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  • 19 comments

    Seán Ó Conaill: Violence in the Bible: A Motivational Pattern?

    April 6 2026
    Sean O'Conaill
    "... Augustine’s Neoplatonism and ... Anselm’s philosophy of cosmic order. These are both very powerful ways of thinking, but their very power can make them obtuse to the tonality of Scripture." This is most helpful Joe. I can see far more clearly now how the 'evangelical albatross' takes flight - from the misapplication of Anselm's focus on the cosmic divine order to mean that it was this 'divine order' - this towering beautiful schema - that God the Father was chiefly concerned with in asking Jesus to accept the Cross - rather than our own liberation - as individuals as well as collectively - from the power of evil as it confronts us daily. This is where the understanding of the long historical debate over atonement - e.g. between Abelard and Bonaventure's 'takes' and Anselm - becomes critical. Still today the Catechism tends to instil the notion that Catholic theology is one perfectly consistent and logical synthesis - a 'seamless robe' rather than an ongoing discussion 'in faith'. You yourself, Joe, cannot be blamed for that - ready as you are always to engage with anyone who floats an opinion. Thanks and God bless!
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  • 19 comments

    Seán Ó Conaill: Violence in the Bible: A Motivational Pattern?

    April 6 2026
    Joseph O'Leary
    Sean, I would say that Anselm has to be placed within the history of metaphysical theology (which begins with Philo and in the specifically Christian world with Justin Martyr), as a key moment in it (he is called the father of scholasticism), occasionally going too far in a rationalistic direction. My general approach is to "overcome" such metaphysical constructions and to "step back" to the foundational biblical phenomena which the metaphysical approach tend to occlude. But like Heidegger in the realm of philosophy, I think the first step in any such critical retrieval of the past is to understand what the figure studied was attempting to do. Heidegger would say that all the great metaphysicians from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche need to be "overcome" but he cautioned against dismissing them. He did not see metaphysics as false, but as creating a blind spot due to its point of departure. Moreover, he found positive material for his step back to a phenomenological thinking of being within the great metaphysical systems. In the case of theology, the first step is to understand what the theologian studied was attempting to do. Karl Barth's book on Anselm names his project as Fides Quaerens Intellectum (https://www.scribd.com/document/789781183/Anselm-Fides-Quaerens-Intellectum-Karl-Barth ). Barth would say that even when he seems to be proving the existence of God by mere reason, Anselm is thinking from faith, and as a saintly monk is thoroughly in line with what the Gospels urge: as you put it, "we are instructed by Jesus himself to ‘come to’ the Father on an intimate, ‘personal’ and friendly level" this applies more to Anselm than to other theologians since the "frame" of his thinking is friendly, contemplative (not merely "intellectual") dialogues, punctuated by bursts of praise for God and concern for the salvation of humankind. The "faith" that is "seeking understanding" is a living faith, not just a set of tenets. The same is true of Augustine, his major predecessor. The search for understanding is a spiritual exercise, and when the theological effort falls short one falls back on faith itself with new appreciation. Having fully appreciated the texture of Augustine's or Anselm's theological thinking, to "overcome" them and "step back" from them means basically to show how their understanding of Scripture was limited by their metaphysical way of thinking, by Augustine's Neoplatonism and by Anselm's philosophy of cosmic order. These are both very powerful ways of thinking, but their very power can make them obtuse to the tonality of Scripture. Yes, measured against the scriptural realities (as apprehended in light of contemporary insight), there is a certain inadequacy and inappropriateness in Augustinian and Anselmian discourse, as you are showing in the case of Anselm. While these saintly teachers lift us up, we may also address a critique to them, in a hermeneutic from faith to faith.
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  • 19 comments

    Seán Ó Conaill: Violence in the Bible: A Motivational Pattern?

    April 6 2026
    Sean O'Conaill
    Thanks, Joe. I respect your sense of duty to do justice to Anselm, a fellow theologian - but all of it makes of God the Father someone (or something) far more complicated for the ordinary person than the Jesus through whom - surely - we are instructed by Jesus himself to 'come to' the Father on an intimate, 'personal' and friendly level? In future I think that's how I'll 'frame' St Anselm - as an intellectual who saw Jesus as restoring the perfect order of the universe in honour of God - whereas for Jesus himself his concern was always the troubled or 'disordered' person in front of him. As troubled individuals we need to, and should, see the Father as equally concerned for us as persons - in order to make us also loving - because it is through the loving lives of individuals that Creation is indeed restored. Where you always seem to want to see the positives in Christendom, I tend to see a legacy of things missing that were not missing in the early church - especially the 'Christus Victor' emphasis on Jesus as revealing and defeating the demonic aspects of pagan imperialism. 11th century Europe - the Europe of the First Crusade - was surely not the New Creation that Paul envisaged, even if the influence of the church upon the state was then at its zenith? I still find it astonishing, and lamentable, that YouCat gives to young people today no clear intellectual framework for connecting 'sin' and violence, when for e.g. St Augustine that connection was obvious in the sin of pride. Can you understand and explain that obvious lacuna? For me we do not hear often enough that Jesus sets the pride of his enemies in high relief by his humility - and that this was also the Father's intent. Anselm's greater concern for a universal order - and a tendency for churchmen more generally not to want to see the pride of the Christendom ruling classes who patronised them - must surely be part of the answer to YouCat's 'voids'.
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  • 19 comments

    Seán Ó Conaill: Violence in the Bible: A Motivational Pattern?

    April 6 2026
    Joe O'Leary
    Is Anselm's theology "always a pastoral albatross"? It seems that in his day he was relieving Christians of another albatross, namely the crude "deceiving Satan" account that had crept into Christian doctrine early on, and also the crude ideas that people formed from an untutored reading of the New Testament. His own theology is caricatured as being based on a divine jealously for His offended honour. But Southern (and also Flämig) put this in perspective: "God's honour is the complex of service and worship which the whole Creation, animate and inanimate, in Heaven and earth, owes to the Creator, and which preserves everything in its due place. Regarded in this way, God's honour is simply another word for the ordering of the universe iin its due relationship to God. In withholding his service, a man is guilty of attempting to put himself in the place of the Creator. He fails; but in making this attempt, he excludes himself from the order and beauty of the universe [a phrase Anselm uses frequently, as in ch. 15]. His rebellion requires a counter-assertion of God's real possession of his honour, not to erase an injury to God [NB], but to erase a blot on the universal order. To do this, God as Man makes good the damage; and God as Lord takes seisin [a feudal term] of his honour once more. And so the whole servitium debitum of the universe is re-established, and God’s ‘honour’ in its full extent is displayed in the restored order and beauty of the whole. All this is capable of expression in entirely non-feudal language. But Anselm used the language of feudal relationships, not because he approved every aspect of them, but because they provided an example of hierarchy, which both philosophically and morally he found most satisfying; and – contrary to what is often thought – he valued hierarchy as an expression of the rule of reason. Those critics who have imagined Anselm’s God as a jealous tyrant, greedy for recognition and honour, have failed to recognize that the feudal image, however unsatisfactory in some of its implications, stood for rationality prevailing against the inroads of self-will and chaos. The rationality of Anselm’s theology is based on the principle that there is nothing arbitrary in God.” (Southern, 226-7) “It is unbecoming to God to overlook disorder in his kingdom” (Deum vero non decet aliquid inordinatum in suo regno dimittere, ch. 13) so he cannot just leave sin unpunished. From the modern point of view this sounds like a big fuss about nothing. “If injustice is merely dismissed out of mercy, then it is freer than justice”; Boso objects that we pray “forgive our sins as we forgive others.” Anselm replies that everything Boso says about God’s freedom and will and loving-kindess is true, but we must understand these is such a rational way that we do not appear to contradict divine dignity. Nothing arbitrary means nothing violent, or at least no unjust violence. Feudal honour is a social bond integrating the whole society, not honour in a later individualistic sense. God punishes sin right through Scripture – what place does that have in Girardian theology? Anselm wants to make it perfectly rational and at the service of the order of all creation. But some of his statements make us uneasy: “as man in sinning robs from God what is His, so God in punishing takes from man what is his” (ch. 14). This sits ill with the Enlightenment with inalienable human rights, with Rousseau’s rejection of Original Sin, and in general with our modern inclination to “forgive myself the lot!” and “cast out remorse” (Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”). Anselm follows Augustine in seeing God as the source of all goods and the orderer of all evils – not in an arbitrary or calculating way but just by being God, manifest in the order and beauty of Creation. Anselm’s God is not affected by human sin, but his cosmic providence is impugned by it and is preserved by the law that all sin must be followed by satisfaction or punishment (necesse est ut omne peccatum satisfaction aut poena sequitur, ch. 15). Is this just pabulum for PhD theses, with no vital relevance today? I would say that worry about cosmic order and justice remains a live issue. I met a young Swiss financial wizard the other day who declared himself a nihilist, in the sense that the universe is a mess, and humanity a barbaric breed, and all we can do is ensure some semblance of social order. Our religion claims much more than that, and wants to find a divine purpose in evolution (with Teilhard, who gave the best reinterpretation of Original Sin). When we undertake such cogitations (or attempt to dialogue with Buddhist ideas of karma), Anselm may draw surprisingly near. The lunar astronauts said that from space they saw the earth as a lifeboat, and others with access to the view from space had the same impression – a tiny community clinging to the edge of the vast uninhabited waste, and direly in need of clinging together to survive. Is there no ordering divine principle presiding over all this? I skip the long discussion of the number of the fallen angels being made up for by the number of the elect, a totally obsolete and tedious topic. Anselm's horror at sin produced a statement that is surely the source of a notorious one from Newman: "Were it not better that the whole world, and whatever is that is not God, should perish and be reduced to nothingness, than that you should make one movement of the eye that is against the will of God." (ch. 21). Newman wrote: "Man had rebelled against his Maker. It was this that caused the divine interposition: and to proclaim it must be the first act of the divinely-accredited messenger. The Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest. She must have no terms with it; if she would be true to her Master, she must ban and anathematize it. This is the meaning of a statement of mine, which has furnished matter for one of those special accusations to which I am at present replying: I have, however, no fault at all to confess in regard to it; I have nothing to withdraw, and in consequence I here deliberately repeat it. I said, 'The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.' I think the principle here enunciated to be the mere preamble in the formal credentials of the Catholic Church, as an Act of Parliament might begin with a "Whereas." It is because of the intensity of the evil which has possession of mankind, that a suitable antagonist has been provided against it; and the initial act of that divinely-commissioned power is of course to deliver her challenge and to defy the enemy. Such a preamble then gives a meaning to her position in the world, and an interpretation to her whole course of teaching and action." (Apologia, ch. 5). Southern actually compares the two passages, finding in Newman's words "a rhetorical exaggeration, even (if one may say so) an absurdity, which is never found in Anselm" (pp. 217-18). The rest of Part 1 accentuates the impossibility of man being redeemed. By Original Sin man cheated God of the beautiful work he was to achieve as man flourished (ch. 23). Boso pleads that man is now is incapable of giving God what he might have been able to in his unfallen state, and how can he be blamed for not giving what he is impotent to give? (ch. 24). But, laying on a huge guilt trip, Anselm argues with fierce Augustinian logic that this very impotence is inexcusable. Boso says: "It is too true. He is unjust because he does not render to God what he owes, and he is unjust because he is unable to render it." Now God cannot let the sinner perish (since he must fill up the seats left vacant by the fallen angels, and since it would be a defeat for God if his creature, man, were to be a complete disaster. So it is necessary that man be saved by Christ. Boso agrees, that is his faith, but he does not understand how, qua ratione, a phrase he repeats obsessively. Both Anselm and Boso agree that one who says something is impossible, though is must necessarily be, just because he does not know how it can be (qui idcirco astruit esse impossibile, quod necesse est esse, quia nescit quomodo sit) is a dolt, insipiens). Part 2 will give a positive account of how God saves man without compromising reason and his own dignity. There is very little about "honour" here, just Augustinian ideas about bondage to sin. Anselm may go farther than Augustine in highlighting the desperateness of man's plight and the dramatic nature of redemption. Luther goes further and resolves the issue more radically in his doctrine of Justification, underlining the sheer gratuity of God's grace and forgiveness, and cutting through Anselm's ratiocinations.
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