Why God Became Man
“Just as right order demands that we should believe the profundities of Christian faith before we presume rationally to discuss them, so it seems to me to be negligence,” Says Boso in the Cur Deus Homo of St Anselm, “if, after having been confirmed in faith, we do not endeavor to understand what we believe.”
As in St Anselm’s day, so in ours, there are many who are asking questions about the deeper mysteries of the Christian religion, and many who speak contemptuously of them, failing to understand why God should have entered the womb of a woman, have been born of her and been nourished by her milk, or to have suffered contumely and died on the cross. These things, they urge, in our day as in his, are”mere pictures,” not “historical events, but fictions,” which “we paint, as it were, on a cloud.” We cannot surely believe that they are realities any more than the rationalist of our Lord’s time could come to believe that Christ was God’s equal or that man could forgive sin.
St Anselm would solve these difficulties not by jettisoning the creeds, as so many who profess the Christian name today would recommend, but by thinking out their meaning, as traditionally interpreted, in its bearing on the problems of life. Recognizing that the Christian life is in origin divine and divinely conserved among us, he would “rationalize” it without surrendering it. Therefore does he ask the question: why God became man; and answer it in an essay which will live for all time.
On the other hand, St Anselm’s answer to this question is, as he confesses, by no means complete. He wrote, as he explains, in some haste and under considerable difficulties. There are many problems which he leaves untouched. His answer, moreover, is plainly adapted to the mentality of the age in which he lived, an age in which law and order were still struggling with barbarism. in which science was unknown and philosophy largely forgotten, in which chief questions were questions of right and justice. He envisages his problem, therefore, from this point of view of justice; and answers that God became man because man, having freely cast away the justice in which he was originally constituted, could not of himself regain it; could not pay the debt he owed to God, because already he owed everything to God; could not restore the honor of which the creature had sought to rob his creator by sin, because he was merely a creature. To forgive sin without atonement, would have been contrary to divine order; and the enormity of sin is so great that God alone can atone for it; which he did by becoming man that he might die on the cross.
The problem which St Anselm really solves, therefore, is rather that of the atonement than that of the incarnation. From his point of view the incarnation is incidental to the redemption; Bethlehem subordinate to Calvary. If we ask further: why did God redeem us, or what is the value and meaning of the redemption, Anselm’s answer is given briefly in the simple phrase: ut homo, Illo fruendo, beatus sit. He does not discuss, as does Aquinas, the nature of the beatific vision, or its relation to faith, or the significance of Christ’s public life, or the value of revelation, or the function of Christ’s Body, the Church. His standpoint, in this work at any rate, is practical rather than theoretical, is concerned with morality rather than with truth. And though in other works he treats of the Trinity, for instance and of the existence of God, he does not link one problem with the other, but deals with each in isolation on its merits.
Yet in point of fact, Christ is not only the savior of mankind, he is also the Incarnate Word. He did not merely die for man’s sins, he also made a revelation. And the characteristic of the Christian is that he accept both the atonement of Christ and the revelation that he made. Indeed, if we are to assign priority to either of these aspects of Christianity, it must be to the latter; for unless Christ be God, as he declared, his atonement on Anselm’s own showing is valueless. Now it is precisely this more fundamental aspect of Christianity that in our day is in question. Those who call themselves Christian are rapidly becoming divided into two classes; and they are tending to divide on just this question of revelation. Either they believe that Christ, being God, made a definite revelation as to the nature of God, or they deny revelation in the strict sense altogether, and reduce Christ to the rank of the greatest of the prophets-the first amongst many, with whom must be counted Confucius, Buddha, and Mohamed, no less than Isaiah and St Paul. Such a view of Christianity was unheard of in the days of St Anselm, and would have been classed then by all parties as sheer paganism, which in reality it is. Yet it is a view which is common enough in our own day. Hence the need of asking once again the question: why should God become man, and of answering it from a somewhat broader and more fundamental standpoint than that which St Anselm adopted.
I make no further apology to the great saint from whom I have borrowed the title of these essays, but rather invoke his assistance, as I know I shall have his sympathy. And will end this introduction by addressing to my readers his words: “Since I see thy importunity and the importunity of those who seek with thee in charity and religious zeal a solution of this problem, I will do my best not so much to show you what you seek as to seek it with you; but all that I say would ask you to accept on this understanding, that, if I shall say anything which a greater authority shall not confirm, even though I seem to prove it by reasoning, it shall not be accepted with any other certainty than that it seems to me so, until God shall in some way make it clearer to me.”-Leslie J. Walker, S.J. From the preface of WHY GOD BECAME MAN
Posted by Dim Bulb
