Anselm: Faith Seeking Understanding

Anselm of Canterbury became a monk at Bec in Normandy in his twenty-seventh year and, three years later, its prior, according to his companion and biographer Eadmer (Eadmer, Life of Anselm 1.6–7 (Rule, p. 320)). There he wrote a meditation on the grounds of faith, the Monologion, and then looked for something shorter: one argument that would be enough by itself to show that God exists and is what Christians believe him to be (Anselm, Proslogion preface) (Eadmer, Life of Anselm 1.19 (Rule, pp. 333–334)). He says that the search wore him out and that the argument came to him when he was trying to put it out of his mind (Anselm, Proslogion preface). He called the little book that resulted Faith Seeking Understanding, and later Proslogion (Anselm, Proslogion preface). Eadmer adds that the first draft, written on wax tablets, was lost, and the second found broken on the floor (Eadmer, Life of Anselm 1.19 (Rule, pp. 333–334)).

The book is a prayer. “I do not seek to understand that I may believe,” Anselm writes, “but I believe in order to understand” (Anselm, Proslogion 1). God, he says, is believed to be “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived”. Even the fool of the psalm, who says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14:1), understands those words, so that such a being exists at least in his understanding. But a being that existed in the understanding alone would be less than one that also existed in reality. So that than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist in reality (Anselm, Proslogion 2), and cannot even be conceived not to exist (Anselm, Proslogion 3).

A monk, Gaunilo, answered on the fool’s behalf. By the same reasoning, he wrote, one could prove the existence of a lost island richer than every other land (Gaunilo, On Behalf of the Fool 6). Anselm replied that the reasoning holds for nothing except that than which a greater cannot be conceived (Anselm, Proslogion appendix, reply to Gaunilo 3), and asked that the objection and his answer be copied with the book from then on (Eadmer, Life of Anselm 1.19 (Rule, pp. 333–334)).

In 1093 King William II gave Anselm, by then abbot of Bec, the archbishopric of Canterbury (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1093). He left England in 1097, judging that little was done there according to right (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1097). In exile he finished Cur Deus Homo, “Why God Became Man”, a dialogue that sets Christ aside, as if nothing were known of him, and asks by reason alone why God should have become man and died (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo preface) (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1.1). To sin, Anselm argues, is to withhold from God the honour that is his due, and the sinner owes satisfaction for it (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1.11). It would not be fitting for God simply to remit the debt by mercy (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1.12). The satisfaction required is one that none but God can make and none but man ought to make; therefore it must be made by one who is both God and man (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 2.6).

Anselm came back to England in 1100 and died in 1109 (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1100) (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 1109). Both books follow the procedure their openings announce: not to reach faith by reasoning, but to understand by reasoning what is already believed (Anselm, Proslogion 1) (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1.1). The schools of the following century are the subject of the Schools Become Universities.