The Justice and Mercy of God

Abstract

Abstract In his eleventh-century Proslogion St. Anselm puts forward the view that, far from being an exception to divine justice, divine mercy is the highest form of divine justice. Anselm’s cryptic reasoning is initially puzzling. It becomes more accessible if we notice that he is taking as a model the theory of imperial clemency put forward by the first-century ce Stoic Seneca in his De Clementia, in which it is argued that imperial clemency is the highest form of justice. Anselm does not quote or make reference to Seneca’s work, and so the case for the relationship between the two works has to be made on internal grounds, but recent scholarship has shown that Senecan materials were readily available in Anselm’s milieu and that there are other cases in which he seems to be using Senecan material.