In the previous chapter, we came to understand both that and how the Son of God assumed a human nature. But we have yet to grasp exactly why the Summa thinks he did this. According to numerous authors, the Summa follows Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo very closely in enumerating the reasons for the Incarnation.1 This conclusion is reached mainly by counting the number of quotations to Anselm in comparison to other sources cited in the text. As we already saw in the chapter on theistic proof, the early Franciscans, led by Alexander of Hales, were the first to appropriate Anselm’s thought, which had largely been neglected during the more than century-long gap that separated him from the early thirteenth-century scholastics.2