The Legal Implications of the Doctrine of the Atonement
Anselm's theory also laid the foundation for the new jurisprudence. It did so by answering the question why either satisfaction or punishment is required, why God in his mercy cannot forgive man's sin freely, as a matter of grace.
The answer was that this would leave the disturbance of the order of the universe, caused by sin, uncorrected, and that an uncorrected disorder would constitute a deficiency in justice. The just order of the universe, the iustitia or righteousness of God, requires that the price be paid. Mercy, said Anselm, is the daughter of justice; it is derived from justice and cannot work against justice. 29It is the mercy of God that lets man live, and indeed offers him redemption, although man has willfully betrayed the sacred trust of Paradise. But God does not act arbitrarily; his mercy is subject to his justice, just as his justice is subject to his rectitudo, his "right ordering."It is interesting to compare this language with that of the tract Concerning True and False Penance, written perhaps forty to fifty years before Cur Deus Homo and well known to Anselm. The earlier work is in the older theological and moral tradition (also the Eastern Christian tradition) of refusing to subordinate God's mercy to his justice or his justice to his mercy. The author writes: "For God is merciful and just, preserving mercy in justice and also justice in mercy." "The just [judge] should be merciful justly." "He should have mercy with justice... and justice in riiercy." 30 Yet the author distinguishes between justice and mercy in his analysis of punishment. "For justice alone condemns," he writes. 39Further, he attacks "the error of those who presume forgiveness without penance," that is, without punishment, on the ground that they in effect justify evil and give a "license to sin." 32 God's grace is not to be cheapÂ
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ened in this way.
Thus the new theory of "true and false penance" paved the way for Anselm's argument that the rational order of the universe requires that sins always be punished. 3_ Anselm is often charged with having adopted a "legal" or "legalistic" view of the atonement. He has also been defended against this charge on the ground that his criteria of justice (iustitia) are essentially moral criteria rather than legal criteria. 34 Neither of these views is quite adequate. Surely Anselm was not legalistic in the sense of being concerned with the technicalities of a divine law of sin and penance or crime and punishment. For him, as for his predecessors, iustitia was the word used for the Biblical term which is translated "righteousness." Anselm was concerned to explore the fundamental character of God's righteousness.He was equally concerned, however, with the way in which God's justice, or righteousness, manifests itself in specific acts and norms. He was not willing to sacrifice a particular decision or rule, derived from justice, on the altar of an inconsistent principle, however attractive. In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm's pupil is led to say: "If God follows the method of justice, there is no escape for a miserable wretch; and God's mercy seems to perish." Anselm replies: "You asked for reason, now accept reason." 35 However broadly Anselm conceived justice, reason required that he stop at the boundary of grace. God is bound by his own justice. If it is divinely just for a man to pay the price for his sins, it would be unjust, and therefore impossible, for God to remit the price. In Cur Deus Homo Anselm's theology is a theology of law. 36
Before the time of Anselm (and in the Eastern Church still) it would have been considered wrong to analyze God's justice in this way. It would have been said, first, that these ultimate mysteries cannot be fitted into the concepts and constructs of the human intellect; that reason is inseparable from faith -Âone is not the servant of the other, but rather the two are indivisible; and that the whole exercise of a theology of law is a contradiction in terms.
And second, it would have been said that it is not only, and not primarily, divine justice that establishes our relationship with God but also, and primarily, his grace and his mercy; that it is his grace and mercy, and not only his justice, which explains the crucifixion, since by it mankind was ransomed from the power of the devil and the demons of death -- the very power which had procured the slaying of Jesus in the first place but which then itself was finally conquered through the resurrection.Eastern Orthodoxy, in fact, never developed theories concerning merits, satisfaction, purgatory, and supererogatory works. Such theories were considered legalistic in the East. The doctrine of eternal damnation was also rejected. Sin was viewed primarily as the fallen state of a person's soul, not as an act committed in violation of divine law. Similar ideas prevailed in Germanic Christendom prior to the Papal Revolution.
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Seen thus from an earlier perspective (and today from an Eastern perspective), Anselm's theory is a legal one in the sense that it explains both human suffering and divine forgiveness in terms of a single framework of justice and right ordering. Human suffering is seen as a price paid for man's disobedience. More fundamentally, God's remission of eternal punishment, despite the infinite w rong that man has done to him, is made right, made legal, by the only possible sacrifice commen surate with the sin. Thus redemption was explained essentially in terms of a legal transaction.