Did Anselm Also Compose the Cur Deus Homo with Invisible Muslim Interlocutors in Mind?

Emery de Gaal

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Chapter 18 Did Anselm Also Compose the Cur Deus Homo with Invisible Muslim Interlocutors in Mind?

In: Anselm of Canterbury

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Emery de Gaal

Emery de Gaal
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 381–399

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004716308_020

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Abstract

Anselm’s famous satisfaction account of the logic of atonement is not the only argument found in his Cur Deus Homo. In the sixteenth to the eighteenth chapter of the first book—the longest chapters in the entire work—Anselm explores another rationale: the population of the heavenly city, despoiled of its number by the fall of the evil angels, whose vacancies human beings are destined to fill. This aspect of Anselm’s argument, so alien to post-medieval imaginaries, is barely mentioned in most secondary retellings of the Cur Deus Homo, perhaps because it seems to bespeak a rigid concept of cosmic order which subordinates human destinies to the demands of numerical symmetry. Anselm’s Benedictine context, however, furnished a rich tradition of the monk’s ‘angelic’ vocation. Hints from Anselm’s other writings suggest that the notion of humans filling up the angelic ranks was a specifically monastic possibility. This chapter examines the Cur Deus Homo’s other argument in the light of Anselm’s belief in the ‘potential angelicity’ of monks, revealing not only a crucial counterpart to his satisfaction argument, but also a dynamic, rather than static or legalistic, conception of redemptive order.

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Anselm of Canterbury

Nature, Order and the Divine

Series: Anselm Studies and Texts, Volume: 8

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004716308

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 11 Dec 2024

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Front Matter

Part 1 Monologion and Proslogion

Part 2 The Three Early Dialogues, De Grammatico and De Concordia

Part 3 Cur Deus Homo

Part 4 Eadmer and Epistolae

Part 5 Addendum

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Chapter 18 Did Anselm Also Compose the Cur Deus Homo with Invisible Muslim Interlocutors in Mind?

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Anselm of Canterbury

Nature, Order and the Divine

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