The attractions of Bec were two-fold, first, the fame of the then Prior, Lanfranc, whose expertise in grammar was well-known, and second, the strict regime on which the house of Bec was based. Rapidly promoted to Prior in about 1063, Anselm eventually became Abbot of Bec in 1076, after the death of the founding Abbot, Herluin. In 1093 he left Bec, to become Archbishop of Canterbury, in succession to Lanfranc, who had died in 1089. The appointment came, for Anselm, with regret at the disruption to his monastic life, for, although the Cathedral of Christ Church at Canterbury was also a Benedictine foundation (there were four Benedictine Cathedrals in medieval England: Canterbury, Worcester, Winchester and Durham), his duties and responsibilities were now to a larger church and world. A series of clashes with his kings, William II and Henry I of England, and fierce proposition of church reform, dominated his archiepiscopal reign, which lasted until his death in 1109.
During his early years Anselm became a noted guide and advisor on monastic living within northern-French and Burgundian circles. He also developed a form of prayer and meditation, which placed a keener emphasis on emotional responses to the object or person of devotion. The Anselmian revolution, as it has been termed, was not wholly his invention, there were older contemporaries, such as John of Fécamp (d.1077) who also experimented with forms of expression focusing on the poles of human emotion, especially as evoked in the contemplation of the wretched situation of fallen humanity. Joy, sadness, hope, despair, glory and tragedy, became an important part of the way in which the human condition, and its effects on human life, were articulated.
As an example, in his Prayer to Saint Peter (here using the translation by Benedicta Ward The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, London, 1973, p. 137), Anselm asks his addressee to look kindly on his supplication, in passages rich with the imagery of broken humanity, and ends with a surprising reminder of Peter’s own weakness in denying Christ when questioned.
‘Peter, good shepherd,
do not be difficult of access;
do not turn away your merciful eyes.
Have a care, I pray you,
lest you throw down the penitent,
and delay to hear a suppliant.
Because his [the supplicant’s] soul loathes the life-giving pasture,
he grows weak for lack of strength;
because he indulges in what is unhealthy,
he attracts tormenting diseases.
Full-grown ulcers, open wounds, putrid decay,
draw him swiftly to death.
Wolves have tastes his blood and now they lie in ambush,
Watching, and plotting his overthrow.
His enemy, ‘as a roaring lion’, goes about seeking him,
so that he ‘may devour him’.
Faithful shepherd, look upon him,
and recognise that he has been committed to you.
He at have strayed but at least it is not he
who has denied his Lord and Shepherd.’
Many similar passages could be quoted. Anselm’s description of sin, and its consequences was vivid, and of significant influence on subsequent generations, writing in both Latin and vernacular languages.
Anselm created a style of theological investigation alongside his prayerful and meditative mode. While not constructing a summa theologica, in the manner of thirteenth-century theologians, Anselm did, over a writing career extending from about 1076 to his death in 1109, provide a systematic discussion of questions central to the theological enterprise. The Trinity, the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the Nature and Being of God, Truth, Free Will and the Fall of the Devil, as well as the Conception of the Virgin, and the Incarnation and Atonement (how sin is recompensed), were all topics for investigation. Anselm operated within a biblical framework, but used the tools of philosophical analysis with which he was familiar, in this sense placing emphasis on the role of reason within theology, while not eschewing the important and prominence of authority.
At the heart of Anselm’s theology lay questions about human sin and the justice and love of God. In his treatise On the God-Man, completed while Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1098, he re-articulated the way in which the Incarnation of God as Jesus Christ might be interpreted in light of its economy, how it worked, who paid what to whom. Original sin, the disobedience of Eve and then Adam to God’s instructions, caused, for the early and medieval churchmen, an indelible stain within each human life, an irremovable impediment to the proper role of humanity, to honour and adore the Creator. Humanity was, as a result of Adamic sin, distorted, unable to act as it should, born with both original sin, and a propensity to sin, sin strongly and sin some more. As Anselm’s Prayer to St John the Baptist puts it (Ward, p. 131): ‘To sin- how evil and bitter that is. Sins – how easy to commit, how hard to give up. Sinners – so misled by sins - are caught by their fetters’.
How was this original sin to be made up for, how was it to be compensated and recompensed, so that forgiveness might be offered, and redemption made possible, were the issues to which Anselm turned his attention. An older model of sin and forgiveness gave a significant role to the devil. Humanity, having sinned, came under the jurisdiction of the devil; by sending Christ, who, although God, appeared as man, to die, the devil could be trapped into trying to extend his jurisdiction over that, over which, he had none, that is, God. Having, wrongfully tried to claim Jesus, as Man, when he was also God, the devil relinquished all rights over humanity; restitution therefore achieved. The clearest articulation of this position in the early church emerges in the writing of Rufinus of Aquileia, and its elements remained prominent in early medieval theology.
Anselm turns the economy, not on the role of the devil, but in a transaction between humanity and God. Only man should pay for original sin, but the sin was of such magnitude that only God could; God should not pay for original sin, since he was sinned against, by man the sinner. The solution is a God-man, who encompasses both the need and the capacity to pay the debt of sin. While Anselm attributes plenty to the devil in terms of worldly temptation, he removes him from the economy of salvation and redemption. It is Christ’s atonement for original sin which allows for the redemption of creation. In the temporal world, it is baptism which is carried as the mark and mechanism of forgiveness for Adam’s sin. In the Prayer to St John the Baptist this is remarked on again (Ward, p. 133):
‘You, God, take away the sin of the world,
and you, his friend [John the Baptist], say,
‘Here is he who takes away the sin of the world.
Behold, before you,
him who is burdened with the sin of the world’.
You bear the sin – and you proclaim that he bears it.
Behold me, whose sin you bear as John proclaims.
Behold, healer, and the healer’s witness, here am I –
behold, the sick servant of the healer and his work
petitions here the healer and his witness.
True healer, I pray you heal me;
true witness, I beg you to pray for me’.
The economy of salvation, as Anselm puts it in the treatise On the God-Man, draws on a distinctive language of debt and payment, of obligation and of justice extracted. Anselm’s vision in this sense was, especially after the Reformation, criticised for a rather legalistic framework in which God demands his due, without much emphasis on the incarnation as an act of love. The justice and the mercy of God, Anselm sees, in fact, as two aspects of the same question, and in the Meditation on Human Redemption which accompanies the more formal treatise, the dynamic of love and the goodness of God are placed more to the fore. Anselm’s economy of salvation relies on honour and satisfaction, but equally on hope and love. A heavy accent is placed on the man-ward nature of the transaction. Anselm states that human nature was exalted in the incarnation, rather than the divine nature humbled. The man-ward aspect is underlined by the language of debt and payment, even in the Meditation on Human Redemption (Ward, p. 233): ‘He [Christ] had what was above all beings that are other than God, and he took on himself all the debt that sinners ought to pay, and this when he himself owed nothing, so that he could pay the debt for the others who owed it and could not pay’.
Anselm, as Prior and Abbot of an expanding monastic house in Normandy in the period just after the Norman Conquest of England, and then, to a much greater extent, as Archbishop of Canterbury, would have been familiar with the economies of his institutions. In fact, Anselm, in his letter collection, leaves a considerable body of evidence for his use of and attitudes towards money (Gasper and Gullbekk, ‘Money and its use in the thought and experience of Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109)’, Journal of Medieval History, 38, 2012). Debt, payment and the obligations incurred within transactions were part of his daily life, materially as well as spiritually. Indeed, the two are part and parcel of the same economy: for Anselm and his contemporaries, action in the world, had, potentially, eternal consequences. How his economy of salvation changed over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and how its investigation helps an understanding of both the broader religious society of the High Middle Ages, and, where the evidence is available, of individual religious activity, will form a significant element of the Economy of Salvation research project.