being turned out from ourselves by our faith in Christ.  This account begins correcting some of the problems that Jenson spotted in Augustine.  Luther’s account is objectivist by being grounded in the completed work of Christ.  It is extrinsic in that what Christ opens for us is a radical type of outward focus first on Christ and (then only subsequently) on the other.  It continues to be materially mediated.  The reason Jenson moves beyond Luther is less Christological than it is practical.

Pride is the paradigmatic sin for both Augustine and Luther, but Jenson does not think this account is adequate. This leads him to interact with feminist theologian Daphne Hampson’s post-Christian critique of Luther in order to complicate the pride-as-sin paradigm.  Hampson critiques the Augustinian tradition’s understanding of incurvature by arguing that considering pride to be the paradigmatic sin does not account for women’s experience of sinfulness.  Hampson argues that women’s cardinal sin is not pride, but is rather a lack of self-assertion, a falling back into oneself that she names self-diffusion or sloth.  It is here that Jenson does his best work in applying Hampson’s insight that the pride-as-sin paradigm is insufficient while offering a substantial critique of her post-Christian feminism.  Challenging Hampson’s implied gender essentialism, Jenson acknowledges that he himself needs the grammar of sloth and self-diffusion to speak of his own sinfulness and that it would be a tragic waste if we were to deny women and men the ability to speak of their sinfulness as either pride or sloth, for they are “complementary aspects of the same pathology” (129, quoting McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 156).  Whether, to follow Kierkegaard, the sin is “in despair willing to be oneself” (pride) or is “in despair not willing to be oneself” (sloth), the basic pathology is still an incurvature, either in activity or passivity.

It is in conversation with Karl Barth that Jenson finally develops the “sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic and materially mediated account of the Christian life” that he wanted from Augustine (46).  Barth defines human sinfulness by means of Christology and plots his three forms of sinfulness (falsehood, pride, and sloth) along a Christological grid.  The first sin, and the covering for the other two, is falsehood in which the human being denies the knowledge that the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ includes them and was for them by grace.  But once human beings become aware of this claim, their reaction is characterized by the other two forms of sinfulness: pride or sloth.  In pride, we deny our participation in Jesus Christ’s servant humility, thus trying to establish our own being.  In sloth, we deny our participation in Jesus’ royal resurrection and ascension where we are set in him at the right hand of God the Father.  In pride, we amplify our being in order to deny the call to humility.  In sloth, we subsume our being in order to deny the call to victory.  Whether by self-assertion or self-diffusion, we try to deny what is basically true of us in Barth’s account: we are established from all eternity in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, Jenson offers contemporary theological thinkers something of great worth.  First, he sets about to rescue Augustine for contemporary reflection.  For some, Augustine never needed saving, but for others the saint has been coupled with degrading and oppressive ideas of sin and humanity.  When Jenson argues that St. Augustine’s account of the human person and sin is itself relational in character and thus in harmony with many contemporary concerns, he gives the latter group the opportunity to reread Augustine with fresh eyes.  Second, Jenson’s argument is strongly Christological.  While the book is ordered historically, it draws its material circle around Christ.  Granted, his account of Christ is strongly influenced by Barth and Luther, but its strong theological grounding allows for its profound pragmatic, personal, and pastoral value.  Which brings me to the last part of Jenson’s contribution, he provides a grammar for sin.  The grammar is Christologically grounded (and therefore objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated), and this concreteness saves it from the navel-gazing that might come from a similar, contemporary account.  I personally have been helped by his description of homo incurvatus in se and his dipolar exposition of sin as pride and sloth, and I have seen this vocabulary ignite people’s eyes as they, in a number of situations, came to understand a part of themselves for which they had struggled for words.  While ordered very differently, Jenson shares Augustine’s concern that our theological language be useful in some way, that it not only bear witness to God but also to who we are in relationship to the Holy Trinity.  For as critical as Jenson is of Augustine’s legacy, Jenson has done us a great service by drawing him back into our conversation about sin and allowing him to again speak words of grace.  I cannot help but think that somewhere the old saint from Tagaste smiles.

“Karl Barth turned to the book of Romans in the hope of hearing the Word of God and in the hope of finding a new starting-point, and principle, for theology. Instead of interpreting the Bible as an expression of human religious experience, as was typical of theological liberalism, Barth turned to scripture not so much to discover God but to be discovered by God. Whereas ‘religion’ concerns humanity’s search for God, the message of Christianity was, for Barth, that God ‘found the way to us’. God is not an ‘object’ of human reflection but an active subject. Theology’s task therefore is not to formulate human thoughts about God but to explicate God’s thoughts about us. The challenge for Barth was to affirm the reality and activity of God while at the same time forestalling its becoming an object of human historical or rational investigation. If God is God, he must remain free to make himself known. [...] Historical critics, he says, are not critical enough; they do not penetrate as far as the text’s distinctive and unique subject-matter. They do not perceive ‘what there is’ or ‘what stands’ in the Bible. The meaning of the words in the biblical text can only be determined in relation to the Sache of which they speak. To read for the human author’s intention fails to do justice to the freedom of God’s Word speaking in scripture. Schleiermacher, in suggesting that the Bible was an expression of human experience, got the subject-matter exactly the wrong way round. Barth’s aim, in his own words, was to bring the reader ‘face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.’[1]The subject-matter of scripture is not merely history, a system of morality, or religious piety but the God of the gospel: the message of what God was and is doing in Jesus Christ for the sake of a fallen world. This is a crucial point, for it is the driving assumption and material insight behind Barth’s biblical hermeneutics. The subject-matter of theology is not merely historical but eschatological: the ‘world of the text’ (Ricoeur) is the ‘world of God’. The Bible is about the breaking-in of God’s world (the ‘kingdom of God’; ‘real history’) into the world order (‘so-called history’) in order to judge the world and renew it. However, though God enters the world he continues to remain God; he is in the world but not of it. By the very nature of the case, then, this subject-matter is not under human control. God’s self revelation is not a matter of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, but of God-in-communicative action.  ‘Real history’ – the time and space of God’s making himself known – is beyond the reach of the historian. The Sache of the Bible is not an object at our disposal. Interpreters are not merely ‘spectators’ of God’s Word but, in God’s grace, participants that may be caught up into the subject-matter (viz., the fellowship creating triune economy).”

(Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of Understanding,” pp. 11-13).

Notes

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[1] Barth, The Epistle to the Romans trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; repr. Oxford, 1968), p. x.

John Webster, in his essay, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,” discusses Balthasar’s friendship with Karl Barth and the various ways that Barth influenced Balthasar’s theology. As is well-known, Balthasar, was an avid reader of Barth, lectured on Barth’s works, and even devoted an entire book to Barth’s theology, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation . As Webster points out, Balthasar’s book on Barth was by far the best of the Roman Catholic responses to Barth, as it “did much to lay to rest a conventional and ill-informed Catholic presentation of Barth which, on the basis of a very partial knowledge of his Romans commentary and a few other early writings, dismissed him as an ‘occasionalist’” (p. 243). Balthasar’s acquaintance with Barth was by no means superficial, as he meticulously engaged Barth’s mature writings, viz., the Church Dogmatics, and took very seriously the need for and mutual benefit to be gained from a charitable dialogue with his Protestant brother in Christ. In his presentation of Barth for Catholic consideration, Balthasar argued that Barth had abandoned the conceptuality that characterized his early work and had moved over the course of the 1930’s and 1940’s to an analogical understanding of the relation between God and creation. According to Balthasar, this shift allowed Barth to affirm a significantly more positive view of the “twofoldness” of Creator and creation. Thus, creation as that which is not God was understood vis-à-vis God as good in itself. “And the shift from dialectic to analogy is christologically driven: ‘Word of God’ (abstract, interruptive, atemporal) is replaced by ‘Jesus Christ, God and man’ such that Barth affirms an incarnationally grounded ‘compatibility between God and creatures’” [KB, 114] (p. 243). Webster, however, disagrees with Balthasar’s schematization of Barth’s development and argues that Barth never completely discarded his dialectical thinking and that even in his early work, Barth was concerned “with the fellowship between God and humankind which Balthasar” thought only came about with Barth’s later discovery of analogy. Regarding the latter, Webster believes that Balthasar tended to blur the distinctions between the Lutheran and Reformed influences on Barth, and, in particularly, Balthasar overlooked the impact of Calvin and the Reformed tradition on Barth’s theology during the period of his professorship at Göttingen in 1921-25. During that period, Barth devoted himself to the study of Calvin and the Reformed confessional writings. “As he lectured on these topics […], Barth very early came to an account of the magisterial Reformation according to which Luther emphasizes the ‘vertical’, soteriological axis in God’s relation to the world, whereas Calvin complements this by stronger humane, moral concerns, a concern with the ‘horizontal’. […] The center of gravity of Barth’s early years as a theological professor was thus not—as Balthasar believed—Luther and Kierkegaard, but the tradition which stemmed from Calvin” (p. 247). Though Webster is wholly unconvinced by Balthasar’s account of Barth’s development, he nonetheless praises Balthasar’s engagement with Barth and lists the following as the most important issues to have emeged from that engagement: “the analogical relation between God and creatures; Barth’s actualism; and his Christological constriction” (p. 248).

I close with the following question. Given the clear connection that Webster traces out between Barth and Calvin, coupled with the suggestion that I made in a previous post regarding the possible link between Balthasar’s view of the self-authenticating nature of divine revelation and Barth’s view of the same via Calvin, perhaps the Balthasar/Calvin connection via Barth is a fertile and hitherto unexplored area of study?

Notes
Webster’s essay is published in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Eds by Edward T. Oakes, SJ and David Moss. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 241-255.

By Michael Vendsel

So if Barth is right about Anselm (which is an open question, of course, but not one which I mean to take up here), then how might Anselm respond to someone who doubted the faith?

Two things appear to be certain. One is that Anselm certainly would not tell the non-believer that they are capable, in and of themselves, of reconstructing the truths of the Christian faith by reason alone. Human reason is incapable in and of itself of knowing those things that God has revealed:

“surely it is impossible that all of a sudden at this point Anselm should have conceded to the non-believer…a noetic rationability [...] in order to embark arm in arm with the unbeliever on an arbitrary reconstruction ‘from pure reason’ of Christian knowledge and so to surrender to him the required proof for the ratio fidei.”[1]

But it is also clear that Anselm thinks that if certain tenets of the Credo were already believed, they could be used as premises in arguments to demonstrate the other elements of the Credo. And Barth reads Anselm as saying that something like this situation is always the case (a point at which, interestingly, Barth’s reading of Anselm enjoys some similarities with C.S Lewis’s concept of The Tao in The Abolition of Man). Any objector, then, would already believe something with which the apologist could work toward dispelling objections.

Assuming for the moment that this reading is faithful to Anselm, is a method of this sort plausible? Is the faith really as coherent as is being suggested, and can it seriously be said that every human being believes at least one part of it?

Taking the second of these two objections first, Barth acknowledges the possibility that a person might reject the entire Christian system, but defends Anselm by saying that the proposed method may still be useful:
“Perhaps he [Anselm] saw him [the unbeliever] standing at his side not only within the precincts of theology, but more important within the precincts of the Church. [...] It may be [...] that Anselm could quite well have risked that assumption because of the power of the objective ratio of the object of faith that enlightens and is enlightened from above by the summa veritas and which, according to Anselm, was able to teach and all along did teach truths, that are beyond the power of one human being to teach another.”[2]

This is a somewhat convoluted paragraph, but Barth’s meaning seems to be that the promise of a proof would win the ear of the unbeliever, and while a proof that operated on explicitly Christian presuppositions may not prove, it would be a chance to preach the faith, and that may be empowered by God to change the heart of the unbeliever. This is how one Catholic reviewer interprets Barth here:

“…there is given [the unbeliever] in the proof an occasion of grace in virtue of the power of faith to enlighten because it itself is enlightened from above by God.”[3]

The reviewer has immediate objections to this interpretation, however:

“This places the efficacy of Saint Anselm’s Proof outside itself. Its ability to convince…that God does exist lies not in any intrinsic merit but in its opportuneness as an occasion of grace. But herein, too, lies its weakness, namely in its lack of intrinsic merit. As Saint Thomas warns, the proof that is not really a proof might well be the occasion for that ridicule which derides the faith for its supposed reliance on proofs that are not proofs.”[4]

The irony of this objection is that Barth might be comfortable with it. In Protestant thought it has long been said that what is an occasion of grace for one person might well be an occasion of hardening for another.

This line of reasoning, however, assumes that there really can be such a thoroughgoing objector. If I may insert some of my own ideas, perhaps more can be said for Anselm’s notion (at least on Barth’s reading) that such thoroughgoing objection is impossible. Anselm’s statement “I believe in order to understand” can arguably be taken two ways. On one hand, believing and understanding could be seen as two distinct but contiguous activities. First comes what is involved in believing, then comes what is involved in understanding, and what is involved in each is fundamentally different. One might think here of lightning being immediately followed by thunder. But could the statement mean that belief itself is involved in the act of understanding? Perhaps the action of understanding presupposes the action of believing, the way that seeing lightning presupposes the firing of the optic nerve. If one took matters this way, would this help the situation?

Remember that Barth said that faith is always faith in something – that is, it is never wholly devoid of intellectum. It begins at a small, meager level of intellectum, and moves from that meager level to progressively greater levels as it matures. If that is an accurate description of faith, then saying that faith is involved in understanding seems tantamount to saying that understanding works to some extent off of theological claims. Put another way, it would be to claim that any act of understanding requires making certain assumptions about God. This reading is not without precedent; in the Scottish Journal of Theology, Professor Stanley Kane discusses Anselm’s understanding of faith and reason:

“The common use of ‘reason’ refers to a method or set of methods for gaining and expanding knowledge, which operates autonomously, free from subordination to extrinsic principles or doctrines. But it also indicates conclusions that have been reached and built into a body of knowledge through the use of such methods. ‘Faith’ has a similar twofold sense. It refers both to the doctrinal content of a system of truth which is based ultimately on revelation and also to the manner or attitude in which this is apprehended by the believer. Thus, in both faith and reason, there is a distinction between cognitive content and the subjective means for apprehending such.”[5]

Kane goes on to argue that Anselm affirms only three of these four uses; he acknowledges the double sense of the term “faith”, but only one sense of the word “reason.” For Anselm, he says, reason is a way of knowing things but not a body of truths. Reason is capable of penetrating the meaning and interconnection of received truths but cannot discern truths on its own. If that is genuinely Anselm’s view, then the substance of any claim would ultimately reduce to something received by faith rather than by reason.

But even if this reading of Anselm is defensible, is this a plausible way to look at things? Does all knowledge actually have a theological component to it? While that may seem untenable, recall that for Descartes the trustworthiness of the laws of mathematics and sense perception both rested on the question of God’s malevolence or beneficence. While Descartes did not think this was the case with all knowledge (his own existence being a prominent exception), in his mind the existence of God was still rife with epistemological ramifications. Of course the isolated example of Descartes does not settle the question, but perhaps it shows that (Barth’s interpretation of) Anselm’s claim is not prima facie implausible.

That leaves the first question – does the faith have the coherence Barth/Anselm is claiming for it? While that question is well beyond my scope here, suffice it to say that if the traditional doctrine of simplicity is true, that would seem to favor Anselm’s claim. If God’s ideas are ultimately one with His nature and if His nature is ultimately simple, that would seem to indicate that God’s ideas cohere in a supreme, ultimately unfathomable way. But that, of course, would mean that their full coherence is not something human reason could ever adequately appreciate. It would, however, be an incentive to persevere in looking for coherence, to continually seek understanding of what has already been revealed and believed. And according to Barth’s reading of Anselm, that is the very heart of the theological task and the very thing that will best provide for Christianity’s defense.

Notes:
[1] Barth, 63.
[2] Barth, p. 70, 71.
[3] Taylor, Joseph C. “Book review of Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum by Karl Barth” in The Thomist, vol. 25, 1962, p. 174.
[4] Idem
[5] Kane, Stanley Gordon. “Fides quarenes intellectum in Anselm’s thought” in Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 26, Feb 1973, p. 59.

By Michael Vendsel

This begins a multipart series of posts on Barth and Anselm by Mike Vendsel, my colleague and very good friend. Mike holds a Master of Arts in philosophy from the University of Dallas, a Master of Arts in Religion from Westminster Theological Seminary, is currently working toward a Th.M. at Westminster and is an adjunct professor of philosophy at LaSalle University. Mike also plans to pursue doctoral studies in philosophy.

***

While a bias toward doubt has been an enduring attitude in Western philosophy since Descartes, it was not a hallmark of scholastic philosophy in the centuries before him. The attitude of those previous centuries is expressed by Anselm in his Proslogion:

“I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.” [1]

This methodology, however, has been a stumbling block for many post-Cartesian philosophers. Even with the postmodern discovery that reasoning is inevitably influenced by the context of the reasoner, the plurality of contexts makes the assumption of the authority of any one of them seem irresponsible. As a result, it has often been assumed that scholastic philosophy has little to suggest to the contemporary philosopher. Jeffrey Pugh gives a good description of this attitude in the beginning of an article about Anselm:

“In our day, it may seem difficult at first pass to imagine Anselm of Canterbury as having much to contribute to the struggles of contemporary theology. The notions of partiality, relativity, and contextuality that mark our age do not allow us to assent easily to Anselm’s apparent placid certainty about theological difficulty….” [2]

But is this a fair assessment? Certainly Anselm and others of his era thought about the basis of authority, and certainly they knew the reality of competing authorities.

In his book Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, Barth provides a close analysis of Anselm’s theological method. According to Barth, Anselm’s view of the coherence of the faith and the universality of certain articles of the faith enable the faith to be defended even if it cannot be proved. If Barth’s analysis is correct, it may be that Anselm’s method is better equipped to deal with the challenges of contemporary philosophy than is commonly thought. To explore this further, I will try to go through Barth’s analysis and show how Anselm might have responded to contemporary interlocutors (assuming Barth has understood him correctly).

Barth begins by asking how theology is possible for Anselm given the distance between man and God. On the one hand, he says, the very nature of Anselm’s faith involves cognition, so that the soul possesses partial knowledge of God from the very beginning of its desire for God. Faith is primarily an act of the will, but the operation of the will cannot happen without knowledge. The will can only be exercised in response to perceptions of good and evil, truth and falsity, desirability and undesirability, and such apprehensions are a form of knowing. Accordingly, the soul cannot have faith in God without having known Him in a limited way, and that initial knowledge comes through God’s condescension to reveal Himself – first through the incarnation of the eternal word, then through the inscripturation of that word, and then through the interpretation and proclamation of that word by the Church. In short, Anselmian faith cannot exist without revelation. The faith that seeks understanding – the faith that impels one to seek understanding – is a faith that springs from the verbal proclamation of the Church and has that verbal proclamation of the Church as its ultimate goal. “Anselm’s subjective credo has an objective Credo of the church as its unimpeachable point of reference,” Barth writes,

“that is, a number of propositions formulated in human words (including, of course, the Bible and the Symbols of the Early Church as basic documents of the Catholic Church’s faith). The ‘Word of Christ’ is the truth that faith believes it to be, in that it is identical with the ‘Word of those who preach Christ’. In relation to this human word of Christian proclamation, credere is the presupposition of intelligere.” [3]

Barth goes on to say that this means theology will only ever be a positive endeavor. It does not assume a defensive posture, guarding the faith from its assailants and answering their objections. Its aim instead is to expound and exposit the elements of the Church’s verbal proclamation. As Barth puts it,

“The knowledge that is sought cannot be anything but an extension and explication of that acceptance of the Credo of the church, which faith itself already implied. The man who asks for Christian knowledge asks, ‘to what extent is it thus?’, on the basis of a presupposition that is never for a moment questioned, namely, that it is as he, a Christian, believes.” [4]

Accordingly, theology is nothing more than an effort to make explicit what the Christian believes. It is not an effort to vindicate the truth of that Christian belief. “Intelligere comes about by reflection on the Credo that has already been spoken and affirmed.” [5] This does not mean, however, that Anselm’s theologian gives no thought whatsoever to the factuality of the Christian faith. He does broach such questions, but only from within the context of the Christian faith itself. He considers the factuality of Christianity “as the impetus of its inner necessity” [6] – that is, he examines the way in which particular articles of the faith are demanded by the logic and coherence of the overall system. In that sense he grounds particular aspects of the Christian faith using other aspects of the Christian faith. What he does not do is try to ground the whole system by arguing from a standpoint outside of revelation: “Intelligere will not go beyond the limit of the inner necessity of the articles of the Credo, beyond the limits of the faith’s essential nature which corresponds to these articles.” [7]

While all this sounds like a restriction on the theologian, it is actually placing an additional responsibility on him. Theology cannot consist merely in articulating the sense of the various articles of the creeds – it must also demonstrate their inner coherence and systematic unity. The articles of faith are not mere items on a list, but strands in a fabric, and the theologian is responsible to enumerate both the strands and the cloth, so to speak.

Anselm goes on to say that the best way to solve theological confusions is to borrow those articles of faith that are accepted by both parties and logically extrapolate from them. The inner necessity and coherence of the faith will guarantee that by doing such, an answer to the questions under consideration will eventually surface. “Throughout all Anselm’s investigation,” Barth writes,
“the origin of the rationes necessariae is to be found somewhere other than where it ought to be found in a philosopher who deduced the Credo a priori – namely, on the same level as that on which the question to be answered is raised, within the Credo itself.” [8]

In other words, the premises behind the arguments that solve theological problems are borrowed from the same body of doctrine as those statements whose interpretations are the whole question. The Credo is governed by such overall coherence that understanding part of the Credo provides one with the tools necessary to embark on the never-ending quest to understand all of the Credo. Barth thinks this is Anselm’s basic procedure in all his theological treatises. Concerning the Cur Deus Homo, he even goes so far as to list out all the various theological presuppositions at work:

“The vital presuppositions which underlie the demonstration of the rationality, or rather, the necessity, of the Incarnation and atoning Death of Christ are: continuity between a divine purpose and the human race, the obligation essential to the nature of man to obey God, sin as man’s eternal guilt before God, the inviolability of God’s negation of man’s sin, man’s inability to save himself, and…the aseity and ‘honor’ of God.” [9]

Even with an argument as seemingly free of theological presuppositions as the ontological argument,

“That God is id quo maius cogitari non potest is not a philosophical assumption arrived at by argument, but a name of God, a divine revelation in the guise of something ‘conceived’ by a human brain…. God has revealed himself by a Name which is also an authentic human conception; a name which we can understand and one which enables us ‘to prove’ God’s existence. Anselm was seeking for a name which would enable him to understand what he believed and thus to do theology.” [10]

Notes:
[1] Anselm, Proslogion, I.
[2] Pugh, Jeffrey C. “Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm as Contemporary” in Theology Today, vol. 55, Apr 1998. p. 35.
[3] Ibid., p. 24.
[4] Ibid., p. 26-27.
[5] Ibid., p. 27.
[6] Ibid., p. 28.
[7] Idem.
[8] Ibid., p. 55.
[9] Ibid., pp. 55-56.
[10] Haroutunian, Joseph. “Critical Review: Anselm: Fides quaerens intellectum by Karl Barth” in Journal of Religion, vol. 43, 1963, p. 153.