What problems was Anselm trying to solve with his theory of atonement by satisfaction?

The theology of the early Church, at least qua atonement, was dominated by the Devil. This is
hardly surprising considering its situation at the time: Christians often took communion together in
isolated pockets of faith, surrounded on all sides by the pagan temptations of the Roman imperial
cult, and were highly susceptible to persecution and denouncement. By Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo,
however, times had changed: the Church had built a hegemony over much of Europe, Judaism and
Islam had established themselves as the other monotheistic religions best equipped for intellectual
combat with Christian theology, and Church doctrine rooted in scriptural ambiguity had been ironed
out with sufficient efficacy to prevent the rise of the same heresies which had dogged the first five
hundred years of Biblical exegesis. This widespread shift of attitude brought with it the Scholastic
movement, which sought to justify Church doctrine by means of a priori reasoning as well as
scriptural interpretation (this being also the philosophical aim of Anselm’s CDH). It will be argued,
however, that the satisfaction theory of atonement, rather than being a targeted attempt to solve any
specific theological problems, reflected a broader effort on Anselm’s part to transform theology’s
public image from that of a battle between the good and the evil, in which God and the Devil are the
sole deciders of the values and limits of human life, to a robust and intellectually viable movement
to which people of other monotheistic faiths could more easily reconcile themselves. It is also,
incidentally, for that reason that Anselm’s theory of atonement proves infinitely more satisfactory to
the modern reader than those of his predecessors.

This is not to say that Anselm did not intend, at least in some degree, to rectify the problems faced
by earlier theologians in dealing with atonement. For one, the doctrine of atonement in the early
Church was rooted in the writings of St. Paul, which — although they did lay the foundations for
later, more nuanced understandings of the Cross — are at best shaky and at worst deeply
problematic. The Torah teaches that ‘he who is hung upon a tree … is accursed’ (Deut 21.23).
Despite this seeming to challenge the very core of the theology of the Gospels, Paul attempted to
settle the matter by formulating the argument (now known as the theory of penal substitution) that
Jesus was ‘accursed’ only insofar as he was cursed to be loaded with man’s iniquities and to die to
pay penance for our sins (Gal 3:13). In dealing with this Biblical lacuna in terms of curse and
expiation, however, the God of Paul’s theory of atonement seems more like a tyrant placated only
by the death of his son than the all-merciful, all-loving God who ‘wishes all to be saved’ (1 Tim
2:4). The response from paganism was no less frosty: the crucifixion of Jesus was often seen as an
embarrassment, an instance of the Lord being utterly subjected to human authority, far from a
necessary step in the process of reconciliation between God and man. Thus early doctrines of the
Atonement placed insufficient stress on the symbolism of the Cross as a model of perfect obedience
and sacrifice, such that the death of Jesus came to be seen as a humiliation to the faith rather than
the tipping point in man’s rehabilitation to the imago Dei as which it was surely intended.

Anselm dealt with this phenomenon both macro- and microscopically. As concerns the former, he
invested the death of the Lord on the cross with such an enormous significance that it almost works
to the detriment of other related Church doctrines; indeed, such was the influence of Anselm’s
teaching on the atonement that it had a lasting effect on the physical space of worship, leading to
the cruciform footprint of the vast majority of churches built and rebuilt during the Medieval era.
Concerning the latter, however, his argument was far more detailed. First, he explicated the tacitly-
accepted but previously-unstated idea that, since God is the true master of man, He is the only one
whom we can worship truly: ‘And when the being chooses what he ought, he honors God’ (XV.1).
Since God is the only being in whose name we act, the sinful temptations of fallen man are an
affront to God’s honour: ‘when he does not choose what he ought, he dishonours God, as far as the
being himself is concerned, because he does not submit himself freely to God's disposal’ (XV.5).
However, because God’s honour is infinite, to satisfy him requires an infinite sacrifice. Thus the
Son chose to humiliate himself in a willing act of obedience to the Father, taking human form so
that he might be slain to effect a sacrifice sufficient to match God’s merit and thus restore His
relationship with the human form. Whether or not this argument is coherent is irrelevant to the
matter in question. What can be said for sure is that it moves the defining moment in the Gospels
from the Resurrection to the Cross, thus rehabilitating both Jesus’s death (as a symbol of obedient
self-sacrifice rather than a cruel and wanton form of punishment) and the figure of God (as a cosmic
arbiter of law and justice rather than a despot-creator) to the wider ethos of New Testament
theology.

More difficult to approach than the contrived character of Paul’s theory of penal substitution,
however, was the role of the Devil in earlier theories of atonement. Before the twelth century, the
popularly-accepted models of atonement consisted in the constellation of ‘ransom’ or ‘bait’ theories.
To Origen, the originator of the most basic ransom theory, the Fall led man to be subsumed by the
person of the Devil, effectively being sold into the slavery of sin. In order to deliver us from
temptation, God ‘bought us with a price’ (1 Cor 6:23), trading the infinitely-significant blood of
Jesus to the Devil in return for our salvation. The transaction, however, was of course defective,
since Jesus was raised from the jaws of Hell and exalted on the third day. Thus an addendum to the
ransom theory was crafted under the auspices of Irenaeus, now known as the ‘bait’ theory, which
states that God tempted the Devil with the blood of Christ so as to effect man’s salvation in the full
knowledge that He would not keep his end of the bargain.

It is surprising, given the evident problems with the early Fathers’ treatment of Lucifer, that the
ransom theory was accepted for as long as it was. For one, suggesting that the Devil is able to lead
man into slavery so absolutely that their salvation requires God to make an infinite sacrifice implies
that God and the Devil are on an equal footing in terms of power and influence. The Scriptures,
however, are clear otherwise. The powers of Satan, being a creature made by God, are contingent;
he does not possess the same omnipotence as the Father, and thus — it would seem — is incapable
of leading the entire human race astray. Furthermore, Job teaches that Satan’s power to tempt is
dependent on God’s permission (cf. Job 1:6, 2:12) and Isaiah explicitly states that God alone can
discern future events: ‘I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me,
declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done’ (Is.
4:9-10). Thus it follows that man’s temptation and wholesale ethical overthrow by the Devil would
not be the results of the compelling powers of Satan but of a divine dereliction of duty in allowing
us to be tempted in the foreknowledge that we would yield. Even leaving the Scriptures aside, the
notion of God being an entity of infinite justice would not be compatible with the idea of Him
‘baiting’ the Devil into releasing us from sin; however much they might benefit His purposes, dirty
tricks and underhanded manoeuvres like this one seem simply unavailable to the one being who can
concern himself with the maintenance of universal laws and rules, lest the entire economy of
creation be corrupted.

Anselm was less successful in dealing with the ransom theory as he was with the theory of penal
substitution. Nevertheless, he did succeed in drawing the spotlight away from the devil, whose
‘infliction of punishment was not meritorious’ (CDH, VII.8), and back to God’s ‘infinite love of
justice’ (ibid.). To Anselm, society can be understood as a parable for creation, in that every man
finds his master in one God in the same way that every slave finds his master in one man. Thus God
is the only legitimate authority, and man can only be subjected to the slavery of sin not by means of
the power of the Devil but by consciously turning away from the Father. However, since the Devil
punishes us not out of a love of justice but for the purposes of his own malice, the punishment we
receive from him, though it may match the magnitude of our iniquities, is unfairly meted out and is
therefore null and void in its effects. In other words, since the Devil’s hold over the human race (if
it ever did exist) was instantiated for the wrong reasons, God, being infinitely loving, would be
justified in using whatever powers He saw fit to break it and restore His relationship with the
human race without the need to pay a ransom to the ‘powers and principalities of the air’ (Eph 6:12)
or set a trap for Satan himself.

Anselm’s teaching on the Devil suffers from his insistence that God’s will is incomprehensible and
utterly irreconcilable to man’s reason. Although it may have made sense in terms of the doctrines of
the medieval Church, the idea that God would permit us consciously to be harmed by Satan, to be
‘tormented by the Devil … permitted by God’s inconceivable wisdom, which happily controls even
wickedness’ (CDH, VII.12,16) is anathema to the modern reader, inculcated by recent analytical
theology into a healthy critical awareness of the coherence of God’s will and more alert to instances
of the Father creating problems which only He can solve. Nevertheless, his theory of atonement by
satisfaction is still broadly successful in diminishing the role played by the Devil in constituting the
value of Christ’s death on the Cross to all believers: which, given the ‘execrable’ character of the
ransom theory in the East and the ‘bitterest fruit’ (Rashdall, 324/325) it bore in the West, must be
counted as a significant theological victory.

Perhaps the most significant problem faced by Anselm, however, was not so much theological as a
matter of public opinion. On account of pagan misreadings of the Scripture (cf. Eph. 2:2, Gen 3:1),
combined with certain unfortunate Patristic texts finding evil begotten of pacts with the Devil to
‘befoul and pollute the world’1 , the Devil and the Father were seen as similarly potent cosmic
opponents, each capable of stripping man of its free will either to pass it over into the slavery of
temptation or to effect its salvation. Furthermore, emergent Islamic theology, headed by Abu
Ghazālī and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, elided the doctrine of atonement altogether, drawing upon salient
passages in the Qur’an to argue that humanity, being unburdened by original sin as a result of God
forgiving the moral degradation of Adam and Eve (2:36-38; 7:23,24), is solely responsible for its
own misdeeds and any resultant punishment (2:286; 6:164). In short, Christianity, with its dramatic
focus on paying ransoms to the Devil and conquering the forces of darkness, had been so
overburdened by a thousand years of intellectual development that it had begun to delve into
metaphysical abstractions bereft of any practical implications on the wider community of faith. This
left it susceptible to new, monotheistic approaches like that of Islamic theology, which sought to
simplify the relationship between God and man and thus emphasise the critical role of personal
responsibility in achieving salvation.

These emergent problems required not only a theological solution but a complete philosophical
revaluation of Church doctrine — something which Anselm was more than ready to provide. Where
previous approaches to atonement had turned it into something esoteric, an inconsequential doctrine
situated only in problematic scriptural evidence which constituted but a single element of the wider
landscape of faith, Anselm emphasised the centricity of belief in God’s justice (and thus belief in
Jesus as the only means to salvation) to understand the theology of New Testament. Furthermore,

1cf. Denike, Margaret. “The Devil's Insatiable Sex: A Genealogy of Evil Incarnate.” Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 1,
2003, pp. 10–43. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3811035. Accessed 26 Oct. 2020.
the value invested in a priori reason throughout his treatises on the divine nature allowed him to
demonstrate not only that his theory of atonement by satisfaction (in addition to the existence of the
Trinity in the Monologion and the existence of God in the Proslogion) was valid within the specific
economy of the Bible, but that the observable features of the natural world and the special qualities
of human mental life point as a matter of pure reason to the truth of the doctrines which he so
carefully formulated. Gone, in Anselm’s Scholasticism, was the legalistic personification of the
Devil and the persons of God which characterised earlier theology. What replaced it was a clearly-
explicated set of doctrines, rooted in the faculties of logical understanding common to philosophers
of all faiths, which facilitated productive intellectual discourse on the nature of God and the
significance of the death of Jesus to the life and worship of the Church. It is this problem, of the
circularity of deriving Church doctrines from scriptural evidence alone, which was most pressing to
Anselm; fortunately, it was also the problem in the respect of which his theory of atonement by
satisfaction proved most successful.