Anselm of Canterbury

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Anselm of Canterbury was a Benedictine monk, abbot, and archbishop whose writings opened the scholastic age — the attempt to set the truths of Christian faith on the footing of strict argument. Born at Aosta, a town on the Italian slope of the Alps then within the Kingdom of Burgundy, around 1033, he left home after his mother’s death and a falling-out with his father, wandered for some years, and crossed into Normandy. There he was drawn to the abbey of Bec, where a Lombard scholar named Lanfranc had built a school of growing fame. Anselm took the habit about 1059. When Lanfranc was called away to the new ducal abbey at Caen, Anselm succeeded him as prior in 1063, and on the death of Bec’s founder, the soldier-turned-monk Herluin, he was made abbot in 1078. Bec was where nearly all his thinking was done: the cloister, not the lecture hall, was the place where the founding texts of scholasticism were written.

In 1093 he was made Archbishop of Canterbury, accepting an office he had not sought and, by his own account, dreaded. He inherited the see his old teacher Lanfranc had held, and with it the long English struggle between crown and church. Under William II, called Rufus, the quarrel turned on the king’s seizure of church revenues and his refusal to let Anselm seek the pallium from a pope of his own choosing; under Henry I it sharpened into the English chapter of the investiture controversy — whether a king or the church invested bishops with the ring and staff of their office. Twice the dispute drove Anselm out of the kingdom: from 1097 to 1100, and again from 1103 to 1106. The exiles were not idle. On the road and in Italy he finished his hardest book, and at the Council of Bari in 1098 he was called on to argue the Western case on the procession of the Holy Spirit before the assembled Greek bishops of the south. He returned to Canterbury under a compromise that left the king his homage and the church its investiture, and died there on 21 April 1109. His chaplain Eadmer, who scarcely left his side for sixteen years, wrote both a history of his archiepiscopate and an intimate life of the man — among the first medieval biographies to record a subject’s conversation, temper, and turns of mind rather than only his deeds.

Faith seeking understanding

Anselm’s method is carried in a phrase that began as the very title of his Proslogion: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. He held that one does not reason in order to arrive at belief but believes in order to understand — and then, standing inside belief, presses reason as far as it will go. He put it as a prayer addressed to God: he did not seek to understand in order that he might believe, but believed in order that he might understand. The formula is older than Anselm. It descends from Augustine of Hippo, who wrote crede ut intellegas — believe so that you may understand — and behind Augustine from the Old Latin of Isaiah, in which the prophet warns that unless you believe you will not understand. What Anselm added was confidence in how far the second clause could be carried. He thought the central articles of faith could be shown not merely to be undisproven but to be necessary — that, granted certain starting points, reason left to itself would be driven to them. This is the conviction that the cathedral schools and then the universities would inherit and build into a whole architecture of question, objection, and reply; the phrase itself still names the working temper of much Christian theology.

His debts ran to Augustine above all, and through Augustine to the Neoplatonism that gave the early medieval Latin West its picture of reality as a single graded order descending from one unconditioned source. He drew also on Boethius, the last of the Romans to hand on a discipline of logic. Yet he cited authorities sparingly. The remarkable thing about his treatises is how little they lean on the chain of named fathers that medieval argument usually leaned on, and how much on the bare movement of the argument itself.

The two arguments for God

His first major work, the Monologion, written about 1076 at the request of his monks, who wanted a meditation on God that proceeded by reason alone and quoted no scripture, gathered a chain of proofs from the gradations of things. Some goods are greater than others; the things called good are good in differing degrees; and a thing is not finally accounted for by other things that are themselves good only in degree. There must therefore be a single supreme good through which all good things have whatever good they have — and likewise a single supreme being through which all beings are. That source is God. The argument is recognizably Platonist in shape: the many that share a quality point back to the one in which the quality is held without measure or limit, the structure that Greek thought called participation in the One.

The Monologion satisfied his monks but not Anselm. He wanted, he said in the preface to the work that followed, a single argument — unum argumentum — that would need no other to prop it up and would prove at one stroke that God exists and is whatever we believe God to be. The search for it, he reported, consumed him to the point of distraction until the proof arrived almost against his will. The result was the Proslogion, written about 1077–1078. Its argument takes as its only premise the very idea of God: God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even one who denies God — the fool of the psalm who says in his heart there is no God — understands the phrase when he hears it, and so the thing exists at least in his understanding. But if it existed in the understanding alone, then a greater could be conceived: one existing also in reality. A being than which nothing greater can be conceived, conceived as existing only in the mind, would be a being than which a greater can be conceived — which is a contradiction. Therefore that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists not only in the mind but in reality. From the same definition Anselm went on to argue that this being could not even be conceived not to exist, and to derive the divine attributes one after another, as if the single phrase were an engine that turns belief into demonstration.

The proof that later philosophers, from the eighteenth century onward, would name the ontological argument has been contested from the moment it appeared. In Anselm’s own lifetime a monk of Marmoutiers named Gaunilo wrote a reply on behalf of the fool, objecting that by the same reasoning one could prove the real existence of a perfect island merely by conceiving it — that existence cannot be wrung out of a concept. Anselm answered that the argument holds only for that than which nothing greater can be conceived, a being whose very notion involves necessary existence, and not for islands or any other thing that can be thought either to be or not to be; the case of God, he held, is unique. He thought so well of the exchange that he asked the objection and his reply to be copied out together with the Proslogion itself, so that the argument would always travel with its strongest challenge. The dispute over whether existence can be argued from an idea — over the place of necessity in such reasoning — passed down the centuries: refused by Thomas Aquinas, recast by Descartes and Leibniz, demolished to most philosophers’ satisfaction by Kant’s claim that existence is not a predicate, and revived again in the twentieth century in the language of modal logic. Nicholas of Cusa would later fold Anselm’s God-than-which-no-greater into his own theology of the maximum.

Why God became man

The other work that carried his name across the centuries was the Cur Deus Homo — “Why God Became Man” — drafted during the first exile and finished in 1098. It is cast as a dialogue with a monk named Boso, who presses the questions an unbeliever might raise: on what grounds of reason, setting the Incarnation aside as if it had never happened, was it fitting or even possible that God should become man and die. Anselm answers with the argument that came to be called the satisfaction theory of the atonement, and which displaced the older picture in which the death of Christ was a ransom paid to the devil. Sin, he argued, is a failure to render God the honor that is owed; and because the one dishonored is infinite, the debt incurred is one no finite creature can ever discharge. Justice demands that the debt be paid — either satisfaction or punishment. But here is the knot: the satisfaction ought to be made by man, since it is man who sinned, yet cannot be made by man, whose every act is already owed to God and who can add nothing to cover an infinite arrears; and it can be made by God, to whom all things are possible, yet ought not to be made by God, who did not sin. Only a being who was at once fully God and fully man could both owe the debt and be able to pay it. The Incarnation, on this account, is not an arbitrary rescue but a necessity that follows from the nature of the debt itself. The argument shaped Western thinking about the cross for many centuries and remains a fixed reference point in every later quarrel over the meaning of the atonement.

Universals, and the place he holds

Anselm stood at a hinge in the history of thought. Behind him lay the monastic, broadly Augustinian inheritance of the early medieval church, with its Neoplatonic cast, formed in the cloister and ordered to prayer. Ahead lay the universities of the Middle Ages and the systematic theology of the thirteenth century, which took his confidence that faith and reason could be reconciled and made it the charter of a discipline. He is often called the father of scholasticism, though the title flattens him: he wrote nothing like the vast ordered summas to come, and he belongs as much to the monastic world he never left in spirit as to the schools he is said to have founded.

He touched, too, the great quarrel of his age over universals — whether the kinds under which we class things, humanity or animal or whiteness, are real features of the world or only names. Anselm took the side of the older realism, the Platonist conviction that universals name something genuinely there, against the nominalism of his contemporary Roscelin of Compiègne, who held that a universal is no more than a vocal sound. The dispute was not a dry one. Roscelin had carried his nominalism into the doctrine of the Trinity and drawn from it conclusions that were condemned as tritheism at the Council of Soissons in 1092; Anselm wrote against him in the treatise on the Incarnation of the Word, remarking that one who cannot grasp how several men are one in their humanity will hardly grasp how three persons are one God. He had inherited from Aristotle, through Boethius, the very logical vocabulary in which the problem was posed, and used it to defend a thesis Aristotle would not have shared. The argument over universals would run on through Abelard and into the late medieval schools, one of the long fault lines of Christian philosophy.

Scholarship treats him as a transitional and unusually independent figure — a thinker who proceeded less by piling up authorities than by following an argument to its end, and whose Latin prose has a clarity and an inward pressure that set him apart from both the fathers before him and the systematizers after. The standard modern life, R. W. Southern’s Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, reads him against the world of Bec and Canterbury, the monk and the politician together. The Catholic Church canonized him in 1494, under Alexander VI, and in 1720 Clement XI named him a Doctor of the Church; he is kept on 21 April. What he left was narrow in volume and large in consequence: a few short treatises, and a way of asking after God that the schools would not put down.

Texts and scholarship

The treatises survive in a critical edition by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia (1938–1961), the basis of all serious modern study; the contemporary life is Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi. A public-domain English collection by Sidney Norton Deane gathers the works most often read together — the Proslogium, the Monologium, Gaunilo’s appendix on behalf of the fool, and the Cur Deus Homo — and is freely available through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. For the life and its setting the standard treatment remains R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1990); a clear survey of the arguments, with the texts of the proofs and their reception, is the entry on Anselm in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The satisfaction argument of the Cur Deus Homo is set out, with its feudal language of debt and honor, in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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