These are the words of political economist and journalist Will Hutton in his now famous diagnosis of the contemporary ills of British society, The State Were In. ‘All the malfunctions of the economy are related’, argues Hutton, ‘fused by the government’s overweening desire to establish the market principle as the basis of every policy.’ (p. 14) The character of the British economy has been shaped by the collective aspiration to a gentlemanly life—to have an income for which one does not obviously labour, ideally from land, but otherwise from finance and commerce—speculation on the markets. At all events, industry, the actual work of production, has been regarded by those at the centre of power as an activity from which to keep a distance. This attitude has created a lack of commitment and poor investment on the part of finance in relation to industry which has, according to Hutton, impoverished the economy, preventing real economic growth and stability. In this approach, Britain is unique among her capitalist partners both in the West and now increasingly in Asia.

Simplifications are dangerous at the best of times and the same may be said of applications of general principle to particular circumstance. In this vein it seems appropriate to offer some thoughts on the recent document of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales entitled The Common Good. A document which purports to offer a moral diagnosis on a specific socio-economic context is, like a surgeon, heavily dependent on antecedent data in arriving at that diagnosis and thence at a remedy for ills detected. In this short study we cannot hope to conflate the entire corpus of Catholic Social Teaching into a few words but it may be helpful to focus on the diagnostic aspects of the recent document of the Conference, viewing it as essentially applicative of previous interventions of the Roman magisterium, and thus be able to discern some possible avenues of interpretation for the future.

Diagnosing the problem, especially with regard to socio-economic conditions, must offer the ecclesiastical spectator the most challenging of tasks, given the shifting and undulating nature of the economic landscape. The historio-genesis of the first official contribution to the problem, Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, bears this out, and yet there are a number of observations from that document which would resonate well with even the most sceptical of economic analyses of our time. Thus Leo XIII observed:

According to the Preface to St. Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo, the work, among other things, “prov[es] by necessary reasons ... that it is impossible for any man to be saved without [Christ].” In the course of this project, Anselm must clarify what is meant by salvation— without knowing this, we could not know whether salvation could be brought only by Christ. Anselm develops an understanding of salvation involving a deliverance from the punishment that is our due because of our sin, and a correlative restoration to blessedness, which deliverance and restoration are made possible by Christ’s “satisfaction” for sin. Hence, the question of the meaning of salvation and the need for Christ as savior includes the question of the meaning of satisfaction. Now, the Cur Deus Homo has been received as one of the most significant contributions to the Church's understanding of soteriology; most recently one finds echoes of Anselm's understanding of satisfaction in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 615). For this reason it is worth inquiring into what Anselm means by “satisfaction.”

It is my intention in this essay to examine especially those sections of Book I of the Cur Deus Homo which treat the relationship between salvation and our deliverance from the devil, and to propose that one finds in Anselm's understanding of satisfaction a requirement for justice even for the devil (something that Anselm's rejection of the idea that our salvation requires payment of a ransom to the devil has tended to obscure).