I would summarize these few chapters briefly.
The book layout is given here, and then the central question is formulated:
what cause or necessity, in sooth, God became man, and by his own death, as we believe and affirm, restored life to the world; when he might have done this, by means of some other being, angelic or human, or merely by his will
Chapter II is interesting in that it explains the relationship between faith and reason, and adopts this twofold methodology. First, we are to understand that faith precedes reason while reason completes faith:
As the right order requires us to believe the deep things of Christian faith before we undertake to discuss them by reason; so to my mind it appears a neglect if, after we are established in the faith, we do not seek to understand what we believe.
Secondly, it is useful to adopt an extreme skeptic attitude in reasoning about the faith:
Suffer me, therefore, to make use of the words of infidels; for it is proper for us when we seek to investigate the reasonableness of our faith to propose the objections of those who are wholly unwilling to submit to the same faith, without the support of reason.
I suspect that Anselm’s account of all this will be very repugnant to our Orthodox brethren.
My untutored take on this is that in the West our language about humanity’s predicament and God’s answer to it is chiefly legal in tone. Our Eastern brothers have a more ontological approach. Anselm says the death satisfies justice. Surely we cannot take too literally either the idea that God owes the devil a ransom -- as though the two of them were litigants in some higher court, OR the idea that God cannot bear to admit sinners to heaven until His thirst for vengeance is satisfied. But understanding and explaining God's relationship to justice is complicated, I think.
My own thinking (Papists, call your holy office!) is two fold:
(a) Each approach has intrinsic merit based on what is very nearly the plain meaning of the language. That is, speaking for the West, we do owe God something we can never pay. And also, since humans are animals with reason and will, any ontological compromise of what we are, owing to our first disobedience, will show itself in many ways among which are moral failures — with consequences pertaining to morality.
We do not always know what is good. Even when we do, we don’t always choose it for the right reasons. Even when we do, our will wavers. Failing to be able to will properly is not only a consequence of the fall, it is the manifestation in the moral sphere of the ontological disaster of the Fall. That we die is part and parcel of our deserving to die.
(b) All this language is using things we experience, things we can scarcely “know” in their essence because they are creatures (and so are we) and very evanescent creatures at that, to explain the unknowable and Most Holy Trinity. Everything we say about God is more wrong than right; it’s all analogies; and we don’t know what we are talking about. So, it seems to me we have to approach these conversations very patiently and praying always for assistance and guidance because we think we must talk about that to which the only correct response is “Hush my mouth,” or maybe “Alleluia!” And we should more then usually commit ourselves to finding the usefulness of one another’s language and thought rather than the problems.
These first two points lead to two more:
(c) Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, is the hermeneutic to the problem. He is unknowable as any human is unknowable -- AND He is unknowable as the Uncreated is unknowable. Some hermeneutic! A key we cannot grasp to open a lock we cannot find! But however impossible it all is, still it seems to me that as we "learn" our Lord we will also come to understand what he did and why He did it.
I am not a pietist, and I'm all over intellectual inquiry by those who can do it and I'm grateful to those who can explain it all as much as they can. But I think theology without prayer and works of mercy and so forth will not prosper. We much get to know the Lord as much as to know ABOUT Him.
And in that enterprise, to which we hope that Father has called us, I think we will find that the moralistic language of the West and the ontological language of the East will help us.
And I don't even know why I wrote this. I hope it at least escapes giving offense and maybe prompts something helpful to someone.
Orthodox etc. ping. You may find this very interesting reading. Anselm’s work is distinctly “non-Orthodox” though from an Orthodox pov, not heresy. Anselm’s atonement theory explains much about the different views of theosis/salvation we see between the East and the West and which are very graphically demonstrated by the way we all experience the Triodion. I am put in mind of a comment made about the Mel Gibson film by the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Boston. +Methodios liked the film but remarked that it was a product of the “Church of the Crucifixion” (the Latin Church) while the Eastern Church is the “Church of the Resurrection”.
Anyway, what you will read here is different from what our Church has taught us, but it is important to understand since it explains so much of the religious mindset of the Western Church.