Part I: Letters of Friendship and Spiritual Direction
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Part I: Letters of Friendship and Spiritual Direction
Of the large numbers of letters Anselm wrote to monks and nuns (and those considering the religious life), many of them wholly or in part take up the topic of friendship. The nature of friendship as described in the letters brings us to another controversy surrounding the letters. Anselm's letters are filled with flowery, emotional rhetoric of passionate love and anguished longing for absent loved ones that ring in modern ears like the expression of romantic, sexual love. John Boswell argued that there is homosexuality expressed in Anselm's letters, and that Anselm's actions to postpone the enforcement of the decree condemning sodomy is proof of his sympathy toward homosexuality.17 However, it is now widely accepted that it is anachronistic to attribute modern notions of homosexuality
(virtually all his letters expressing passionate love are to fellow monks) or notions of romantic love to Anselm. Romantic love is at least a century away, though Southern notes the overlap which seems to bring Anselm's model of friendship closer to romantic love than classical friendship.
While the latter is the "rational association for a common purpose," Anselm's friendship is expressed in "the kisses and embraces, the passionate sense of loss at separation, his desire for the presence of his friends; the immense joy at meeting; the need for physical expression as well as a physical presence," though expressing a far different relationship than romantic love.18 And as many have argued, we are in Anselm's world far from contemporary notions of homosexuality or gayness. While there are sexual acts between men as well as male behavior negatively characterized as "effeminate," the former are condemned as all sexual acts outside marriage are. The latter are criticized more as male passivity (as in the Greek condemnation of the passive partner in sex between two males) and as a failure to take up male identity, in other words, as a kind of deficiency of male sexuality, the opposing vice to the excess of lust. But neither of these alone or together corresponds to the contemporary notion of gayness—conscious and enduring same sex attraction.19
17. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), 204, 215–16, 218–20. Southern argues that Anselm drafted the anti-sodomy legislation and delayed it only because he was waiting to get support from his fellow bishops. Far from being prohomosexual, Anselm reacted strongly against the homosexual activity at the court of William Rufus, a response Southern speculates might be the product of an "exaggerated sensitivity on this subject, which may point to a violent rejection of his past." Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 149,
152. See also Glenn W. Olsen, "St. Anselm and Homosexuality," Anselm Studies 2 (1988): 118–20. Olsen also argues against Boswell's view of Anselm and homosexuality.
18. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 146.
19. Olsen, "St. Anselm and Homosexuality."
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Still scholars differ over whether there is any sexual meaning in Anselm's effusions of love and passion. Brian McGuire argues convincingly that Anselm was so sensitive to the possibility of his own sexual sin— witness Anselm's anguished and self-punishing "Meditation on Lost
Virginity"—that he could not have spoken in such overtly ardent terms of his love for other monks had the possibility of, even the conscious desire for, sexual relations not been utterly absent.20 Such a view is strengthened when we remember the public character of letters in general and of Anselm's letters to fellow monks specifically, in which he often said that what he expressed to one could and should be expressed to others. For McGuire, Anselm is homoerotic but not homosexual.21 McGuire also argues that the model of spiritual friendship Anselm develops in these letters was a reaction to Anselm's love for a particular young monk, Osbern, sent by Lanfranc from Canterbury to Bec for Anselm to discipline. Anselm seems to have become quite attached to Osbern, managing by love and empathy rather than punishment to change his behavior, though there is no implication that the relationship was a physical, sexual one.
After Osbern fell ill and died, McGuire argues, Anselm's letters of love to fellow monks became models of spiritual and nonspecific friendship as Anselm was loathe to become so personally attached to any other of his fellow monks.22 Richard Southern's opposition to the homosexual thesis was in many ways less vehement than his objection to Anselm as political schemer, though he relegated any such inclinations to well before Anselm's entrance to the monastery.23
20. Brian McGuire, "Love, Friendship, and Sex in the Eleventh Century: The Experience of Anselm," Studia Theologica 28 (1974): 149. See Med. II, S III, 80–83. Cf. Ep. 168, 169, S IV, 43–50, in which Anselm councils Gundhilda against marriage, describing sexual intercourse as commingling with a rotting, worm infested corpse. McGuire also quotes a scene from Eadmer's Vita Anselmi, in which Anselm has a vision of worldly life and bodily intercourse as inhabiting polluted water. McGuire, "Love, Friendship, and Sex," 120–21; Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury/Vita Sancti Anselmi archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, edited by and translated by Richard W.
Southern (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962), vol. 1, xxi.
21. McGuire, "Love, Friendship, and Sex," 149–50. Olsen finds the attribution of "homoerotic" to Anselm problematic. Given the "overwhelmingly masculine world" in which Anselm lived, Olsen argues, if Anselm "were to love anyone with the vivid language of his letters, it would by definition be a relative or a man." From women he was "expected to maintain a formal distance." Hence we cannot conclude much from the fact that Anselm's expressions of ardent friendship were expressed toward men. McGuire might mean to attribute something like "latent homosexuality" to Anselm but, as Olsen points out, that while this is possible, it is practically impossible to prove. Olsen, "Anselm and Homosexuality," 107.
22. McGuire, "Love, Friendship and Sex,"121–27.
23. For Southern's response to Boswell's account of Anselm, see Portrait in a Landscape, 148–
53. See also Bruce O'Brien, "R. W. Southern, John Boswell, and the Sexuality of Anselm," in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, edited by Mathew Kuefler
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 167–78.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Southern wrote that his earliest interest in Anselm was piqued by the letters, specifically by their emotional language.24 His exploration of the letters led him to the thesis that Anselm's letters described a new kind of friendship, one that left behind the reserve, moderation, and urbanity of the classical model Anselm would have known from Aristotle and Cicero, and as filtered through Cassian.25 There are several steps in this transformation which reveal more clearly where Anselm's innovation lies.
Aristotelian friendship requires living together, without which there is only good will toward another, not true friendship. Thus while grounded in virtue rather than any physical or temporary attribute, Aristotelian friendship is nonetheless subject to the limits of space and time and is, like Aristotle's notions of happiness and virtue, derived from and appropriate to an embodied and mortal being. There is also in Aristotle a certain emotional restraint because of the ground of friendship in reason and virtue, and there is certainly no need for nor dependence on friends.
The magnanimous man has friends primarily in order to perform acts of virtue on their behalf.
Cicero translates this model to the Roman world and in a way the most striking shift is in tone. Cicero waxes more lyrical on the topic of friendship than Aristotle, describing the "blazing up of great benevolence" in friendship;26 it is never "unseasonable" "never annoying"27 and those who would seek to do away with or minimize the ties of friendship do the equivalent of taking the sun out of the world, removing the best and most joyous of the gifts of the gods.28 Cicero grounds friendship in nature, not the mutual exchange of services. He argues against those who think the desire for friendship is a kind of weakness "born of poverty and neediness" and against those who argue that having friends is itself a burden one would do better to avoid, and who counsel keeping the ties of attachment as loose as possible if they cannot be nonexistent.29 What is striking is that Cicero feels the need to make this argument, and it is a testament to the strength of the ancient sense of virtue in the (Latin) etymological sense of manly strength (and the contrary of need, weakness, dependence, or vulnerability) that he must explain why friendship does not contravene that standard.
24. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, xiii.
25. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 70–73; Portrait in a Landscape, 139–41.
26. Cicero, De amicitia, in Cicero: De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, translated by William
A. Falconer, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), ix, 30, 140.
27. Cicero, De amicitia, vi, 22, 132.
28. Cicero, De amicitia, xiii, 47, 158.
29. Cicero, De amicitia, viii, 26, 26–28; ix, 30, 140; xiii, 45, 156.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union In Cassian's Collationes, Aristotelian, Ciceronian friendship is translated into the monastic community. Cassian explicitly distinguishes as lower the friendship of domestic relations because it is merely founded on the instincts of nature and consanguinity.30 The friendship of those united in the monastic life is a friendship of virtue, Cassian writes, and is indissoluble even given changes in fortune or distance in space or time. It is a unity of "spirit" rather than "place," in a shared commitment to purpose, willing and nilling the same things.31 Cassian also places a new emphasis on humility, on not preferring one's own opinions to those of the community. A key step in the union of the community in friendship, after the contempt of worldly goods, is the "pruning" of one's own wishes; one should not consider oneself wise and experienced nor prefer one's own views to those of others.32
Anselm outlines a type of friendship which, first, like classical friendship, is based not on passion but on virtue, and, second, like Cassian's, is a spiritualization of classical friendship, lasting forever and surviving absence. Anselm's letters, it is important to remember, describe attachment based on virtue, not sexual passion or other forms of affection, and virtue is for him, as for Cassian, found in the commitment to the monastic life.
John Haseldine points out that the language of emotional attachment is an instrument to express "the public relations of powerful and influential men" in order to project "their role as figures of piety and authority" rather than the expression of actual feelings of affection.33 Thus we can see how
Anselm can express passionate attachment for those he had never met or had not seen in years just as ardently as he did toward those with whom he had lived intimately.34 "The fire [in Anselm's letters] was primarily intellectual," Southern notes, and "fed on an incorporeal ideal. It was a product of philosophy rather than of feeling."35 However, unlike both friendship in Aristotle and Cassian and to a much greater degree than Cicero, Anselm's letters express (or seem to express) passionate longing and anguished grief at separation, using the language of physical grief and longing. Thus, even once overt sexual meaning is rejected, there is still something to be explained in the "new emphasis" Anselm gives to intimate friendship
30. Cassian, Collationes, edited by Michael Petschenig (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2004), XVI, 2, 439–40.
31. Cassian, Collationes, XVI, 3, 441. Cf. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 71.
32. Cassian, Collationes, XVI, 5–6, 442–43.
33. Julian P. Haseldine, "Love, Separation and Male Friendship: Words and Actions in Saint
Anselm's Letters to his Friends," in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, edited by Dawn M. Hadley, Men and Women in History (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1999), 238–55.
34. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 74.
35. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 74.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union and in the "strikingly original" manner so "open to misunderstanding" in which he expressed this intimacy.36
It is not just that Anselm borrows from physical and sexual love his language of longing and fervor, but that he uses the language of love of something for its own sake rather than as a means, of that which is in Augustine's language frui rather than uti, for human beings and human attachments.37 The question is whether or not other human beings are to be used or enjoyed. Augustine answers that there are, in effect, two kinds enjoyment of human beings, one in which we (wrongly) place all hopes for happiness in them and one in which we enjoy others in God, really enjoying God rather than the human being.38 Anselm's task in the letters of spiritual direction is to begin from the language of delight in his correspondent, responding emphatically to their language of delight in him, but moving that correspondent toward what St. Paul asked of Philemon, that he might enjoy him in the Lord rather than enjoy him tout court.39
What is striking, and strikingly different from the rhetoric in Augustine's letters, is Anselm's language of love for the individual in a way that seems, contra Augustine, to place all his bliss in their presence and despair at their absence.40 What emerges from Anselm's letters is the— consciously and artfully constructed—paradox of passionate desire for purely spiritual friendship. Passionate desire—that is for physical, real presence and union as the only source of joy—in the face of unconquerable absence and separation creates an apparently irresolvable problem.
Having created the problem, Anselm goes on to solve it by the thorough spiritualization of relationships in a way that completely transforms the classical ideal of friendship. In analogous fashion, Anselm describes as irresolvable and then dissolves the conflict of wills that seems inevitable in relationships—between monk and monk, monk and world, and monk and God—in his new model of friendship.
36. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 140.
37. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I, 3, 3.
38. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I, 32, 35–33, 37.
39. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I, 33, 37; cf. Phlm. 20.
40. Cf. Augustine's correspondence with Nebridius as a possible analogue to Anselm's letters to his fellow monks. However, the rhetoric of Anselm's letter is much more extreme than anything between Augustine and Nebridius. The letter is much less effusive and is without the kind of appeal of physical longing and grief found so frequently in Anselm. Moreover, the letters between Augustine and Nebridius move almost immediately after opening greetings of affection into discussions of philosophical and theological matters; their main topic is not the relationship itself, as it is in so many of Anselm's letters. Rather Augustine and Nebridius are engaged in philosophical dialogue.
See letters 3 through 13 of Augustine's correspondence in Letters, in vol. 1 of The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, translated by Roland Teske and edited by John E. Rotelle, pt.
2 (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2001), 19–43.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union The squaring of this circle, passionate desire for purely spiritual friendship, is accomplished by various strategies. While the grace and goodness of God and the saints overcome the gap between Anselm and the satisfaction of his desire in the prayers, in the letters Anselm achieves union by foregoing physical closeness for spiritual communion.
Anselm redescribes the intimate presence he is entreated to provide (by monks taking Anselm's professions of love as personal and his desires for unity in individual and real terms) as communion with and through God, in the spiritual rather than physical realm. Anselm overcomes conflicts of will and rejections of suffering and separation as wrong and unfair by coming to see (and advising others to come to see) suffering and separation as brought about by the providence of God and as offering spiritual and more rewarding forms of pleasure and union. The letters transform sorrow at irremediable physical absence into joy in the spiritual union of the perfect community where all are united through pursuit of union with God. Thus, the same narrative line found in the prayers, moving from complete absence to perfect union, is found in the letters.
The Problem of Separation: Anguished Absence In letters to the community at Bec, Anselm always greets his monks with a description of his longing for them. Anselm describes his attachments to his fellow monks in vivid and concrete terms, writing in one letter, "My eyes long [concupiscunt] to see your face, my most beloved; my arms stretch out to your embraces. My mouth pants for your kisses; whatever remains of my life desires your conversation, so that my soul may delight in complete joy with you in the next life."41 Anselm writes of his relationship to Gilbert Crispin, "I often recognized how great and how true this affection was when it revealed itself face to face, kiss to kiss, embrace to embrace."42 Urging his friend Wilencus to enter the monastery at Bec, Anselm writes, "my soul loves [diligit] you so much that unless it holds you, my heart will not be consoled nor my desire for you satisfied."43 This is Anselm's response to a letter from Wilencus which was,
Anselm claims, written with a "burning and fragrant love."44
Because letters are written to the absent, love for that person is made more painful because its longing is unfulfilled. "My love [dilectio]" Anselm writes, again to Wilencus, "desires to be delighted [delectari] by the presence of your love [dilectionis]," and while he waits his heart is tor41. Ep. 120, S III, 258, 8–12.
42. Ep. 130, S III, 272–73, 6–8.
43. Ep. 115, S III, 250, 9–11.
44. Ep. 115, S III, 250, 5–6.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union tured and his soul tormented.45 To have been separated, Anselm writes to his cousin, is for their souls to have been not just separated but "torn asunder."46 As he writes to Gilbert Crispin, he describes himself as blinded by tears pouring down over his face and hands.47 He is inconsolable because there are no substitutes for Gilbert's presence: if sent "every aromatic perfume, every gleaming metal, every precious gem, every variety of fabric" instead of Gilbert himself, Anselm tells Gilbert, he would reject them all.48 Of a monk Anselm has not even met he writes,
"my mind will not rest until my eyes have seen his face, my ears have heard his voice and my soul has enjoyed his presence."49 To the community at Bec devastated by Anselm's appointment as bishop, Anselm writes, "When I think deeply of your souls saddened by a separation so unexpected and so contrary to our wills, immediately just as the sea is by winds, my heart becomes swollen and disturbed by its own storm and my eyes rain tears."50
In a way that seems quite contrary to Cassian's insistence that what is key for friendship is unity in spirit not in time and place, Anselm makes his own longing and need for physical presence a major theme of his letters. Anselm does not hesitate to express his need for and dependence on his friends in his longing for them and his apparent inability to function in their absence. Unlike Cicero, who must protest that virtuous men can have friends without being weak, Anselm seems to embrace that weakness. Because Anselm writes of his need for his friends in physical terms and of his intense desire for their particular presence, separation seems to make their continued love impossible. Just as the prayers create an apparently irresolvable problem, the letters describe the separation between lover and beloved as permanent and structural. In the prayers the distance is created by the gap between Anselm's sinfulness and the holiness of God and the saints. In the letters, it is in the physical separation between Anselm and his loved friends, exacerbated by the very physical and specific need Anselm expresses for those absent friends. Anselm does not temper his longing or neediness so that it may find satisfaction in less than complete union; rather he exaggerates it, seeking a solution not in the cooling of desire (just as the prayers do not minimize but exaggerate Anselm's sinfulness) but looking for a different path toward its consummation.
45. Ep. 115, S III, 250, 15–17.
46. Ep. 55, S III, 169, 7.
47. Ep. 84, S III, 209, 8–10.
48. Ep. 84, S III, 209, 5–6.
49. Ep. 85, S III, 210, 8–9.
50. Ep. 156, S IV, 18, 9–11.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Finding Presence in Absence Though Anselm's letters begin in this passionate longing for physical union, they always end by sublimating the desire for physical presence into the enjoyment of spiritual union as Anselm thoroughly redefines friendship in spiritual and general rather than physical and specific terms. Expressions of sadness at separation are always wrapped in a concessive clause: even though Anselm is so saddened to be away, Anselm's love endures and somehow bridges that gap of absence and longing. As with later notions of romantic love, the very intensity of this love explains, at least partly, how it can last forever regardless of the parties' separation from one another. Anselm rejects the notion that separation cools desire, arguing instead that longing increases rather than decreases with absence.51 His separation from Gilbert Crispin, he claims, has taught him the intensity of his love, which he would not know about had they never been separated.52 "Everything I feel about you is sweet and delightful to my heart," Anselm writes to another monk, Gundulf, whose attractions, he says, fill his imagination, his mind, even his sight and hearing.53 He concludes, "hence, wherever you go my love follows you and wherever I may be, my desire embraces you."54
In this way, Anselm relies on the intensity of feeling and attachment to make up for the absence of an essential ingredient for Aristotelian friendship—the living and being together without which one can only wish to be friends. In this sense Anselm's model is a step away from classical friendship and a step toward romantic love, as eternal but concrete and individual. But, as Kierkegaard noted, there is a paradox within the notion of romantic love, as an eternal but concrete and physical love, a paradox intensity of feeling will not entirely overcome. Even Anselm's love of paradox does not bring him to embrace this oxymoron. Rather
Anselm's friendships are maintained by the nonphysical and ultimately nontemporal character of the relationship. As he explains in a letter to Gundulf, the union they have is of souls, on which the images of their love for each other are identical.55 Charity fuses lovers' hearts and souls,
Anselm writes to another.56 The strength and certainty of their spiritual love is so complete that these lovers need not even exchange letters and require physical proximity even less. On the one hand, Anselm cannot, he explains, give proof through hearing or sight (through letters or his presence) of his love which "eye has not seen nor ear heard."57 But on 51. Ep. 75, S III, 197, 7–10.
52. Ep. 84, S III, 209, 13–14.
53. Ep. 4, S III, 104, 5–7.
54. Ep. 4, S III, 104, 8–9.
55. Ep. 41, S III, 152, 6–11.
56. Ep. 48, S III, 161, 4–5.
57. Ep. 59, S III, 174, 12, 18–19; 1 Cor. 2:9.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union the other hand, since it cannot be expressed, Anselm concludes, "let our consciences, by which we are aware of how much we love each other, be sufficient."58 Their kinship, he writes to his biological cousins, can become a spiritual kinship if they enter the monastic life, but if not, Anselm continues, they "will no longer be blood kinsmen [consanguinei] but really of flesh [carnales] and blood [sanguinei]."59 Anselm writes to a monk for whom he has expressed a special attachment that he, Anselm, need not write more often with professions of love. "Since," Anselm explains, "your soul and mine can never suffer absence from each other but are unceasingly embracing one another. . . . Since we are known to each other by the presence of our souls, I do not know what to say to you except, may God do with you what he knows to be pleasing to him and useful to you."60 In this way, the spiritual connection replaces the physical one, making the latter superfluous.
While the abbey of Bec functions as the longed for home in the letters, like the heaven Anselm longs for in his prayers, Anselm reformulates his physical absence from the abbey as a kind of spiritual presence: "Even though I am unable to be physically present with you, yet through the love of my heart for you, I never cease being with you."61 Whether at home or away, Anselm writes, "by the gift of God I am no different than when I am in our proper place."62 Anselm's absence or presence should make no difference to his monks either, he continues: "by living well, you gladden my heart, whether absent or present, and by your goodness you fulfill my desire and my joy."63 One can, Anselm counsels, live a good life regardless of the time or place one finds oneself in.64 To the monk Maurice, who had apparently been begging Anselm to intercede so that he could return from Canterbury to Bec, Anselm writes, "Although the more I love you, the more I want to have you with me; but henceforth I love you more, however, from where I cannot have you. For since I love you not for myself but for God and for yourself, I love you more since you show yourself to be such that those who have you don't want to send away someone they love rather than easily sending away one they disregard. . . . For although I greatly desire and love you that you might be joined (cohaereas) to me dwelling with me in community, more, however, I wish that you hold fast (inhaereas) inseparably (indissolubiliter) to good morals."65 For Anselm, Haseldine notes, "monastic obedience is not only superior to love, it is part of the very nature of the love upon which their friendship rests"; and, more58. Ep. 59, S III, 174, 19–20.
59. Ep. 120, S III, 259, 37–38.
60. Ep. 41, S III, 152, 6–7, 13–15.
61. Ep. 165, S IV, 39, 42–44.
62. Ep. 118, 255, 9–11.
63. Ep. 118, S III, 256, 26–27.
64. Ep. 96, S III, 222–23, 12–13.
65. Ep. 79, S III, 202, 3–7; 12–14.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union over, "separation, the inspiration of Anselm's expression of grief and love, is here almost essential to the continuance of that love on a solid foundation."66 Spiritual union is not mere consolation for physical separation but supercedes physical presence. Absence makes love more perfect; it strengthens rather than attenuates their connection. The unusual and important point about Anselm's notion of friendship is that the connection through and in absence by the spiritual bond of the monastic life and obedience to its vows is not in any way second best, a substitute for more desireable physical presence but is infinitely more satisfying and effective of true union. Having expressed intense longing for physical presence and grief over the distances that divide friends, Anselm then builds up a notion of friendship that does not depend on proximity in time and space, in which presence is spiritual and not necessarily physical presence. The life of monastic obedience is the union which Maurice seeks; in harmony with monastic life and in monastic obedience, then, will he find union with Anselm.
Interchangeable Presence and Nonspecific Attachment Besides the limits of time and space that can separate friends, the other barrier to union is the exclusivity of friendship. Not just erotic love, which seems to require complete exclusivity, but also Aristotelian friendship is limited; for all earlier accounts, friendship with one person to some degree or another excludes an equally intense relationship with another. But in Anselm the professions of intense love and attachment are, paradoxically, general rather than personal. After expressing ardent love for one monk, Anselm adds that he would write all of the same things to another monk. He tells one monk that he has written to another, and that if they exchange their letters and change the names,
"his could be yours and yours could be his."67 In another letter, Anselm describes his intense love for a group of monks; he writes only one letter to them all, he says, because all are moving toward the same goal and since his desires for all are the same.68
For Southern such a view of friendship is the personal corollary of Anselm's doctrine of atonement based on the ability of one man to substitute for another.69 In the atonement, one human being, Christ, substitutes for another, and in friendship, all dedicated to the same ideal are the same and can stand in one for the other, just as, I would add, equiva66. Haseldine, "Love, Separation and Male Friendship," 250.
67. Ep. 4, S III, 104, 41–42.
68. Ep. 51, S III, 164, 4–6.
69. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 75.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union lent expressions can substitute for one another in an argument without remainder. Anselm uses the language of substitution very explicitly in a letter asking mercy for a runaway monk, Moses, returning to his community: "Truly since there is no greater intercession than giving skin for skin and soul for soul, as the Lord says, 'greater love hath no man than a man should lay down his life for his friends,' your love should know that Dom Moses from the soles of his feet to the top of his head all around is covered in the skin of your servant, brother Anselm, and his mouth is my mouth."70 Based on this model of substitutability, then, Anselm can maintain that the feelings of friendship he has for that individual can be transferred without loss or remainder to another of the community.
The problem is that when Anselm turns this substitution model around, not only substituting himself for Moses by taking on his punishment, but substituting one monk for another in his affections, Anselm is telling those monks that there was nothing special or individual in his attachment for them, and they felt abandoned. Anselm awakened in them the desire for perfect union, only to move on himself, leaving them in anguished disappointment. They expected something else. As Southern writes, "they expected him to write and he was silent; they expected him to stay and he left. Hence, the reproaches which his letters were partly intended to answer; hence the bitter sense of desertion which swept through the community of Bec when it learned that he was after all to be archbishop of Canterbury."71
Anselm's confreres are unable to transpose so thoroughly their longing for physical presence and individual connection onto the spiritual realm. For Southern, though he does not use this word, Anselmian friendship achieves a kind of sacramentality in which "the particular is generalized, but loses nothing of its particularity in the process."72
On this view, Anselm does not simply reject the physical for the spiritual but imbues the physical with spiritual meaning and reality. For Olsen, Anselm so thoroughly spiritualizes friendship that the individual evaporates into the general: "Anselm did not seem to realize that it is precisely the intimate relatedness of one being to another which makes for friendship, for atonement, for cooperation. . . . However, relatedness is not synonymous with identity and atonement is affected not by substitution but by compassion and love."73 Even though there is much evidence of Anselm's real care for his monks and real action taken on their
70. Ep. 140, S III, 286, 29–34. Southern's translation, Portrait in a Landscape, 157.
71. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 70.
72. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 158.
73. Olsen, "St. Anselm and Homosexuality," 138.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union behalf as individuals in the letters, Anselm's theory of friendship leaves the individual behind. In sacramental love, the specific love of particular and concrete individuals serves as the ground for spiritual love, which sustains it and makes its promise real in a way that goes beyond what physical love alone offers. But in Anselm the physical is merely a mode of expression, a symbol for the spiritual, and in the move to the spiritual the reality of the physical and the individual is lost. Only the disappearance of the physical and individual into a general ideal can explain how it is that Anselm expresses passionate attachment for those he had never seen or not seen in years just as ardently as he did toward those with whom he had lived intimately for years.74
Anselm attempts to assuage the hurt feelings that seem to have arisen from the disappointment of those hoping for more particular relationships and expressions of love from him, but he gives them only the indirect comfort of his love of them through his love of God. The following response, written to the monks of Bec as he is leaving them for Canterbury, makes the generalization and redirection of their love complete:
"Many among you, whom I embraced with so sweet and intimate a love that it could seem to each of them that I loved no other as much, are wondering why I do not write to them individually with some mention of our love. . . . For the present I say only this to them, that they remember that I have not loved them except so that they would love God and their own souls. . . . Let them do this and they will always preserve my love for them inviolable."75 Anselm tries to make clear to fellow monks hurt because they were looking for his particular love for them and his physical presence that they have mistaken what he is really offering: spiritual friendship based not on their individuality, not on direct relationship between them and Anselm, but on their shared status as monks, an indirect relationship in which they are all linked to each other by their link to the community.76
As the solution to the problem of absence from those they love, Anselm counsels his confreres to substitute another for those from whom they are separated. Fellow monks' affection for him, he advises, should
74. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 74.
75. Ep. 156, S IV, 23, 169–75.
76. On the complaints of those who took themselves to be Anselm's special friends, see McGuire's analysis of Anselm's letters to Gundulf and Maurice. McGuire, "Love, Friendship, and Sex,"128–40. McGuire concludes that "Anselm is afraid of loving anyone when that love imposes immediate, concrete demands on him, when that love means a personal relationship in daily life"
(140). He contrasts Anselm's distancing himself from Gundulf and Maurice with his consistently passionate letters to Gilbert Crispin and concludes that Anselm could express himself this way to Gilbert because Gilbert did not demand much of Anselm in return (143).
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union be redirected into hospitality to all men, into the gaining of new friends among their fellow monks. When monks write of their desire to return to Bec or to Anselm, Anselm constantly urges them to make a new home where they are: "Truly you cannot be wherever someone you love is, but wherever you may be, you can be loved and be good."77 Anselm does not offer a new object of love to replace himself but quietly substitutes satisfying someone else's love by being present for them for being able to satisfy one's own love by and in the presence of his beloved. Anselm's very different, more spiritual, more indirect consummation is found in their common love of God. He loves his fellow monks because God loves them and so that they might love God. Fellow monks' affection for him, he advises, should be redirected into hospitality to all men, into the gaining of new friends among their fellow monks. Keeping the rule, Anselm iterates time and again, is the very union his friends seek. When the monks at Bec vehemently protest his appointment as archbishop because it will take him away from them, Anselm tries to redirect their passion away from himself and toward God: "no one became a monk because of me nor out of hope of a reward from me. It is to God that you have vowed yourselves, it is from him, to whom you gave all that you had, that you must look for all that you need."78
Even if this dynamic is a completely rhetorical construction, even if there were no real hurt feelings because of Anselm's redescription of particular love of one monk as spiritual love for them all, we have to ask what the rhetoric tells us. Anselm casts the monks' lack of spiritual progress as a mistaken wish for a particular relationship and for signs of particular affection from Anselm for them as distinct from and over against fellow monks. What Anselm counsels is the spiritualization and generalization of their attachments—which means essentially to dissolve those attachments, to make of friendship the oxymoron of nonspecific attachment. Certainly Cassian describes a kind of friendship one can and should have for all, agape, but even Cassian leaves open the possibility of nongeneral love for a particular person or a few in a special way, which he calls by a different Greek term, diathesis (or affection), on the model of Jesus' love for John the Evangelist, as special, even as he loved the other disciples.79 The ground of this special attachment in Cassian is in a shared disposition and tie of goodness. Anselm blurs this distinction, extending affectio to a much larger group without differentiating individuals as individuals. He does so on the basis of the shared com77. Ep. 69, S IV, 139, 19–20.
78. Ep. 156, S IV, 22, 145–47.
79. Cassian, Collationes, XVI, 14, 448–49.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union mitment to the monastic life which is the tie of goodness that unites all monks and other religious in affection for one another.
There is, perhaps, a development in Anselm's expressions of friendship in some of the later letters. Writing from Canterbury to the community of Bec, which now includes many young monks who have arrived since Anselm left, Anselm still expresses his general love for the whole community. Anselm begins by noting how much he has loved them, how deeply he longs for them, a love and longing so great that, as he puts it,
"a large parchment would not suffice" for its expression. Even though some there have no experience (experimento) of it, he reassures, his love for them is real. Do not doubt, he writes, that "just as I loved the root, so I love the branches, however much they are multiplied; I love all the sons of my mother, both the first-born and those born after me as brothers in the womb I love and embrace in my heart."80 Thus the intensity of expression remains. This statement of his affection for the whole community does not seem as problematic as earlier ones, for unlike the earlier letters, there are no individual and specific relationships Anselm is redefining in general terms.
Anticipating Perfect Communion The perfect realization of this kind of friendship will be, of course, in heaven. In heavenly friendship, Anselm writes to Hugh the hermit, "so great will the love be between God and those who will be there and between each other that all will love each other as they love themselves but all will love God more than themselves."81 Because all love and are united in this love, their wills are perfectly united, willing the same thing in which everyone's desires are fulfilled. On this model, there is no conflict and in fact no difference between one's own will, that of others, and that of God, and no competition between love of self, love of others, and love of God. "No one there," Anselm writes, "shall will anything but what
God wills; and what one wills, all shall will; and what one or all will, God himself shall will."82 Sounding like an anticipation of Rousseau's general will and Kant's kingdom of ends, Anselm continues, "they shall each be perfect kings, because what they will individually shall come about; and all of them shall at the same time be one king with God and, as it were, one person, because all shall will one thing, and it shall come about."83
In this environment, there is no loss and no loser; everyone gets what they wish and all wish that all others get what they wish.
80. Ep. 205, S IV, 98, 12–15.
81. Ep. 112, S III, 245, 26–28.
82. Ep. 112, S III, 245, 28–30.
83. Ep. 112, S III, 245, 31–34.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Spiritual friendship in this life will be perfected in heaven, Anselm preached, but it can be experienced now, at least momentarily, as fully as in heaven.84 The monastic community is an anticipation of this unity of wills and minds. What monks share and what will make the union of friends perfect is the spiritual journey they undertake together. Though they travel by different routes, Anselm notes, they will be united at the same destination.85 So rather than grieve over his absence, Anselm advises his monks, "I entreat you as a brother and exhort you as a father so to be striving to advance in peace and monastic life that you may find beatitude as the reward for your efforts, and I also may be able at some time to congratulate you on your beatitude."86 The monastic community is an anticipation of this unity of wills and minds. Anselm wants to sweep his monks into this vision of love based not on the particular (unstable, jealous) exclusive love but on the unity of all those individuals in the love of God. What Anselm wants from those to whom he writes in passionate terms and from whom his separation is unbearable, then, is unity with them in the community of the monastic life.
Such unity makes possible and in fact requires perfect communication. In such relationships all things are told and understood, even when the truth exceeds the capacity of language to express it. Anselm writes to his monks at Bec, "whatever you write or say, in common or individually, in the letters you send out of the affection of your heart to one you most love and desire, and which neither tongue nor pen can express, all these are distinctly and clearly written in my heart."87 To Boso, Anselm writes of their mutual love: "the sweetness of your love for me knows the sweetness of my love for you, and my affection for you knows your affection for me. One knows the intimate things of the other from his own intimate things, since true sincerity understands true sincerity and certain experience permits no doubts about anything to arise."88 Anselm grounds his wish for perfect communication in the love that unites lovers, even writing to a prior he has never met: "Lord Abbot Roger [a mutual friend and brother of the monk on whose behalf Anselm intercedes], being so certain of you and me that the fire of charity has fused us into one heart and one soul, that he himself cannot not will that what one knows the other know."89 Anselm exhorts his fellow monks to strive for this spiritual unity, a unity which precludes any attachment to anything else: "Be in 84. Anselm, Liber de beatitudine caelestic patriae X (PL CLIX, 638), cited in Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 73.
85. Ep. 37, S III, 145, 6–8.
86. Ep. 98, S III, 229, 14–17.
87. Ep. 148, S IV, 3, 4–6.
88. Ep. 209, S IV, 104, 66–10.
89. Ep. 48, S III, 161, 4–6.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union agreement with God and men," Anselm advises; to be occupied by other desires, other loves takes away from this "perfect love."90
Conflicts between different human wills in Anselm's letters are encompassed within God's will to which all human wills should and must bend. The unity of wills in the company of God and the angels is achieved in the monastic life through obedience and humility, through the subordination of one's will to higher authority: "Anyone who wishes to possess this love perfectly with which the kingdom of heaven is purchased should love contempt, poverty, work, and submission."91 To a young monk who has been scourging himself and asking others to do it, rather than subjecting himself to the command of his superior, Anselm writes asking him to stop these activities and follow the will of his superior.
There is a difference between "monastic" and "royal" judgment, Anselm explains. The latter is from one's own will, the former, from obedience to another. Obedience to a royal judgment is what the rich and proud command to be done to themselves, and it claims that one sustains oneself, while monastic obedience shows that one is not one's own, Anselm explains.92 This is the subject of De casu diaboli—being faithful to the truth that one has received everything and has nothing properly of one's own— here expressed as spiritual direction. It is noteworthy that the notion of monastic judgment is not put to use to exhort the young monk to submit to greater punishment at the hands of a superior but rather to plead that he give up the notion that he is holier and better for sitting harshly in judgment on himself. Similarly, in another letter, he exhorts a monk not to subject himself to harsher dietary restrictions than is required by the rule, and in yet another, he chastises a talented copyist for relying on his own judgment in his work copying manuscripts rather than obeying the instructions of his superior.93 Anselm insists on the connection between unity and obedience, and though he is not an advocate of harsh punishment or extreme asceticism, he seems untroubled by the way in which the call to obedience can bring about the disappearance of the individual into the corporate whole. Thus he writes to a monk resisting his election as abbot of his community that what it means to be united as members of the body of Christ is that one must be willing to let others use you as their own member, letting oneself become, in effect, their instrument.94
The conflict of wills that looms largest in Anselm's letters to Bec was over Anselm's appointment as archbishop. According to the letters,
90. Ep. 112, S III, 245, 45–46.
91. Ep. 112, S III, 246, 69–71.
92. Ep. 233, S IV, 140, 8–13.
93. Ep. 196, S IV, 86; Ep. 232, S IV, 140.
94. Ep. 345, S V, 283, 11–19.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union both Anselm and his monks vehemently fought the appointment.95 Anselm writes to his community of his prayers to God for it to be rescinded, describing God's act allowing the appointment as "violence" against him, but concluding that his resistance failed in the face of the divine will. "Hence no longer defeated so much by the violence of men as God, against whom there is neither prudence nor courage," Anselm writes, he surrenders totally.96 He concludes that he has no choice: "putting aside my own perception and will, I commit myself entirely to the perception and will of God."97 Anselm sets this up as his will vs. God's, human vs. divine. The goal or movement is not toward harmony of two distinct wills, his and God's, but the giving up on his own will in complete capitulation to God's.
Anselm advocates not just subordination, but the utter disappearance of the lower into the higher, of his will into God's and of his monks' wills into his. The difference between his will and God's evaporates when he reflects on his monastic profession. "For when I made profession as a monk, I denied myself of myself, so that then I was no longer my own; that is, I did not live according to my own will but according to obedience."98 Thus after great anguish, Anselm gives in to his appointment as archbishop and tries to move his former community in the same direction. If Anselm refuses his appointment or if the monks ask him to refuse it, they all cease to be monks, Anselm argues.99 In becoming one with others in the monastic life, nothing of one's individuality remains.
Whether we think Anselm's protestations and his construal of the community of Bec's dismay is, in our sense, literally true, or in some sense shaped to model a required rejection of power, what is indisputable
95. See Epp. 148, 156, S IV, 3–6; 17–24. See also Eadmer's dramatic retelling of Anselm's refusal to take the staff and of others having to pry open his fingers, forcing it into his hands, in Historia novorum in Anglia, edited by Martin Rule (London: Longman, 1884) [Eadmer's History of Recent Events in England, translated by Geoffrey Bosanquet (Philadelphia: Dufour, 1965), 33–36]. The degree to which Anselm really fought his appointment and the true source of the monks of Bec's objections to Anselm being made archbishop are strongly disputed by Southern, on one side, and Vaughn and Fröhlich, on the other. Southern takes Anselm's protestations at face value while Vaughn and Fröhlich have a more complex view. Vaughn argues that Anselm sought the appointment, but out of sense that the appointment was God's will and a duty rather than his inclination. Fröhlich argues that the monks of Bec resisted not just because they were loathe to lose him as abbot but that at least some suspected Anselm of cupidity for the appointment. See Southern, Portrait in a Landscape,
278–80; Vaughn, Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan, 116–48; Fröhlich ("Introduction," in The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, 41–42) argues that letters omitted from the collection seem to be Anselm's attempt to deal with gossip that he lusted for the appointment as archbishop. See the following and n. 100 for a discussion of Anselm's refusal of office in terms of the ancient typos of humble rejection of power.
96. Ep. 148, S IV, 4, 42–43.
97. Ep. 148, S IV, 5, 48–50.
98. Ep. 156, S IV, 20, 91–93.
99. Ep. 156, S IV, 21, 96–101.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union is that Anselm constructs human desire, both his and his monks', and God's will as absolutely opposed to one another. Moreover he depicts his own shift and that he recommends to his monks as capitulation to a kind of violence, to a divine will which is deeply opposed to natural inclination.100 He does not describe a process whereby human inclination turns, like a flower to the light, toward the divine; rather the story is of the defeat of individual human will as the path toward its ultimate fulfillment.
The desired end is not just the union of distinct wills willing the same thing; rather the wills of those united in friendship should overlap recursively. That is, they should will what the other wishes them to will, wish only to take pleasure in what the other takes pleasure in, and do so because it pleases the other. "Whenever something is pleasing to you, that pleases me," Anselm writes to Lanfranc, "this is indeed pleasing to me; and whatever first was pleasing becomes even more pleasing."101 As with Anselm and his monks, Anselm strives for a perfect harmony of wills with Lanfranc, their differences disappearing (or, better, never appearing) in their shared values and purpose. Anselm's relationship to Lanfranc illustrates both Anselm's commitment to this ideal and his own limits in complying with it. In his correspondence with Lanfranc Anselm styles himself in relation to Lanfranc as suus quod suus.
The difficult to translate phrase means something like "he who is all and only his." Anselm wrote to Lanfranc explaining this usage, likening it to the prophet Zechariah's conclusion of every verse of his prophecy with "thus saith the Lord," in order to signal the source of the authority for his prophecy. So, Anselm continues, "in order to put on my words the stamp of the person to whom, and the spirit in which I speak, I always begin my letters with this inscription on their forehead."102 Thus, Anselm places
Lanfranc as source and authority for his own thought.
100. A pattern of piously refusing episcopal office goes back to Augustine, Ambrose, Pope
Gregory the Great, Martin of Tours, and others. Marylou Rudd quotes a telling passage from Origen to the effect that reluctance to accept office is a qualification for it: "We do not accept those who love power. But we put pressure on those who, on account of their great humility, are reluctant hastily to take upon themselves the common responsibility of the church of God. And those who rule us well are those who have had to be forced to take office, being constrained by the great king, who, we are convinced, is the son of God." Origen, Contra Celsus, edited and translated by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), vol. 8, 75, cited in Marylou Rudd, "'Unworthy
Servants': The Rhetoric of Resignation at Canterbury, 1070–1170," The Journal of Religious History 22, no. 1 (1998): 11. Rudd analyzes the letters of resignation not just of Anselm but also Lanfranc and Thomas Becket, all of whom asked to resign their office because of their unworthiness, emphasizing their humility and reluctance for office. Much earlier but perhaps more famous was Ambrose of Milan's original refusal of the office of bishop.
101. Ep. 32, S III, 140, 4–5.
102. Ep. 57, S III, 171, 3–7. See Southern's translation in Portrait in a Landscape, 60–61.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Anselm sent the Monologion to Lanfranc asking him to approve or disapprove it, hoping for this recursive identity of wills: "since," he explains, "I want nothing to please me that displeases you."103 Recognizing the possibility that this unity of wills might not be immediate, Anselm notes his readiness to subordinate his own will to Lanfranc's on intellectual matters just as he would in spiritual or moral matters: "just as it rests only on your experience to judge how much you will allow of what I say I greatly desire, so it is for your judgment to choose whether [the Monologion] pleases you.104 What Anselm wanted to believe (and have Lanfranc confirm) is that his whole identity, his thoughts and feelings, were given him by Lanfranc and are in complete harmony with Lanfranc's.
Anselm wanted Lanfranc to signal that pleasure by naming the work.
He has not given the work a name because of its insignificance, but if Lanfranc approves, Anselm asks that "from him from whom it receives confirmation, let it receive a name." Failing that, Anselm requests that it not be returned it to him but disposed of it "by one of the elements."
Not just any destruction will do, but complete obliteration by having that on which it is written flung back to rejoin the basic elements of the cosmos by means of one of the four kinds of elemental destruction: burying
(earth), sinking (water), burning (fire), or scattering it to the wind.105
Lanfranc, however, did not approve of the work as Anselm wished; he did not in effect join on as an author by giving the title, but neither did he destroy the work as Anselm requested. In refusing to do any of these things, he asserts what Anselm wishes to deny—their difference.
With this act, Lanfranc says essentially, the work is not what I would have written; it is yours and you must claim it as such even in the light of my criticisms. You cannot obliterate our difference by pretending the breach has never happened; it has happened and you must decide what to do about it; I will not decide for you. As a result of this episode, Southern contends, Anselm stopped using suus quod suus in letters to Lanfranc.106
However, there must have been a sort of reconciliation between them; the Monologion appeared in its final form with a dedicatory letter to Lanfranc, and there might have been face-to-face meetings between Anselm and Lanfranc after Lanfranc expressed his criticisms, for Anselm's reply to Lanfranc ends with the mention of Anselm's hopes to correct the work and to discuss it with Lanfranc.107 Lanfranc must have given some kind
103. Ep. 72, S III, 193, 9–10.
104. Ep. 72, S III, 193, 10–12.
105. Ep. 72, S III, 193, 16–17, 21–22.
106. Anselm uses this form of address is letters 23, 25, 27, 49, 66 but not in later letters 72, 77,
89, 90, 103, 126. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 60, n. 30.
107. Ep. 77, S III, 200. Herbert E. J. Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk and Archbishop (Oxford:
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union of consent because Anselm would not have published a dedicatory letter to Lanfranc without Lanfranc's permission. On the other hand, Anselm clearly did not rewrite the treatise along the lines Lanfranc seems to have suggested; he did not shift his trinitarian language or add scriptural or patristic authorities to his text.108 We have to conclude that Anselm in the end accepted their difference, that he no longer thinks of himself as "all and only" Lanfranc's, even as he continued to work with and maintain his affection and respect for him.
Just as Anselm's beloved monks find it hard to completely spiritualize their connection to Anselm and become interchangeable with one other, but continued to long for individualized affection, so Anselm found it impossible to completely submerge his own will and voice into Lanfranc's. Though disappointed to find that Lanfranc was not of one mind with him on his work, Anselm did not withdraw it but named it himself and circulated it to more sympathetic readers.109 In some sense, then,
Anselm did not follow his own theory about how to achieve the harmony of wills and desires he claims with Lanfranc. However, he maintains that in the work he expresses nothing different than that found in scripture or the fathers: "This was my intention throughout the whole disputation . . . that in it I should never state anything at all unless I saw that it could readily be defended either by canonical writings or by the words of blessed Augustine. And now, whenever I reconsider what I said I cannot conceive of having stated anything else myself."110 Even though not of perfectly one mind with Lanfranc, Anselm asserts that he is of one mind with Augustine and other authorities, having subjugated his thought to theirs, to the degree that any difference is not just nonexistent but inconceivable. Lanfranc's complaint about the Monologion was that Anselm had presumed to speak on the topic of the divine nature and Trinity in his own voice rather than to rely on the opinions of the authorities. ParaOxford University Press, 2003), 211. Cowdrey disagrees with Southern that the relationship between Lanfranc and Anselm was damaged by this disagreement, though he thinks of Lanfranc's attitude toward the Monologion in the end as merely a lack of opposition. Cowdrey, 208–11. Holopainen goes much further and argues that Lanfranc was actively helping Anselm to construct a more positive reception for his rational theology. See Toivo Holopainen, "The Proslogion in Relation to the Monologion," The Heythrop Journal 50 (2009): 590–602.
108. We do not have Lanfranc's letter in response to Anselm's request, but we can tell from Anselm's response to that missing letter (Ep. 77, S III, 199) that these were the main lines of Lanfranc's criticisms.
109. See Epp. 100, 109, S III, 231–32, 241–42 to Hugh, archbishop of Lyon, to whom Anselm sent his Monologion and Proslogion. Even if Southern exaggerates the effect of Lanfranc's criticisms on Anselm, it is clear from the tone of these letters that Anselm is thrilled to have Hugh praise and approve his work.
110. Ep. 77, S III, 199, 13–17.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union doxically, Anselm thinks of his work, which does not mention the names of authorities or quote scripture explicitly, as so completely in tune with Augustine and scripture, having so completely digested them, that it is virtually identical with them. Unlike his appointment as archbishop,
Anselm in this case neither directly resists an opposing will nor completely surrenders his own. However, unwilling to compromise his ideal of perfectly united wills, he fits it to the more distant and intellectual unity he has with Augustine and scripture.
Turning Sadness into Joy Though Anselm uses the language of grief and longing at separation from God to describe his feelings at being separated from his fellow monks, the letters unrelentingly enfold suffering and separation into a larger perspective of future solace and union. What monks share and what will make the union of friends perfect is the spiritual journey they undertake together. Though they travel by different routes, Anselm advises, they will be united at the same destination.111 So, for example, rather than grieve over his absence, Anselm counsels his monks, "I entreat you as a brother and exhort you as a father so to be striving to advance in peace and monastic life that you may find beatitude as the reward for your efforts, and I also may be able at some time to congratulate you on your beatitude."112
When his fellow monks suffer, Anselm places their suffering the context of the journey toward God, reminding them that it moves them closer to their goal. To one monk suffering from illness, Anselm sends both compassion and congratulations: compassion "because you are being worn down by suffering," and congratulations "because you are being trained for your heritage." The outer man is tormented, but suffering purges sin and "transfers the destiny of the sons of God, to whom an eternal reign of joy is promised, to us."113 Suffering is a burden, he tells another young man, but keep bearing it; it will take you longer to get home but the household runs more joyfully toward someone weighed down.114 To Gundulf, who, like Anselm, lamented his own appointment as a bishop, Anselm writes, "glory be to God on high who has so loved you that he has placed you in the fire of tribulation that he might boil down your works to perfection and your hope to firm obligation."115 Making explicit his theodicy, Anselm cites from St. Paul, "all things work together
111. Ep. 37, S III, 145, 6–8.
112. Ep. 98, S III, 229, 14–17.
113. Ep. 9, S III, 112, 8–14.
114. Ep. 13, S III, 118, 35–36.
115. Ep. 78, S III, 201, 19–20.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union for good to those who love God."116 To Hernost, an ailing bishop, Anselm writes with "human sadness" at Hernost's suffering, but, he continues,
"when I consider that through this your soul is being nourished for eternity, your progress consoles me with spiritual joy."117 To his sister and her husband, having sent their only surviving child to him to take up religious life, Anselm writes that they should give thanks now that they are free from all worry and can dedicate themselves wholly to the saving of their souls. He holds out the hope only that their surviving son will, along with them and their departed sons and daughters, rejoice together with them in heaven where "each will be glorified as much for each of the others as for themselves."118
Anselm concludes that in effect what classical thinkers would have called bad fortune is good. Do not return the world's smile, Anselm counsels, "for it does not smile at you so that you may smile, but that under its mocking prince you may lament when he laments. Rather, whenever he laughs, shrink from his smile, mock the smiler in horror, so that afterwards you may mock his mockery and smile when he laments."119 When
Anselm's dialogue partners in De veritate and De casu diaboli object to the notion that bad fortune is good, Anselm concedes them some ground; in the letters, however, Anselm defines evil out of existence without hesitation or qualification. Anselm advises Hernost in his illness to consider "that from the defect of the flesh comes the progress of the soul, from the illness of the flesh, the health of the soul, from punishment, forgiveness;" hence, he should "draw consolation from this very affliction and joy from this sorrow."120 In this way, Anselm embraces paradoxes that are just as radical but more existentially poignant than those in his speculative theological works: sorrow is really joy, and affliction, consolation. Anselm sees suffering, as he does human relationships, from a completely divine or redeemed perspective. He neither tries to minimize nor mediate the distance between human and divine perspectives but baldly states it in its most irreducible form and then leaps over it, bringing, he hopes, his friends with him.
What is required to achieve this view of suffering and separation is an unflinching orientation toward the future. The past, Anselm tells his monks, is "as nothing;" one's whole effort should be focused on forward progress.121 Instead of turning around to see where others are on the path to heaven, Anselm advises his monks to look steadily forward and consider only whether one is keeping up with those further on the road
116. Ep. 78, S III, 201, 20–21; Rom. 8:28.
117. Ep. 53, S III, 167, 6–8.
118. Ep. 211, S IV, 108, 18–25.
119. Ep. 2, S III, 101, 77–80.
120. Ep. 53, S III, 168, 24–26.
121. Ep. 51, S III, 165, 23–24.