Status Updates From The Major Works

Halfway through Cur Deus Homo. A fascinating work attempting to show the means of salvation through Christ is not only logical, but really the only way salvation could be achieved.

On The Incarnation: important text about the nature of Christ and how it reflects upon the nature of the Trinity. "For one who understands the Son's incarnation believes that the Son assumed a human being into the unity of his person and not unity the unity of his substance." In the Trinity, multiple persons in one substance; in the Incarnation, multiple natures in one person. Those distinctions really matter.

Quick skim of the replies concerning Aunilo and on Truth (skipping de grammatico altogether). Concerning Free Will and its application in On the Fall of the Devil are both very interesting and pertinent to me recently. St. Anselm was a good monk and looks at it like a good monk. To desire more than God wills is to desire to be a god oneself (and to destroy justice in the process while disappointing ourselves).

Finished the Proslogion. I appreciate the monastic style. This is not so much an academic question of "does God exist?" so much as a search for everything that is good, true, and beautiful, what that really means, and how we can attain it.

Finished the Monologion. A much better book than I had been led to believe. It's less "the greatest thing we can come up with is God" and more the fact that we see good in life, but different things are better or worse, so there must be a hierarchy of good. That implies a superlative, the best, which is God. That best must be existing (as existence both is and is good). The best good is the most beautiful, etc.

Not an easy read, to be sure, but interesting. Attempting to get to the Trinity with philosophy rather than as simply a tenet of faith. Has to be kept in mind that this is the meditation of a monk, with the purpose of coming to love God the better, rather than as a pure speculative text.