Weekly update 3

 

Anselm hands over a work
to Matilda of Tuscany

I end my third week very slightly ahead of schedule, just beginning a new chapter, which deals with creation and assorted related issues (including the Trinity, as it turns out). This chapter is one of two that I don't basically have written in my head already--the other being the introductory chapter on Anselm's life, work, and contexts--so the next week or so may be rough going. But I'm encouraged by the progress I've made so far.

The excerpt I've appended is some basic but important stuff about the nature of God's causality. It originally included a digression about Humean vs non-Humean views of causality, including a hilarious (to philosophers) anecdote about two former colleagues of mine. I finally settled on the view that (a) "hilarious (to philosophers)" = "not remotely hilarious" and (b) only someone already corrupted by philosophy would entertain a Humean view of causation, so why make a big deal of it in a Very Short Introduction?

            Anselm was fascinated by the language of causation throughout his career, returning to different fine-grained analyses of causal language again and again in his treatises. (He also left some unfinished writings on the subject in what we call the Lambeth Fragments.) Since he is open to using the word facere, to make or bring about, in so many different ways, it is important here to note that he understands God’s making or bringing about creatures as causality in the most basic and direct sense. God acts knowingly and intentionally, and everything other than God is an effect of that intentional act.

            We have an intuitive feel for this sort of bringing-about, because we experience causation all the time. I move my fingers in a certain way over the keyboard and thereby cause a bit of Bach to be played. I may not be able to say much about the mechanics—how the keys, the hammers, and the strings all work together in producing the sound—but I have no doubt that I have just brought about some music. I have experienced causation, and I myself was the cause. This sort of causation, which philosophers call “efficient causation,” is the kind of causality Anselm is ascribing to God with respect to creation.

            Yet although we can say that God’s causality is of the same kind as the causality we experience in our own actions and in the world around us, God’s exercise of that kind of causality is quite different from ours. I need a piano to play, air for singing, paper on which to write and a pen to discharge the ink, my natural powers of mind to generate thoughts and arrange them. That is, I exercise my efficient-causal powers on things that already exist, using powers that ultimately belong to my nature: and my nature is not something that I have from myself.

            God, by contrast, has (or rather is) his nature from himself, a se, and he does not require pre-existing things on which to exercise it. Moreover, God’s causality cannot be impeded, as ours can: both my natural powers and the objects on which I exercise them can fail me to various degrees. I want to sing, but my laryngitis is atrocious; I want to jot down a note, but the paper is wet and, anyway, my hand is shaking. God simply wills, and it is so.