The Wonder of God as an Argument for Belief

In the 11^th century, a group of presbyters approached St. Anselm to ask for a written form of his teachings on the Divine Majesty. But there was a catch: could Anselm demonstrate his teachings on the divine nature apart from assuming the authority of holy Scripture, so that the truth of Divine Revelation would shine forth clearly?1 It would be easy to conclude that the project is therefore a proto-rationalist project, seeking to support faith from reason alone. But it would be better to see the Monologion as a project in reason-seeking-wonder-at-faith’s-doorstep; that is, whereas the Proslogion(a sequel of sorts) is an exercise in faith-seeking-understanding, such that understanding is used to clarify the doctrines of faith, the Monologion is an exercise in discovering the wondrous Supreme Nature, who is discovered as three-in-one love, in and from the very structures of our existence. The telos, for Anselm, is not merely to guide reason unto rational assent, but to guide the reasoning mind to the supreme love and worship of the triune God. Apologetics is for doxology.

Anselm’s Argument from Human Experience

The telos, for Anselm, is not merely to guide reason unto rational assent, but to guide the reasoning mind to the supreme love and worship of the triune God. Share on X The telos, for Anselm, is not merely to guide reason unto rational assent, but to guide the reasoning mind to the supreme love and worship of the triune God. Anselm starts with the concrete realities of goodness, value, excellency—what we might call “axiological” categories, on account of which we might say that human nature is more excellent or valuable than the nature of a horse, which is more excellent or valuable than the nature of a rock, etcetera. Hence, Anselm argues that our concrete experience of value (a category itself amenable to the experience of wonder as a kind of intuition of “grandeur” or the “significance” of things2) reveals gradation; some things are more excellent than others. Surely the life of a sentient puppy has more value than the life of a rock, and the life of a child more than that of a puppy. But this presupposes a Supreme Value or Nature which serves as the paradigmatic measure of all value and excellency. It is not possible to say that a line is “more straight” or “less straight” than another unless a paradigm of “straight-line-ness” is the measure against which we judge other lines. Similarly, Anselm reasons, we must be apprehending some Supreme Nature of supreme value that serves as the paradigm for ordered axiological judgments.3 But as the Supreme Value must be itself the paradigm of all excellence and value, it must possess in itself those things which would qualify it as eminently valuable. As such, it must be the summit of all good, all beauty, all being, and all reality. And indeed, it must be supremely personal—for consciousness raises the value of a given entity given that a conscious being is more valuable than a non-conscious one. From this point, Anselm attempts to show that this Supreme Nature (which possesses super-abundant personhood) is that through which all other things are made, and nevertheless is a three-fold movement of Supreme Nature, the Verbalization of the Supreme Nature (Word), and the Love of that which is Verbalized (Holy Spirit).4

Beyond Valid Syllogisms

Anselm’s theological method is especially important. If one simply takes Anselm to be engaged in a project of rational demonstration, they will assess his work purely on the basis of whether the arguments “work”. And they may or may not “work” as successful proofs. But to do this would be to miss the breath-taking vision Anselm seeks to uphold. As we have already noted, Anselm’s argument for God intends not only to persuade people that such a being exists, but to lead people from the experience of Value and Excellence to the intuition of a Being in whom all value, excellence, and beauty is summed up. The Word is the pattern for all created things, in whom the divine nature is refracted into the field of creation as the pattern for creatures. The Word is the pattern for all created things, in whom the divine nature is refracted into the field of creation as the pattern for creatures. Share on XWhat a breath-taking vision of God—the Ground of all Being in whom personality and value is eminently contained in the three-in-one dynamic of his own interior life! His argument that the Word is the verbalization of the Supreme Nature that serves as a paradigm for all created things is not merely aimed to show that the Supreme Nature subsists as Word and Son as well as Father, but also to furnish a rich understanding of the personal property of the Word: the Word is the One in whom the Father utters himself and all created things through a singular utterance (a single Word). The Word is the pattern for all created things, in whom the divine nature is refracted into the field of creation as the pattern for creatures.5 Once again, rational reflection is meant to lead the reader to a glimpse of the majesty of God’s being, and the permeation of that majesty in all creaturely reality; it is preparatio for the vision of God, in which God’s beauty will be seen in all things.6

A Model of Grandeur and Depth

There are three enduring points of relevance for contemporary rational or “apologetic” engagement in the Church today. The Monologion teaches us that, even when we do not have the authority of holy Scripture as a common assumption shared with our hearers, the goal of rational argumentation for the Christian is never merely to get someone to assent to the proposition “God exists.” You can bet that even if one has a rock-solid argument for God’s existence, but that argument breathes no sense of the majesty of the One argued for, it will fail to rouse the enduring interest of its hearers. If wonder, after all, is the intuition of depth, and faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ treasures that God as the soul’s true food (the object and satisfaction of wonder), then an argument that fails to lead people to wonder will fail to lead people into living faith, even if it happens to give rational assent. Now, one might argue “but leading someone to assent to God is the first step in leading them to faith”; and while that may, at times, be true, people do not generally maintain interest in the question of God unless the grandeur and depth of the concept of God proposed is already lurking somewhere in their minds.

In her book Apologetics and the Christian Imagination, Holly Ordway suggests that given the world is no longer flooded with the kind of “social imaginary”7 in which Christian imagery was second-nature, people no longer intuit the grandeur of the God Christians reference in their argumentation and speech.8 Her integrated approach to apologetic defense of the Christian faith therefore draws heavily upon rich sources for the imagination (Tolkein and Lewis, to name two of the usual suspects), suggesting that apologetics must reach and retrain the cultural imagination of God to prepare them with wonder. St. Anselm’s argumentation does exactly this. Let’s compare his argument from Value and Excellence with a similarly structured moral argument:

P1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist

P2) Objective moral values and duties do exist

C) Therefore God exists

This argument, given by William Lane Craig, may do the job of “convincing” someone of the conclusion. Indeed, he might try to argue for, say, premise 2 by pointing out how awful it would be to say the Holocaust is not objectively wrong and such, or he might argue for premise 1 by challenging the atheist to ground objective moral values and duties. But St. Anselm’s approach is quite different even though his argument is similar. He argues from the actual experience of value (isn’t it quite clear that a human being’s majesty exceeds that of a rock, or that two things are excellent, just, or good through “excellence”, “goodness”, and “justice”—that we are indeed making contact with “goodness” or “excellence” when we predicate these attributes of multiple things?). Anslem’s reputation more justly stems from the majestic vision of God and all things in God he communicated to his hearers. Anslem's reputation more justly stems from the majestic vision of God and all things in God he communicated to his hearers. Share on XBy engaging the hearer’s experience of wonder, Anselm starts to lead them inward and upward to worship the Supreme Nature as the true source of all that they have already apprehended as wondrous, good, just, etcetera. This approach reasons not merely to a God without whom morality could not exist (though it does that), but also to a God of whom all values in the world are as rays to the sun. The argument aims to reconfigure how the hearer experiences entrenched facets of their world. And indeed, even Anselm’s argument for God’s one-ness and three-ness, while it might not fully work, nevertheless aims to reconfigure one’s sight of creatures as the refractions of the Word perfected by the Divine Love (the Holy Spirit).

Call to Action

St. Anselm is rightly famous for his keen intellect, even where he may be wrong about the strength of his reasoning. But his reputation more justly stems from the majestic vision of God and all things in God he communicated to his hearers. The arguments we use must aim to do the same, as we aim to stir faith-effective-through-wonder-filled-love in those who both don’t know and know Christ. For that reason, his apologetic approach and the vision of God underlying that approach are well-worth commending for the project of re-enchanting the world in the light of Jesus Christ.

Endnotes:

1 Anselm et al., The Major Works, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.

2 Anders Schinkel, “Wonder, Mystery, and Meaning,” Philosophical Papers 48, no. 2 (2019): 293–319, https://doi.org/10.1080/05568641.2018.1462667.

3 Anselm et al., The Major Works, 12–15. For several interesting expositions of this argument, see Jeffrey E. Brower, “Platonism about Goodness—Anselm’s Proof in the Monologion,” TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 3, no. 2 (2019): 3–30, https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v3i2.14803; Christophe De Ray, “Why the Good Is Supremely Good: A Defence of the Monologion Proof,” Religious Studies 58, no. 4 (2022): 715–31, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412521000275.

4 Anselm 22-57. See also Kevin Staley, “Anselm’s Proof That God Is One and Three in Monologion XXXVIII–LX: Ontology and the Future of Philosophical Cosmology,” The St. Anselm Journal 14, no. 2 (2019): 83–96, Atla Religion Database with AtlaSerials PLUS (ATLAiFZK220815000480).

5 Anselm 45-52

6 Gerald Boersma, “Augustine on the Beatific Vision as Ubique Totus,” Scottish Journal of Theology 71, no. 1 (2018): 16–32, Atla Religion Database with AtlaSerials PLUS, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0036930617000643.

7 To use a phrase from Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004).

8 Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, Living Faith (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2017).

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