Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (50 page)

Anselm's theological writings, painstakingly copied in the scriptoria of monasteries all over Europe, made him one of the most influential thinkers of the age. It was Anselm who boldly offered proofs of God's existence, including the ontological proof that is still debated: "God is that greater than which cannot be conceived."
¹⁴
Therefore God must exist, because the idea of God is not greater than the reality of such a being. As the ecclesiastical legislation of the twelfth century began Europe's rescue from the anarchy of brigands, so Anselm's insistence on the primacy of human reasoning began a recovery from the superstition of an illiterate people not long removed from barbarism. Theology, he said, is faith in search of reason. I believe, he said, in order that I may understand.
¹⁵
Anselm is called the father of scholasticism, but he is better remembered as father of a faith that owes no apology to intellect.
¹⁶

Anselm was an intimate friend of Urban II, who called the First Crusade. Before becoming pope, Urban had been a reforming monk. For a time they lived close to each other.
¹⁷
At the moment Urban was calling for the Crusade, at Clermont in the autumn of 1095—God wills it!—Anselm was beginning work on a major treatise. Published in 1098,
Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man)
is a first, systematic attempt to explain the doctrine of the Incarnation in logical fashion. His purpose, as he says in the preface, was to answer "the objections of unbelievers who reject the Christian faith because they think it contrary to reason."
¹⁸
The unbeliever to whom Anselm addresses his argument is not the "infidel" against whom Urban has just launched his Crusade, but the Jew. Anselm's dialogue partner in
Cur Deus Homo
is a fellow monk named Boso, a stand-in not for Muslims or pagans, but for those who alone had considered Christian claims and rejected them, the Jews.
¹⁹
Prior to Anselm, the Christian case was always made by appeals to Scripture, which Jews so infuriatingly rejected. Now the appeal is to be made—this begins a new era between Christians and Jews—solely on the basis of reason. Anselm reshapes the patristic and Augustinian understandings of Christian revelation, reducing them to an apologetic purpose.

"For we have proposed to inquire by reason alone whether His advent was necessary for the salvation of men..." Anselm tells Boso. "Let us proceed, therefore, by pure reason ... [along a course] in which faith in Christ is put to a rational test."
²⁰
The train of thought runs like this: After the Fall of Adam, human beings were in a state of sin, alienation, and misery. If God is all-powerful, and if God, in his mercy, wanted to forgive humanity, why didn't he do so by means of the sacred
Fiat!
with which he had created the world in the first place? This is the most basic question that can be put to faith. Anselm's answer is not an ontological argument but a more compelling social one—an argument, that is, from the structure of society as he and his readers would have experienced it. For our purposes, the point is this: God became a man expressly to die on the cross.

The epoch-shaping image of Henry IV prostrate in the snow before Pope Gregory VII, the event that took place only a few years before, gives Anselm his motif, for he applies the assumptions of a feudal power struggle to relations between God and human beings. His logic is drawn from the rigid feudal order, which squares with Anselm's accepted notion of creation as a hierarchy of finite goods under the infinite good of God. When Adam was expelled from Paradise, humans were banished from that hierarchy. The human problem then became not merely how to make amends to a being whose place in the order of existence is superior, but how to do so from outside that very order. Thus the ontological argument has been subsumed by the social one: The problem of salvation is defined as a matter of rendering satisfaction and restoring honor to a Supreme Being who has been insulted by an inferior being. According to feudal norms, only a person of equal rank within the hierarchy could make amends to the one offended. The analogy is ruthlessly applied: If the one offended was divine, then only a divine being could redress the offense.

Or, as
Cur Deus Homo
has it: "If, therefore, as is certain, it is needful that that heavenly state be perfected from among men, and this cannot be unless the above-mentioned satisfaction be made, which no one
can
make except God, and no one
ought
to make except man, it is necessary that one who is God-man should make it."
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The first conclusion: Jesus, as the man come to reverse the Fall of Adam,
had
to be divine. Thus God
had
to become a man. The Incarnation is necessary. The beauty of this logic prompts the credulous Boso to exclaim, "Blessed be God! Already we have discovered one great truth on the subject of our inquiry. Go on, therefore."
²²
And Anselm does. But he moves immediately to a new problem, for God's becoming man, in this scheme, is not enough.

The Incarnation, as realized in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, involved many "saving events," as the tradition calls them. Jaroslav Pelikan reports that, for many centuries, the "seven seals" of the Apocalypse were taken to refer to the conception, birth, life, crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.
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Any one of these, or the whole course, could have been offered as satisfaction to the offended divinity as a way, in Anselm's word, of "atoning" for the sin of Adam. Since Jesus himself was divine, that should have been enough—a life well lived to compensate for a life squandered. But this would not work in a schema drawn from a rigid code of feudal honor. "The man who does not render to God this honor, which is His due, takes away from God what is His own, and dishonors God, and this is to sin."
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The offense God took at Adam's freely chosen act of disobedience can be removed only by a contrary act of obedience, and it too must be freely chosen—which leads, in this logic, directly to the isolated moment of death. Suffering and death are the wages of sin, the result of Adam's act. But Jesus, though human, is free of sin. So he is the only human being who came into the world with no need to suffer and die. Every other "event" of his existence was normal to his dual nature, but death was not. Jesus was born exempt from the sentence of mortality, which meant that only by a supreme act of his own freedom could he die. Such an act of freedom was exactly what the feudal honor code required.

If for righteousness' sake He permitted Himself to be slain, did He not give His life for the honor of God?...Do you not see that when He endured with uncomplaining patience injuries, and insults, and the death of the cross with robbers, brought on Him (as we said above) on account of the righteousness which He kept with perfect obedience, He gave men an example...? No man beside Him ever gave to God, by dying, what he would not at some time have necessarily lost, or paid what he did not owe. But this Man freely offered to the Father what it would never have been necessary for Him to lose, and paid for sinners what He did not owe for Himself.
²⁵

We are in a rigidly juridical world here, with God as an aggrieved feudal lord, carefully weighing out recompense on a finely calibrated scale. This was very much the world of Anselm, who was forced to play out in his own life, both in Urban lis behalf and in his own as archbishop of Canterbury, a version of the feudal dispute that set Pope Gregory VII against Emperor Henry IV. Honor, satisfaction, reconciliation, atonement—these notions were all forged in the crucible of politics before being so rationally applied to religion. The furies of the long-simmering "investiture controversy," which at bottom was nothing but a feudal power struggle, infuse this theology with an energy that can be felt even in our era of church-state separation. Anselm wrote
Cur Deus Homo,
in part, after having been forced into exile by the English king, William Rufus, over a question of offended honor. Anselm, as the feudal lord claiming primacy, would not have his own honor satisfied until William died and his successor, Henry I, agreed to pay the archbishop homage. The king, that is, had to disavow the royal claim to the right of investiture—the right to make appointments to monastic and ecclesiastical offices. Thus satisfied, Anselm could duly acknowledge the king's temporal authority. This feudal pattern of offense and atonement between king and archbishop would repeat itself intermittently. Only a few decades later, one of Anselm's successors, Thomas a Becket (1118–1170), would play it out, mortally, with Henry II.

God was the ultimate feudal lord, and therefore, in Anselm's schema, God's preeminent virtue was justice. But even Boso, toward the end of
Cur Deus Homo,
has to ask about mercy. Even in a brutal feudal world, an "economy of salvation" that requires as a kind of debt payment the savage death, however freely chosen, of a beloved son raises a troubling question about the nature of this God. As Hans Küng points out, fathers of the Church like Origen (c. 185–254) had similarly described the death of Jesus as a kind of ransoming,
²⁶
but in their schema, the one being paid off was Satan. The brutality fit. But in Anselm, the brutality only jars. How can God be doing this?

"The mercy of God...," Anselm asserts in reply, "is so great, and in such harmony with His justice, that it cannot be imagined to be either greater or more just. For what greater mercy can be conceived than when God the Father says to the sinner condemned to eternal torments, and having no power to redeem himself from them, 'Accept My only-begotten Son, and give Him for thyself'; and when the Son Himself says, 'Take Me and redeem thyself'? For it is as though They were saying these very words, when They summon us and draw us to the Christian faith."
²⁷

Anselm's motive, as we saw, is to draw to the Christian faith the unbeliever, which in his context always means the Jew. But could Jews of that or any age respond to such an image? "That God needs a human sacrifice to reconcile his own creation with himself," the Jewish writer Pinchas Lapide protests, "that he, the ruler of the world, cannot justify anyone without a blood sacrifice, is as incomprehensible to Jews as it is contrary to the Bible."
²⁸
Perhaps Lapide is thinking here of Isaac, whom God spares from such a fate. Yet versions of the idea of a God-required blood sacrifice had entered the religious imagination of Christians beginning, perhaps, with Saint Paul, but mainly as a way of understanding the crucifixion as something other than a cosmic disaster. Anselm succeeded in bringing the notion of Christ's death as atonement to its fullest expression. The appeal among Christian believers of this cross-centered theology, if not among Jews and Muslims, was immediate and widespread. It explained the dominant religious experience that Christians were undergoing in that millennial era, for an atoning cross lent meaning to what life required in a brutish time. But the cross could be misunderstood. Had Jesus come to promote suffering or to oppose it? Could the cult of the crucifix and related phenomena, like the flagellant movements, be a surrender to the very powers of sickness, suffering, and death that Jesus had intended to overcome? Could God, in other words, be portrayed as a bit too invested in the misery, not only of the Son, but of the rest of us? Is there a curl of sadism in this economy of salvation?

Anselm's theology of atonement took root in the Catholic mind, and it remains a dominant paradigm. I embraced it myself as a young man without understanding why it reinforced my inbred fear instead of freeing me from it. Salvation? Judgment? Where is the Good News in such appeasement? This paradoxical and tragic idea of God's mercy, bound to the cross, is profoundly violent. Whatever the feudal origins of the system, however tenderly meant its composition, and however glibly we invoke the word "love," the God of such atonement can appear, in a certain light, to be a monster. It was inconceivable that I, bred to the consoling devotions of Irish Catholicism, should see the God of Jesus Christ in such a way. And it has become equally inconceivable to me, weaned from those devotions and informed by this history, that a Jew of Anselm's era could see this God in any other way.

Now that the death of Jesus had become fully rationalized as the central saving event, or even as the
sole
saving event, the place of Jews became all the more precarious. This was so despite the logical flaw adhering in a scheme that emphasizes both that Jesus' death was freely chosen by Jesus himself and that Jesus' death was caused by the Jews. When Jews are blamed for the event that makes possible Christian salvation, a new, more pernicious layer is added to the Augustinian framework of ambivalence. For Jews, the cross became the symbol of the ultimate cul de sac. Their doom, resulting from no decision of their own, was more complete than ever.

29. Abelard and Héloïse

W
E TOOK NOTE OF
a theology that was implicitly tied to violence before, in Saint Ambrose's rigidly allegorical reading of the Old Testament, which led to the literal conclusion that the synagogue had no place in the New Testament era of allegorical fulfillment. Ambrose, as we saw, supported a Christian mob in the burning of a synagogue. But we also saw how the protégé of Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine, subtly reversed his master's position. Something like this began to take place after Anselm, as his most prestigious successor offered a critique of
Cur Deus Homo
and its punitive theology of atonement. In contrast to what occurred with Augustine, the successor theologian, Peter Abelard (1079–1142), did not carry the day. Augustine prevailed, and as a result Jews survived as a people. We will see now that Abelard could have represented an even more positive turn in the story. After a thousand years of misbegotten Jew hatred, climaxing just then, this profoundly Catholic thinker lifted the pike on a road toward Jewish-Christian mutuality, a road leading to an end to hatred and the beginning of real respect. Alas for the Church, and more so for the Jews, it was a road not taken.