Anselm of Canterbury - Cur Deus Homo

Available here in a modern scholarly translation, Anselm’s famous treatise Cur Deus Homo (Why the God-Man?) attempts to show unbelievers that, far from being an unfitting and irrational act, God’s incarnation as man was a suitable, even (contingently-speaking) a necessary act by which to restore the right relation of God and a human race afflicted by sin. Anselm’s “satisfaction” theory of atonement formalized a tradition with its seeds in the patristic period and set the context for much reflection on the Cross in the Middle Ages and throughout the Reformation period.