lol. thank you for admitting your rejection of a Scriptural understanding both Roman Catholics and Protestants share.
Agnostics do that, I’m told.
Kosta..”New Advent...so the one who demanded ransom and who paid it was God himself to himself? Why would God pay himself when the one holding people hostage was the devil? Of course, Anselm couldn’t reconcile this.”
You’re correct,it cannot be reconciled and New Advent goes on to further say....”But we can never rest in these material figures as though they were literal and adequate”
Both Pope Pius XII,Pope Benedict XVI and others did not agree entirely with Saint Anselm ,rightfully so because Divine love is the key to understanding this,not Divine justice
Pius XII encyclical- Haurietis Aquas
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_15051956_haurietis-aquas_en.html
“The mystery of love was, as it were, both the foundation and the culmination of the Incarnation and the Redemption. For frequently and clearly we can read in their writings that Jesus Christ took a perfect human nature and our weak and perishable human body with the object of providing for our eternal salvation, and of revealing to us in the clearest possible manner that His infinite love for us could express itself in human terms.”
....And Cardinal Ratzinger(Pope Benedict XVI) book- “The Yes of Jesus Christ” 1991
http://www.amazon.com/Yes-Jesus-Christ-Spiritual-Exercises/dp/0824523741
“Jesus did not reject the principle of equality as a basic legal principle but rather wanted here to open up to man a new dimension of his behavior. Law in isolation and made absolute becomes a vicious circle, a cycle of retaliation from which finally there is no way out any longer. In his relationship with us God has broken through this circle. In the face of God we are in the wrong, having turned away from him in the search for our own glorification and thus fallen victim to death. But God renounces the punishment that would be just and replaces it by something new: salvation, our conversion to renewed “yes” to the truth of ourselves. For this transformation to occur he goes ahead of us and takes the pain and suffering of transformation upon himself. The cross of Christ is the real discharging of the saying: not eye for eye, tooth for tooth, but the transformation of evil through the power of love. In his whole human existence, from the incarnation to the cross, Jesus does and is what is said here. He burst our “no” open by means of a stronger and greater “yes.” “