In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm’s
focus is on Christ. He spends the whole first book arguing that divine purposes
for Adam’s race cannot be fulfilled without a God-man. In the second book,
Anselm turns to further questions about what else would have to be true of the
God-man to fulfill the soteriological job Anselm has designed for Him. Adam’s
race can render to God what it owes, its debt can be paid with justice, only if
satisfaction is made by a member of Adam’s family. But Christ will not have any
capital with which to pay the debt, if He is personally mired in the
disabilities and liabilities that make it impossible for other members of
Adam’s race any longer to render to God what they owe. The purity and
defilement calculus, the seminal transmission theory lurk in the background as
Boso (Anselm’s interlocutor) asks:
[H]ow did God assume from the
sinful mass—i.e., from the human race, which was completely contaminated by
sin—a sinless human nature (as something unleavened from something leavened)?
For although the conception of this man was clean and free from the sin of
carnal delight, nevertheless the virgin from whom He was assumed was conceived
in iniquities, and her mother conceived her in sins; and this virgin was born
with original sin, since she sinned in Adam in whom all have sinned. (Cur
Deus Homo II.16; Schmitt II.116,16–24)
Contamination is catching. The
Blessed Virgin Mary was seminally propagated and would have become contaminated
by her parents. Even if Christ were not seminally propagated, even if the
Blessed Virgin Mary were Christ’s only human parent, she would be infected and
Christ would have caught it from her.
The challenge provokes Anselm to
thought-experiments that bear the fruit of two different, to his mind,
independently adequate responses. Neither focuses on, but both bear on the
question of the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Cur
Deus Homo account contends that by virtue of being a God-man, Christ is
pure through Himself. It appeals to the excellence of Christ’s saving work to
explain how His humanity was not assumed from tainted forebears. Christ’s
obedience to death was so pleasing to the Godhead that it is efficacious, not
only for the then present but also future members of Adam’s race; it reaches
backward to cleanse the elect who came before Him during their ante mortem
careers. Anselm does not elaborate exactly when or from what they are cleansed,
and so does not itemize the respects in which the Blessed Virgin Mary would
have been immaculate. But the logic of the argument would require the elect to
be free of whatever the offspring would have “caught” from them in the course
of their biological derivation.
Anselm observes that original sin
is a topic in its own right, and returns to give it focused attention in De
conceptu virginali et de originali peccato. There Anselm makes three points
that loom large in later debates about the immaculate conception of the Blessed
Virgin Mary. First, Anselm insists that nothing merely material, but only the
soul can be the subject of sin. God made rational creatures with reason and
will and endowed their wills with a separable affectio iustitiae and
freedom (the power to preserve justice). Creatures are unable to endow
themselves with justice. Unlike God, if they are just, they are just through
another (per aliud). They owe their justice to God, both in the sense of
having it from God as the source, and in the sense of being obliged to God to
preserve uprightness of will for its own sake. For Anselm sin is the failure to
preserve justice, and original sin is the lack of required justice. Given the
commonly held mediated animation theory—that what is seminally produced in the
mother is not immediately animated (infused with a soul) but only after the
material is shaped into an organic body (40–46 days after conception for males,
80 days for females)—Anselm concludes that original sin cannot begin at
conception but only at animation. Because the parents produce only the flesh
and soul, original sin cannot be seminally transmitted in conception itself. (De conceptu virginali et de originali
peccato, chs. 1–4; Schmitt II.140–145; ch. 7; Schmitt
II.147–149)
Second, if the seminal
transmission theory was a starting point for Boso’s question in Cur Deus
Homo, Anselm’s definition of original sin and relocation of its subject
brings him to refocus on the juridical or quasi-legal explanation of its
inheritance. In De conceptu virginali, Anselm distinguishes between
those of Adam’s offspring whose propagation lies, broadly speaking, within the
scope of natural human powers and the parents’ will to exercise them, from
those whose propagation lies outside the scope of natural human reproductive
powers. Paradigmatic of the former are human beings begotten the normal way by
bisexual intercourse. Eve is an obvious example of the latter, since she was
made from Adam’s rib. Anselm explicitly notes that biblical examples of
children from over-age parents (e.g., Isaac from Abraham and Sarah, John the
Baptist from Zechariah and Elizabeth) belong in the first category, because
they are begotten by the will of their parents and through miraculously
restored natural reproductive powers.(Ibid., ch. 16; Schmitt II.157–158) Anselm
then hypothesizes that if God determined that if Adam did not sin, Adam’s
natural offspring would be reproduced in the condition in which Adam himself
was created; but if Adam sinned, Adam’s natural offspring would be reproduced
in the condition into which Adam fell. Here condition includes both
legal and concrete dimensions; in the latter case of fallen humanity it ranges
over the quasi-legal obligation to have justice and the liability to punishment
for not having it, as well as the concrete punishments—psycho-physical
dysfunction, psycho-spiritual disorder, physical vulnerability and
mortality—themselves. Biological descent is relevant, not because the parents’
biological acts somehow cause original sin in the offspring, but because it
makes the offspring members of the class to whom the laws apply.
Christ’s human nature is excepted
precisely because His reproduction was not natural in the relevant sense, but
virginal. (Ibid., chs. 10–13; Schmitt II.151–155) In De conceptu virginali,
ch. 18 Anselm explicitly notes that on this juridical or quasi-legal
explanation of Christ’s purity can be secured quite independently of whether or
not his mother was pure. It is not necessity but propriety that drives the
conclusion of Marian purity. In a statement much quoted in later debates (and
this is the third salient point in the treatise), Anselm exclaims, “it was
fitting that the Virgin be beautified with a purity than which a greater cannot
be conceived except for God’s,” because “the Son was naturally one and the same
common Son of God the Father and of the Virgin.” (Ibid., chs. 18–19; Schmitt
II.159–160) Potuit, decuit, fecit, as the later slogan would say. What
Anselm does not observe is how the soteriological statutes to God not open any
loophole that would except Mary from the common inheritance of Adam’s race,
because traditional Marian infancy narratives model her conception on that of
John the Baptist—another case of voluntary use of miraculously restored natural
powers. (Marilyn McCord Adams, “The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin
Mary: A Thought-Experiment in Medieval Philosophical Theology,” Harvard
Theological Review 103, no. 2 [April 2010]: 135-37)