Reviews 471

Christ (Godmanhood), but the living out of this event both personally and socially in the promise of a life wholly patterned after Him in the Church, the Kingdom of God, and the task of fullling this promise through elevating, transubstantiating all social and political forms into that Kingdom (p. 156). Brandon Gallaher Regents Park College University of Oxford Pusey Street, Oxford UK OX1 2LB UK brandon.gallaher@regents.ox.ac.uk

Reading Anselms Proslogion: The History of Anselms Argument and Its Signicance Today by Ian Logan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) + 220 pp.
For centuries, philosophers have disagreed considerably when it comes to determining the purpose of the argument for Gods existence that Anselm presents in his Proslogion and whether it is plausible. According to this argument, a being than which no greater can be conceived (X) necessarily exists in reality if He exists in thought, else He would not be X. Since God is X, the logical inference is that God exists and indeed cannot be thought not to exist. In the introduction to his book, Ian Logan of Blackfriars, Oxford readily acknowledges the controversies this argument has caused and delineates a three-fold plan for making his own contribution to efforts to interpret it. In this plan, the rst priority is to conduct a careful translation and analysis of the primary text; the second is to trace its late Medieval and modern reception; the last is to determine what the signicance of the argument actually is. On Logans account, much of the confusion over the argument results from a scholarly failure to attend to the actual message Anselms text communicates. As a result of this tendency, Anselms argument has been misunderstood and criticized on the basis of misapprehensions. One of the basic assumptions Logan admits to making in his book is that a proper rendering and analysis of the Latin and English text is the key to deciphering its meaning. Operating on that assumption, Logan bypasses the existing critical edition of Anselms Opera omnia and turns straight to the text on which the edition itself is based, that is, to a manuscript titled MS Bodly 271. By transcribing and translating the Latin text of the Proslogion this manuscript contains, Logan presents the primary source in unadulterated form and thereby takes the rst step towards understanding it. His translation is followed by a line-by-line commentary on the text, which elaborates the meaning of key Latin phrases. The commentary is succeeded in turn by an investigation of the added support for his argument Anselm gives in his reply to the objections of Gaunilo. After devoting more than the rst half of the book to these textual considerations, Logan turns to evaluate the reception of the Proslogion. In discussing the relevant thirteenth-century developments, Logan makes the important but rare observation that Anselms argument came to be understood during this time, for the rst time, in the way it is commonly construed today, namely, as an argument according to which Gods existence is per se notum (self-evident), such that knowledge of Him is a priori or innate. Logan rightly emphasizes that Anselm never afrmed this. For him, after all, the thought of God is the thought of a Being so great that it cannot be conceived. Inasmuch as Anslem acknowledges this, Logan notes, he is in agreement with
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472 Reviews
Thomas Aquinas, who rejected the innovative aprioristic interpretation of Anselms arguments some of his contemporaries were propounding. From this point, Logan proceeds to describe how variations on the argument were subsequently championed and challenged on the basis of the assumption that it is what it in fact is not, namely, an ontological proof in which evidence for the existence of God is derived from the very denition of God and therefore purely rationally, without recourse to revelation or experience. In the last ve pages of his book, Logan turns to identify the signicance of Anselms argument. On his account, what is important about the Proslogion is not simply that it proves that God exists but that it further proves that human minds are made in Gods image, inasmuch as it establishes that the thought of Gods non-existence is unthinkable. For those that realize it is unthinkable, namely, the people of faith, Anselms argument reveals that the unknowable God grounds the human ability to engage in acts of reasoning, to wit, reect His image, and thereby indirectly experience Him. Although the conclusion Logan draws concerning the purpose of Anselms argument is certainly true, it is reached rather abruptly. The statements made at the beginning of the book lead one to believe that the textual and historical analyses the author undertakes in the better part of the book will ultimately contribute in a major way to clarifying what this signicance is. In the end, however, the bearing those analyses have on the effort to dene the purpose of the argument is not brought into sharp relief. Those analyses are nonetheless useful, however. Ever attentive to detail, Logan illuminates textual nuances in his translation and commentary. Moreover, he rightly emphasizes in a way that others who have given accounts of the modern reception of Anselms argument do not often do that what was received in modernity was not in fact Anselms argument, but some mutation that was the product of late Medieval thought. Recently, this point has also been stressed by Scott Matthews in his book, Reason, Community, and Religious Tradition: Anselms Argument and the Friars. There, Matthews extensively demonstrates something Logan only suggests, namely, that the transformation of Anselms argument was wrought by Franciscan friars who were seeking to account for and vindicate St. Francis of Assisis intuitive and unbroken connection with God. With Logan, Matthews underscores the fact that Dominicans such as Thomas Aquinas were not criticizing Anselm so much as the new (Franciscan) rendering of Anselm, which was subsequently taken to be Anselms own argument. In calling attention to the mistaken nature of this assumption on which so many interpretations and objections to Anselms argument are constructed, Logan helps clear the ground for efforts to identify the purpose of Anselms argument. In his own attempt to do this, he makes the crucial point that part of the purpose of the argument for God is to raise the human minds awareness of its creation in Gods image. Ultimately, however, the author does not elucidate the implications of this observation in a way that clearly conveys what the argument is introduced to accomplish and whether it succeeds. In order to do just that, it seems essential to stress that Anselms argument reiterates the thought of God as the supreme good that was forgotten at the fall, as Anselm himself afrms in the prologue to the Proslogion. According to the Monologion, He is such a good because He is the source of all the good things the world contains and for that very reason transcends the world. Although He is unknowable by the worlds inhabitants as a result, He made them in His image to indirectly know Him by knowing after His own manner, that is to consider the things they can know in light of the fact that He is the supreme good. By doing this, human beings are enabled to identify the limited nature and extent of the goodness that all creatures exhibit and use them accordingly.
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When they forgot about Gods great goodness and their creation in His image, human beings became predisposed to consider themselves rather than God as ultimate beings to be pleased. Consequently, they began to regard nite goods as ultimate ones with the power to make or break their happiness. In staking all hopes for happiness in the attainment of desires for things that are either eeting or hard to nd in fallen circumstances, they not only set themselves up for disappointment but also for conict with one another. With his argument, Anselm gives his readers the resources they need to unlearn this fallen tendency and thus recover Gods image. He does so by summarizing the Christian teaching that the God who is uncreated rather than any created being is ultimate, and by extrapolating the implications of that teaching for human patterns of thought. Since existence in thought and reality is one and the same with God by denition, Anselm implies, the same should be true of those who profess belief in Him. These, in other words, should think and act in reality in accordance with the assumption that God is supreme and that temporal circumstances cannot therefore make or break their happiness. Although it is foolish in Anselms opinion to hear of God and refuse to believe in Him whose existence accounts for the existence of reality and the possibility of reasoning about it, it is also foolish or at best inconsistent, to hear of God, assent to belief in Him, and proceed to act like what is believed is not really true. The apparent purpose of Anselms argument is to promote the efforts of those who claim to believe in God to act like they believe in Him, that is, to reect the image that was lost at the fall, reinstated through faith in Christ, and that is renewed each time they reason in the light of faith in Gods supremacy. To interpret Anselms proof as a conceptual tool for undergoing the gradual restoration of the image of Godfor becoming the living proof of His existence that can scarcely help but be persuasivewould be to complete the story of the arguments signicance that Logan so carefully and insightfully begins. Lydia Schumacher Institut Catholique de Paris 21 Rue dAssas Paris 75006 FRANCE lydia.schumacher@gmail.com

Scriptures Doctrine and Theologys Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics, edited by Markus Bockmuehl and Allan J. Torrance (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2008) + 240 pp.
This is a collection of revised papers from a seminar held at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland in 2007. The broad theme of the seminar is reected in the subtitle. These thoughtful papers, in various ways, all contribute to a lively and ongoing discussion about interpreting Scripture theologically. The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, Scriptures Doctrine, the essays focus on particular issues arising from the work of biblical scholars that should (and often do not) exert some role on the work of theologians. J. Ross Wagner probes questions around the role and status of the Septuagint, particularly in the light of the work of the late Brevard Childs. Wagner clearly and carefully displays both what is and is not at stake in taking the Septuagint and the Masoretic text seriously as part of Christianitys two-testament witness to the Triune God. As he notes in his concluding pages, however, his position of holding
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