Faculty Letter of Support 1
Contemporary Views on the
Proof for Divine Incarnation Put Forward by Saint Anselm of
Canterbury (Excerpt)
Anselm of Canterbury is one of the
most exciting medieval philosophers. He is well-known to all
philosophers as the originator of the famous
ëontological' argument. Contemporary
philosophers of religion have recently begun to rediscover the rest
of his work and incorporate it in their own thinking to the extent
that ëanselmian' has become an adjective to
describe a certain analytic approach to an analysis of the
divine. My own work has focused on reminding the contemporary
community of what the original Anselm actually intended. I
have published a book on Anselm's metaphysics and
epistemology with a companion book of my papers attempting to
defend some of Anselm's conclusions in the contemporary
idiom. I am now about 2/3 of the way through a manuscript on
Anselm's doctrine of free will, action and ethics.
(This book has been a long time coming as I've
repeatedly had to put it on the back burner as more pressing
projects arose.) I hope to finish this manuscript during the
coming year ('99-00') at which point I plan
to start on my final book on Anselm, a study of his various
arguments for proving God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation.
I am especially interested in the ëproof' for
the Incarnation. Anselm is almost alone among philosophers in
believing that he can offer philosophical reasons for believing
that God became a human being. His argument has been
discussed by contemporary thinkers, but largely rejected due to
what I take to be a failure to see what he's getting
at. I intend to argue that the ëproof'
while not conclusive, is nonetheless plausible given certain common
assumptions. Needless to say, a successful revival of the
idea that one can offer philosophically persuasive reasons for
believing in the Incarnation, would be a very significant
contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion. I shall
also defend Anselm's attempts to mitigate the mystery of
the divine becoming human. So I have a good general idea of
where I want to go in these chapters of my book. I have not,
however, begun any serious research. And here's
where the student comes in.
The first stages of my research
would involve searching the indices for recent articles on proofs
and disproofs of the Incarnation, and on attempts to render the
Incarnation coherent, or show that it is intrinsically
incoherent. It would give me a tremendous head start if the
student, having familiarized himself with Anselm's work
on the subject, could do this job for me with respect to work in
English. He could find the articles, read them enough to
assess whether or not they would be of use to me, and, of those
that look useful, produce abstracts paying special attention to my
concerns regarding Anselm's thought. Thus he would
be producing, first, a lengthy bibliography of everything related
to our topic. In the interests of making the project
manageable we would limit the time frame of research, probably to
articles since 1960. Then he would produce a series of
abstracts of more important articles. I would like to see him
produce some sort of ësumming up' research
paper at the end of his project, but just what this would involve
would depend on what he's discovered in the recent
literature, and on his own interest and schedule.
Student
Proposal