I meant to jot this down last month when I saw it in Sandro Magister's column on Anselm's 900th birthday, but forgot until now. I was just saying to Dan the other week that one thing I've noted over the last few years is that I have an increasing fondness for Anselm of Canterbury (or, less famously, "of Aosta" or "of Bec," as below). When I was doing my Master's degree, I repeatedly heard Anselm blamed for making his Christology too "legal" in its conception, borrowing too much from medieval ideas of law, and thus (I was told) propelling theology of Christ down a path that increased bad, legalistic understandings of the faith.

Like most easy ideas that excuse you from having to actually work through details, that's garbage, I've since discovered.

Like an awful lot of other myths, someone once summed up an idea in a catchy way, that probably had the useful benefit of "explaining everything," and likely also offered the bonus feature of making us feel smug in our superiority for having risen above such tawdry ideas. Augustine of Hippo gets that all the time, usually getting the blame for every dysfunction in the history of Western sexuality and psychology because he had issues with his own sexuality. This gets repeated endlessly among professors of numerous fields, I've found, none of whom have ever read a word of Augustine. After all, why mess up a good punchline with complicated facts and details? That's boring.

So it is with poor Anselm, too, I've found. But as I've been reading him – and more importantly, teaching him – over the last few years, I've found a thinker who is subtle, exciting, human, and complicated; not in the way of "over-complication," of multiplying difficulties, but complicated in the way that anyone trying to describe reality and to avoid "sound bite thinking" has to be complicated. I noticed that my students in engineering and the physical sciences seemed to especially like his passion for logic, and that's no surprise in the writer known as the "Father of Scholasticism." ("Scholasticism" is that medieval movement – the thinking "of the schools" – that gave rise to today's university system.) His thought is rich, urging a wonderful and useful consistency of universal scope, and that's been fun to discover. So I thought it worth while to jot down this more popular note and recognition of one of those long-gone thinkers whose words still challenge and provoke our own thinking today. (Hmm. Even all this is probably too vague and cluttered of me: I need to eat some food. So here's the cartoon version someone made, in case that's more accessible.)

Anselm of Aosta: a "formidable thinker" among the modern prophets of nothing
Nine hundred years later, his "intelligence of faith" is still the main way through "our age of the proliferation of doubts." The blistering homily with which Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, in the name of the pope, opened the celebrations for the great doctor of the Church.
by Sandro Magister

ROME, April 23, 2009 – To celebrate the "doctor magnificus" Anselm at the ninth centenary of his death, Benedict XVI sent as his delegate a bishop theologian like himself, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi. And the cardinal carried out his task in his own way. In the cathedral of Aosta, the birthplace of the saint, in the homily for his liturgical feast on April 21, he defended the extraordinary relevance of the great Anselm: "a formidable thinker" and a man of faith among the many false teachers of doubt, absolutely faithful to the successor of Peter among the many, including bishops, who left him alone. Cardinal Biffi's homily is presented in its entirety further below.

For the occasion, pope Joseph Ratzinger sent two messages: the first, to the abbot primate of the Benedictine Confederation, Notker Wolf, and the second to Cardinal Biffi, his special envoy for the celebrations. The second of these messages was read at the cathedral of Aosta on April 21, immediately after Biffi's homily. A link to the complete text can be found at the bottom of this page.

One of Anselm's savings has become famous: "Non quæro intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam"; I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand.

But even more famous in the history of thought is his way of asserting the existence of God: as the evident, undeniable equivalence of "that than which no greater can be thought" and the being that cannot be thought of as not existing. This argument was criticized and rejected by Thomas Aquinas and by Kant, but considered valid by Duns Scotus, Descartes, Leibniz, and Hegel. But properly speaking, the reformulation that Descartes and others after him made of this "ontological argument" does not correspond to Anselm's authentic thought.

According to the most attentive students of his work, for Anselm the existence of God is not something that must be "demonstrated." The evident "proof" instead concerns the denial of his existence: those who deny the existence of "that than which no greater can be thought" trap themselves in an insurmountable contradiction, cutting off the possibility of all thought.

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My first session of Theology Through the Centuries students today had a discussion of the middle part of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?/Why Did God Become Human? where we made particular note of Anselm's description of how it is human beings are seen to be "in the image of God." He pointed to two standard items, the first of which was the rational nature of human beings: that rational mind that so distinguishes us from other animals. (Even the basic hints of reasoning capability we've come to observe in higher species of late are of such a different order that it's difficult to grasp the magnitude of difference, in a serious, non-sentimental comparison.) The second aspect in which we display the imago dei, he says, is the human capacity for holiness, by which he means the capacity for real love, rightly ordered to love's proper ends or goals. Now, we were talking about this in terms of his anthropology: in discussing what this "humanity" is, which God has taken on in the Incarnation. We were trying to see clearly with his vision, for the purposes he was pursuing in this text, at that point in the discussion.

It has only now struck me that these two components to the imago dei that grant a new dimension to the human mammal, and raise it to a new order of being – capacities for reason and love – just so happen to be those very aspects with which the "hands of God" are identified. That is to say, "the hands of God," a phrase or image which I believe goes back to Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 200), are the two Persons of the Triune God who achieve the Father's will in Creation: the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Son, or the Second Person, is identified in earliest Christian theology as the Logos, the Word: the rational principle underlying all of reality, or the Reason that makes the physical universe rational. It's a descriptive or ancient "scientific" notion taken from Stoic thought and adapted into Jewish and Christian theology as a descriptor what what this aspect or Person of God in particular achieves. Similarly, the Holy Spirit, or the Third Person, is identified strongly in Western Christian theology, from Augustine of Hippo, as the very living Love generated by the First and Second Persons.

So, you might say, other names for the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity are "Reason" and "Love." And it just so happens that these are the two characteristics given to our species that make it "in the image of God" in a way that is distinct from the ways that the rest of the Creation reflects its Creator.

Anselm, I think, would call this symmetry of concepts "fitting" in how they neatly fold into one another, even though this is not the way in which they were introduced or presented. And I too, had a moment of intellectual or spiritual pleasure in suddenly seeing this fittingness. It is this very "fittingness," this aesthetic harmony within Christian thought, that Anselm is largely using as his theological argument: an argument of Beauty, ultimately, as I noted last semester, when I did a more basic glance at him in my Introduction to Theology course. So yay for reading Anselm!, I guess. That's all.

Kind of a lame couple of days. My vague temptation to tag along on the Marquette bus with my track team student Erynn for her meet at the University of Missouri today was tempered by the fact that I not only had to teach today, but that an inexpensive visit to Emily that way wasn't possible anyway as she was in Portland for the national 18th Century Brit Lit conference. And anyway, I've had these uncomfortable cramps on and off again for the last 48 hours, now, just some gas from something I ate, I suppose, but enough that I'll constitute a treaty violation at some point down the line. No fun.

I bailed on a dinner invitation yesterday with the Lloyds because I was uncomfortable enough that I knew it was just going to make me distracted and wishing that I was at home. (My baby-whisperer work with Owen has even expanded to Dan holding the phone to Owen's ear and me telling him to calm down and go to sleep, and Amy said they'd like to treat me to dinner in gratitude for their own resulting good night's sleep.) For me on the other hand, this thing keeps waking me up about every hour and so I've been a bit foggy, though I think I managed today's lesson on the dense and difficult Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Human?) by Anselm reasonably well. I spent about eight hours prepping thirty pages there, which gives some sense of how loaded a text it is. I am dismayed when I think of the 40 or 50 pages the students are reading for Tuesday: I don't know that we'll cover those as completely as I'd like, but this is all a first-time effort for me.

The high point of the last two days thus ended up being my student Jessica dropping in to talk during my office hours yesterday. Jess jumped from Biomeds to Theology and Philosophy after taking my Intro to Theology class last year, and thus is one of those students you kind of feel slightly amazed around in realizing the concrete effect you can have on another person's life and vision. She's heading down to Notre Dame for the weekend, taking in the Edith Stein conference with friends with whom she formed a Chesterton-reading society here at Marquette, and we talked about Notre Dame's campus and sights to see: it got me a bit nostalgic. My chief recommendation was her walking around Saint Mary's Lake: walking around Saint Mary's Lake was where I did the bulk of my Master's walk. Too bad it's still too early for those cute little turtles to be out....

I see that Adobe released a free online service version of their Photoshop program today, to try to compete with those kinds of basic service. Naturally, this comes as I'm waiting for my pre-paid copy of next Tuesday's release of Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. I've been without a Photoshop program since I upgraded to this new computer and had to leave my OS 9 Photoshop behind for good. Tonight that leaves me restless as I'm in that vague and distracted mood where I like to putz around with graphics for fun, something that requires some creativity or thought, but not enough where I'd be alert enough to do school research. It's been frustrating not to have that outlet for the last several months, so I'm eager for April 1st to roll around and that new software to arrive. I can't even do something as basic as a LiveJournal icon as well as I'd like to, leaving a few new ones I've added a bit fuzzy-looking to my eye after using the LJ icon-maker. Still, I think I'd done a number from favourite movies or such since I last put a pile of them up for grabs here:


I wanted to call Grace today to let her know that I finally saw my first robin of spring. Actually, there were a group of seven of them outside of LaLumiere after my first class this morning, just as our unwelcome snowfall was beginning. The eagle-eyed Gracie had beaten me to the punch by a full two weeks, crowing about having seen on Friday morning as she headed out to school when I was down babysitting her the other week. I was secretly pleased that with no prompting at all – at least from me – that she took it to be as important a sign of the coming of springtime as I do, as I look forward to that first recognition of the birds each year.

Easter was full of the best sorts of celebration again this year. Well, the Mass could have been more engaging – the homilist didn't do much for me, despite his attempts and the music was all Daniel Shulte stuff that also had no attraction for me – but the gathering at Dan and Amy's with Mike and Donna as well as aorlov was the sort of pure pleasure that I always find in these kinds of gatherings of friends. I was the last to arrive and, after a bit of futile knocking at the front door, found everyone in the back yard, sitting in the sunlight around the table on the shoveled-off deck from our 16-inch Spring Surprise the other night, with everyone bundled in their coats and the kids playing in a bit of a "maze" Dan had shoveled out in the backyard.

I thought the outdoor gathering was a bit crazed at first, but as long as the sun was on us, sitting there wasn't too bad at all, although I noticed that the conversation drifted toward stories of Andrei's service in the Soviet Army and other Russian themes, so there might be some connection there.... When the sun got behind the garage, though, and left us in shadow, we all packed up the hors d'oeuvres all at once and moved into the kitchen. The standard two-shift evening commenced, of the kids eating and getting put down before the adults gathered around the table for our own feast, with lamb and a marinaded chicken, a yummy rice dish whose name I disremember, broccoli and much wine with a new bottle of sherry afterwards, as well as raiding the candy dish.

Andrei shared a far more detailed version of the story of how, after his time in the Soviet army, he had been reading religion in the bowels of Moscow University and had ended up heading off to Soviet Mongolia to join a Tibetan monastery there, and that it was in his time there, observing their practices and sinking into their beliefs that he really discovered and embraced Russian Orthodoxy. We also celebrated the news that he had been asked to write the Hermeneia commentary on 2 Enoch, which will be an important feather in his cap as he's already applying for early tenure. There was other shop talk, like about the concept of "fittingness" in Anselm's Why Did God Become Human?, which both Dan and I are teaching this semester, and talk of politics, like hashing out the merits of Obama's speech last week and my contention that the biggest thing about it, which hasn't been commented upon at all, as far as I could see, is that it actually marks a break with the stance on racism that the New Left took in 1968 after leaving King behind and which has been more-or-less the Democratic orthodoxy ever since. There was also some talk about the significance of Buckley and explanation of his role in American political history and culture for Andrei, and just the fun verbal play among everyone. The best of times: intimate friendship, thoughtful conversation with a great variety of perspectives, and good food and drink.

Ten years ago, on the 12th of April, Easter was celebrated on a balcony of the four-star Abou Nawas Sfax Hotel (now called the Mercure Sfax), quarters our host Muhammad was graciously providing for us, in downtown Sfax in Tunisia, overlooking the harbour and the Mediterranean. This Easter saw Erik, Hugh and I perhaps being the only Christians, for all we knew, in what used to be the Christian stronghold of Roman Africa. Following African Christian tradition dating from the ancient Church, Erik and I elected Hugh to be Bishop of Sfax by acclamation (subject to Vatican approval, of course, which we had no time to apply for), and had a service on the balcony with my prayer book and some bread and wine ordered up from room service. We sang, prayed, read lessons, and remembered Christ in bread and wine. It was one of the more memorable Easter services ever, and to his death I always hailed Hugh as Bishop of Sfax.

It is gratifying to have students coming up to me on the street to say that they're signing up for my class next semester, or to have freshman coming up after class, like today, and asking if and how they can get into the course. Especially after my first period today was kind of blah, where I felt like I was pulling teeth to try to get discussion going, except out of my usual suspects. Sometimes I cannot tell if it's my fault, if I'm not asking the right things or in the right way to get conversation flowing, or if it's a disinterest in the students themselves. I have to presume more my end of things, and work at what can be improved, although I suspect my first session always has the penalty of getting me first, and that I'm able to warm up on them, and use the knowledge of what did and didn't work so as to make my second session much more focused and successful.

It cracks me up that with this new computer now ordered, I find that expectation alone has made my perceptions change. For five-and-a-half years, the 15-inch screen on my iMac G4 (the one that looks like the flat screen on the swing arm attached to the volleyball) has seemed "right" to me. Generous, in fact. A pretty large screen, bigger than my older computers, at least. Now that I have the new 24-inch screen iMac on the way, my current screen suddenly gives me the feeling that I'm on the 1960s television set of Star Trek, where Mr. Spock is hunched over, peering into that little, glowing, blue hooded screen of his. My G4's screen feels that small, just big enough for my eyes to fit. Not that the new one will cover the entire wall....

seraphimsigrist asked me to contribute to a volume he's editing, after he read my entry on my class discussion on Anselm the other day. His proposal surprised me when I found it in the comments, but it has turned into a pleasant little project. Having seen an angle of discussion that I think I can offer, I'm digging into a full re-reading of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?/Why Did God Become Human? and Karl Rahner's essay "Christology Within an Evolutionary View of the World" from Theological Investigations, Vol. V. I hope to have that finished by the end of the week. It's an essay on a Western vision or experience of theosis or divinization – the goal of Christian faith; of all humanity, if Christianity is true – of being taken into the life of God. Or, as Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) famously put it in a text I'll be reading with my students next semester: “God became human so humans would become gods.” (On the Incarnation of the Word 54:3)

It's a popular language these days, speaking of finding "the divine" in us, but one that in new religious movements is usually coupled with a refusal to do the historical and scientific thinking involved in theology: to not seek the best, most supported or factual answers in matters spiritual, but to try to content ourselves with a language devoted to, well, contenting ourselves. It is a curious fact that you find people willing to accuse Christianity of being solely a "warm fuzzies" or "pie in the sky" institution: a religion of sentimental self-deception. But then when you start to marshal the array of evidences necessary to put together a case for its serious intellectual claims, the same people complain about how complicated you're making everything, and how simple true spirituality should be. That "the divine" should be as complicated to discuss as our physics ought to be no real surprise, and yet, for striving for truth in this field, such folks will consider me wicked and oppressive. So much for consistency. But in the case of this essay, I'm actually taking a more popular, intuitive and free-flowing approach, rather than the extended and focused work academic theology tends to produce, although my attempt at accuracy is in no way lessened. I'm engaged with some serious conversation partners in Anselm and Rahner, more on the level of making associations and drawing connections, but it's been a welcome new direction in reading and writing from the dual focus on the Intro course and on the dissertation. I think I'll head over to the library now for some more late-evening reading in that direction.

Life rolled on in its interesting way this week. I had to stop and go back to the drawing board with my Introduction to Theology course on the two lessons I was scheduled to give this week, selections from Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo? or Why Did God Become Human?, which I discussed in an earlier entry, and a lesson from Thomas Aquinas: the first question from his Summa Theologiae on whether Theology is necessary as a science. Both of these are more difficult and far more subtle texts than they appear on the surface, and my original lessons were okay, but just weren't getting as much across to the students as I had hoped. So in both cases I slowed down quite a bit, walking with them through the form and argument, letting the students argue out each point at length and thus achieving some kind of "ownership" of the thought before moving onto the next point. Meta-questions about the meaning of the whole then were left until the very end, with only maybe one key idea that I tried to draw out of the students, but one which they were now much more able to articulate and understand the significance of. It felt much better than the last time I taught the material. Wednesday and Thursday, in preparation for Thursday's class, I re-read G.K. Chesterton's masterful study (somewhere between "charming" and "thrilling") Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, with leaps over to James Weisheipl's more academic text Friar Thomas d'Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Work for more detailed treatment of various points.

Having dinner at Dan and Amy's this week was fun for the new added thrill of Dan and I getting ready to both teach sections of Theology Through the Centuries next semester, and to discuss possible texts and lessons together. He just fairly recently got the job, and as I noted a few entries ago, I've already ordered my texts, but he was looking at what I ordered and why, checking out the less-known edition of Julian of Norwich that I so favour, and reading Benedict XVI's book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. It is interesting to have the opportunity to hear someone else's thoughts on sculpting such a course, like while I had thought to move purely chronologically, and to use the Pope's book as a way of treating and understanding the challenge of the Enlightenment for us today, Dan had countered with the suggestion to open with it, to set up an example of the careful examination – and use of such an examination – of history, so as to model for the students what they would be doing in reading these other historical classics together. I never thought of that! But modeling the skill of appropriation in a text, instead of just trying to engage that skill as we read together, struck me as a great idea. So I'm considering the pluses and minuses of that one.

I was disappointed to find out from Faith that she really didn't feel the kind of connection where she would want to pursue dating, which seemed a shame from my first impression, as I thought her the best conversationalist on a first date of anyone I'd gone out with since the start of summer. So that was too bad: it's been a while since I'd dated an artist, and as stupid as it is to look at dating in such ways, if we had found some chemistry then I thought dating an artist and scholar sounded great fun.

Thursday I had the great pleasure of going out to dinner with Mike and Michelle Dougherty, two of my three closest friends from my first two years at Marquette, but who had since moved on after graduating, and now being down in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio Dominican University. I had not actually laid eyes on them for at least two years, and so this was pure refreshment. Now they were a trio, having produced a son, Thomas, a year ago, and who Mike thought must be thrilled to be dining with theologians (we were also joined at dinner by another of that old circle, Chris Dorn) because he was so quiet. I don't know that there were great revelations to be posted from the dinner: it was just good, honest conversation of the catching-up sort, with them digging for details on my dissertation (Mike's doctorate is in Philosophy, (particularly Medieval/Renaissance; Michelle's in Literature, 18th century). Mike's book was finally finished, it was good to hear, and brought out by Cambridge University Press, Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, and it was also news to hear that Chris had revised his dissertation from last year and gotten it accepted by a publisher, as well as become an editor of Reformed Review. I felt slovenly by still being a mere doctoral candidate!

We walked back to the Hilton, where the Catholic Philosophers of America or some such group was having their annual conference (thus bringing Mike and Michelle back to Milwaukee, and Chris and Mike talked for a bit while Michelle and I walked and talked a bit ahead of them, with Thomas in his stroller. I had an odd moment when all of a sudden a man with a sledgehammer half-swung the thing at my head, murmuring, "You better BELIEVE I might hit you!" before walking on with his companion as though nothing untoward had occurred. Michelle and I kind of looked at one another in delayed alarm or disbelief (I'm not sure Mike and Chris even noticed, it was so quick and relatively quiet), before just kind of writing it off as the kind of craziness you sometimes run into in downtown Milwaukee. Still, a few days after two police were shot by a 15 year-old, you kind of wonder.... Chris took off and I stuck around the hotel, talking with them in their room for another hour while Thomas ran down his extra energy, and just hearing more about life at ODU, parenthood and the like. Mike says his combined Philosophy/Theology Department is putting in for two new Theology hires for later this year, and that I should be prepared to throw my hat in. Mike's best friend from the Philosophy program here already has gotten hired there in their expansion drive, so Mike might want to continue his run of stocking the program with scholars he can vouch for. I won't deny that it would be pleasant to go someplace where I already know some of the crew, and maybe by a late spring addition, I'd feel better about where I was in my dissertation so as to be willing to apply....

daysprings posted the following gem on her journal, which I thought one of the funniest things I'd read in a long time, and deserving of being remembered:

…Our birth instructor spent part of her early stage labor sculpting clay? Really? The woman brought clay to the hospital, because she wanted to make some “birth art” to help her “remember the experience”? – I cannot even imagine the kind of “art” I would create during labor. Probably the sort that would scare little children.

And tonight, Friday, I was pleased to spend in the company of Diane, who had been plotting with me over the last month to head down for the signing event that was going on at Collector's Edge South with writers Greg Rucka, Gregg Hurwitz, and Brian Azzarello. (I didn't know anything by Hurwitz, and didn't really remember who Azzarello was until later, which I regretted, because there was one writing question I might have profitably asked him.) She and I are both huge fans of Rucka's work, she especially for his espionage thillers like Queen and Country, and me for his stuff in the DC Universe, which had a huge role in bringing me back to reading comics a few years ago, when, intending to only pick up some old runs that were favourites when I was a kid, a guy at South talked me into picking up Countdown to Infinite Crisis, and I got sucked into Rucka's incredible The OMAC Project, which slightly outshone the epic Infinite Crisis it introduced. (That epic was a sort of sequel to the unprecidented story Crisis on Infinite Earths, which capped my childhood comics reading, which I then gave up so that I could afford college.) Diane and I laughed a bit from the back of the modest crowd, about how we so weren't the fans that went to conventions, got really excited about getting things signed, dressed up in costumes, etc., but we were enjoying listening to the conversations going on with Rucka.

But we did go forward, eventually, buying something to have signed so as to get an excuse to talk. Diane asked about his research, which she very much admired, working as a technical writer herself, and laughing with him about her own time working as a clerk at Collector's Edge, and the real minority women still are in the comics readership. I got to talking with him, first with a tongue-in-cheek complaint about his writing drawing me back into the readership over the last two-and-a-half years. When I said, "So the way I see it, I'm out a few grand because of you!" he rolled backward in his chair laughing. More seriously, once I realized all these favourite contemporary stories of mine seemed to be written by the one guy, I realized that the one thing that I like in his work above all is that he takes a most fantastical genre like superhero fantasy/sci fi, and he tries to imagine what would be the impact of such people living in "the real world." What's the political consequences of someone with Superman's abilities? What do good and bad cops in the ruinously corrupt urban jungle of Gotham City do with a nut in a costume crawling through the night waging his own very successful war on crime? That was the drama in Rucka's work, whether that last basic scenario in Gotham Central; the political consequences of Superman's sudden appearance in someplace very like Iraq when his wife Lois, an embedded reporter in a U.S. military unit, is shot; the political fallout Diana of Themyscira (Wonder Woman) as a U.N. ambassador for her people, who is seen on worldwide television breaking the neck of a man only she knows is a terrorist who apparently cannot be stopped any other way; a U.N. program to monitor and respond to people with special abilities; the hijacking of a U.S. military protocol to exterminate all "metahumans," these individuals with such concentrated power.

Rucka (hey! what do you know? he's one of us! ruckawriter) nodded when I described this as a consistent device in his work, and he said that he really thought that that was a central possibility in this kind of literature: not so much the fantastic or extraordinary as such, but the point of contact where the extraordinary meets the ordinary. That rung a bell with me, as I've long thought that that was why the Superman stories had Clark Kent surrounded by such a relentlessly human supporting cast. Rucka started excitedly talking about Renee Montoya in this regard, a minor character who had actually appeared in the 1990s Batman comics after having been created for Batman: The Animated Series, and who then migrated into the comics. It was in Rucka's hands that she began to dramatically fill out as a complex, and very flawed character. By the end of the Gotham Central series, she's virtually destroyed: outed as a lesbian to the public by a criminal fixated upon her, her relationship ruined, her partner on the force murdered, and, well on her way toward alcoholism, her resignation from the police force. The weekly, one-year series 52 further puts her through the wringer, but toward a constructive end, rebuilding her into a character with a place in the DC Universe that puts her on that border between the extraordinary and ordinary, neither "superhero" nor "civilian," but definitely a character to watch. When I asked about the limits of realism that he can bring to a medium like this, his response tended not to be so much focused on inherent limits of the fantasy aspects of the DC characters and universe, but rather the limits of drama itself: you don't write a TV drama about what cops actually do every day because most of it doesn't keep your attention as a story. Most never shoot their gun outside of training, and most never get into a car chase, yet these are conventions of the "cop show." That's what stood out to him as the border of writing realism in even the fantasy of the DC Universe: the mundane. I understood his response, but was certainly not the type of answer I was expecting. I now had a few more things I wanted to ask him about, particularly in getting so involved with a character like Montoya, which he doesn't own (I was curious if DC gives him a certain level of "dibs" on the character, to work with her long-term, as a trusted writer, and not letting other writers turn her in other directions and thus foiling all his intentions), but there were plenty of other people around, a few waiting for signatures, and I felt geeky enough by this point.

Diane and I wandered off, after she'd made the rounds of old co-workers, getting a gyro for her and a fish-fry for me at the Knick, and then heading over to the Metro for dessert (where I was happy to hear Over The Rhine's "Trouble" on the sound system), which we hadn't done in a good long while. Being a Friday, the latter was packed with clubbers, but we talked a long time over apple pie, cinnamon ice cream, and tawny ports, mostly about her and Tim's growing relationship, all of which made me increasingly excited for her, as I really got a good vibe from the guy last week. That, and relationship/love theory in general was enough to keep us going until 11:30. With that, and with my evening with the Doughertys the night before, I really feel like I got in my "weekend" already, and I'm looking very forward to just settling in and working for the next few days.

We had a good pair of sessions on Anselm of Canterbury yesterday. I was still not satisfied with that lesson after having already taught it for two semesters. I just seemed that the students were not really getting the impact of the material, and I had a distinct feeling that the lecture portion of my class was not illuminating and empowering the discussion portion for them at all. As I thought about it, though, I really began to think that the reading from Cur Deus Homo? (perhaps most accurately translated as Why the God-Man?, but more comfortably, if loosely, in English as Why Did God Become Human?) was in fact the most difficult selection in the Department's Introduction to Theology reader. It doesn't help that you have four chapters that aren't connected – 3, 14, and 24 from Book One, and 7 from Book Two – though they represent key parts of Anselm's argument.

So I decided a much slower walk-through was appropriate for this text, starting from the assumption that they really didn't understand the text, rather than from an assumption that they would have gotten the gist of it and proceeding from there. So I had them simply try to outline the argument for their written homework, and then they opened class working in groups, comparing their various outlines and trying to come up with a stronger and more complete group summary, tempered by one another's insights and criticisms.

But there was so much that they hadn't really seen before, that even in groups, they had no words for. The fact that Anselm's philosophical argument was largely an aesthetic one was something they needed help with. What did Reason have to do with Beauty? How could one make an argument based on Beauty? With "beauty" in our culture having been reduced to a commodity – supermodels selling us washers and dryers – I had to slow down and backtrack to the relationship in classical philosophy of the areas of Metaphysics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, of dealing with questions of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and how all these were inter-related. The medieval philosophers had a much wider concept of Beauty as that "fittingness" or symmetry or harmony that one found through nature or reality. The students could see that kind of language scattered through our art, but also through our mathematics, our physical sciences, and literature. They had just never tied this altogether under the category of "Beauty," and considered what philosophical implications or usefulness the idea of Beauty might have.

Beyond that, once we had wrapped up coming to terms with the intentions of the text and the nature of Anselm's argument, I asked them the basic question out of the introduction to the chapter as to why Anselm is called the "Father of Scholasticism," even if he was before the rise of the universities and the philosophical/theological method of those of the schools. After getting them to simply do the "trivia" of defining scholasticism and refreshing themselves on the historical note – important to know as a point of historical data and contextualization, yes – I hit them with the real question: After looking at the text itself, what could we say that it showed us about Anselm's beliefs about the status of human reasoning? What was the extent of Reason's power? Reason had the power to let humanity "decode" even the actions and intentions of God: Reason could connect the finite to the infinite, to give us finite creatures access to the infinite Creator.

Perhaps this shouldn't come as a surprise, but the implications of things we often say or take for granted – of words we are too used to hearing – those implications sometimes escape us if we don't go looking for them. Christianity had always taught that it was that aspect of God – the Logos in Greek, the Word, or variously translated as Reason or the Tao – that had become human in the man Jesus of Nazareth. But this medieval declaration about the power of Reason connecting God and the human mind had deeper implications. This was the great breakthrough. As any historian of science will tell you, it was this moment, this "leap of faith" that not only said Reason could help us "decode God," but also to decode the universe, God's creation. Thus Europe's intellectuals, through this act of faith, without any evidence to back them up, put in the decades and centuries of work that would become "modern science," and which would eventually start paying off in the immensely concrete benefits of the technology this version of science would produce. The irony would be that the anti-Christian philosophers of the 18th century would swoop in and claim credit for science just as it started paying off, and to create the "science versus religion" propaganda that is still with us today, casting the new science as the product of an anti-religious radical skepticism, despite the historical facts of Modern science's origins, like a teenager rebelling against his parents, or, more oddly, claiming not to have had any.

It let us end the session with some thoughts on the unity of Faith and Reason, which in our Enlightenment philosophy are taught to us as opposites, but which in reality are inextricably related. Religious faith, where "faith" means more "trust" than "belief," is like other human trusts: given through reflected-upon experience. We reason from our data and experience who it is in our lives that we will trust. Likewise, one of the Post-Modern insights into the Modern sciences has been to realize that science, too, acts on certain unprovable first principles – faith – such as the idea of the universal applicability of what we call "scientific laws," even though we have no access to almost the whole of the universe. Science as a system works because we assume that what holds true on both sides of the Earth also holds true on both our side of the universe and the opposite side, even though we have no proof at all that this is the case.

Getting past the cheap propaganda of "science versus religion" or "faith versus reason" is in many ways one of the chief goals of my class: I just want the students to slow down and ask questions. Our crappy thinking about these matters today is largely because people accept glib thinking on these matters without careful examination, whether that glib thinking is skeptical anti-supernaturalism or the superstition of much popular religion, both Christian and neopagan. If I can get the students to habitually think about this sort of thing, in the face of all the pressure our culture has to not really think, then I've won.

Anselm’s “second” argument/Plantinga’s restatement (largely as presented by Peter van Inwagen)

• If we define a perfect being as one that possesses every perfection essentially, and if we suppose that necessary existence is a perfection, then the existence of a perfect being follows from a single premise: that a perfect being (so defined) is possible. (That is, is not intrinsically impossible, i.e.—“a square circle”)
• If a perfect being is possible, then a perfect being exists in some possible world.
• If a perfect being exists in some possible world, then in that world it is not only existent but necessarily existent—necessary existence being a perfection.
• Necessary existence, however, is the same thing as existence in all possible worlds: a necessarily existent being is just a being whose non-existence is impossible, and the impossible is just that which is not included in any of the possible ways for reality to be (which is not included in any possible world).
• A being that exists in some possible world w, however, must exist in this world, our world, the actual world—for if that being did not exist in the actual world, it would not be necessarily existent in w; that is, it would not be true in w that it existed in every possible world.
• This being, moreover, must not only exist in this, the actual, world, but it must have all perfections in this world—for if it lacked some perfection in this world, it would not have that perfection essentially in w.
• If, therefore, there is a possible world w in which there is a necessarily existent being that has all perfections essentially—that is to say, if a perfect being is possible—there must actually be a being that has all perfections.
• In sum, given only that it is not intrinsically impossible for a perfect being to exist, a perfect being actually does exist.

• But what about the antecedent of this conditional? Is it true? Is it so much as possible for a perfect being to exist? Difficult.
• Consider the concept of a “correct atheist,” the concept, that is, of someone who believes, and rightly, that there is no perfect being. If the concept “correct atheist” is a possible concept, the concept “perfect being” is an impossible concept. (For if “correct atheist” is a possible concept, then in some possible world there is no perfect being; and, as we have seen, if “perfect being” is a possible concept, then in no possible world is there no perfect being.) And if “perfect being” is an impossible concept, “correct atheist” is obviously a possible concept.
• One of these two concepts is therefore possible and the other impossible.
• But which? There seems to be no way to conclusively answer the question.
• Although there seems to be a version of the ontological argument that is without logical flaw, the argument proceeds from a premise such that there is no way to decide whether it is true.
• Or no way other than this way: someone may somehow know that there is a perfect being; that person will, of course, know that a perfect being is possible.
• It would seem, therefore, to be impossible to know that the premise of the ontological argument is true without first knowing that its conclusion is true.
• The ontological argument, therefore, cannot serve as a means by which someone can pass from not knowing whether a perfect being exists to knowing that a perfect being exists.

This is what Anselm said up front, knowing that he depended on knowing God already in order to come to this new understanding of his faith. He was dependent upon such other avenues of knowledge as history, revelation, personal experience of God, and the like.

And, of course, isn't that the point? All one has to do is read the passionate language of Anselm regarding God's love for us in order to realize that God has no interest in being "necessarily existent" in our lives, but rather that God wants us to enter into the fundamental reality of our existence: the Love that Is God. It seems to me that the biggest part of the work in getting this text across to students is to break them out of the easy mistake most people make: reducing God to a god. God is not a god. Infinite is not finite, not even "really big" finite. God has no environment, no cause, no context. Most of the flaws in understanding related to these points, in the way people tend to think on this matter, is to think of God as being on some kind of scale with us, even if superlatively "bigger." To wrap your mind around God as the Ultimate Reality, "behind" which there is no other context, is a major shift in thinking. And a necessary one if understanding is to occur. Which is why Anselm originally entitled the work Faith Seeking Understanding.