Seán Ó Conaill: Violence in the Bible: A Motivational Pattern?
Is there an underlying sameness to biblical stories of violence – including the crucifixion of Jesus?
“The Lord looked with favour on Abel…” (Gen 4:4) And so began Cain’s hostility to his brother, the cause of the first murder as related by the Bible.
“Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons…. But his brothers … came to hate him so much they could not say a civil word to him.” (Gen 37:3,4)
“Saul has slain his thousands, David his tens of thousands.” (1 Sam 18:7) This song of the women of Israel triggered Saul’s hatred of David and desire to kill him.
“Put Uriah out in front where the fighting is fiercest …” King David designed the death of Uriah after Uriah’s wife Bathsheba became pregnant, so that David’s sin with her was likely to be revealed. (2 Samuel 11)
Herod the Great sought to kill the infant Jesus when he heard of the birth of this ‘king of the Jews’. (Matt 2)
The religious authorities who sought the adult Jesus’ life feared that “the whole world will go after him” and that Rome would “take away our holy place and our nation”. (John 11:48)
Wherever you look in the bible the same pattern seems to reveal itself when violence occurs or impends – the pattern of hostility to others compared with ourselves because those others have either already displaced us in the favour of others, or may do so in the future.
As 21st century neuroscience confirms, no human fear is greater than fear of the negative opinion of others. For anyone in any way already ‘celebrated’ this fear is even more acute, because then a truly catastrophic fall from grace impends – from ‘highly favoured’ status to that of outcast.
Try this yourself – can 21st century AI ‘large language models’ see and confirm this pattern, and can they name it – either in biblical language or the terminology of the 21st century?
Here’s one such experiment, with the Microsoft Chatbot Copilot:
Q. (to Copilot) The Bible narrates multiple instances of violence, beginning with the murder of Abel by his brother Caine, going on to tell the stories of Joseph and his brothers, Saul’s pursuit of David, David’s betrayal of Uriah, Herod the Great’s ‘slaughter of the innocents’ – and climaxing with the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Focusing on the described behaviour of the perpetrators is it possible to discern a pattern in the described motivation of these perpetrators?
A. (from Copilot)
A clear pattern does emerge — not in the surface details of each violent act, but in the inner logic that the biblical narrators consistently attribute to perpetrators. When you line these episodes up, the motivations form a remarkably coherent arc. What follows is a structured synthesis that treats the biblical texts as a literary‑theological tradition reflecting on the roots of human violence.
Concise takeaway
Across the biblical canon, perpetrators of violence are repeatedly shown acting from status anxiety — fear of loss, envy of another’s favour, rivalry for honour, or the panic of a threatened hierarchy. The violence is not random: it is consistently portrayed as an attempt to restore, protect, or manufacture a threatened identity.
1. The recurring motivational pattern: threatened status, perceived loss, and rivalry
When you examine the perpetrators you listed — Cain, Joseph’s brothers, Saul, David, Herod, and the coalition that crucifies Jesus — the same motivational structure appears:
A. Perceived loss of divine or social favour
- Cain: “The Lord looked with favour on Abel…” → Cain experiences the loss of divine regard as an existential diminishment.
- Joseph’s brothers: Jacob’s love for Joseph destabilises the brothers’ sense of standing.
- Saul: David’s rising popularity (“Saul has slain his thousands, David his tens of thousands”) triggers Saul’s fear of displacement.
- Herod: The birth of a “king of the Jews” threatens his political legitimacy.
- Religious authorities re: Jesus: Fear that “the whole world will go after him” and that Rome will “take away our place and our nation.”
B. Envy and rivalry as accelerants
The biblical tradition is unusually explicit about envy:
- Cain envies Abel’s acceptance.
- Joseph’s brothers envy his dreams and favour.
- Saul envies David’s charisma and success.
- The chief priests envy Jesus’ influence (explicitly stated in the Gospels).
Envy here is not mere jealousy; it is rivalrous comparison — the sense that the other’s rise is my fall.
C. Fear of losing control or being displaced
This is especially clear in the political narratives:
- Saul fears losing the throne.
- David fears exposure after his sin with Bathsheba and eliminates Uriah to control the narrative.
- Herod fears a rival claimant.
- The Jerusalem authorities fear Roman reprisal and the collapse of their fragile power.
D. Violence as a misguided attempt to restore equilibrium
In every case, the perpetrator imagines that eliminating the rival will:
- restore honour,
- secure identity,
- re‑establish control,
- or prevent humiliation.
The Bible repeatedly shows this logic to be self‑defeating.
2. The deeper pattern: violence as a response to shame, not simply anger
If you look beneath the explicit motivations, a deeper anthropological pattern emerges:
A. Shame at being “less than”
Cain’s “fallen face,” Saul’s brooding, the brothers’ resentment, Herod’s paranoia — all are shame responses. The self feels exposed, diminished, or unworthy.
B. The other becomes a mirror one cannot bear
The rival reflects back:
- God’s favour (Abel),
- paternal love (Joseph),
- public acclaim (David),
- divine legitimacy (Jesus).
Violence becomes an attempt to shatter the mirror.
C. The biblical narrators consistently portray violence as arising from misrecognition
The perpetrator misreads:
- God’s favour as a zero‑sum game,
- the rival’s success as a threat,
- the situation as requiring elimination rather than conversion.
This misrecognition is a theological and anthropological diagnosis.
3. The crucifixion as the narrative climax of this pattern
The Passion narratives deliberately gather all these motifs:
- Envy (explicitly named).
- Fear of losing status (“our place and our nation”).
- Political anxiety (Pilate’s fear of Caesar).
- Crowd dynamics (mimetic contagion).
- Scapegoating (one must die for the people).
Jesus becomes the ultimate “rival” — not because he seeks power, but because his presence destabilises every fragile identity built on comparison, control, or fear.
The crucifixion is thus the culmination of the same pattern that began with Cain: violence born of threatened identity.
4. A synthetic model: the biblical anthropology of violent motivation
You can summarise the pattern in a four‑step schema:
- Perceived loss of status
(divine favour, paternal love, public honour, political legitimacy)
- Affective response of envy, fear, or shame
(the self feels diminished by the other’s presence)
- Rivalry and misrecognition
(the other becomes the obstacle to one’s identity)
- Violence as attempted restoration
(eliminate the rival to restore equilibrium)
This is astonishingly consistent across genres: primeval history, patriarchal narratives, royal chronicles, and the Gospels.
(Copilot response ends.)
…
When then asked to supply a biblical alternative to ‘status anxiety’ as the diagnosis of this human problem, Copilot chose ‘pride’.
*****
The above article is another way of presenting the argument published in this month’s Furrow ‘YouCat, Violence and the Cross’ – that God the Father’s ‘willing’ of the Crucifixion was far from being the sole cause of that event – that the scriptural account of it was carefully designed to reveal the ‘hidden thoughts’ of all involved, and that in so doing it simply repeats a pattern that recurs over and over in biblical accounts.
All of our ‘catechisms’ – not just YouCat – need to ‘catch up’!
CoPilot can write whole essays, stories, even novels developing hints given by the user, which it will encourage and laud with comments such as “now you are getting to the heart of the matter” or “let me help you to refine this brilliant idea.” It is eerie to feel that you are in the hands of a responsive human partner or an expert mentor, such as you may never have met in real life. How do they do it? You have to keep telling yourself it is a mere machine. You might ask if this is a form of deception and if you are being manipulated by a huckster, somewhat as an AI doll can lay on companionship too good to be true. One thing to note is that CoPilot provides very little really new information, content to dip into the most banal sources close to hand. In response to Sean’s query, for example, it does not mention any other biblical figures of status anxiety (Sarah, Hagar, Hannah are glaringly missing, as is Ismael, as is the entire Jacob saga which is all about status usurpation, resentment, culminating in the sublime reconciliation with Esau), and it does not go into collective forms of rivalry for status issuing in the genocidal treatment of other tribes.
I suspect that CoPilot has inbuilt limits on where a questioner can do, possibly a whole string of no-go areas. CoPilot loves to string you along — dragging out the chat endlessly. Trying to recall the name of singer Nick Higgs I fed all the info needed to CoPilot and it was like playing a charade game: “Yes, we think we have it — could you tell me, does he have fair hair — ah, clinches it, we have the name, but first let us ask, etc.” When the name is at last gloriously revealed you feel you have achieved something along with the machine and you bask in its hearty congratulations.
I hear that CoPilot is especially grounded in literary material and versed in all the tricks of the compositional trade (leitmotifs, structures, tone and atmosphere, etc.). Its literary efforts should be taken as a guide to what to avoid. You might think you have a cute idea, but it is deflated when CoPilot reacts with enthusiasm; the meaning it “oh yes, that is just the kind of thing our creative writing manuals are stuffed with.” None of this has anything to do with creating literature or exploring truth; there is a constant financial concern; and when you think you are getting some assistance free of charge you are perhaps helping a shoddy product establish itself on the market.
It is perilous to repeat anything AI tells you without first checking it (and often the texts one needs to consult for this are inaccessible). Plagiarism and copyright breach is rife, as a journalist who took a few lines from AI for a book review in the New York Times discovered to his cost — the same lines had appeared in another review in the Guardian, so he was no longer hired as a reviewer. How do students survive all this? How do professors navigate the turbulence? I once asked ChatGPT who had burnt Louise Colet’s letters. Answer: Flaubert. I followed up, “I have the impression it was his niece.” In reply, I received a long essay, meticulously structured, with subdivisions, etc., proving beyond doubt that of course it was not the niece. The machine was really in its element and displayed great authority and mastery of detail. But now imagine that a student set out to write an essay on the same topic — they might spend a month hauling books to and from the library — and going to the trouble of writing the essay — whereas the machine could do it better and in a few seconds.
Very confusing are the many mistakes and contradictions, which the machine always compliments you on finding. But are the mistakes deliberate, to draw you further into the game. For instance, despite correction, ChatGPT assured me two or three times that there is no such pope as Leo XIV (and someone on this website got the same reply). Presumable doctors and surgeons will use higher and more expensive types of AI when diagnosing and prescribing… Oh, but AI is only in its infancy, we are assured, and it is improving exponentially every day…
You are quite right, Joe, in warning against reliance on Copilot, or any AI, to form one’s conclusions on any subject – but you do not seem to be disputing Copilot’s confirmation in this case that there is indeed a motivational pattern in narratives of violence in the bible, including the pursuit of Jesus – a pattern that could be described as acute sensitivity to the presence or possibility of the negative judgement or rejection of others – to which in 2004 the philosopher Alain de Botton gave the name ‘status anxiety’, and which the Bible calls ‘pride’.
To clarify, if you are indeed disputing that, could you specify the biblical narratives of violence that clearly point to a motivation that is contrary to that conclusion?
In 1999, five years before de Botton’s ‘Status Anxiety’, Columba Press published ‘Scattering the Proud’, my own short historical appraisal of Jesus’ ‘downward journey’ to crucifixion – as a contrast to the pursuit of acclaim that typifies the great military heroes of history, such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon I. I didn’t have de Botton’s term ‘status anxiety’ but I defined the central human problem as the tendency to be over-concerned to gain and retain the approval of others. You can see therefore that my perception of Jesus as the great revealer of humanity’s biggest problem – and the root source of ‘all our ills’ – predates AI by over two decades.
So you can see that I use Copilot – and all AI – not to form my conclusions but to see if they ‘hold up’. If Copilot has misled me on this occasion, please show me.
CoPilot traces “status anxiety” back to 1941 but says that de Botton popularized it. I totally agree that violence stemming from it is a central recurring pattern in Scripture, and worthy of further exploration. The parts of Scripture where it surfaces most are narratives, beginning with the thoroughly archetypal story of Cain and Abel, and there must be influence from one narrative to another within that tradition. Scripture is thus a masterly diagnostician of the roots of violence in its tales of sibling conflict, rivalry of wives, political strife as between Saul and David, and so on.
The style of violence in the Psalms or in the Prophets is different and might require other models. The Psalmist is not chiefly worried about the status of his enemies, he just wants the Lord to avenge him on them. CoPilot recommends Eric J. Seibert, The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy (Fortress, 2012).
But the Bible is its own best critic, and we need to turn it on itself in this area. There is a lot of ‘unacceptable’ violence in Scripture, both in the attitudes consciously taken and at an unconscious level. For example, the ten plagues of Egypt, once generally regarded as a summit of biblical narrative, which children acclaimed with delight, but now arousing unease as we ask what the violent motivations behind the narrative are. The David-and-Goliath or Moses-and-Pharaoh showdown is about status both in the narrated action and the narrative motivation.
Thanks Joe.
Re the Prophets and the Psalms, is the ‘anthropology’ of violence truly different there, or is this literature simply written from a different point of view?
Girard traces the pov of the prophets to mimetic desire also, in that it is status-driven covetousness (mimetic desire) that builds the ‘cities’ of the privileged that the prophets inveigh against, and at least some of the prophets (e.g. Jeremiah, Jesus) become victims (scapegoats) of the powerful.
In the same way a righteous minority could well become the hated adversary of the privileged – leading to the pov of the Psalmists as protesters of the scapegoating mob. (Most of the Psalms are written from the pov of a victim beset by surrounding enemies.)
As for the ‘unacceptable’ violence of the plagues of Egypt, isn’t this just ‘righteous protest against tyrannical violence’ ‘off the leash’, the kind of thing we are seeing with Israeli vengeance against Hamas today? Wanting God to hammer your enemies is one way to go if you have experienced persecution – but the Gospel is a corrective to that: Resurrection is the reward of those who forbear and forgive.
The collaboration of Herod / Pilate / the Sanhedrin in the scapegoating of Jesus is for Girard an archetype of ancient societies attempting to stabilise themselves by scapegoating, which he sees as the origin of sacrificial religion. In a potential crisis that may ruin all, powerful rivals will collaborate, shelving their individual differences in the punishment of some likely scapegoat, for short-term gain.
How could J.D. Vance, a one-time severe critic of Trump, actually join with him in declaring that Haitians in Springfield Ohio were ‘eating the dogs’ – when he (supposedly) had read Girard? Another very serious case of status anxiety – and a ‘golden opportunity’ going abegging?
Another book that is much cited is Mark McEntire, The Blood of Abel: The Violent Plot in the Hebrew Bible (Mercer University Press, 1999). There is also Matthew J. DiStefano, From the Blood of Abel: Humanity’s Root Causes of Violence and the Bible’s Theological-Anthropological Solution (Quoir, 2016), which is explicitly Girardian, and gets this praise from James Allison: “Matthew Distefano offers us a robust and intriguing approach to the Gospel. Having had his Christianity restructured both by Girard’s insights into violence, and by Becker’s understanding of death, he makes available a much stronger and richer sense of what Jesus was about in undoing those things than so many approaches which pile quote upon quote, leaving readers at the mercy of their own violence. Those questioning received notions of hell, of wrath, and of an exclusive God will find solid food here.”
Freud warns against ‘deriving something as complicated as religion from a single origin’ at the start of the fourth essay in his Totem and Taboo (‘The Infantile Return of Totemism’), which he considered one of his very best pieces, though the book is notorious. He adds that when psychoanalysis ‘in a onesidedness driven by necessity and really a matter of duty wants to bring to recognition a single one of the sources of this institution, it is not claiming for it exclusivity nor the first rank among the factors that are working together.’ Maybe Girard and Schwager might post similar warnings before their texts.
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Perhaps the moral of the accounts of violence in the Bible is that “sin happens.” People live in the context of the battle between good and evil.
Given the nature of human psychology, it is to be expected that the violent actions of perpetrators of violence mirror each other over time albeit with individual modifications. Perhaps underlying motivations may differ from case to case in terms of how the motivations are ranked. Insightful observers be they secular or religious can predict outcomes shortly after violence is initiated, but the predictions are governed by probability.
The Furrow article is somewhat interesting and serves as one of the myriad reminders Catholics are offered in life. But the real objective of a Catholic faith analysis of any negative human activity is to help one to avoid going there, possibly raising awareness of the ongoing battle between good and evil and of the nature of grace.
Christ Himself used violence both physical and non-physical. At times He acted to avoid being subject to violence and eventually succumbed to it. An interesting topic for “compare and contrast.”
Traditionally individual Catholics have been required to reflect penetentially on their thoughts, words and deeds in the Confiteor at the Sacrifice of the Mass. For many years children in Catholic schools were led to consecrate their thoughts, words and deeds to the praise and glory of God. Saints such as St Thérèse of Lisieux have served as role models. We shouldn’t need AI although it might supply some reminders.
Catechisms can always be improved upon, but they are not the problem. The difficulty as it relates to all sin including violence, is that the Bible is not heeded and that the Catholic faith is difficult to practise and that the means of grace are not utilised. The motivational analysis of the practitioners of violence cited above doesn’t move from the transcendent to the supernatural. The kernel of the situation is that the Biblical individuals basically suffered from a lack of certain awarenesses of the good which grace would have confronted, but perhaps not solved.
“But the real objective of a Catholic faith analysis of any negative human activity is to help one to avoid going there, possibly raising awareness of the ongoing battle between good and evil and of the nature of grace.”
If the violence so often described in the Bible results from an inability to bear with the reality or possibility of the negative judgement of others, does not that in itself – plus Jesus’ towering example of bearing with total social rejection – tell us not to ‘go there’ – and to be more reliant on prayer – a relationship with the One whose love is constant – for our own self-approval?
Which takes us as usual, Neil, to the probability that we disagree on the fundamental meaning of ‘Sin’. For me ‘sin’ begins with doubting our own value and lovability as we are, irrespective of how many ‘likes’ we think we may have accumulated. If God loves us unconditionally and equally is it not likely that this is what Jesus wanted to teach us – and not the implicit message of St Anselm’s atonement theory – that God the Father needed Jesus to die for us before he could forgive us?
The ‘transcendant’ begins for us humans, surely, with our basic theology. How can it be theologically sensible for YouCat to imply that God’s will for Jesus to die was utterly unrelated to the ‘tragic external circumstances’ that forced Jesus to choose between reciprocal violence (which he had explicitly warned against) and submission to humiliation? That he bore with that total rejection is surely ample encouragement to do the same, and to see such forbearance as an ample source of grace? Why should we not believe that this all along was the meaning of the cross – when Jesus tells us to take up our own?
I am frankly astonished that you categorise e.g. Jesus’ ‘whip of cords’ in the Temple as ‘violence’ without differentiating it categorically from the murderous violence of Abel, Saul, David, the Herods et al. Never, never did Jesus target any individual with rivalrous rage – while his anger in the Temple was entirely prophetic, i.e. released on behalf of others – and horrendously dangerous to himself, given the certainty of retaliation.
I put to you the question I asked in the Furrow article: how could Jesus have resisted the concerted campaign to kill him – at the head of ‘legions of angels’ – without reciprocating and mirroring the pride and violence of his enemies?
We are faced in the end with radically different conceptions of God the father: that he was and is – in every important way – identical to Jesus, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, or that he was and is more like a medieval monarch, insistent on ‘satisfaction’ for his offended ‘honour’, as St Anselm tells us.
Does our understanding of, and readiness for, grace – our relationship with the transcendant – depend not at all upon our understanding of God the Father, our grounding theology?
“We are faced in the end with radically different conceptions of God the father: that he was and is – in every important way – identical to Jesus, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, or that he was and is more like a medieval monarch, insistent on ‘satisfaction’ for his offended ‘honour’, as St Anselm tells us.”
I think the line “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10;30) has been horrendously abused in Christian theology. Rather than a crass identity we should think in terms of a mystical non-duality. “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28) must be read in the same way. Johannine exegetes have the greatest trouble in attuning to the Johannine mode of thought, with even Raymond Brown saying, “Let’s scotch the myth that I John is a mystical text” (it’s all about sectarian bickering among postulated Johannine communities, according to Brown). Alfred Loisy naughtily claimed that this line was a Sabellian interpolation to annoy the Jews; this shows a lot of literary and theological recklessness on Loisy’s part. Generally, exegetes are poorly versed in the subtleties of Chalcedonian Christology. Schnackenburg professes to find the teaching of Nicaea in first lines of the Gospel, glossing over what Origen pointed out in the first great commentary: that “the Word was God” does not say he was God in the same sense as the Father — “theos” without the article is very different from “ho theos” (sharply differentiated from Jesus in John 17:3 — yet Thomas seems to close this breach in John 20:28 — when he calls the risen Christ “ho theos mou” — but then we hear that the emperor Domitian was hailed as “my Lord and my god”). In the finally established dogmas of 325-451 the divinity of Christ is entirely derived from the Father, and the relation of this divinity to his humanity is subtly indicated by four negative adverbs: “Without confusion, Without change, Without division, Without separation” (all taken from the vocabulary of Neoplatonism), which leave everything to be defined — so that Rahner famous declared that “Chalcedon is a beginning not an end.” I think it is better to renounce the itch for further definition (which leads to Byzantine logic-chopping) and to let Chalcedon point us back to Scripture, with John as first port of call.
Meanwhile Anselm continues to play the role of scapegoat… I believe that Cur Deus Homo is a great text that it would be profitable to meditate on, and I see it continues to inspire vast scholarly inquiries such as Jonathan Flämig, Cur Deus homo und die vom Ordnungsdenken geprägte Theologie Anselms (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2026), 537 pp.
Firstly, the term “compare and contrast” involves distinguishing between two issues.
Secondly this whole thread is about sin of which the following are relative:
1. One version of the act of contrition used in the Catholic Church has the penitent making a definite act of faith saying that God is deserving of all the penitent’s love, while at the same time confessing to sins committed. This indication that commitment to the love of God can in fact co-exist with acts contrary to the will of God. This is borne out by St Paul
“15 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (Romans 7:15-20).
2. Life has to be lived. The Catholic faith has to be lived in action, be that in thought, word or deed. Christ didn’t destroy the physical temple and He doesn’t “destroy the temple” of our lives but offers us through the Church the means of preserving the overall objective of a destiny in heaven, of salvation. The prayers at the Sacrifice of the Mass, the prayer given us by God, are constant prayers for help to live accordingly. We are warned as were the Jewish leaders about the temple as to the outcome if we don’t cooperate with grace. So, the Church should be alerting its members about the type of action required on their part to receive the required graces to achieve this destiny. This action is tied into being delivered from every evil, to being granted peace in out days, to being “free” from sin through the mercy of God, to being “safe” from distress in a life of blessed hope and significant fulfillment. This latter was the type of other gift offered by Christ in the Court of the Gentiles.
3. The money changers and the animal dealers in the Court of the Gentiles were engaged in legal activity. Their problem was the corrupt methods they used. The temple police did not seek to restrain Jesus but to inquire regarding what authority he had assumed to engage in the physical clearly violent clearing of the transgressors. Christ’s answer was given via Philip and Andrew to the Greek visitors. Christ’s authority derived from the Cross and the Resurrection. This answer reveals one aspect of why the Passion of Christ occurred. This still doesn’t reveal fully why the Passion as it occurred had to take place. As Sebastian Morello says redemption was made in the way God wished it. Christ’s obedience is central to the fact of his authority. Similarly obedience is central to the salvation of humankind.
4. Psychology and philosophy as transcendent activities are useful instruments in creating insights into the Gospel but are incapable of replacing theology in pursuit of the supernatural.
“Meanwhile Anselm continues to play the role of scapegoat… ”
Could you come to ground level, Joe and attempt to explain to us how Anselm’s reduction of the crucifixion to the repayment of a cosmic debt to the Father can be anything but pastorally scandalous and a gift to fundamentalism – as well as anything but an alignment of God the Father with Jesus’ persecutors – if he was indeed, as satisfactionism implies, bent first of all on collecting a sin debt in his calling of Jesus to the Cross?
No amount of scholarship – without clarity on this – can resolve the faith formation and evangelisation problem. Cur Deus Homo was written when the First Crusade had been called for by Pope Urban II in 1095, and that crusade was under way in 1098 when it was published – so a permissive climate on Christian violence was clearly the context in which Anselm could not see Jesus’ rejection – and the Father’s rejection – of violence in his submission to the Cross.
How could e.g. Maximilian Kolbe, Sophie Scholl and Franz Jagerstatter have been inspired to peaceful self-sacrifice by a theology of the Father as primarily self-interested debt-collector, rather than as forgiving father of the Prodigal Son – who demanded absolutely no additional payment from that son on his return from profligacy and want?
‘How do you teach the theology of atonement?’ When I asked a catechetics colleague this question, sometime before the millennium, she replied dolefully “Oh… that’s very difficult” – in a tone close to despair. To labour mightily over Anselm’s nuances is not to solve this problem – and the church’s too- close relationship with the violence of the state is clearly Satisfactionism’s birthplace.
For the early church, influenced pastorally by an entirely different theology, a rejection of violence was clearly central. It follows that Anselm’s theology is utterly surplus to need today, and always a pastoral albatross. Surely it met the need to ignore the utter sinfulness of Christian crusading in the High Middle Ages – and may even yet spawn a thousand doctoral theses – but what possible pastoral and evangelical need can it meet today?
Isn’t the emphasis of theologians since Vatican II – such as e.g. Balthazar and Schillebeeckx – on divine solidarity and liberation – rather than substitution and satisfaction – proof that Anselm’s emphasis is a kerygmatic liability rather than an asset?
Personally I wouldn’t swap John 16:33 for the whole of Cur Deus Homo. In enduring crucifixion Jesus overcame – on our behalf – the judgment of the world and we need to regard that text as promise of victory – intended by God the father also – over all adverse judgment and ‘fear of the world’ today.
Augustine of Hippo could see pride – ‘superbia’ – as the wellspring of sinful violence. How come YouCat cannot even go there?
“Psychology and philosophy as transcendent activities are useful instruments in creating insights into the Gospel but are incapable of replacing theology in pursuit of the supernatural.”
OK, Neil, so what’s your theology of the Father in his asking of Jesus to submit to the Cross? How do you understand that? Was he encouraging Jesus to overcome the judgment of the world and the temptation of violence against his enemies, or, as St Anselm would have it, calling in a debt of honour compiled by our sinfulness – or maybe both?
I have no doubt that Jesus sacrifice takes away our sins, by the way – or that the Father intends always our own liberation rather than the assuagement of his own anger. My problem is that having read your reply about five times I still don’t know how you see this, so I unfortunately cannot figure out your basic theology of the Father and the Crucifixion.
I’m reading Cur Deus homo now with pleasure, realizing that the charm of Anselm’s exchanges with Boso (his disciple and successor as Abbot of Bec) is a peculiarly Italian one. There is a radiance and good humour that comes from Aosta and that his English experiences (twice banished as Archbishop of Canterbury) left intact. Boso puts the objections of unbelievers so well and so succinctly that some commentators have imagined his own faith was imperiled, but in fact he has the task of representing folk who were part of the actual interreligious landscape of the time and who would put the very objections that he voices. It is not only theologians who had to deal with these Jewish and Muslim objections, but also the ordinary faithful (Flämig, p. 51, referring to Jewish expansion in England and northern France at that time and to Islam in Spain). So Anselm is not just developing a detached proto-scholastic speculative rationality or an abstract all-purpose apologetics; he is practising responsive dialogue. The evocation of concrete unbelievers, looking at the Christian claims from the outside, allows the objections to belief in the Atonement to be formulated quite sharply (unlike the perpetual imperturbability of the later scholastics).
The older idea that the logic of atonement had to do with a legal claim the devil had on sinful humanity, which he was cheated of when lured into exerting it on the sinless Christ, is put forward succinctly by Boso and devastatingly dismissed by his teacher (part 1, ch. 7). God forgives our sins and erases the record (chirographon) that stood against us with its legal demands (decrees, dogmasin), according to Colossians 2:13-14. The idea that this record was in the devil’s hands and that he had to be negotiated with by God attributes to the devil a righteous claim that is impossible in a being who is all sin and deceit, and puts God in a position hardly compatible with either his wisdom or his power. The devil cannot be the agent of a legal decree condemning sin, and it is absurd to think that God must outwit him be deceiving him. This monastic common sense sweeps away a hallowed tradition that muddies the stream of soteriology in Origen, Augustine, Gregory I, and many others.
Humans are condemned, then, by the Law, which exacts just punishment. Boso objects to the solution attributed to God: to have one man die on behalf of all: “What kind of justice is it to hand over the most just man of all to death for a sinner? What man, if he condemned a guiltless one that he might free a guilty one, would not be judged worthy of condemnation?… And if God could not save sinners otherwise than by condemning a just person, where is his omnipotence? If he could, but would not, how can we defend his wisdom and justice?” (ch. 8). St Athanasius poses similar riddles in his De Incarnatione, which might be seen as the most lucid account of the logic of the Redemption before Anselm.
Anselm’s first reply to the objection voiced by Boso is to state that “God did not treat that man as you seem to think nor did he hand over an innocent to death in place of a guilty one. He did not force him to that death or permit him to be killed, but he himself suffered that death of his own initiative (sua sponte) in order to save humanity.” Boso isn’t buying it. Christ may have freely obeyed, but he was still forced in that he was faced with a divine command. Anselm makes this point: Christ’s obedience consisted in his righteous living, an obedience expected of us all, and it was this that prompted the resentment that caused him to be persecuted unto death. So it looks like Anselm sees Jesus as very like Maximilian Kolbe, Sophie Scholl and Franz Jagerstatter… You might say, Anselm says, that God commanded Jesus to die insofar as he commanded the righteous behavior that led to his death. The Son embraces the Father’s will lovingly, not at all as something he is forced to do, and this habit of obedience leads him to the Cross. You might say he is driven to this by the Father, but not in a violent sense (ch. 10).All very well, says Boso, but we still don’t see “how this death can be shown to be reasonable and necessary… nor is it clear how this death avails to save humanity. It is strange indeed that God delights in or needs so much the blood of the innocent, that unless he is slaughtered He cannot or will not spare the guilty” (ch. 10). At this point, Anselm asks what sin is and what it means to make satisfaction for sin. Sin is not to give God his due (non reddere deo debitum ch. 11). This we render by upright and obedient hearts, “This is the only and the total honour that we owe to God and that God demands of us (Hic est solus et totus honor, quem debemus deo et a nobis exigit deus).” Well, let me pause here at the appearance of the much incriminated word “honour”!
“Cur Deus Homo was written when the First Crusade had been called for by Pope Urban II in 1095, and that crusade was under way in 1098 when it was published – so a permissive climate on Christian violence was clearly the context in which Anselm could not see Jesus’ rejection – and the Father’s rejection – of violence in his submission to the Cross.” “For the early church, influenced pastorally by an entirely different theology, a rejection of violence was clearly central. It follows that Anselm’s theology is utterly surplus to need today, and always a pastoral albatross. Surely it met the need to ignore the utter sinfulness of Christian crusading in the High Middle Ages – and may even yet spawn a thousand doctoral theses – but what possible pastoral and evangelical need can it meet today?”
Actually, Anselm took a negative attitude to the Crusade. As Archbishop of Canterbury, “he wrote to the bishop of Salisbury, instructing him, in his own name and that of the king, to prevent the abbot of Cerne from carrying out a plan for taking his monks on the Crusade in a vessel already hired at the abbot’s expense. It was a madcap scheme of a wild and wealth abbot, but interesting as expressing the general enthusiasm for the Crusade, which was shared neither by Anselm nor the king. Anselm wrote to the bishop to tell him that he and the king had agreed that the monks were to be forced to stay at home” (Southern, Saint Anselm, p. 252).
“ Actually, Anselm took a negative attitude to the Crusade.”
You have caught my attention, Joe – but I am still waiting for confirmation that Anselm also noticed the parallels between the motivation of Jesus enemies and that of those other perpetrators of violence in the Bible – the status anxiety that the bible calls pride – as a factor in violence more generally – and Jesus’ exposure of that problem of pride in the ‘honour’ that he gave to the father.
Here is where ‘I and the Father are one’ really matters – in the virtue of humility. As the purpose of crucifixion for the Romans was to humiliate utterly, thereby proving that the victim had been abandoned by whatever God or Gods existed, does Anselm understand the Father as sharing in Jesus’ humility, thereby also aligning himself with all of the victims of crucifixion?
That the Father was instead more concerned about the honour of his own system of justice, and for reparation for the injustice of all sin, is the usual interpretation of Anselm’s atonement theory – because Anselm did not see the injustice of the medieval social hierarchy of his own time. If he did not see Jesus, and the Father, as in humble solidarity with the victims of human status anxiety, in all eras, his satisfaction theory of atonement is still a liability, a ‘scandal’ or ‘stumbling block’, today.
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.
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’.
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.
“… 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!
Mesmerising though this exploration of the theory of atonement has been, historically interesting and theologically of satisfying complexity as conducted here chiefly by Sean and Joe, as an unlearned outsider I wonder if there is not an undue emphasis in the discussion, on the separateness of the Persons in The Holy Trinity, and a corresponding lack of focus on what has been taught of the unity of the Three Persons in the One God indissoluble. The Trinity as an idea is, of course, baffling to our intelligence, immensely challenging, as it presents a blinding paradox of a three – in – one being that would defeat the best of physicists to explain. But in an attempt to identify the internal dynamics in the One God, is our understanding of the separateness of the Persons to be allowed to outweigh our understanding of their unity? Since learning must fail (has failed) to provide a formula to explain it, the dynamics of that which can’t even be described as a relationship (as that word necessarily implies, again, separateness) since the Three are One, the very idea is impossible. As putative cause of a serious strand of human wickedness, underpinning, allegedly, violence in our nature and history, surely that’s going too far. Human wickedness thrived before Anselm and a lot of it nowadays takes place without any reference to him at all.
“…is our understanding of the separateness of the Persons (of the Trinity) to be allowed to outweigh our understanding of their unity?”
This names very well the evangelical conundrum, MJT: how to speak of God as utterly one in trinitarian concern to liberate (‘redeem’) us from the power of evil, with the conviction and energy of, for example, St Paul.
The theologian Bishop Irenaeus, for one, was completely convinced of God the Father’s direct agency in that liberation. Writing of Satan’s usurpation of God’s kingdom as an ‘apostasy’ he put it this way in the late second century:
“The Word of God, powerful in all things and not defective with regard to His own justice, acted justly even in the case of the apostasy itself, redeeming from it His own property, not by violent means, as the apostasy had obtained dominion over us at the beginning, when it insatiably snatched away what was not its own, but by means of persuasion, as became a God of counsel, who does not use violent means to obtain what He desires. Thus He did not destroy the apostasy by force, but overcame it by persuasion, as He did not violate His own handiwork.”
Notice the force of ‘the Word of God’ here – in reference to Jesus – meaning clearly that God the Father speaks to us directly through Jesus – to destroy the power of Evil. There is no ‘separation’, of Father and Son, as you put it – only a completely unified divinity bent on liberation.
And that passage, in Irenaeus work ‘Against Heresies’, was written 900 years before Anselm’s ‘Cur Deus Homo’ c. 1098.
That was the early church’s understanding of Atonement – God’s Word, Jesus the Christ, had overthrown the power of evil – without violence.
Joe has explained why Anselm underlined instead Jesus’s restoration of a cosmic divine order, to repair a certain crudity in the understanding of how Satan could have become so powerful as to merit the payment of Jesus’ life to liberate us. That surely is the origin of the separation we find even in CCC 615 – if we suppose that God the father sent Jesus to die because he was ‘dissatisfied’ with us and needed to punish a ‘substitute’ to end this situation of estrangement.
We need to recover Irenaeus’ faith in Jesus as God’s Word – as ‘Christus Victor’ – by the power of God the Father – refusing to see the Crucifixion and Resurrection as separate events. It was the Father who destroyed, through Jesus, the power of death to intimidate us, and who gives us the Spirit to ensure that Jesus is still with us.
I am convinced that a brief historical overview of the atonement debate can resolve that separation of the Trinity in e.g. CCC 615, and return us to an evangelical grasp of the Trinity as One and as intimately ‘present’ also. I don’t think the separation you speak of would have occurred if the church from the beginning had steered clear of state violence and social hierarchy, but we have learned much also from that mistake.
Thank you, Sean. That is so rich it will take me some time to understand it fully, but even at one reading I can appreciate its force, and its invitation to further reading and thought.
One thing that emerged strongly in last year’s endless Nicene discussions was that homoousios to patri (consubstantial with the Father) is a dative construction, naming a relationship, and a relationship that goes in one direction: we say the Son is of the same nature as the Father but not that the Father is of the same nature as the Son. The Creed is a commentary on the Johannine prologue. It is not concerned at all with a riddle of three persons in one substance. Likewise, in the fuller creed of 381, the Spirit is introduced relationally, as proceeding (not a technical but a biblical term, John 15:26) from the Father (the NRSV translation scandalously erases the term, repeating “comes” which has already occurred in the same verse). The Son depends totally on the Father for his very being, and it would sound very wrong to add “and vice versa”. The Cappadocians stress the unity of action between the three persons, which begins always with the Father, and they try to move from this united action to unity of being. Anselm insists heavily on distinguishing the divinity from the humanity of Christ, and he makes much of the Incarnation before coming to the actual Atonement. God the Father does not take on human nature, but he sends the eternal Son or Logos to take it on, to “become flesh”, in order to redeem it. In the background again one can hear the thinking of St Athanasius, who reached a climax and summary of his De Incarnatione in the hugely influential utterance: “He became man that we might become God”. This is actually borrowed from the foundational thinker of the Redemption: St Irenaeus, the hero of Aulén’s Christus Victor (1931), which at Sean’s prompting I picked up after 55 years and am perusing with much better understanding.