Anselm On The Incarnation of the Word

My idea of getting all Christmassy was to read On The Incarnation of the Word by Anselm of Canterbury. Better that than waste time putting up a tacky tree. It's a remarkable little work in which the great Medieval theologian sets out to refute the idea that the Father and the Spirit became incarnate as well as the Son. He set down his thoughts in a letter addressed to Pope Urban II. 

The work is a marvel of tightly compressed theological reasoning. Its occasion was a controversy between Anselm and 'a certain cleric' he encountered when he was abbot of a monastery in Bec, France. This cleric held that, 'if the three persons are only one thing and not three things... then the Father and the Holy Spirit as well as the Son became flesh', p. 233. 

Anselm initially wrote to refute this error while still ministering in Bec. The cleric in question seemed to have recanted his heterodox views. It transpired later that he only recanted because he feared the population might kill him. Meanwhile, once the danger had passed, he continued to teach the incarnation of the whole Trinity. Partial copies of Anselm's refutation were doing the rounds and now as Archbishop of Canterbury Anselm felt the need to respond in a more thorough and complete way to the French cleric's 'novelty'. 

Despite his high ecclesiastical rank and theological ability. the Archbishop felt ill equipped to defend the faith. He likens the task to a man endeavouring to stabilise Mount Olympus. He wrote not so much to confirm the faith, as to satisfy Christian brothers who urged him to put pen to paper in response to the error under discussion. And this was no mere intellectual exercise for Anselm. He saw his task as one of faith seeking understanding the things of God. Our minds need to be illuminated by the Spirit if we are to receive and experience  God's truth. 

Anselm did not believe that doctrinal disputes can be resolved simply by appealing to the text of Scripture. Some heretics don't believe in the authority of the Bible. Others interpret it in a perverse sense. It is necessary therefore to use theological arguments derived from the Bible to expose error and defend the faith. That does not mean, however, that everything is up for grabs. The Catholic faith that is based on Scripture and confessed by the Church should be received and lived out by faithful believers. We must believe in order to understand the mysteries of God's Word. 

In terms of the Trinity, Anselm assumes the orthodox teaching that there is but one will and power in the being of God, which all three persons share, as each is fully divine. Yet there are not three gods, but one. Plurality in God is a property of the persons, not the divine nature. Were plurality a property of  nature, God would be composed of parts, which he cannot be. God is the perfect being. In all composite entities are some things superior and some things inferior. God cannot be anything less that perfect in his simple and undivided essence. He is a being than which none greater can be conceived (Anselm's Proslogion). 

The persons may be distinguished not in terms of their shared nature, but on account of their personal relations. The three are not interchangeable and there is an order of persons in the Trinity.  The Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. These distinctions may not be misattributed. The Son is Son because he is begotten of the Father, the Father is Father because he begets the Son.

The personal distinctions are real, not modes in a unipersonal god. The same man may be a father in relation to his son and a son in relation to his father, yet he is one person, not two. The situation is quite different in the Trinity, where there are three distinct persons in the one God. 

It was fitting that the Son should become incarnate rather than the Father or the Holy Spirit. Had the Holy Spirit taken human flesh, reasons Anselm, there would have been two sons in God, the eternal Son of the Father and the human son of Mary to which the Holy Spirit had become personally united. Had the Father been born of Mary, according to Anselm, 'two persons of the Trinity would take the name of grandson, since both the Father would be grandson of the Virgin's parents, and the Father's Son would be the Virgin's grandson, although the Son himself would have no part from the Virgin'. (p. 251). 

The economic missions of the Trinity reflect the eternal processions. It was signally appropriate that the only begotten Son of the Father should have become the son of Mary. 'Therefore' continues Anselm, 'no divine person other than the Son ought to become flesh, since there cannot be any least inappropriate thing in God. For although we declare that the Son in his humanity is less than the Father or the Holy Spirit, yet the latter two persons do not on that account surpass the Son, since the Son also has the same majesty whereby he himself is also superior to his humanity.' (p. 251). 

It is not right to say that because there are three persons in the one God that all three persons therefore became incarnate. The incarnation was not an act of the divine nature, but an act of a divine person, namely the Son.  Neither do we say that the Son as the second person of the Trinity became a human person at the incarnation. Rather, the Son took a human nature in addition to his divine nature into the unity of his person. Having said that, the external acts of the Trinity are undivided so the Son did not become man apart from the Father who sent him and the Spirit by whom his human nature was conceived in the womb of Mary. 

Anselm's On the Incarnation of the Word might seem to address a rather abstruse point; that the whole Trinity became incarnate, rather than simply the Son. Who would ever say such a thing these days? His letter is worth reading, however. Anselm's grasp of Catholic trinitarian dogma is is remarkably clear and profound. The arguments he deploys to refute his opponent's theological novelty are in full accord with the Nicene Creed and Definition of Chalcedon. 

The simplistic biblicism of some sectors of Evangelicalism has left its pastors and theologians incapable of doing much more than trading proof texts. Our ability to engage in theology as a work of 'holy reason', or 'faith seeking understanding' is often weak and underdeveloped compared with Medieval theologians such as Anselm, the Church Fathers, the Reformers and their Orthodox Reformed successors.  

The Reformers did not jettison the creedal heritage of the church. The Westminster Confession of Faith and its Congregational and Baptist derivatives (the Savoy Declaration and  the Second London Baptist Confession) bear all the hallmarks of historic doctrinal orthodoxy. See this Tabular Comparison for Chapters II (The Trinity) & VIII (Christ the Mediator). We are Reformed Catholics, recognising that while Scripture alone has magisterial authority for the church, the ancient creeds have ministerial authority, as they accurately summarise key Bible teachings and help to guard against erroneous ideas. 

In recent years Evangelicals have denied the eternal generation of the Son, which is a key component of trinitarian theology, here and here. Others have posited that will is a property of persons rather than the being of God, which leads to them saying that the Son eternally submitted his will to that of the Father, here. Anselm is a better guide to understanding the relations between the three persons in the being of God and what that means for the incarnation. 

The Trinity and the incarnation are the two great mysteries of the Christian faith. The role of creeds, confessions and classic treatments of these doctrines is not to fully explain the fundamental truths of Holy Scripture. Rather, such texts serve to erect a fence around the high mysteries of divine self-revelation. In doing so they act as a safeguard against error and provide us with sound parameters for faith seeking understanding. 

As to 'Why God Became Man', that's next on my 'Christmas with Anselm' reading list. But I guess that tree tinsel decked-tree will have to go up sometime.