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 in the Alps around 1033, he crossed into Normandy and entered the abbey of Bec, where he succeeded his teacher Lanfranc first as prior and then as abbot, and where most of his thinking was done. In 1093 he was made Archbishop of Canterbury, an office that embroiled him in long quarrels with the English kings over the church’s independence and twice drove him into exile. He died in 1109.

His method is captured in a phrase he gave his early work the Proslogion: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. He held that one does not reason in order to believe but believes in order to understand — and then, within belief, presses reason as far as it will go. The Monologion offered a chain of arguments for God’s existence and nature drawn from the gradations of goodness in things. The Proslogion sought instead a single argument that needed no premise but the idea of God itself: God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” and a being so conceived cannot exist in the mind alone, for then a greater could be conceived — one existing also in reality. What later philosophers named the ontological argument has been contested from the start; the monk Gaunilo answered it in Anselm’s own lifetime, and the dispute over whether existence can be argued from a concept has never closed.

The other work that carried his name was the Cur Deus Homo — “Why God Became Man” — which recast the meaning of the crucifixion as the paying of a debt. Human sin, Anselm argued, dishonours an infinite God and so incurs a debt no finite creature can discharge; only one who was both God and man could render the satisfaction owed. This account of the atonement shaped Western theology for centuries and remains a reference point in debate over it.

Anselm stood at a hinge. Behind him lay the monastic, broadly Augustinian inheritance of the early medieval church, with its Neoplatonic cast; ahead lay the universities and the systematic theology of the thirteenth century, which took his confidence that faith and reason could be reconciled and built on it. He also touched the era’s quarrel over universals, opposing the nominalism of his contemporary Roscelin. Scholarship treats him as a transitional and unusually independent figure — a thinker who proceeded less by citing authorities than by following an argument to its end. The Catholic Church canonised him and later named him a Doctor of the Church. 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.

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