ABSTRACT
In the Cur Deus Homo we see the plan of redemption unfold in all its beauty, harmony and fittingness as the transcendent God recreates and reorders sinful humanity through the immanence of the incarnation. Anselm does, however, begin the Cur Deus Homo much the same way he has begun a number of his other works: by ascribing the reason for writing to his fellow monks. As in the case of the Monologion and the Proslogion, Anselm’s younger colleagues entreated him ‘most earnestly . . . to set down a written record of the reasoned explanations with which I am in the habit of answering people who put enquiries to me about a certain question of Our Faith’.2 What is different about the request this time is that Anselm’s interlocutors make it explicit that they have not appealed for a written record of his wisdom ‘with a view to arriving at faith through reason’,3 but in order that they might delight in a greater understanding of that which they believe and so that they might always ‘be prepared to give a reason for the hope which is in them’.4
