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- Title
God, Creator of His Own Necessity: The Logic of Divine Action in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo.
- Authors
McIntosh, Jonathan S.
- Abstract
In discussions of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, the necessity of God's act of Incarnation is commonly traced either to the divine nature, to the divine will, or to some combination of the two. In contrast with the shared, theistic "possibilism" of these essentialist and voluntarist readings of Anselmian necessity, according to which God's possibilities for action are defined prior to and independently of what God afterwards does, I argue that Cur Deus Homo is best interpreted as pointing in a somewhat different, more "actualist" direction for the source of the necessity of the Incarnation. For Anselm, it is neither the divine nature nor the divine will taken in the abstract, but God's ad extra action of creation itself that principally defines and determines what God both can and must do with respect to that creation. In this way, far from God having to choose, create, act, or save from an existing array or domain of already defined possibilities or necessities, Anselm instead implies a model in which God is the sovereign creator of his own possibilities and necessities.
- Subjects
ATTRIBUTES of God; CHRISTIAN Science; CUR Deus Homo (Book); NATURE in the Bible; INCARNATION
- Publication
Saint Anselm Journal, 2017, Vol 13, Issue 1, p68
- ISSN
2689-6230
- Publication type
Article