ABSTRACT
Anselm of Canterbury is one of the classic Christian theologians who ascribed importance to such notions as ‘fittingness’ and ‘propriety’. In his Cur Deus homo, he appeals to what is fitting or unfitting in a double sense: theological and ontological. The former implies a doctrine of God that ascribes to the divine being only theologically fitting attributes and a way of building rational arguments that are based on (un)fittingness. The most fitting portrait of God is drawn with the help of a ‘fittingness check’: whatever faith and reason show to be inappropriate of the most perfect being should be regarded as false and whatever looks appropriate of the Godhead is likely to be true. The latter, the ontological aspect of the Anselmian thinking, explains why arguments based on fittingness are supposed to work. They reflect the reality: good reasoning reflects the harmony of the God-created world, and this harmony, in turn, reflects the most appropriate intention of God. Thus, in addition to purely theological and methodological notions of fittingness, Anselm’s theology may legitimately be said to contain the elements of ontological and, by extension, ethical fittingness. This panoply of varying Anselmian concepts of fittingness is the focus of this chapter.
