Anselm’s “Bottom-Up” Theology

An enduring problem for Christian theology in the West is its professionalization in the university and academic world. This is understandable, considering theology’s classic position as “Queen of the sciences” under Aquinas and the historical religious foundations of many top institutions of learning. There’s also a huge benefit to taking the standards, rigors, and results of the academy and applying them to the field of theology. However, as theology has developed as a human science over the years, one of the side effects has been to take theology out of its proper context: God himself.

What do I mean by this? Too often theology becomes a scientific field wherein God is the object of man’s analysis and judgment. We make determinations about God, about his intentions, his meaning, his relevance, his existence, even his character, as if we’re studying some strange new species of bug or dinosaur. Beyond the absurdity of mankind claiming to have God “in the dock” as CS Lewis would say, it also renders theology irrelevant to people’s lives. The results of theology by the guild are increasingly applicable only to those in the guild. Read a theology book written in the last 100 years and try to explain it to a lay parishioner at your church. Good luck.Read your pick of what is called theology today and ask if we’ve gone forward or backward. Share on X

A Flawed Approach to Theology

This is a fundamental flaw to any theological method because the Living God makes for a squirmy object of study, often (as Martin Luther once put it) hiding himself from our analysis. He does this purposefully, making sure that we will not find him outside of where he wants to be found. God gets smaller and smaller the bigger our microscopes get. And yet the guild continues on, pages continue to flow, books are printed, lectures given, and all of it leading toward what? Do we really know more about God? Or have we simply continued to talk about something, or Someone, as if they cannot be known outside of this mountainous tradition of reflections called “theology”? Again, read your pick of what is called theology today and ask if we’ve gone forward or backward.

And to be clear, this isn’t simply God being mischievous and attempting to make things difficult for us. He cannot be found by man precisely because he is God. If he were to submit himself to human objectivity and study, he would become a creature within creation and no longer God outside of creation. God cannot be found on the map; he’s not waiting at the bottom of an archeological dig. Anything a creature finds is just another creature. God is like the ominous crime boss from the movies: when asked, “Where can I find him?” What is the classic movie response? “He’ll find you.”

Anselm’s Approach to God

Anselm’s Proslogion is a work of this kind of theology, not putting God under the microscope, but of a man understanding that he, not God, is the one under the microscope; how can he know who it is that is looking at him? He begins the entire work by asking the question, “Come then, O Lord, teach my heart where and how to seek you, where and how to find You. Lord, if You are not present here, where, since You are absent, shall I look for you?” (p.111)

The Proslogion’s starting place is the human being unable to know God, and yet longing to know him. We yearn to see God, and yet his “countenance is too far away,” we desire to be close to God, but find his “dwelling place is inaccessible,” we long to find him but do not “know where you are.” And yet, despite our inability to see God, Anselm is able to call him “my God.” (p. 111)

You are my God and my Lord, and never have I seen You.

How does one possess God as his God without ever seeing or knowing this God? How can one love what one does not know? How can the amoeba in the microscope know the scientist looking at him, much less call him “mine”?

Anselm’s work begins where all Christian theology must begin: by grace through faith.

I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that You have created Your image in me, so that I may remember You, think of You, love You. But this image is so effaced and worn away by vice, so darkened by the smoke of sin, that it cannot do what it was made to do unless You renew it and reform it…I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that ‘unless I believe, I shall not understand’ (Isaiah 7:9). (p. 115)

True knowledge of God will only come if God allows us to know Him, on His own terms, and his terms are our faith and trust in Him before we understand Him. True theology is top down, not bottom up, it is revealed by God to us, and we gratefully accept it and respond in love and praise. True theology is top down, not bottom up, it is revealed by God to us, and we gratefully accept it and respond in love and praise. Share on X

The God Who Is

Now, once we have our foundation out of the way, what can we know about God’s character and his attributes? Much less, how can we talk about God without putting him back under the microscope as an object of our study? Anselm begins with a working definition of God, “Now we believe,” he says, “that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought.” (p. 117) This, for Anselm, is the best way to keep God as the one at the microscope looking down at us. God is simply that which is highest and most absolute. Go as high as you possibly can, and that is God.

So, what can we know of this “something-that-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought”? Well, first of all, that he exists. This is probably Anselm’s most famous contribution to theology, often referred to as the “ontological argument.” For the most part, in the real world, it comes across as a little trick of logic that isn’t all that convincing but also can’t quite be disproved. But as we’ll see, the purpose of this argument is much bigger than owning an atheist in an internet argument.

Anselm notes that “something than which nothing greater can be thought” can obviously be thought about. As soon as we say it, we are immediately thinking of it. Therefore, this conception of God certainly exists at least in our minds. But since existing in reality is greater than only existing in the mind, “something-that-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” must therefore exist in reality.

His purpose here is not to simply win an argument, but rather to set a foundation for the exploration of God’s character that follows. God is “something-that-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought,” and this God exists, but who or what is he? What attributes does he possess?

Perfections of God

This leads to Anselm’s next topic of discussion: how does “that which is greater than anything that can be thought” actually have attributes and remain transcendent? If someone described me as “tall,” that would imply there is a bigger category of “tallness” above me that I am part of, and others could be part of too. But if God is that which nothing is greater than, and He alone is the only God, how can he possess attributes? Wouldn’t possessing an attribute mean that, in some way, that attribute is higher than God and God is subservient to it? Wouldn’t God’s attributes mean one more place where we can begin to get God under the scope and dissect him?

“No,” says Anselm. In chapter 12, he writes, “But clearly, whatever You are, You are not that through another but through Your very self. You are therefore the very life by which You live, the wisdom by which You are wise, the very goodness by which You are good to both good men and wicked, and the same holds for like attributes.” (P. 133)

Anselm redirects God’s “attributes” towards a better phrase: God’s perfections. He “that something cannot be thought of to be greater” does not merely possess attributes, he is the perfection of them. He is not merely perceptive, as if he has been granted eyesight by working biological eyes or digital surveillance technology; he is perception in and of Himself. This is true for the other perfections of God: his mercy, his justice, his goodness. “Goodness” is not an abstract idea that God participates in. Rather, what we perceive as the concept of goodness emanates from God himself, who is eternally and perfectly good. “Goodness” is not an abstract idea that God participates in. Rather, what we perceive as the concept of goodness emanates from God himself, who is eternally and perfectly good. Share on X In other words, there’s a difference between how we see God’s attributes on our end and how they are seen on God’s end. Again, this is top-down theology, not bottom-up.

Unity of God’s Perfections

Take Anselm’s discussion on the relationship between mercy and his justice in chapters 8 through 11, for instance. To us, the mercy of God and the justice of God are two attributes in tension within God himself. Anselm discusses how concepts like God’s mercy present problems to God being “that which nothing greater can be thought of,” because a God of that kind of greatness, by definition, cannot be affected by anything beneath Him. This isn’t to say that this God is cruel or cold or indifferent. But rather, a God who can be affected by that which is not greater than him is to make that thing therefore greater than Him, and He therefore ceases to be God. How can God be compassionate if he cannot suffer sorrow? How can he be merciful if he cannot be compassionate? If theology is from the bottom-up, then we are left with a muddled mess of contradictions.

Concepts like “grace and truth,” “love and wrath,” “law and Gospel,” can often be seen as dualisms within God’s own self. This causes all kinds of problems, from pitting God’s attributes against one another, or perhaps even bad forms of substitutionary atonement that look past the cross up into a God who is trying to figure himself out (where the cross becomes a tool to help God relax God), or even can effectively split God in half to where, following the 2nd century heretic Marcion, we begin to think there must be two Gods.

Anselm moves us past this tension and posits that the issue isn’t an ontological one between justice and mercy, because those can both be easily understood as participating in God’s goodness, but rather the answer is an epistemological one: our view is just not the same as God’s view of himself. Anselm states: “In fact, You are [merciful] according to our way of looking at things and not according to Your way. For when You look upon us in our misery it is we who feel the effect of Your mercy, but You do not experience the feeling.” (p. 125) 

In God, his justice and his mercy are not in tension with one another, but rather a simple unity of the perfections of this perfectly good God. Our perception of God’s perfections is analogous but not complete knowledge. We can know a bit of what compassion is in our own compassion for other creatures, and this is true, analogous knowledge of God’s perfections. But like all analogies, there is a limit to it, and beyond the analogy we must let God be God. Eternal God, who gave great gifts to your servant Anselm as a pastor and teacher: grant that we, like him, may desire you with our whole heart and, so desiring, may seek you and, seeking, may find you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Share on X

In the end, Anselm posits knowledge of God and His perfections rooted in faith, given to us by the grace of God, to bring our hearts to bear in our love and worship of him. When we seek He “that is greater than anything that exists,” we do not seek a stranger, a science experiment, or a means to an end. We do not seek Him that we might control Him or dominate Him. Rather, we seek the One whom we call “mine,” a God who has claimed us as His own, and promised that all He has is ours. This was the heart of Anselm when he prayed in chapter 1, “Let me seek You in desiring You, let me desire You in seeking You, let me find You in loving You, let me love You in finding You.” (p. 115)

As the Collect for the feast day of St. Anselm in the Church of England so perfectly states: Eternal God, who gave great gifts to your servant Anselm as a pastor and teacher: grant that we, like him, may desire you with our whole heart and, so desiring, may seek you and, seeking, may find you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Amen. 

image credit: Gary Campbell-Hall