Anselm of Canterbury is one of the most important theologians in the history of the Western Church. That means that his ideas most likely have influenced the way you think about the world, whether you realize it or not. It also means that the ideas he taught have reached us in a very garbled form. Take his doctrine of the "atonement," for instance (you can read it in "Why God Became Man" in this volume). Anselm taught that by sinning humans have failed to give God the "honor" due him as our creator and as a supremely great and good and beautiful being. This creates a "debt" that must be paid back. We can't pay it, because even if we were perfectly good (which we can't be), that would only be our due anyway. It wouldn't pay back the original "debt" incurred by Adam and Eve. That debt is so great that only God himself could pay it. Yet the debt had to be paid by a human being. So God became human and paid the debt on our behalf.

This notion lies behind hundreds of evangelical and fundamentalist sermons which you can hear in churches throughout this country every Sunday. It also is partly responsible for the notion of God a lot of nonreligious people reject--a cosmic tyrant who demands perfect obedience and threatens us with punishment if we don't comply.

Yet Anselm actually _never_ taught that Jesus was "punished" on our behalf. On the contrary, the debt was paid precisely so that no punishment would be necessary. Jesus' death on the cross was not a sadistic punishment exacted by an angry God, but was the culmination of his absolute obedience to God's will. It was that obedience, completed in his sacrificial death, that paid "the debt we could not owe."

For Anselm, and for Christians generally, honoring God is the highest and most joyful thing we can do. It is the most truly human and humanizing activity imaginable. This is tied to Anselm's notion of God (expressed in his "Proslogion," also in this volume). For Anselm, God is the being than which nothing greater can be imagined. This isn't primarily about an omnipotent being who can make us do things. It's about a being so unimaginably glorious that the greatest happiness anyone can know is just to be in his presence. To turn away from a being like that (knowing what we're doing, which most of us don't) is to be something less than we could be. Obviously this is a bit of a modern interpretation of Anselm, but I don't think it contradicts him.

I do think, though, that there are better ways to think about the Atonement than Anselm's. Earlier Christians had spoken of Jesus' death and resurrection primarily as a victory over death and the devil--what the baptismal vows in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer call the "forces that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God." Anselm didn't like this notion, because he thought it limited God's power and gave the devil some sort of independent existence (and in some versions even legal "rights"). But I think that that understanding of Jesus' saving work is probably truer to the Bible and Christian tradition than Anselm's.

But even if--indeed especially if--you disagree with Anselm, he's worth reading. He and the "scholastic" theologians who followed him helped shape Christian thinking in the West for the past thousand years. They are partly responsible for the fact that Western Christians--Catholics and Protestants--think so differently from the Orthodox.

Anselm was a very important author for Medieval Christianity. He contributed the Ontological argument for the existence (or should I say subsitence) of God, as well as formulating verbally the substitutionary atonement of Christ. This book provides these as well as a host of other rich classical Christian thoughts. It is difficult reading, but excellent in that it makes one think, believer or non-believer, in the metaphysical realities of life. I would have to say a must for anyone interested in the development of Christian thinking, as well as Philosophical development.

The main problem with translations, obviously, is that they all too often say more about the translator(s) than the work translated. The Jowett translations of Plato are cases in point, on the negative side, and Mitchell's translation of Rilke are another, on the positive side. This series of translations by Hopkins and Richardson fall decidedly into the positive side.

I personally have a love/hate relationship with the great saint of Canterbury. On the one hand, as a philosopher his works on ontology and the "proofs" of God, while ultimately refuted, nevertheless have served as fodder for nearly every thinker since his time. I am constantly amazed by his depth and committment to inquiry. Many have nuanced or adapted his arguments, particularly the (in)famous "ontological" proof, and Anselm to this day still enjoys a wide readership and is likely to remain popular, not only as history, but, like Plato, as a living intellectual force.

On the other hand, Anselm is responsible for bequeathing to the Christian world the feudal satisfaction theory of the atonement (Cur Deus Homo?, wonderfully presented in this translation). Anslem won the war with Abelard, and we inherited the God whose honor has to be satisfied. I dare say most Christians today have no idea that Anselm's theory was new in his day, and yet was so brilliant (in his day) that it has stood as our paradigm for the atonement ever since. There were myriad interpretations of the atonement before Anselm. Augustine would never had recognized Anselm's theory, committed as he was to a "ransom" theory, and Paul's mystical-communal "en ho christos" concept of the work of Christ certainly stands in contrast to Anselm's feudal monarchial view. Still, history and the church was with Anselm, so we today take for granted the satisfaction theory of Anselm. Sadly, the satisfaction theory is one of the most infortunate (to be kind) beliefs ever adopted by the Christian church.

Five stars for the translation, minus one because I cannot give even the mighty Anselm a perfect score. The message is more important than the medium, however satisfying the medium may be.

There are two ways that you could rank this book, either on the basis of the content by Anselm or as a packaging of Anselm's writings. I'll talk about the latter. If you're at all interested in Anselm's thought, this book is a great deal. A hard-bound edition of all of Anselm's philosophical and theological treatises for eleven bucks? What's not to like? I haven't studied the translations in detail, but from glancing at them, they seem fine, and render Anselm into fairly clear English. This book also includes a short and useful introduction, which gives an overview of Anselm's life and works, reprinted from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.