On the Incarnation of the Word

Written against a logician who said Lanfranc and Anselm agreed with him, it defends the Trinity and attacks those who think universals are only words.

by Anselm of Canterbury55 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: Epistola de incarnatione Verbi
First published: 1094(aged 61)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Roscelin of Compiègne, a canon who taught logic, argued that if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were one thing and not three separate things, like three angels, then the Father and the Spirit must have become flesh along with the Son. He claimed that Lanfranc and Anselm thought as he did. A council at Soissons, called by Rainald, Archbishop of Reims, made him recant in 1092 or 1093. Anselm, then abbot of Bec, had begun a letter against him and abandoned it once Roscelin had given way, but some monks copied the unfinished part without his knowledge and passed it around. Then, after he had been made Archbishop of Canterbury, he heard that Roscelin was saying he had recanted only because he was afraid the people would kill him. Anselm finished the work and addressed it to Pope Urban II. Its sharpest pages are aimed at the logicians of his day who hold that universal substances are nothing but a breath of the voice, a word spoken, and who cannot think of anything they cannot picture. A man who does not yet understand how many men are one man in their species, Anselm argues, will never understand how three persons are one God. To the claim itself he answers that the Son can take on a human nature without the Father or the Spirit doing so, because what is incarnate is a person, not the nature the three share. He sends readers who want the reasoning behind the Trinity to his Monologion and Proslogion. Roscelin went on teaching for years afterwards, and among his later pupils was Peter Abelard.

Key concepts

What is the difference between a nature and a person here?

A nature is what something is, and a person is the one who is it. Father, Son and Spirit share one divine nature but are three persons. Anselm argues that the Son took a human being into the unity of his person, not into the unity of that shared nature. So the person who became man is the Son alone, though the God who is that person is not a different God from the Father and the Spirit.

What are universals, and what did the dialecticians say about them?

Universals are what many individuals have in common, such as the humanity that makes Peter, Paul and every other man a man. Anselm’s opponents, the dialecticians of his day, held that such universal substances are nothing but a breath of the voice, a word spoken. For Anselm this is a crippling mistake. Someone who cannot see how many men are one man in their species has no way to see how three persons are one God.

What does Anselm mean by the “relations” in God?

Relations are what Father, Son and Spirit are toward one another: being Father of, being Son of, proceeding from. Anselm grants that the persons can be called three things only if “things” means their relations, not their substance. In everything else they are one. This is how he can deny both that the persons are separate like three angels and that the whole Godhead became flesh.

Why does Anselm warn against thinking in bodily images?

Bodily images are the pictures the imagination forms from the senses. Anselm warns that some minds are so wrapped in them that they cannot think of anything they cannot picture: they take a colour to be a body and a person’s wisdom to be the soul itself. Such minds cannot tell a horse from its colour, he writes, and so they will not tell one God from his relations.

Themes of the book

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

Logicians Who Can Only Picture Things

What kind of mind is fit to argue about the Trinity at all? Anselm’s answer puts some of the cleverest logicians of his day outside the conversation.

Before answering the argument, Anselm turns on the kind of thinker who made it: dialecticians who hold that universal substances are only a breath of the voice and cannot think of a colour except as a body. A mind that cannot tell a horse from its colour, he writes, will not tell one God from his relations. Questions of faith belong to those who come to them humbly. A believer should keep the faith and look for its reasons; if he understands, he should thank God, and if not, he should not lower his horns against it.

faith and reason
theological method
intellectual humility
ecclesiastical authority
doctrinal controversy
theological language
substance
predication

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Why Only the Son Became Man

If Father, Son and Spirit are one God, how could one of them become human without the others? The letter answers a logician who thought the Trinity collapsed under that question.

Roscelin’s dilemma was that either the three persons are three separate things, like three angels, or the Father and the Spirit became flesh with the Son. Anselm denies the second branch without accepting the first. The Son took a human being into the unity of his person, not into the unity of the divine nature the three share. His image is the Nile: spring, river and lake are one Nile, yet if the river ran through a pipe, only the river would be enclosed. He adds reasons of fittingness why it was the Son rather than the Spirit.

trinity
incarnation
divine persons
personhood
relations
analogy
christology
divine unity
divine simplicity
identity
divine and human nature
monotheism

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Within this work

passages held: 55
distinct concepts: 81
by passages held, corpus-wide: #638

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: “incarnation” and “trinity”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 34 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
incarnation	trinity	17
divine persons	trinity	9
relations	trinity	6
analogy	trinity	5
incarnation	personhood	5
divine persons	incarnation	4
divine simplicity	trinity	4
personhood	trinity	4
divine persons	relations	3
faith and reason	trinity	3
faith and reason	incarnation	2
incarnation	relations	2
analogy	divine persons	1
analogy	divine simplicity	1
analogy	relations	1
divine persons	divine simplicity	1
divine persons	faith and reason	1
divine simplicity	faith and reason	1
divine simplicity	incarnation	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)
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.
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1094 On the Incarnation of the Word (Epistola de incarnatione Verbi) you are here 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.
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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.
LA

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