The Transformation of Friendship
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union of Canterbury and king, for Anselm, should be ordered for one and only one purpose: the furthering of the city of God in the spiritual life of his community, a community which embraces not just clerics and monastery but the whole of his jurisdiction, which was all England.144 Just as Anselm thinks of himself as speaking the language only of scripture and the fathers (even though their voices are not distinct but subsumed under Anselm's voice), he sees secular power and the Church both from within the same perspective, that of the heavenly rather than the earthly city.
The Transformation of Friendship Anselm's idealized notion of friendship makes human friendship resemble the relationship to God. Anselm demands the complete renunciation of worldly life and relationships but promises the rewards of friendship in the transformation of earthly into completely spiritualized relationships. Rather than thinking of friendship as the relationship of two different individuals, Anselm makes it the subsumption of individuals into a single identity, the perfect union of minds and wills.
His spiritual community can allow no separation between individuals any more than his arguments can between word, thought, and thing. Just as in his arguments, Anselm leaps to the moment of union between word and thing, in the letters he asserts the perfect union of minds and wills and friendship. Obedience and humility and the subjection of the secular to the spiritual are the means to bring about that perfectly unified relationship. The right will for all does not emerge from any sort of conflict of opinions or any sort of compromise between the worldly and spiritual points of view. Rather it is the absorption of the individual into the corporate, the worldly into the spiritual.
As Anselm makes clear more than once, the price of the spiritual joy he promises is the rejection of one's secular identity and relationships.
His friendship in its strongest form is available only to those professing the monastic life, which involves exchanging an individual identity for a joint one. In a late letter to a nun, he tells her that her life is now completely cut off from her family in the world.145 And in one of Anselm's
144. It is beyond the scope of this book and my expertise to sort through the details of the complications of Anselm's relationships with popes and kings. There are, as has been noted, many disagreements among historians on how to interpret Anselm's actions as archbishop as successful or politically astute that cannot be settled here. What I conclude here is what I think could be agreed by the major commentators on Anselm as archbishop: Southern, Fröhlich, and Vaughn. See Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer, 142–93, and Portrait in a Landscape, 259–347; Fröhlich, "Anselm's Weltbild," 499–517; Vaughn, Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan, 149–345.
145. Ep. 405, S V, 349–50.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union analogies, he describes the monks as able to remain safe against the onslaughts of the enemy only if they remain within the walls of their castle, not looking out the windows even when they hear the cries of their relatives being killed.146
What is peculiar to Anselm's spirituality expressed in the letters is not the construction of human life into a narrative reaching toward
God—this goes back at least to Augustine and extends far beyond Anselm. It is, rather, the way in which he shapes that narrative. The story begins with the grief and longing at the separation of one human being from another and the utter opposition of human and divine wills and ends with the complete and total unity of divine and human wills in the perfect unity of friends and perfect harmony of wills in the monastic community. On the one hand, Anselm goes so far as to characterize
God's plan for him as not just different from how he sees his own good, but as violence, yet, on the other hand, he thrusts himself (and others) equally violently toward total subsumption of self into God. Similarly,
Anselm describes his dejection at separation from friends as complete and his sorrow as irremediable only to go on to reimagine separation as unity and requiring the complete redirection of love onto a different and completely general object. On Anselm's model of friendship, the attachment and unity between friends becomes more complete even as it comes to lack specificity and physicality.
In an important sense Anselm never casts himself nor addresses his fellow monks as "on the way" but places them at one extreme or the other.
Anselm's addressees, like Anselm and everyone in this life, of course, is in via, but the point is that for Anselm, being "on the way" is not a place to stay and or be at home. Anselm only recognizes two possibilities: one is either moving out of the world toward God (in which case what matters is not where one is but where one is going, not the motion but its goal), or one is mired in the nullity of the world. Moreover, Anselm doesn't reconcile the conflict between human will and God's by appealing to a future point of convergence between the lines of his will and God's, nor does he resolve the problem of the meaning of events in human life by reference to a providential plan whose outlines are still unclear. Rather the trajectory of one's own will must be erased in order to join it to God's and the providential plan is made clear by its end: death and union with God.
Anselm first widens and then traverses in one giant step the gap between his will and God's, enveloping sadness and separation within a larger perspective of spiritual joy and presence.
146. Mem. 66–67.
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union The transformation of friendship and community Anselm effects, dissolving the vicissitudes of human relationships into the relationship with God and the diversity of wills into one will identical to God's, is striking not because this itself is new—nothing could be more Augustinian or in tune with the Benedictine rule. What is striking is that he has effected this change by beginning from a model of friendship that looks like the opposite of the Augustinian, Benedictine model: an intense, specific, exclusive attachment which is desirable for its own sake, frui rather than uti, and turned it into a monastic model of human relationships as general, indirect, and in which all the intensity is directed not at one's fellow monk but at God, in and through whom they are friends.
Like Anselm's evocation of the intimate love between mother and child, brother and brother, nursemaid and baby in the prayers, there is in Anselm's ministry to his fellow monks an acknowledgement of a human desire for these kinds of intense, physical, and exclusive attachments. It is evidence of Anselm's deep psychological insight that he recognizes and speaks to that desire, but then completely redirects it toward the monastic life.
Anselm has combined elements of earlier forms of classical friendship and sexual love in poets like Ovid, put together the moral basis and stability of classical friendship with the intensity of longing and desire in erotic love, to describe a model of human relationship that anticipates the advent of romantic love in the twelfth century. The borrowing of the language of erotic love for a higher love has precedents, of course, in Plato's ascent of the soul and even closer to Anselm in mysticism, where longing for union and union itself with God is described in erotic terms.
However, Anselm uses the kind of language mystics use for love of God for his love and longing for his fellow monks. He takes his language not just "up" from erotic love but also "down" from mystical union to form his model of monastic friendship.
Anselm evokes this mode of relationship and the desire for it as a way into the monastic life; it is his recruiting tool. His argument is that the monastic life, in which human relations are grounded in the relationship to and dedication of one's life to God, is the path to the satisfaction of that desire. It is also a language and model that he deploys to convince other monks and clerics to join their wills to his, to will, with him, one thing. Though some of the reaction to Anselm's construction of friendship was disappointment and confusion, we cannot impute any duplicity to Anselm. His sincerely and deeply held view is that the monastic life as he understood it meets fully, more fully than any other kind of relationship, the human desire for attachment. Moreover, the letters show that
Physical Separation and Spiritual Union Anselm deployed this rhetoric of union of hearts and wills in a monastic context in way that shows real care for his fellow monks. He writes often to beg for mercy on behalf of an erring monk, seeking forgiveness for him from his superiors, and his direct rebukes of individual monks rarely seek greater abnegation. He writes to urge them to continue in the monastic life when they are tempted away, to show them a way to find a kind of fulfilling love having left a community in which they felt at home, and to discourage them from imposing on themselves more strict physical renunciation than called for by the rule. Pride earns Anselm's censure far more than concupiscence.
What this model of human relationship shares is the pattern found in Anselm's prayers, that stretch from this world to the next, from the lowliest human needs and desires, the most basic desires of child for mother love, of (sexual) desire for consummation. Anselm finds the fulfillment rather than the obliteration of those desires in divine love in the community of the religious life. While Anselm tells monks to abandon their families, exhorts them not to leave the cloister to help family members on the outside, urges husbands and wives to give up their marital relationship to join the cloister, Anselm does not disparage the desires those domestic relations are designed to satisfy (though we would have to say he does disparage the domestic and sexual relations themselves). Rather he argues that, paradoxically, those most intimate, specific, concrete and physical desires are fulfilled in the utterly spiritual relationships of the monastic life.
There is nonetheless something problematic about Anselm's attempt to put into practice in this world a kind of friendship suited to the next, to design for creatures of flesh and blood, operating in finite time and space, a model of relationship that transcends all those limitations. It is not surprising that this vision of monastic life as both the fulfillment of the deepest and most ardent human desire for relationship with one's fellows and what Southern so aptly called "a programme of the most exacting renunciation" was not immediately understood and embraced by all Anselm's fellow monks.147
147. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 165.
Grammar and Logic Linguistic Analysis, Method, and Pedagogy There was a time when Anselm's De grammatico, the Lambeth Fragments, and even De veritate were neglected and disparaged in favor of the famous treatises on God, the Proslogion and Monologion.1 Prantl, the great historian of western logic, complained that Anselm's short dialogue known as De grammatico was "futile, wandering, tiresome, and laborious."2 Nineteenthcentury commentators tended to draw a sharp line of separation between Anselm's theological works and De grammatico, seeing its preoccupations as unconnected to the rest of the Anselmian corpus.3 Desmond Henry convincingly showed that the analysis of ordinary language, the construction of a technical language, and distinction of senses present in the logical writings are not an anomaly but are significantly present in all Anselm's work. Thus, Henry argues that all the works, logical and philosophical, are united by the theme of the "distinction between the meaning and the use of words and sentences."4 Anselm's interest in linguistic analysis "permeates" all his work, on Henry's view.5 Henry notes the parallel gap between grammar and logic, on the one hand, and between ordinary language and the language used to talk about God, on the other, and he speculates that it may have been Anselm's awareness of the gap between the latter that drew his attention to that between the former.6 Gillian Evans essentially con1. Desmond P. Henry has given a bibliography of some of these views in his "Saint Anselm's De
Grammatico," Philosophical Quarterly 10, no. 39 (April 1960): 115.
2. Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1861), vol. 2, 92, cited in Henry, "Saint Anselm's De Grammatico," 115.
3. Barthélemy Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique, 2 vols. (Paris: Durand et PedoneLauriel, 1872), vol. 1, 268.
4. Henry, "Saint Anselm's De Grammatico," 116.
5. Desmond P. Henry, The Logic of Saint Anselm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 22.
6. Desmond P. Henry, "Saint Anselm as Logician," in Sola Ratione: Anselm-Studien für Pater
Linguistic Analysis, Method, and Pedagogy curs, arguing that Anselm "builds his general theory of language upon a special theory of divine language."7 Marcia Colish remarks that the "quasilogical grammar" Anselm developed by "adjust[ing] the current notions of grammatical signification to the new and disturbing insights of eleventhcentury logic" "is Anselm's basic theological tool."8 Henry concludes that Anselm's "concerns with meaning, use, and logical form endow his techniques with a family resemblance to those of contemporary linguistic analysts sufficient to bring him . . . within the ambit of some such title."9 Henry further speculates that the Lambeth Fragments was Anselm's sketch for a unified treatment of language and calls it "central text" for Anselm's views on language.10
While an earlier generation of commentators ignored the logical writings or at best subordinated their questions those of the theological works, Henry tends toward the other extreme, understanding the concerns, or at the very least, the methods of the theological works in terms of the logical ones. Henry has not been alone in this. Alain de Libera's
La philosophie médiévale, for example, devotes over twice as much space to De grammatico and its posterity as to the ontological argument. With the encounter of Stoic grammar and Aristotelian logic in De grammatico, de
Libera concludes, "a world is in the process of being born."11 There are, as Colish notes, two different lopsided views of Anselm on language, one that would make him "a modern linguistic analyst and symbolic logician avant la lettre" and another that would make him "a proponent of the Platonic and Pauline doctrine of the poverty of language."12 On the one hand, in De grammatico and in the fragments, Anselm's primary activity is linguistic analysis of the type Henry describes, and the theological writings use many of the same techniques. In fact, all Anselm's writings reveal a thinker who does not simply engage in this type of linguistic reflection as a means to an end; he clearly enjoys it.13 On the other hand,
Dr. h. c. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt OSB zum 75. Geburtstag am 20. Dezember 1969, edited by Helmut Karl
Kohlenberger (Stuttgart: Freidrich Frommann Verlag, 1970), 16.
7. Gillian R. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 20.
8. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed.
(Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 58.
9. Henry, Logic of Saint Anselm, 120.
10. Henry, Logic of Saint Anselm, 120. Henry subtitles the chapter in which his discussion of the fragments appears, "the central text." The fragments, he argues, "can be supposed to constitute the draft of the promised unified treatment" of linguistic analysis.
11. Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993),
294, 292–305.
12. Marcia L. Colish, "St. Anselm's Philosophy of Language Reconsidered," Anselm Studies 1
(1983): 118.
13. Ermanno Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense: The Case of Anselm and His God (Princeton: