St. Anselm, Joseph Ratzinger, and the Atonement

In his 2013 book The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God (Oxford University Press), Fr. Nicholas E. Lombardo, O.P., launched several severe critiques against St. Anselm’s model of the atonement. “Anselm’s solution not only fails to solve the problem of God’s apparent injustice; through his narrative of Trinitarian decision-making, he also creates new problems.”

The first problem, says Fr. Lombardo, is that Anselm says nothing about the Father willing our salvation, and instead “his entire narrative depends on the Father not setting it in motion.” Only in this way does the Son freely (without any pressure or command by the Father) volunteer to go to the Cross.

The second problem created by Anselm’s theory follows from the first: “the Father and the Son act independently of each other.” The Father wanted the world to be saved only in this way, but he did not will it; only the Son positively willed to suffer and die to save us. For Lombardo, “

his narrative paints a very strange picture.”

The third problem is that Anslem does not account for the incarnation, says Fr. Lombardo. If the Father sent the Son to take on flesh, it must have been for some other purpose than to suffer and die. “To preserve the coherence of Anselm’s narrative, we can only conclude that the Son was instead sent for some initial objective other than our redemption.” This could logically work out if, with Scotus, we posit the primary purpose of the Incarnation with (say) the restoration of creation and only secondly with man’s redemption. The Father willed the incarnation to restore all of creation, but while he was incarnated the Son decided He might as well will the salvation of humanity on the side. Something like that would have to be posited for Anselm’s theory to work out, but even here, says Fr. Lombardo, you have two wills acting independently of one another.

But Fr. Lombardo isn’t buying it. The whole purpose of Cur Deus homo is to give an account of why God became man, and Anselm’s answer is to provide a necessary mechanism of man’s redemption. Why did God become man? Well, to do this other thing Jesus was sent by the Father to do, but on the side, there is this other thing we call redemption that he did and that’s kind of part of the reason.

Having given his best effort at following Anselm’s own logic, Fr. Lombardo concludes that it is “profoundly incoherent” and that “[i]t does not hang together”.

Fr. Lombardo thinks that Anselm wasn’t please by his own account either, which is why the latter introduces his next chapter by suggesting “[a]nother way in which the same passages can be understood correctly.” “It is as though,” says Lombardo, “he wants a fresh start in tackling the issue.”

Anselm speculates that it might have been with an “interior desire” to go to the Cross for the sake of justice. Lombardo responds that “even if the Father were to have inspired Christ with an interior desire to go to his death, then the Father would also have necessarily caused that death.”

Thus, Fr. Lombardo concludes: “Anselm’s solution to the problem of God’s apparent injustice in Book I.8–10 is tortuous, confusing, and maddening.” And that, when he finally finishes saying all he has to say, Anselm “cannot avoid the implication that God intends the death of his Son and thus wills the crucifying of Christ and its associated moral evil.”

What’s at stake in all this is quite clear. The Anselmian model of the atonement is by far the most popular theory among Catholics today and has been for several hundred years. Fr. Lombardo’s critique has major pastoral and practical consequences. Have we been misunderstanding what happened on the Cross? Do we have a distorted image of the Father, and, therefore, of the Trinity, because of this? And, if this has been going on for centuries, how can we wrap our minds and hearts around such a possible truth of the matter?

So influential has Anselm’s “satisfaction theory” been that Joseph Ratzinger, in his Introduction to Christianity, says it “molded the Western consciousness more and more exclusively.” Ratzinger criticizes the unfair situation in which precedence has been given to Anslem’s model over others (say Augustine’s, for example). “Even in its classical form,” says Ratzinger, “it is not devoid of one-sidedness, but when considered in the vulgarized form that has to a great extent shaped the general consciousness, it looks cruelly mechanical and less and less feasible.”

How can a view of the meaning of the cross that has dominated the minds and hearts of Catholics for centuries suddenly become “less and less feasible”? Along with Fr. Lombardo, Ratzinger, after finding whatever good he can in Anselm’s model, is forceful in his conclusion: “But even if all this is admitted, it cannot be denied, on the other hand, that the perfectly logical divine–cum–human legal system erected by Anselm distorts the perspectives and with its rigid logic can make the image of God appear in a sinister light.”

These are the kinds of statements and conclusions that keep many an SSPX priest up at night! Not least for reasons pertaining to the effect such conclusions have on our understanding of the Sacrifice of the Eucharist. For many, Anselm is the one who gives us the true meaning of the Sacrifice of the Cross and thus the true meaning of the Sacrifice of the Mass, since both sacrifices are, of course, one and the same. Throw Anselm out and we are back to square one, attempting to understand what exactly the Mass is all about.

Was not Anslem’s model canonized at Trent? How are Catholics expected to stomach the idea that many Catholics have been picking up a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit the true picture of the Cross?

For many, not only SSPX priests, Anselm’s model was indeed canonized at Trent and is the only model that adequately explains both what happened on the Cross and what happens in the Eucharist. To explain what happened on the Cross is to give an account of what goes on in the Mass. Atonement theology really is the science of which liturgical theology is a branch or subdiscipline. There are, then, major implications here.

If Ratzinger’s (popular level) and Lombardo’s (more thorough) critique of Anselm’s model is correct, where does the Church go from here? The amazement that comes with the idea that we have quite possibly been misunderstanding what actually happened on the Cross, along with a distorted image of the Father’s will, is paralyzing at first. And one wonders still more if the Protestant Reformation, whose Anselmian framework was used to launch its novel understanding of salvation, was (and still is today) one of those moments in history in which heresies surfaced and flourished due to the church’s unpaid debts to her own Tradition. In this case, a tradition of unanimous consent by the Fathers, who, for Lombardo, understood the meaning of the Cross as a ransom liberating man, not from a debt to God, but bondage to the devil.

For Lombardo, that Tradition, which has been forgotten, lost, and devalued over the centuries–not least of which is the only model that can logically keep safe the goodness of God–is the ransom theory of the atonement.

Lombardo’s thesis needs to be taken seriously. The Council of Trent did indeed state that the Cross made satisfaction for our sins, but in what way and in what sense? Did Trent have in mind Anselm’s, Aquinas’s, or Augustine’s (patristic representative) model of satisfaction? These questions and others like them will continue to challenge the next generation of Catholic theologians. Lombardo’s work, I believe, marks the beginning of a recovery of the patristic account of redemption, and for that one can be grateful for his witness and scholarship.

(Editor’s note: Margaret M. Turek’s new book Atonement: Soundings in Biblical, Trinitarian, and Spiritual Theology, just published by Ignatius Press, is a detailed study of atonement in Scripture and Tradition, drawing on the work of several theologians, including Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. CWR will be publishing an interview with Professor Turek in the near future.)

Catholic World Report