De Concordia (The Compatibility of God's Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Human Freedom)

God's foreknowledge, predestination and grace are set against human freedom one at a time, and in none of them does Anselm find a contradiction.

by Anselm of Canterbury75 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio
First published: 1107(aged 74)
Original language: Latin

Report a rights issue

Overview

The quarrel that had driven Anselm out of England twice ended in 1107, when Henry I agreed at London to give up the king's right to invest bishops, and the archbishop spent the two years he had left on the business of his see. In that time he completed this treatise, the last he finished. It takes up three problems, each a version of one worry: if God knows everything in advance, decides who will be saved and gives the grace without which no one can do good, it is hard to see what is left for human choice to do. Anselm deals with them one by one. God foreknows what will happen, but what he foreknows includes the fact that some things will happen freely, so his knowledge does not force them; it simply cannot be wrong about them. Predestination, he argues, raises no new difficulty: God predestines as he foreknows, so the same answer holds. Grace and free choice work together: the rightness of the will is first given by grace, and the will keeps it by choice, with grace still helping. Behind the first answer stands an account of eternity he had begun in the Monologion more than thirty years earlier. God's present is not a moment in time like ours but an eternal present in which all times are held at once, much as the present moment contains every place. Unlike his earlier treatises, this one is written in a single voice, which raises the objections and answers them itself rather than giving them to a student. When Anselm died on 21 April 1109, he left unfinished a further dialogue on ability and inability, possibility and impossibility, necessity and freedom, of which only fragments survive.

Key concepts

What is the “eternal present”?

The eternal present is the way God exists: not moving from one moment to the next, but holding all times at once. Anselm compares it to the present moment of our time, which contains every place and everything in every place. Seen from there, nothing is earlier or later for God, so his knowing what we call the future is not a guess made in advance but a seeing of what, for him, is present.

What does predestination mean in De Concordia?

Predestination means God ordaining something before it happens. Anselm argues that it runs exactly alongside foreknowledge: God predestines as he foreknows. Whatever God foreknows to happen freely he also predestines to happen freely, so predestination imposes no more necessity than foreknowledge does. God does not make injustice, though he makes every action, since injustice is not something but a lack.

What are the will’s tool, leanings and use?

Anselm distinguishes three things in the will, as in any tool: the tool itself, its leanings and its use. The tool is the power of willing, which a person always has even when not using it. The leanings are what the tool is inclined to, even in sleep: a just person stays inclined to will justice. The use is an actual act of willing. Grace and choice meet differently at each level.

What are the will’s two “affections”?

The will has two leanings, which Anselm calls affections: one toward advantage, what benefits oneself, and one toward rightness, what is just. The first is never lost, because a person always wants to be happy. The second was given with human nature and lost through sin, and only grace restores it. Every good act needs the second to govern the first.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Known in Advance, Yet Free

If God already knows and has decided what we will do, is anything left for human choice? The treatise takes the worry seriously and denies that there is any contradiction.

Anselm’s answer is that what God foreknows includes the manner of each event, so a free act is foreknown as free; his knowledge cannot be wrong about it, and that is all its necessity amounts to. Predestination is treated the same way, since God predestines as he foreknows. Behind both stands an account of eternity begun decades earlier in the Monologion. God’s present is not a moment in our time but an eternal present in which all times are held at once, much as the present moment contains every place.

divine foreknowledge
predestination
necessity
modality
time
eternity
free will
divine causality
moral responsibility
justice

Enter a dialogue

Grace and Choice Working Together

Does a good life come from God’s gift or from one’s own choice? The treatise refuses the choice between them and shows where each one does its work.

Scripture seems to give salvation now to grace alone, now to free choice alone, and some readers took one side as the whole truth. Anselm joins them. Nobody has rightness of will unless grace gives it, and free choice keeps what was given, with grace still helping. Infants who die baptized are saved by grace alone, because they cannot yet choose. The word of God works in a heart like seed in a field: the earth grows weeds unaided, but useful crops only from seed and labour. Last he takes the will apart into a tool, its leanings and its use.

grace
salvation
faith
rectitude
merit
baptism
original sin
scripture
preaching
will
faculty psychology
dispositions
desire
virtue

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 75
distinct concepts: 90
by passages held, corpus-wide: #565

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “free will” and “grace”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 77 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
free will	grace	15
free will	necessity	14
divine foreknowledge	free will	13
free will	moral responsibility	13
divine foreknowledge	necessity	9
free will	salvation	9
free will	justice	8
grace	salvation	8
grace	moral responsibility	7
justice	will	6
justice	moral responsibility	5
justice	salvation	4
moral responsibility	salvation	4
free will	will	3
grace	justice	3
grace	will	3
moral responsibility	necessity	3
moral responsibility	will	2
salvation	will	2
divine foreknowledge	justice	1
grace	necessity	1
justice	necessity	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1076 Monologion
The earliest of Anselm's books about God and the longest he wrote at Bec, composed in the mid-1070s while he was still prior there.
LA
1078 Proslogion
The book by which Anselm is known: twenty-six short chapters composed at Bec in 1077 and 1078, a year or two after the Monologion.
LA
1078 Reply to Gaunilo (Liber apologeticus contra Gaunilonem)
A treatise Anselm did not choose to write: his answer to a critic of the Proslogion, in which he restates its argument point by point.
LA
1080 De Grammatico (De grammatico)
The odd one out on Anselm's shelf: a short exercise in logic for beginners, of disputed date, which he refused to count among his dialogues on Scripture.
LA
1080 On Truth (De veritate)
The first of three dialogues Anselm wrote at Bec in the 1080s and later arranged as a set, with On Freedom of Choice and On the Fall of the Devil.
LA
1085 On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)
Builds on the definition of justice reached in On Truth, and supplies the account of the will that On the Fall of the Devil then tests on the first sin of all.
LA
1085 On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)
The longest of the three dialogues from Bec and Anselm's fullest account of evil, worked out on the case of the angels who fell.
LA
1094 On the Incarnation of the Word (Epistola de incarnatione Verbi)
A letter turned treatise, begun by the abbot of Bec around 1092 and finished by the Archbishop of Canterbury two years later, addressed to the pope.
LA
1098 Why God Became Man (Cur Deus homo)
The founding text of the satisfaction theory of the atonement, in two books, completed during Anselm's first exile from England.
LA
1099 On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato)
A sequel to Why God Became Man, written a year later for Boso, the questioner of that dialogue, to give a second answer to a question it had raised.
LA
1102 On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (De processione Spiritus Sancti)
Given first as a speech at a council and written up four years later: the treatise in which Anselm argues not with a pupil or a critic but with another church.
LA
1107 De Concordia (The Compatibility of God's Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Human Freedom) (De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio) you are here LA

— or open another of their works