The Sacramental Presuppositions of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo

The completion of F. S. Schmitt's critical edition of the Opera omnia of St. Anselm of Canterbury, with its elimination of a good many spurious meditations and prayers and with its recalendaring of the old and the newly identified correspondence, has stimulated widespread interest in the father of scholasticism. In the present study I wish to show that Anseim's Cur Deus Homo is a “penitential-eucharistic,” as distinguished from a “baptismal,” theory of the atonement. This is a terminology which must be explained at once.