Part II: Friendship and Politics after Bec
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union toward salvation.122 Taking to a kind of extreme the notion that the rewards in a future heaven will make up for present suffering and loss, Anselm draws the narrative line oriented toward the future in stark terms:
"as long someone has lived, so much shorter he has to live; and as distant is the day of his birth, so much closer is the day of his death and reward for his whole life."123 What Anselm's arguments are metaphorically, one enormous extension toward God, is the literal structure of earthly life itself for him. And like the objects that medieval physicists theorized would move more quickly toward their natural place the closer they came to it, Anselm contends that human beings should hasten toward their end, becoming more rather than less courageous and joyful the closer they come to their reward: "the more you consider your labor hastening to an end and approach [your] rest and crown, the more you should accomplish in great vigor, pressing on more strongly and, comforted, persevering more joyfully."124
Part II: Friendship and Politics after Bec As many have remarked, the topic of friendship and the intensity of the language of love and longing fades a bit the later one moves in the correspondence, though it is not altogether absent after Anselm left Bec.
Letter 156 is written after Anselm's departure from Bec to become archbishop and describes his love for his friends at Bec and grief at their separation.125 In a slightly later letter to the young monks at Bec, Anselm describes his face as bathed in tears at being without them.126 Even several years after his departure, Anselm writes back to the community at Bec in great fervor, "my love for you goes on burning in my innermost heart."127
Nonetheless, the diminution of the topic is obvious and, perusing the letters as a whole, hardly surprising given the difficult and serious problems with which Anselm had to deal as archbishop. The sheer number of letters written to kings, popes, nobles, and bishops reveal a set of issues that would have crowded out the space for friendship in most lives.
That Anselm lacked the time to express and perhaps find comfort in this kind of connection with his fellow monks is completely understandable.
The intense language of friendship that does flame up again in the later letters is always connected to monastic life. First, Anselm's language is more intense the more the addressee is engaged in or being exhorted to monastic life. Second, except for letters to those with whom Anselm has
122. Ep. 51, S III, 165, 33–36.
123. Ep. 2, S III, 100, 57–59.
124. Ep. 2, S III, 100–1, 64–67.
125. Ep. 156, S IV, 17–23.
126. Ep. 166, S IV, 40.
127. Ep. 199, S IV, 90, 6–7.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union real rather than indirect ties, like Gilbert Crispin, or later, Boso, a monk of Canterbury, it is in letters to young monks, most especially those at his beloved Bec, that Anselm's language becomes the most tender and effusive. These expressions of love resemble most the tenderness of parent for child. Anselm writes with an understanding of the special need these youngest entrants into the monastery have for a sense that they are loved and cared for.
What characterizes the later letters is not so much the elaborate and ardent expression of love but more the substance of that love drawn on as the ground for communication and action. The ties of spiritual friendship are assumed rather than forgotten as Anselm begins his life as an administrator. Anselm uses the common identity and shared commitment to the values of religious life to exhort young monks to greater virtue and obedience and cooperation and correction with his equals and secular rivals. To a young monk who wrote to Anselm expressing great love, Anselm replies that "true affection (dilectio) desires the constant progress of the one who is loved." Progress is achieved through the "love of your monastic way of life (propositum) above all," a commitment best kept by never hiding or defending one's faults and striving for complete openness toward his abbot.128 Through this perfection of monastic life one will find joy and delight, Anselm writes, deftly moving the young monk's love and delight away from himself and toward monastic life itself, and shifting his desire to know and be known by Anselm toward an openness to the abbot and community.129
This goal of making operative the shared love and commitment of spiritual life has been part of Anselm's correspondence from his earliest letters. In one of these earlier letters, cited above, in which Anselm declares that a mutual friend could not not will their complete mutual sharing of information, it is clear that Anselm is using the claim of mutual love to express what should be the kind of community all those joined in a common way of life should form.130 Similarly, Anselm writes to the subprior of Canterbury as "beloved friend" and "dearest son," admonishing him not to punish merely careless infractions of the rule as if they were intentional. Suspicions of more serious wrongdoing should be dismissed if there is no proof; if he does this, Anselm concludes, the brothers will love him and correct themselves.131 In this way, Anselm both uses friendship to ground his exhortation and urges his addressee to use friendship in the same way to move his monks toward faithfulness to the rule. In 128. Ep. 232, S IV, 139–40.
129. Ep. 232, S IV, 139–40.
130. Ep. 48, S III, 161.
131. Ep. 313, S V, 240.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union a later exchange, Anselm uses the notion of friendship to attempt to resolve a very earthly dispute over market rights; he writes to the sheriff and port reeve of Canterbury, admonishing them as "faithful friends" of his and of the church to return the market to Canterbury.132
The degree to which Anselm cultivated and used friendship in order to accomplish his goals is disputed by Vaughn and Southern. They interpret differently the passage in which Anselm advises the monks at Bec to continue the work he had done to gain friends "for the utility of the church" and the "welfare (salutem)" of those they love. Southern takes issue with the notion that Anselm deployed friendship politically and with any aim other than the spiritual welfare of the church and those he loved, while Vaughn rightly rejects as anachronistic Southern's strong distinction between spiritual and material utilitate and salutem for Anselm.133 A kind of misplaced romanticism affects Southern, for whom interest in the material success of Bec would taint the commitment to its spiritual excellence. Though Anselm thoroughly rejects the notion that worldly and material success are in any way to be sought, Anselm acted vigorously to protect and expand both the spiritual and material success of Bec and Canterbury. From within the monastic context, Anselm understood the protection and expansion of lands, donations to the monastery, as well as the increase in professions to monastic life as utile and part of the salutem of an abbey. This does not conflict with but rather supports
Southern's beautiful summation of Anselm's notion of friendship as cultivated both within and outside the monastic walls:
For Anselm, friendship and unity in the service of God were identical.
Friendship spreads out into the world as a healing influence beyond the monastic walls. It begins within the community in the practice of meditation, in prayer, in teaching, and common worship; and it spreads out as a missionary influence in bringing others into the circle of monastic life, some as monks, others as attached widows or associated individuals, and all, especially the poor, as recipients of the consolations of alms, healing, miracles, and the aid of the saints. . . . This is what he meant by the utilitas, the wellbeing, of the monastery. The conglutitas fraternitatis extends the benefits of the monastic life around the countryside.134
132. Ep. 356, S V, 297–98; 358, S V, 299–300. A reeve is the chief officer under the king, in this case, over the port of Canterbury. See Haseldine's discussion of this exchange in, "Love, Separation, and Male Friendship," 249, n. 26.
133. Southern, "Sally Vaughn's Anselm," 188–91; Vaughn, "Anselm: Saint and Statesman,"
218–20.
134. Southern, "Sally Vaughn's Anselm," 191.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Anselm's theory of friendship is in the end political, not about personal or individual feelings or relationships but, like shared citizenship, about relations defined by reason and principle. His aim is to displace other grounds on which connections might be made and used for political leverage—kinship, material and political power, regional ties—with his notion of spiritual friendship grounded in a common spiritual goal, entailing the strict ethical and spiritual rules which must be shared by those with the same goal. This model of friendship expresses a new vision of Christian unity made possible by Gregorian reform, which brought about greater uniformity grounded on shared Christian ideals. Such a vision,
Haseldine explains, "open[ed] up for ecclesiastics the prospect of a common interest and identity beyond the range of traditional, regional political ties."135 We can see Anselm in his letters pushing not just what is but what should be true about his relationship to the abbot or prior to whom he writes; there is in his language an edge of aspiration and obligation. This is the community to which we belong, Anselm is saying, one whose models of relationship are not based on particularity, power, family, or regional relations but on our common way of life, our common dedication to a single goal. These are the only grounds on which we should relate to one another. It displaces other models, not only in being broader but in being very different than feudal relations. Though Anselm does not, of course, reject the legitimacy of feudal relations, his notion of friendship is based on a moral code and on a kind of equality.136
This equality, however, is consistent with the assertion of hierarchy in the demand for obedience. Since equality means the unity of all friends in the same project, such a spiritual life demands subordination of individuals to those who have the authority to guide that life. Any disunity or disobedience amounts to rejection of that common goal. Walter
Fröhlich argues that Anselm's views on ecclesiastical and secular authority are an expansion rather than contradiction to his pastoral letters of friendship and spiritual direction. Just as the monks subordinate their wills to the abbot's and ultimately to God's will, human laws should be completely subordinated to the law of God, and all, including the king, must be subject to the Roman pontiff.137 By the same token, for 135. Haseldine, "Love, Separation, and Male Friendship," 254. With this more general goal of Gregorian reform, a grounding of society and relationships on the common principles of the Church, Anselm thoroughly agrees, though as Vaughn, Southern, and Fröhlich all note, Anselm's specific account of the relationship between church and state was not truly Gregorian.
136. Cf. Haseldine's similar conclusion contrasting the basis of equality in friendship as opposed to patronage. "Love, Separation, and Male Friendship," 254, n. 38.
137. Walter Fröhlich, "Anselm's Weltbild," 507–8.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Anselm bishops have no secular duties; their devotion was wholly to the spiritual life, not the earthly.138 The picture is one of complete separation of earthly and heavenly, and, in any areas of overlap, the complete subordination of the earthly to the heavenly.
Consistent with his picture of monastic life in his letters of spiritual direction to fellow monks, Anselm is uncompromising in his assertion of his principles in the face of encroachments by secular values. Over and over Anselm asserts the complete lack of any secular moral claim and the emptiness of any secular life. Though Anselm was an able and committed politician in his battles with secular power, his politics considers the world from a single perspective, with the secular ordered firmly toward the sacred. With this conviction firmly in place, Anselm writes as archbishop to counts and kings, urging them to subordinate their earthly aims to the spiritual goals of the church. This advice is sometimes general in exhortations to rule justly and on the model of King David, as, for example, he writes to the newly crowned kings of Jerusalem and Scotland and the count of Flanders.139 It is sometimes more pointed, urging a clear subordination of secular rulers to the church,140 and sometimes yet more specific, exhorting those hesitant and congratulating those compliant with the ban on investiture of bishops and abbots by secular leaders.141
Anselm's battles with William Rufus and Henry I are, though complex, clearly one thing: rejections of any secular authority over the Church. In relation to both kings, Anselm insisted on the primacy of religious authority, and twice chose exile rather than compromise this principle as he understood it. On the questions of lay investiture he even found himself defending a position more papist than the pope's own.142 Whether we see Anselm as canny or naïve in these battles, it is clear that he acts on principle. For Fröhlich, Anselm's political principles are more Augustinian than Gregorian, based fundamentally on the distinction between frui and uti: "whoever acts in such a way as to progress farther towards the vision of God is doing good; whoever acts in the opposite way is doing evil."143 This meant in practice both the defense of the papal ban on lay investiture and the protection of the primacy and independence of Canterbury, not just against the king and nobles but also, where necessary, against the pope. The particular arrangements between the archbishop
138. Fröhlich, "Anselm's Weltbild," 510.
139. Epp. 180, 235, 413; S IV, 64–65; 142–43; S V, 358–59.
140. Epp. 249, 262; S IV, 159–60; 176–77.
141. Epp. 248, 329; S IV, 158–59; S V, 261–62.
142. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 174–76.
143. Fröhlich, "Anselm's Weltbild," 515.