Chapter I. The Idea of Reconciliation Through Christ According to Anselm and Abelard
187040 min read
WHEN the theologians of the West raised the problem of reconciliation into the sphere of legal and ethical consideration, the free movement of their thought was not hampered by any fixed decision of the Church. Consequently there followed, one upon another, a series of diverse and even antagonistic attempts at a solution of the problem, of which, however, none, during the middle ages, gained the sanction of the Church’s authority. On the contrary, at the very height of the theological development of that time, Thomas Aquinas bears witness that the antagonistic hypotheses of earlier teachers were allowed to pass current side by side in the Church. This fact is not without importance towards our understanding of the different mediæval theories, when we bear in mind, on the other hand, that these same theories, as soon as they are transplanted, with certain modifications, to the Reformation period, are immediately looked upon as too sharply opposed to exist side by side, and exercise a separating influence upon the Church. The quite opposite attitude assumed in the middle ages towards theories bearing on the idea of reconciliation, depends on the fact that people were under the impression, even with regard to the most conflicting essays in this department, rather that they were mutually complementary, or that they only differed from one another as varieties of one species. In other words, the problem was still at that time regarded as exclusively an affair of the School within the Church. When we reflect that since the Reformation the theories which formerly might be taught side by side have been brought into direct collision,—that about the method of reconciliation between God and man there has been stirred up the irreconcileable conflict of church against church, of church against school, of school against church, we may well contemplate with sympathetic joy the peaceful course which this development of thought took in the Church of the middle ages:—and yet we ought to be on our guard against supposing that the subsequent conflict of views was in itself a fault. For the new form which men’s interest in the doctrine assumed, simply shows that it was the Reformation that first gave rise to a lively perception of the peculiar importance of this doctrine, as being that on which turns the question whether Christianity is to be a thing of the Church, or only of the sect and of the school; whether or no Christianity is the broad common basis of a scheme of life which shall be at once religious and moral. The mediæval attempts at a construction of this doctrine were uninfluenced by interests of that sort. This explains at once the fact that divergent and even conflicting hypotheses draw together in order to support and supplement one another, and also the fact that the first attempts have an appearance of fortuitousness of which even the later ones, which stand connected with the development of complete theological systems, do not entirely divest themselves. But it seems to be especially incumbent on us to take together, in the way of direct comparison, the theories of Anselm and Abelard, which were the earliest, chronologically, while their tendencies pointed in exactly opposite directions. If we were not to do so, it would not be possible for us rightly to discern the importance of their views to the theology of the middle ages; and the conventional and unhistorical over-estimation of Anselm’s theory would receive a continuance of support which I think it right to withdraw from it. For the modern pietistic tendency in theology, which in this century is reacting against rationalism, has shown a partiality for the theory of Anselm which is quite misdirected; and has made that theory appear as if it were a model for everybody—which it was not considered to be, either in the middle ages or in the period of Reformation orthodoxy.1 And Baur, too, both by his presentation of the theory itself, and by his classification of other analogous attempts of mediæval theologians, has given countenance to this opinion. Now unless the history of the doctrine of reconciliation is at the very outset to lead us in the interests of a party, we certainly ought not to overlook the fact that, in the middle ages themselves, through the influence of Peter the Lombard, the preference is given to Abelard over Anselm. But further, apart from the fact that they were almost contemporaries,2 their kinship in this question is manifest both in their common opposition to the theory of a buying of men out of the power of the devil (see above, p. 6), and also in their respective ways of treating the question, which, though at first sight directly antagonistic, yet are not without traces of mutual relationship. For Anselm develops the thought of a reconciliation of God in the death of Christ by means of legal conceptions—Abelard the thought of a reconciliation of men with God, in respect to the moral disposition of the parties towards each other. But Anselm after all transfers the consideration of the relation between man and God to the sphere of moral judgment; and Abelard does not forget to point out that Christ’s work in the act of reconciliation has also an important bearing on God. Now if Anselm has the advantage of Abelard in artistic exposition of his theory, the latter certainly excels his elder contemporary in that he elevates the problem into a higher sphere than that of law, and indicates fruitful points of view which the positions of the former never come up to. Finally, it should also be premised that the one comes only indirectly, and the other, as it were, accidentally, to set forth the theory of the atonement: Anselm, namely, in the answer to the question cur Deus homo; Abelard, in the Exposition of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. But in connexion with this, again, the characteristic difference shows itself, that fundamentally the doctrine of Anselm has no relation to Scripture, but moves entirely amid considerations of the natural reason,3 while on the other hand Abelard’s doctrine, on certain sides of it, bears the direct Pauline or Biblical stamp.