Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was the outstanding Christian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century. He is best known for the celebrated “ontological argument” for the existence of God in chapter two of the Proslogion, but his contributions to philosophical theology (and indeed to philosophy more generally) go well beyond the ontological argument. In what follows I examine Anselm's theistic proofs, his conception of the divine nature, and his account of human freedom, sin, and redemption.

On the assumption that theistic religious commitment takes place in the face of evidential ambiguity, the question arises under what conditions it is permissible to make a doxastic venture beyond one’s evidence in favour of a religious proposition. In this paper I explore the implications for orthodox theistic commitment of adopting, in answer to that question, a modest, moral coherentist, fideism. This extended Jamesian fideism crucially requires positive ethical evaluation of both the motivation and content of religious doxastic ventures. I (...) suggest that, even though the existence of horrendous evil does not resolve evidential ambiguity in favour of atheism, there are reasonable value commitments that would preclude those who hold them from satisfying extended Jamesian fideist conditions for committing themselves to classical theism. I then begin a discussion of a possible revisionary theistic alternative (in the Christian tradition) which – one might hope – may meet those conditions. An earlier, shorter, version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait (omniscience). But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind of sacrifice: God can (...) never make tradeoffs that diminish God’s overall greatness, even when those diminishments are relatively small (like forgetting a particular proposition) and the (altruistic) rewards of making the tradeoff substantial. I argue that God’s inability to make such tradeoffs is not a trivial cost for traditional perfect-being theologians who also believe that God is in loving relationships with creatures. Along the way, I explore the prospects for a less traditional form of perfect being theology, perfect being kenoticism, and different models for divine forgetting. (shrink)

Kearns (2021) argues that there is a parody version of Anselm's ontological argument (a "gontological argument") which shows that God does not exist. I show that Anselm considers one of the key premises in Kearns' gontological argument, and explicitly gives an argument which entails its falsity, and hence the unsoundness of the supposed parody argument. -/- .

Anselm’s On the Incarnation of the Word is presented as a letter to Pope Urban II for the purpose of exposing and correcting the theological errors of Roscelin of Compiègne, who maintained that since only the Son became incarnate, we must conclude that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are numerically distinct substances. In this paper I argue that Anselm’s rejection of this conclusion involves an account of the Holy Trinity which includes a strongly relativized conception of identity, (...) that is, one which allows an object x and an object y to be the same F, but different Gs. I further contend that Anselm buttresses this account with two non-theological examples of relative identity. Although it may well be the case that advocates of Latin Trinitarianism are generally committed to such an account, since they affirm that the Father is the same substance as the Son but not the same person as the Son, I take Anselm’s defense of this position to be theologically significant, first, because it may well be the first explicit defense of Relative Trinitarianism, and second, because Anselm’s position as a bishop and a Doctor of the Church is an indication of its theological soundness. (shrink)

According to classical theism, impassibility is said to be systematically connected to divine attributes like timelessness, immutability, simplicity, aseity, and self-sufficiency. In some interesting way, these attributes are meant to explain why the impassible God cannot suffer. I shall argue that these attributes do not explain why the impassible God cannot suffer. In order to understand why the impassible God cannot suffer, one must examine the emotional life of the impassible God. I shall argue that the necessarily happy emotional life (...) of the classical God explains why the impassible God cannot suffer. (shrink)

In certain theological circles today, panentheism is all the rage. One of the most notorious difficulties with panentheism lies in figuring out what panentheism actually is. There have been several attempts in recent literature to demarcate panentheism from classical theism, neo-classical theism, open theism, and pantheism. I shall argue that these attempts to demarcate panentheism from these other positions fail. Then I shall offer my own demarcation.

In this paper, Anselm’s argument for the uniqueness of God or, more precisely, something through which everything that exists has its being is reconstructed. A first reading of the argument leads to a preliminary reconstruens with one major weakness, namely the incompleteness of a central case distinction. In the successful attempt to construct a more tenable reconstruens some additional premises which are deeply rooted in an Anselmian metaphysics are identified. Anselm’s argument seems to depend on premises such as that if (...) two things have the same nature, then there is one common thing from which they have this nature and in virtue of which they exist. Furthermore it appears that infinite regresses are excluded by the premise that if everything that exists is through something, then there is something through which it is “most truly”. (shrink)

Divine temporality is all the rage in certain theological circles today. Some even suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity entails divine temporality. While I find this claim a bit strong, I do think that divine temporality can be quite useful for developing a robust model of the Trinity. However, not everyone agrees with this. Paul Helm has offered an objection to the so-called Oxford school of divine temporality based on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. He has argued that (...) this form of divine temporality entails Arianism. In other words, divine temporality suffers from an inadequate doctrine of the Trinity. In this paper I shall first articulate the so-called Oxford school of divine temporality. From there I shall develop some of the Oxford school’s theological benefits that help flesh out the doctrine of the Trinity, and assuage the charge of Arianism. Then I shall offer an examination and refutation of the Arian charge to divine temporality in order to show that the divine temporalist can maintain a robust Trinitarian theology. (shrink)

This paper considers Anselm’s Proslogion argument against a background of historical events that include philosophical disputes between Christian and Jewish polemicists. I argue that the Proslogion argument was addressed, in part, to non-Christian theists and that it offered a response to Jewish polemicists who had argued that the Christian conception of God as an instantiated unity was irrational. Anselm is not trying to convince atheists that there really is a God. He is arguing that the Christian conception of God is (...) logically coherent. (shrink)