On the Fall of the Devil

Told that the devil fell only because God never gave him perseverance, Anselm argues at length that the fault was the devil's own.

by Anselm of Canterbury78 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: De casu diaboli
First published: 1085(aged 52)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

The student puts the problem as bluntly as it can be put. The devil did not persevere in the good because he did not have perseverance; he did not have it because he did not receive it; and he did not receive it because God did not give it. The student wants to know where, then, the devil's fault lies. The question is about the first sin of all, committed by an angel before any human being existed, and it threatens to make God the author of evil. The teacher's answer reverses the order of causes. The angel did not fall because God withheld perseverance; God did not give it because the angel abandoned justice by willing what he ought not to will. What he wanted was happiness, which is good in itself, but more of it than he had been given, and he wanted it against justice. Anselm argues that an angel needed two wills, one for its own happiness and one for justice, and that sin is the first deserting the second. Along the way the dialogue faces an old puzzle: evil is nothing, only the absence of a good that ought to be there, and yet the word evil means something, and hearts shudder when they hear it. Anselm placed this dialogue last in the set of three he wrote at Bec in the 1080s, after On Truth and On Freedom of Choice. Two centuries later John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan theologian, took up Anselm's two wills as the will's two affections, for advantage and for justice, and changed the account: where Anselm held that the affection for justice was lost in Adam's fall and could come back only by grace, Scotus held that it is born in every human being.

Key concepts

What are the “two wills” in On the Fall of the Devil?

The two wills are a will for happiness and a will for justice, both given to the angel at its creation. The first wants what is good for oneself; the second wants what is right. With the first alone a creature could want nothing else and could not be blamed for anything it wanted. The second lets it hold the first in check. Sin, for Anselm, is the will for happiness overriding the will for justice.

What is the difference between justice and advantage?

Anselm names two kinds of good. Justice is the good that makes someone just, and its opposite is injustice. Advantage is the good of what benefits someone, and its opposite is harm. Every rational being, and everything that can feel, wants advantage, but not everyone wants justice. That difference explains how one can sin by wanting something good: an advantage pursued against justice.

What does it mean that evil is a privation?

A privation is the absence of something that ought to be there. Injustice is not a thing added to a will but justice missing from a will that ought to have it. That is why Anselm can say evil is nothing and still say it is real enough to blame: what is real is the will and its act, which come from God, and what is evil is the justice the will gave up.

What is the difference between the form of speech and the thing itself?

Anselm distinguishes how something is spoken of from how it really is. In grammar “to fear” is active, though the one who fears is acted on. In the same way “blindness” is grammatically a name like “sight”, and we say someone has it, though in reality it is not something one has. Many puzzles about evil and nothing, he argues, come from reading the form of speech as if it reported the thing.

Themes of the book

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

The First Sin of All

If God gave perseverance to the angels who stood and withheld it from the one who fell, how can the fall be the devil’s fault? The dialogue stakes God’s innocence of evil on the answer.

The student’s chain of reasons ends with God, and Anselm turns it round: God did not give perseverance because the angel did not accept it, abandoning justice by willing what he ought not. To show how that was possible he imagines an angel made step by step. With a will for happiness alone it could be neither just nor unjust, whatever it wanted; so a second will, for justice, was given with the first. The devil wanted happiness, a good thing, beyond what he had received and against justice. He could not have foreseen his fall, because it was not necessary.

free will
justice
moral responsibility
will
sin
divine providence
agency
happiness
perseverance
moral psychology
foreknowledge
grace
divine justice
desire
injustice

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The Nothing Called Evil

If evil is only a lack, why does it feel so real, and why can we name it? The answer decides whether God, who makes everything that is, also makes evil.

The student presses an old difficulty from both sides. If evil is nothing, the word “evil” signifies nothing, yet hearts shudder when they hear it; and if the will that sins comes from God, God seems to make the evil. Anselm answers that language often speaks of something according to its form and not according to the thing: “blindness” is said like a name for something, though it is only sight missing where it ought to be. Injustice is likewise the absence of a justice that ought to be present. Whatever a sinning will has of being comes from God; the lack does not.

evil
privation theory
privation
nonbeing
negation
semantics
ontology
creation
causation
divine causation
goodness
metaphysics

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Within this work

passages held: 78
distinct concepts: 94
by passages held, corpus-wide: #558

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 “moral responsibility”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 64 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
free will	moral responsibility	13
free will	justice	9
free will	sin	9
justice	moral responsibility	9
divine providence	free will	8
evil	free will	6
free will	will	6
divine providence	moral responsibility	5
justice	sin	5
divine providence	evil	4
evil	moral responsibility	4
justice	will	4
evil	ontology	3
moral responsibility	sin	2
divine providence	justice	1
divine providence	sin	1
evil	justice	1
evil	will	1
moral responsibility	will	1
sin	will	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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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1085 On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli) you are here 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
Anselm's last completed treatise, written in 1107 and 1108 after his second exile, and his answer to a question the student had raised in On Freedom of Choice more than twenty years before.
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