Satisfaction Theory of the Atonement

Anselm's procedure is as distinctive as his conclusion. He proposed to argue remoto Christo, setting Christ aside, as though nothing were known of him, and to show that reason alone arrives at the necessity of the incarnation. The dialogue form is part of that: Boso is given the objections and made to press them, so that the reader watches the case being tested rather than asserted.

The substantive argument begins with honour, a word that has to be read carefully. Anselm does not mean an injured feeling. He means the ordered relation in which each thing renders what it owes, so that to sin is to withhold from God what is his and thereby to introduce disorder into the whole. On that reading, forgiveness by simple remission is not merciful but negligent, because it would leave the disorder standing. Anselm's alternatives are therefore stated as a pair: either the penalty or the satisfaction.

The mismatch follows. Satisfaction is owed by a human being, since the debt is a human debt, but its measure exceeds anything a human being has, because nothing is owed to God that is not already owed to him. Everything a person might offer is owed already, so nothing remains as surplus. Only God possesses what is not already owed.

The conclusion is the incarnation, and it is reached as a deduction rather than assumed. A man who has not sinned does not owe death; a death he does not owe is therefore free; and being the death of one who is also God, its worth is beyond measure and can be assigned to those who owe.

Modern readers argue about the feudal setting. Some hold that the honour framework is borrowed from eleventh century society and that borrowing it imports assumptions about rank into the doctrine of God. Others reply that every account borrows a vocabulary from somewhere, that the criminal courtroom of penal substitution is no less borrowed, and that the question is whether the borrowing illuminates or distorts.

Cur Deus Homo was received quickly and altered almost as quickly, and the alterations are worth distinguishing because they are often collapsed into one another.

Thomas Aquinas kept satisfaction and loosened its necessity. Where Anselm argued that God could not have done otherwise without leaving disorder standing, Thomas held that God could have restored humanity by another route and that this route was supremely fitting rather than strictly required. He also set satisfaction inside a larger treatment in which merit, sacrifice, redemption and efficient causality each say something about the same act, so satisfaction becomes one aspect rather than the whole account. That move matters, because it is why the later Catholic tradition can use satisfaction language without holding a single theory of the atonement.

The Council of Trent speaks of Christ meriting justification for us and making satisfaction to God the Father, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church retains that language while declining, as the councils always have, to define a mechanism.

The Reformation change was of a different order. The Reformers took the word satisfaction and filled it with penalty, so that the satisfaction now consists precisely in the punishment being borne. Anselm had offered punishment and satisfaction as alternatives; the Reformed doctrine makes the second happen by means of the first. The setting shifts from a court of honour to a criminal court, and the governing terms become law, curse and acquittal.

Whether that is a development of Anselm or a departure from him is one of the genuinely unsettled questions in the field, and it is not a merely antiquarian one. Defenders of penal substitution who claim a continuous Western tradition running from Anselm through the confessions have an interest in the first answer. Critics who present penal substitution as a sixteenth century innovation have an interest in the second. The atlas notes that both readings are argued by serious scholars and that the texts themselves show a real change of category.