“The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them).” Treebeard on the Entwives, The Two Towers, page 99.
I am the Living Bread: Meditation Eight: John 6:51 I kening through Astronomy Divine The Worlds bright Battlement, wherein I spy A Golden Path my Pensill cannot line, From that bright Throne unto my Threshold ly. And while my puzzled…
At the beginning of the year I started reading through the works of Anselm of Canterbury. I have decided to post some of my miscellaneous thoughts on different aspects of his writing from time to time throughout the remainder of the year.
The preface of the Monologion lays out the goal of the book: for Anselm to write intelligibly and accessibly on the divine essence without making his argument from the authority of scripture. My initial skepticism in that approach flowed from the impossibility to separate the rational from the revealed. Dividing the discernment of God’s essence from nature, apart from scripture, is the beginning of jettisoning divine self-revelation in scripture in the pursuit of rationality. His approach to me smacked of pursuing of a neutral starting point (an impossibility), namely human reason. But there were two aspects of the Monologion that cooled this skepticism…
Prayer by its nature acknowledges the supernatural dimension of creation. There is a God who transcends and upholds the universe, yet is also so immanent as to hear the cries of creation. Prayer presupposes that the transcendent God is not only capable of controlling and altering the mechanics of the universe, but actually does providentially intervene in response to prayer. This is why God’s people can, in confidence, petition him to heal those who are sick. We understand that even if the normal means of healing are ineffective, he can still act and provide restoration to the broken.
But we do not pray for severed arms to regrow. Why not? At first glance this case seems similar to other medical conditions, like terminal cancer: there is an aspect of creation, someone’s body, that is broken and in need of healing, and the available medical resources are inadequate to repair the damage. God can intervene and heal, right? But we don’t pray for the regeneration of a lost limb, and tend to scoff at those who do as acting in futility. It is here that atheists reject prayer as a foolish superstition. It cannot seem to follow its own rules when it matters most and falls into special pleading…
