Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Brief Lives

Anselm (1033-1109)

Martin Jenkins recalls the being of the creator of the ontological argument.

To Italians, he is Anselm of Aosta; to the French, Anselm of Bec; to the English, Anselm of Canterbury. If you’re a Catholic, you can dodge the nationalism by calling him ‘Saint Anselm’. But whatever you call him, Anselm is probably the most important thinker of the eleventh century, and he was responsible for one of the big philosophical ideas about God which is still discussed today: the ontological argument for God’s existence.

Anselm was born about 1033 in Aosta in northern Italy. At some point he quarrelled with his Lombard noble father Gundulf, and began the life of a wandering scholar. In eleventh century Europe, abbeys and monasteries were the only institutions offering any sort of teaching; they were the nearest things to universities. So Anselm travelled through Burgundy and the Loire valley before reaching the Norman abbey of Avranches, in the north of France. Then in 1059 Anselm moved from Avranches to the abbey of Bec.

Bec was a peculiar abbey. It had been founded twenty-five years before by Herluin, who was still its abbot. Herluin, a former knight, was committed to a life of poverty. In 1041, Lanfranc, another Italian, moved to Bec from Avranches, where he had been a teacher. Herluin eventually convinced Lanfranc, who had reverted to being just a humble monk, to resume teaching – and so the abbey of Bec, founded on principles of poverty by a knight who was no intellectual, became a centre of learning, in which Lanfranc was its prior, in effect, the abbot’s deputy.

Anselm studied under Lanfranc, and in 1060 was invested as a monk. Lanfranc, meanwhile, having become a principal counsellor to Duke William of Normandy (later William the Conqueror), left in 1063 to become the abbot of the men’s monastery at Caen. This led to Anselm’s becoming the principal teacher at Bec. In 1078, he became its abbot, too.

Anselm the Teacher

Anselm changed the emphasis of teaching at Bec from external students to the intellectual formation of the abbey’s monks. He also began to commit his teaching to writing. Probably Anselm’s first published work was the dialogue De Grammatico (On Grammar), a dense and challenging piece of linguistic philosophy. Anselm was quite modern in arguing that we need to think about the language with which we think, although he does refer back to ideas defined by the Catholic Church’s favourite pagan philosopher, Aristotle, such as substance and quality. (He only knew Aristotle at second hand, through the sixth century writer Boethius.)

Anselm’s next work was the Monologion (The Monologue), This was essentially a writing up of his lecture notes at the request of the monks of Bec, who probably had difficulty in following his arguments. As he states in the preface, they’d set out the condition, ‘Nothing whatsoever to be argued on the basis of Scripture’, although he cheated slightly by introducing a few Biblical quotations into the final chapters (maybe by then he was feeling tired).

In the Monologion Anselm was doing something original for scholarly research in the Middle Ages, relying on pure logic rather than on authority, the latter being the normal mode of enquiry. He sent a copy to his old teacher Lanfranc, now Archbishop of Canterbury, for approval. Lanfranc was slow to reply; and when he did so, he criticised Anselm for not citing Augustine of Hippo.

The Monologion begins with an argument for the existence of God. Since all existences derive from other existences, there must be an ultimate existence from which all others derive, which must be greater than all the other existences if they derive from it. The book goes on to explore the nature of God and to make a case for the doctrine of the Trinity. One has to question whether Anselm would have reached the conclusions he did if he had not already known where he was heading…

Anselm’s next important treatise was the Proslogion (Discourse). In its preface Anselm records his dissatisfaction with his argument in the Monologion. And “So it was one day… that I eagerly grasped the notion which in my distraction I had been rejecting.”

His new argument was that we must conceive of God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’ – in other words, as embodying perfection. But perfect greatness implies existence, since something great that exists is greater than something great that does not exist: Can anything be perfect if it exists solely in imagination? Therefore, if we must think of God embodying perfection, then the God which we think of must be real.

This argument was soon challenged by Gaunilo, an obscure monk from Marmoutier in Alsace. Gaunilo’s basic rebuttal was that it’s possible to conceive of a perfect island somewhere in the ocean, therefore, following Anselm’s reasoning, that island must exist. (Gaunilo ends his work by saying that the rest of Anselm’s treatise is sound and helpful – which is a bit like saying, “It’s a nice play, Mr Shakespeare; could you just get rid of the Prince of Denmark?”)

Anselm wrote a response to Gaunilo, and insisted that in future the Proslogion should be published with Gaunilo’s objection and his reply. His response was in essence what he had argued in the Monologion: that God exists in a different way to everything else. God enjoys a transcendent being distinct from the created being of his creation – for instance, of human beings, or of islands: so what might apply to God might not apply to his creation.

Anselm continued to teach and publish. However, in 1093 his life was turned upside down, when he was appointed to succeed Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Anselm versus Orthodoxy

Anselm hated administration but undertook it conscientiously. He also hated politics, and was not good at it. However, the job of Archbishop of Canterbury was highly political and, just to add to Anselm’s problems, the current king of England, William II, was notoriously anti-clerical. It was inevitable that they would come into conflict, which they did when Anselm objected to contributing money for the king’s campaigns in Normandy because it would be hard on his diocese’s tenants. It was also probably inevitable that Anselm would go into exile in Rome. Well, technically he went to receive formal investiture, but he stayed in Rome from 1097 until after William’s death in 1100. Pope Urban II did what he could with this rather unworldly scholar. It didn’t help that William II Rufus and most of the English bishops did not recognise Urban as pope.

The Catholic Church’s main difficulty then was with the Greek Orthodox Church, which had split with the Western (Catholic) church in 1054, mainly due to political power struggles, but ostensibly over the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed. Behind this word lay the theological question whether the Holy Spirit proceeded (or emanated) from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son. The Western church had insisted on adding filioque (which means, ‘and from the son’) to this key Christian creed.

The Pope sent Anselm to debate with Greek Orthodox representatives at the Council of Bari. Unfortunately, Anselm regarded the problem as purely intellectual, and apparently did not appreciate the political dimension. He’d argued the double procession in the Monologion, and probably thought that he could convince the Greek clerics. But the Greeks would not accept that the Pope could unilaterally impose the filioque: in their view, since the Nicene Creed had been decided by the Council of Nicaea, it could only be amended by another such council of the whole church, not by the Bishop of Rome alone. For them, it was democracy versus dictatorship. Anselm wrote up his arguments in another work.

Meanwhile he was writing his last major work, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), which he began in England and finished in Italy. In it he addresses the question, ‘By what logic or necessity did God become man, and by his death restore life to the world, when he could have done this through the agency of some other person, angelic or human, or simply by willing it?’

This treatise is, it must be said, not entirely coherent. For example, Anselm gets drawn into an inconclusive digression on whether the number of human beings saved through Christ’s death equals or is greater than the number of fallen angels whom they were to replace. Anselm’s explanation for the incoherence is that parts of his first drafts were being circulated without his permission and so he had to finish the work in a hurry. However, from a philosophical point of view, it is Anselm’s methodology rather than his argument which is important. A thinker of the generation following Anselm, Hugh of Saint Victor, distinguished between the opus creationis – the study of the nature of God and the universe – which was a legitimate subject of logical and philosophical enquiry, and the opus restaurationis – the understanding of the salvation work of Christ – which could only be understood Biblically and through church authority. What Anselm was doing in Cur Deus Homo was attempting to explain the second by methods appropriate to the first; that is, explain the incarnation through logical argument. So although Cur Deus Homo is perhaps not a triumph of philosophy, it is a triumph of the philosophical method.

Anselm Transcends

Eventually Anselm felt able to return to England. However, his relations with the new king, Henry I Beauclerc, were strained. The problem lay in what historians have labelled ‘the investiture contest’, which is one of those historical issues which seemed important at the time but which baffle modern minds. It was accepted that monarchs should invest bishops with the lands and goods which, technically, under the feudal system, they held on the ruler’s behalf; but could earthly kings also invest bishops with the ‘spiritualities’ – the symbols of their ecclesiastical power? Henry said yes, Anselm said no – and in 1103 Anselm went into exile again.

In due course the new pope Paschal II reached a compromise with Henry. Anselm was not happy with it, but accepted it obediently, and returned to England in 1107. The official version is that Henry was glad to receive him, which may translate as everyone was glad to have the problem go away.

Anselm had one final treatise in him: De Concordia (On Harmony). In it he sought to reconcile his understanding of God with his understanding of free will. God, he argues, is outside time and space and has an overview of everything that happens in the universe, while human beings are constrained by their existence in space and time. Therefore, although God does not preordain what humans do of their own free will, he is always immediately aware of it, and more importantly, of the consequences of it for their salvation or condemnation. Anselm argues that foreknowledge is not predestination: God knows what you do, but doesn’t make you do anything. So God does not damn you. Rather, your own sin damns you.

By now Anselm was an old, tired man. He hoped to write one final work on the origin of the soul, but illness prevented it. He died on April 21st 1109, at the age of seventy-six.

The Weight of Being

To understand Anselm’s thought we need to refer to what he said in the Proslogion, following Augustine of Hippo: “For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand.” For Anselm, faith (that is, theological belief) preceded logical argument, which meant that to a degree he knew the answers to his theological questions before he asked them. There was one exception: proof of the existence of God. He needed to find the logical argument which proves that God is. Whether he succeeded in this is open to question. Nevertheless, the Ontological Argument has bothered philosophers ever since Anselm first formulated it.

Generally, Anselm’s legacy is contentious. Both Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas found themselves uncomfortable with his conclusions and the logic by which he had reached them. However, Anselm established the principle that logic could legitimately be applied to theological questions. In doing so he allowed his intellectual successors to apply philosophical thinking to questions of faith, which opened the way to the philosophy of religion (among other things). So Abelard and Aquinas, although rejecting Anselm’s arguments, inherited the methodology he had created, and which dominated theological thinking until the sixteenth century, when Luther and Calvin insisted on a return to the Bible to settle theological issues.

The late Martin Jenkins was a Quaker, a retired community worker, and a frequent contributor to Philosophy Now.