The Problem of Faith and Reason
The Monologion and Proslogion Language Straining toward God The Problem of Faith and Reason Central to the interpretation of the Monologion and Proslogion and the focus of centuries of controversy about them is their dueling claims to proceed sola ratione and by "faith seeking understanding." Commentators have tried to understand and reconcile these claims in a variety of ways. The opposing positions were classically articulated by Karl Barth, who argued strongly that Anselm's investigation takes place wholly within the context of faith, which provides the premises as well as the questions, and Etienne Gilson, who took it that Anselm's project was to prove the things of faith—all of them—on rational grounds. Thus for Barth, the presupposition of the notion, that which none greater can be conceived, is a theological one, and its exploration is undertaken in faith; for Gilson,
Anselm is, as I noted earlier, "recklessly" rationalistic, his pretensions for reason "indefensible."1 Others have argued that Anselm contradicts himself without knowing it.2 Still others have argued in different ways
1. See the introduction to this volume. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, translated by Ian W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), 55–59; and Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1951), 26. For more on Gilson's views on Anselm's project, see Gregory B. Sadler, "Saint Anselm's Fides Quaerens Intellectum as a Model for Christian
Philosophy," The Saint Anselm Journal 4, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 32–58; and Eileen C. Sweeney, "The Problem of Philosophy and Theology in Anselm of Canterbury," in Medieval Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, edited by Kent Emery and Russell Freidman, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 487–514.
2. M. J. Charlesworth, "Introduction," in St. Anselm's "Proslogion" with "A Reply on Behalf of the Fool" by Gaunilo and "The Author's Reply to Gaunilo," edited and translated by M. J. Charlesworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 34–40. Charlesworth claims that Anselm's practice is rationalist but that Anselm's description of his work in terms of an older patristic conception of theology does not match his practice. David Pailin contends that the arguments are meant to be based only on
Language Straining Toward God that Anselm's project is reasoning within faith, but that it might, though not designed for this purpose, be convincing to those without Christian faith who might approach it with an open mind.3 On this view Anselm intends his arguments both for the faithful and the fool.4
The difficulty for both those advocating a more "philosophical" or a more "theological" account of Anselm's project is Anselm's insistence that his arguments to objectors, infidels, and unbelievers of various stripes are the same as those he offers to believers piously seeking to understand their faith. The difficulty for those advocating some version of the claim that Anselm intends his arguments to address both believers and unbelievers is how to make coherent sense of such a project.
Though the issue is larger and extends further into Anselm's corpus, the main ground on which these battles have been fought is the Proslogion, and its sister work, the Monologion. Some commentators have tried to draw a sharp line between the two works, arguing that Anselm puts aside the rationalism of the Monologion in the Proslogion. This claim is partly based on the slightly different language he uses to describe their tasks; Anselm describes the Monologion as operating "sola ratione" and as "exemplum meditandi de ratione fidei" and the Proslogion as "faith seeking understanding."5 Gregory Schufreider concludes that while the Monologion "provides no obvious justification for proceeding by means of reason, nor is it clear how its procedure is relevant to those in the monastery," the Proslogion "places the text within the context of spiritual reading, making such rational thought appear to be relevant to the medireason but that they assume a kind of "Neoplatonic" faith. David A. Pailin, "Credo et Intelligam as the Method of Theology and of its Verification: A Study in Anselm's Proslogion," Analecta Anselmiana 4, no. 2 (1975): 120.
3. André Hayen, "The Role of the Fool in St. Anselm and the Necessarily Apostolic Character of True Christian Reflection," translated by Arthur C. McGill, in The Many-Faced Argument: Recent
Studies on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, edited by John Hick and Arthur C. McGill
(New York: Macmillan, 1967), 176.
4. The "fool' in Anselm's argument is not so much an atheist but the atheist or at least agnostic within the believer. Hayen, for example, describes the fool as "the principle of foolishness which struggles against God in all the fools." Hayen, "The Role of the Fool," 169. Cf. Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 86. Colish calls the nonbeliever in the Proslogion "a hypothetical straw man rather than an organized contemporary threat to the Christian faith." Katherin Rogers argues that Anselm intends "one and the same argument" to do two different things: "convert the unbeliever, and help the Christian attain intellectus." See Katherin Rogers, "Can Christianity be Proven?
St. Anselm of Canterbury on Faith and Reason," Anselm Studies 2 (1988): 465.
5. See Pros., Prooem. S I, 94, and Mono. 1, S I, 13. See A. Antweiler, "Anselmus von Canterbury,
Monologion und Proslogion," Scholastik 8 (1933): 558. See also Anselm Stolz, "Anselm's Theology in the Proslogion," translated by Arthur C. McGill, in The Many Faced Argument, edited by Hick and McGill, 183–88. This is a translation of Stolz's "Zur Theologie Anselms im Proslogion," Catholica 2
(1933): 1–24. See also Stolz, "Das Proslogion des hl. Anselm," Revue Bénédictine 47 (1935): 331–47.
Language Straining Toward God tational movement toward God to which monastic existence is itself addressed."6
Anselm begins the Monologion without explanation, simply supposing someone ignorant of God. He begins with the following supposition: "If about the one nature, highest of all things that are, alone sufficient to itself in its eternity and beatitude, and giving and making all other things which are something and are in some way good through its omnipotent goodness," "and of many other things which we necessarily believe about God or his creatures," whether through not hearing or not believing, someone is ignorant, he can "persuade himself to a great degree," even if he has only a mediocre intellect.7 It is an amazing, even shocking supposition, both because of how much Anselm supposes one may come to know led by "reason" and because of the character of his imagined persona. As others have noted, there could have been no actual persons Anselm would have known or even known about in this position. The non-Christians of Anselm's world would have been theists. Anselm softens the shock by leading with the object, describing the highest being first, and withholding the description of the subject and his ignorance, a syntax reproduced above, despite its awkwardness in English. Even more shocking, the Monologion sets out to derive the persons of the Trinity from the notion of the highest being, as well as the rest of the divine attributes and its creative act. Moreover, Anselm keeps carefully to his conceit throughout the text, referring only to the summum ens throughout the Monologion, concluding only in the very last lines that this highest being is God.
There is a precedent in Augustine's De libero arbitrio for the construction of an argument for the existence of God beginning only with the most basic, universally acceptable premises. But Augustine did not imagine someone who might receive this argument as news; rather, Augustine's dialogue partner, Evodius, places himself in the position of one whose faith is firm but who seeks to understand.8 Anselm's persona in the Monologion is both more distant from and more intimately connected with him. More distant because imagined as ignorant (or even obstinate) rather than inquiring into the grounds of his already extant belief, and 6. Gregory Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994), 278–79.
7. Mono. 1, S I, 11, 5–10.
8. See Augustine, De liberto arbitrio II, 3–15 for Augustine's argument. In book II, 2, Augustine mentions the fool from the Psalms, asking whether they should dispute with him. But the proof
Augustine does offer is to Evodius, who asks questions as a person of firm faith and seeking understanding from faith.
Language Straining Toward God more intimate because not constructed as a distinct dialogue partner but as a voice Anselm takes on himself.
The claim that there is a substantive change of method from the Monologion to the Proslogion is not, in the end, persuasive.9 First, Anselm repeatedly links the two works as similar and as having a similar method.10 Second, though Anselm's evocation of the "fool" as foil and possible beneficiary of his argument in the Proslogion is rooted in scripture, the role Anselm constructs for the fool is virtually identical to the figure of someone ignorant or disbelieving created in the Monologion. The fool in the Psalms passage from Cassiodorus to Peter the Chanter was most often interpreted as a Jew who rejects the divinity of Jesus.11 Though Anselm cannot not have known the common interpretation, he chooses to interpret the fool as rational unbeliever who rejects the God common to the religions of the book rather than Jewish objector to the Incarnation. He chooses, at least as he sets out in both works, to confront unbelief as generic rather than sectarian, and as seated in reason rather than the will.
Nonetheless, the scriptural source for the fool should not be ignored.
As John Clayton points out, Anselm would have "confronted the fool of the psalms" at least twice a week in Psalms 13 and 52 in the Benedictine cycle of weekly prayers.12 Thus the idea of the fool would have been deeply entrenched in Anselm's prayer life, and addressing such a figure is not contrary to but inspired by rumination on scripture. What the Proslogion adds to the Monologion's supposition of a nonbeliever, then, is a link between scripture and the task Anselm has set for himself in both works.
However, Anselm is not merely creating a cover from scripture for his rationalistic project in the Proslogion but rather making that link more explicit.
Third, though the Proslogion makes the link to scripture explicit, it sets as its task something similarly or even more audacious than the Monologion: to prove everything that is believed about God and to do so with one argument and in such a way that it cannot even be rejected by "the fool who says in his heart there is no God." The goal Anselm sets for reason is to prove that God exists, even, just as in the Monologion, to one un9. Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 56–63.
10. See EDIV 6, S II, 20, 16–19 as well as Pros., Prooem. S I, 93–94, and Ep. 109, S III, 241–42.
11. Gilbert Dahan, "Sainte Anselme, les Juifs, et le Judaïsme," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe siècles: études anselmiennes. IVe session: Abbaye Notre-Dame du Bec, Le BecHellouin, 11–16 juillet 1982, edited by Raymonde Foreville, Spicilegium Beccense II (Paris: Editions du
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1984), 521–34.
12. John Clayton, "The Otherness of Anselm," Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophiae 37, no. 2 (1995): 136.
Language Straining Toward God willing to believe it. Anselm describes the fruit of his search for understanding through reasoning this way: "what I formerly believed by your gift, I now so understand by your illumination, that if I were unwilling to believe you to be, I would not be able not to understand it."13
Thus Anselm is not doing something different in the Proslogion but he has learned from the criticisms made of the Monologion that his method needs explanation, one which he attempts to offer in the Proslogion. This is a different view than that recently put forward by Toivo Holopainen, who argues that the only difference between the two works is in the devotional rhetoric Anselm gives to his rational project in the Proslogion.
That rhetoric serves as a somewhat duplicitous defense of the rational project of the Monologion, Holopainen argues, as Anselm uses it to involve the reader in (and bring him to enjoy) rational analysis "before s/he starts to suspect anything."14 However, it is clear that Anselm always thought of the rational and devotional projects as intrinsically and organically linked but adds a more explicit account and defense of that link in the prologues to both works. Thus, before launching into the interpretation of these two works separately, we turn to the way in which Anselm introduces them, attempting to explain and defend them in response to criticism.
Unifying the Pursuits of Faith and Reason We know a surprising amount about the composition of Anselm's first speculative, theological works both from Anselm himself and from Eadmer's Vita Anselmi, which attempts to describe and justify the works. We have already seen in chapter 2 the circumstances surrounding Anselm's submission of the Monologion to Lanfranc, asking Lanfranc to name it.
After Lanfranc declined to give his approval, it was, of course, Anselm who subsequently gave the work a title and had his name as author attached to both works.15 Anselm tells us of his desire to come up with a "single argument" to substitute for the "interwoven sequence" of arguments in the Monologion and of his difficulties in doing so.16 In a truly re13. Pros. 4, S I, 104, 5–7.
14. Toivo J. Holopainen, "The Proslogion in Relation to the Monologion," The Heythrop Journal
50 (2009): 590–602. Holopainen interprets Anselm's later addition of the preface and the chapter headings, as well as his request for the inclusion of Gaunilo's objections and his reply as all ways in which Anselm revised the work, now bringing out rather than hiding its rational character. On these changes to the text, see Schmitt, "Prolegomena," 64–65.
15. For the exchange with Lanfranc see Epp. 72, 77 (S III, 193–94, 199–200), and chapter 2, 61–
63. See also Ep. 109 (S III, 241–42) in which Anselm instructs Hugh, archbishop of Lyon and supporter of his work, to rename the works and to append Anselm's name to them as author.
16. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 4–6.
Language Straining Toward God markable passage that seems quite true to the composing process, Anselm describes coming close but failing in his pursuit, only to have the argument force itself upon him as he tried to resist it.17 Eadmer repeats this much and adds the story of Anselm writing down what he had discovered on wax tablets only to have one set disappear and the next set destroyed.18
We also know that Anselm changed and adjusted the titles of both works as part of his worry about how they had been and would be received.
He had, he explains in the preface to the Proslogion, titled his first work "An Example of Meditating on the Reason (ratione) of Faith" and the second, "Faith Seeking Understanding." Now he names them Monologion, id est soliloquium, and Proslogion, id est alloquium.19 Anselm's letter to Hugh of Lyons, likely written before the Proslogion preface as we have it, reveals that there were slightly different interim names; he asks Hugh to change the name Monoloquium to Monologion and asks to have the subtitle, "on the reason (ratione) of Faith" removed as unnecessary (superabundans); he changes Alloquium to Proslogion though in the preface published with the Proslogion he leaves alloquium as a gloss along with soliloquium as the gloss for Monologion.20 The Greek names he gives them are more polished and less generic, more suited to works more explicitly published.
Anselm does not explain why he wants to change the titles in the letter to Hugh, though in the Proslogion preface he says that these titles are more appropriate (aptius) now that his name has been attached to both works.21 For the period, Anselm is a surprisingly self-conscious author of his works and the majority of his works are similarly equipped with prefaces instructing others on the form and manner in which the works are to be read. Anselm presents these works as if they began in his own meditation and conversations with fellow monks simply wanting to think these things through; he even implies that he wrote them down at first without too much of a notion of that they would be regarded as fixed and stable text, of which he would be the known author. His concern as he composes the two prefaces is to claim his authorship, giving the titles as the privilege of authorship (even changing them more than once).
However, the prefaces also in a sense allow Anselm to distance him17. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 10–19.
18. Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury/Vita Sancti Anselmi archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, edited and translated by Richard W. Southern (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1963), book 1, xix, 29–31.
19. Pros. Prooem, S I, 94, 12–13.
20. Ep. 109, S III, 242, 8–12; Pros. Prooem., S I, 94, 12–13.
21. Pros. Prooem., S I, 94, 11–13.
Language Straining Toward God self from the works. He does this first by telling of his reluctance to write both works, importuned by forces outside himself. Second, he crafts a persona in whose voice he writes in both works, a voice not exactly the same as his own. In the Monologion preface, Anselm writes, "whatever things I say here are put forward in the person (sub persona) by thinking alone (sola cogitatione) disputing with himself and investigating that which he had previously not considered, just as I knew those whose requests I tried to comply with wanted."22 In a strikingly similar way, Anselm describes the Proslogion as written "in the persona (sub persona) of one endeavoring to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and seeking to understand what he believes."23 This description of the persona under which Anselm writes the Monologion comes after a defense of the way the work talks about the Trinity as three substances (protesting that this claim is neither novel nor untrue) and before his plea to have his preface included in all versions of the work.24 He asks that the preface be included so that readers will understand the intent (intentione) and manner (modo) of the discussion and, thus, be less likely to judge it rashly.25
In the prologues written to both works, Anselm is clearly responding to criticism, criticisms already lodged against the Monologion and criticisms he anticipates will be made of the Proslogion. We know from Anselm's letters to Lanfranc that Lanfranc had been critical of the Monologion for its lack of specific reference to authority as well as its language of the Trinity.26 And we can see signs that Anselm feared similar criticism of the Proslogion. Giles Gasper has made the fascinating and persuasively argued suggestion that it was those who disapproved of his project at Bec who twice destroyed earlier drafts of the Proslogion (or at least its basic argument) before Anselm managed to make a final copy, and that this is a sign of much greater disagreement and foment both in the inner politics at Bec and about Anselm's approach to theological issues.27
22. Mono. Prol., S I, 8, 18–20.
23. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 21–94, 2.
24. Anselm is defending the claim he makes in the text, Mono. 79, S I, 86, 14. See my discussion of this passage on pp. 145–46. Augustine makes the same claim in De Trinitate VII, 4, 7; cf.
VIII, Prooem. The claim is also made by Boethius in Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, in The Theological
Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester,
Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 90. See n. 103, and also chapter 7 for the discussion of the Greek views on the Trinity in relationship to Anselm's
De processione, Spiritus Sancti.
25. Mono. Prol., S I, 8, 10–18; 21–26.
26. See Anselm's letter describing the criticisms made of the Monologion and the kind of criticism he fears in terms similar to the Monologion preface, Ep. 83, S III, 207–8. For more discussion of the exchange with Lanfranc, see chapter 2, 61–63
27. Giles E. M. Gasper, "Envy, Jealousy and the Boundaries of Orthodoxy: Anselm of Canter-
Language Straining Toward God Writing in the voice of an assumed persona serves as a kind of defense.
Anselm can thus distance himself from the questioning of the most basic beliefs about the divine nature the words contain. To critics attributing the skepticism such questions might imply to Anselm personally, he can reply that these are not his views but rather that of the persona he has created. In the same way, Anselm's attribution of the manner of his meditation—by reason alone and without reference to scripture—to the request of his fellow monks serves as a defense, showing that he undertakes this method of reflection not on his own initiative but theirs.
However, these ways in which Anselm contextualizes his arguments are more than defenses. The stories of composition and publication Anselm relates in both prefaces do not just invoke but enact the dialectic of "faith seeking understanding." The preface to the Monologion requests that readers begin from a kind of faith in Anselm's intention not to contradict authority, a faith that will bring them to join in the spiritual exercise of the work. In the Proslogion preface Anselm makes clear that the insight on which the work is based is both his and not his, both the product of his own efforts and a gift rather than his own achievement. The insight not only had to preexist his insight of it, but it had to find him rather than vice versa. In both works, Anselm is overcome and on the receiving end of the impetus to composition. It originates either from his fellow monks in the Monologion or from an insight coming to him of its own rather than his volition in the Proslogion. Both prefaces also describe intense introspection as well as probing conversation at the root of both works, reinforcing the sense in which they come from within and without.
The crafting of a persona who undertakes these questions under these constraints also aligns Anselm's project with that of his meditative prayers. Just as Anselm put himself in the position of Mary Magdalene and saw Jesus as mother in the prayers, here he puts himself in the position of one who has not considered the divine nature or who is atbury and the Genesis of the Proslogion," unpublished paper used with permission. For the story of the two distinct destructions of Anselm's writing on wax tablets, see Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, book 1, xix, 30–31. Cf. René Roques, "La méthode de S. Anselme dans le Cur deus homo," Aquinas 5 (1962):
3–57, who speculates that the Proslogion text was destroyed by someone who disapproved of Anselm's lack of reference to authorities. Gasper's picture is in stark contrast to the account Southern gives of Anselm's life at Bec as one of peace and tranquility. See Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm:
A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 113 and Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought 1059–c. 1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 47–48. Gillian Evans, too, seems to think of Anselm's monastic life as tranquil, requiring the contrast of the fervent emotions of the prayers and Proslogion. See Gillian R. Evans,
Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 171.
Language Straining Toward God tempting to approach the divine nature from below, assuming only the attempt not any particular content or background. Both personas are of a somewhat naïve beginner as Anselm tries, by taking an unexpected perspective, to invigorate and enliven the meditation, making fresh insight possible.
There is a formal continuity between the Monologion, Proslogion, and Anselm's earlier work; he thinks of them all as meditationes. The prayers, sometimes with the short pieces we now call meditations and sometimes on their own, circulated under various titles, described both by Anselm and in manuscripts as prayers, meditations, and both, that is, orationes sive meditationes.28 In his preface to the Monologion Anselm refers to the work as having the form of meditation and repeats this in the Proslogion preface.29 The practice of meditation, of rumination and introspection is, as I noted in the introduction, the crucial link between these works, mostly thought of as philosophy or speculative theology, and Anselm's monastic practice of meditative prayer. Both grow out of the Benedictine rule's emphasis on thoughtful examination of self and scripture.
What commentators have focused on is the claim to proceed sola ratione, but it is equally important to see that Anselm's exercise of reason is at the same time an exercise that is, though in the modern not medieval sense, imaginative. Anselm imagines himself in the position of someone else, feeling and reasoning as he thinks they would. This imaginative act creates the odyssey of reason from which these two works begin. This exercise has something in common with the simplest and more characteristic product of the imagination: metaphor. And as in metaphor, what
Anselm aims to produce is a fresh insight with an unexpected combination. The vehicle is the means—reason and clear and simple argument, and the tenor, the end—knowledge of God. Anselm does not join grammatical, dialectical training and lectio divina, as becomes common in the next century, by using dialectical and grammatical arguments to interpret scriptural passages or to mediate conflicts between authorities. Instead he uses the tools of dialectic to reach toward the basic truths about the divine substance taking on the voice of an imagined persona.30
When we think of these exercises in the context of meditative practice and monastic conversation as acts of imaginative reflection, we can see
28. On the titles see F. S. Schmitt, "Prolegomena seu Ratio editionis," in vol. 1 of S. Anselmi cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1984, reprint, Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1940–1961, Seckau, 1938), 140–48. Anselm's dedication refers to the collection as "orationes sive meditationes" (S III, 3, 2).
29. Mono. Prol., S I, 7, 3–5; Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 2.
30. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 1–3.
Language Straining Toward God that they are less like attempts to confront skeptical doubt than attempts to meditate the truths of faith in a new way. As meditations they aim to display the ground and significance of what he believes about the divine nature in ways that might have been obscured by the routine repetition of prayers.31 To the degree that they are acts of rationalism, they are so in the service of rumination. Taking the perspective of later intellectual history, we could say that, insofar as such things can be traced back to Anselm, the origins of rationalism and skepticism in his work arise from within not outside of monastic spirituality, derived from rather than opposed to its practices of reflection, introspection, and meditation. This does not mean that there is no tension between the means—the search for rational reasons and perfected language, and the end—the ineffable
God, but the tension is not an opposition of faith and reason.32 Just as we must not project back onto Anselm an opposition between faith and reason, we cannot reduce or circumscribe Anselm's rational project within faith or spirituality.33 Those who see Anselm this way save his work from one kind of distortion, equating it with philosophy as opposed to theology, only to fall prey to another kind of distortion, making it theology as opposed to philosophy. Neither of these categories as mutually exclusive exists for Anselm. We thus have to try to understand his project as neither philosophy nor theology in these narrow and exclusive senses but as both in some broader sense of each.
The projects in these works in their very extremity, both in the reliance on rational argument and in the seeking of the most important truths about God with the greatest possible certainty, are not only not opposed to the spirituality of the prayers and letters but are actually another expression of it. We shall see this in the way these works re31. Cf. the comments of André Hayen, "The Role of the Fool in St. Anselm and the Necessary
Apostolic Character of True Christian Reflection," translated by Arthur C. McGill, in The ManyFaced Argument, edited by Hick and McGill, 176.
32. Bencivenga does seem to construe the tasks of faith and reason here as opposed, characterizing Anselm's attempt to convince the rational objector as playing the spy (or even double spy) in the enemy's camp, Ermanno Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense: The Case of Anselm and His God
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 78–91. As Bencivenga writes, "The practice of questioning the system in order to establish it is, after all, a practice of questioning the system, and if that is what you do, you will end up in fact working for a different master than you thought. . . . You will be attempting a final vindication of ordinary beliefs and will generate one aporia after another and wake up sleepy souls and initiate centuries of challenging, provocative inquiry." Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense, 89, his emphasis. See chapter 3 for a discussion of Bencivenga's view of Anselm's practice of linguistic analysis.
33. For theologians like Anselm Stolz, Anselm's starting point, like his end point, is in theology. He concludes that "faith seeking understanding" means the attempt to "attain a vision of God through an understanding of what the faith says about God," a task accomplished by mystical theology. See Stolz, "Anselm's Theology," 185–86.
Language Straining Toward God peat over and over the moment in the narrative found in the letters and prayers. Here again insoluble problems, painted with the colors of reason as logical contradictions, are resolved, also with reason, as Anselm creates the greatest distance between word and thing, human ideas and divine reality, and then manages, as Gillian Evans put it, to "spin threads across [the] chasms" he has created.34
Anselm connects his rational and spiritual projects by means of the opening prayer of the Proslogion. The prayer both lays out the problematic for the Monologion and Proslogion and turns to reason as that which might satisfy monastic longing for God. This prayer creates the same kind of double bind we found in Anselm's prayer collection, describing extreme need for and desire for God but with impossible barriers to union with him. Anselm prays to God that he might find him but wonders, "Lord, if you are not here, where will I search for you, being absent? But if you are everywhere, why do I not see you present?"35 Where, Anselm continues, is the "inaccessible light" in which God dwells, and how might one come to it? The condition of exile as Anselm describes it implies infinite distance and ignorance; the exiled, Anselm tells God, "desire to come to you, and your habitation is inaccessible . . . long to discover you, and do not know your place."36
The paradoxes in his relationship to the divine in this prayer echoes, of course, the opening prayer of Augustine's Confessions. Augustine wonders as he prays how he can make room for God or reach toward God when it must be the case that he already exists in God; he reflects on the paradoxes of space in a God who fills all things by containing them, without having parts and without being dissipated; the God to whom he prays is merciful yet just, hidden yet present, ever active but at rest.37 These are not excesses of rhetoric in Anselm just as they are not in Augustine. The whole of both the Proslogion and Monologion are, in effect, explorations of these paradoxes. However, it is noteworthy that Anselm limits himself in his opening prayer to those paradoxes that have to do with the relationship between his desire for knowledge and union with God who is both supremely present to and absent from him, and that he places the others, internal to the divine nature, later in the works as spun out of their ba34. Gillian R. Evans, "The 'Secure Technician': Varieties of Paradox in the Writings of St. Anselm." Vivarium 13, no. 1 (1975): 20. Evans notes Anselm's penchant for paradox, but she argues that he creates them in his prayers and meditations and resolves them in his logical writings. My claim is that Anselm both creates and resolves paradox not just in the devotional writings but also in his speculative writings.
35. Pros. 1, S I, 98, 2–3.
36. Pros. 1, S I, 98, 3–7, 9–12.
37. Augustine, Confessiones I, 2–4.
Language Straining Toward God sic notions of the divine, the notion of the highest good in the Monologion and of "that than which none great can be conceived" in the Proslogion.
The paradoxes of presence and absence describe the central philosophical and theological problem of the Proslogion; they are Anselm's version of the Meno paradox. On the one hand, if one does not know God or that he exists, then there seems to be no path toward the discovery of these things, for Anselm concedes that God is infinitely beyond human comprehension and experience. How, then, can anyone know anything about God, who is by definition incomprehensible? If, on the other hand, one does know God, no proof should be necessary since his existence should be self-evident; God should be so thoroughly present that his absence cannot even be thought. Just as in the Meno paradox, there is apparently no middle ground here, no room between extremes for an argument to take place—God is either thoroughly absent or utterly present. Moreover, the supposition of God's complete presence becomes an argument for his absence—if God were present we could not not see him.
Since we cannot, he must be absent. The problem, we see clearly, is not extrinsic to faith but arises out of it.
The formula of the Proslogion, that that which none greater can be conceived, both captures and resolves the paradox of presence and absence explored in the opening prayer. For the formula mirrors the sense in which God is both supremely present, given in the very structure of thought, and, at the same time, always beyond the limits of thought.
Echoing his prayers and the opening of the Confessions, Anselm places on human nature and the fall the blame for this inextricable difficulty and on God the responsibility for leading him out of it.38 Since, trapped by the limits of his own nature, he cannot seek that which he cannot know because it is so radically distant from him, God must perform the act both of moving him toward God and of revealing himself to Anselm. Hence,
Anselm prays, "Teach me to seek you, and show yourself to me seeking you, for I cannot seek you unless you teach me, nor find you unless you show yourself."39 Anselm's solution to his version of the Meno paradox is, as was Augustine's, to proceed by way of "faith seeking understanding." It is on this note Anselm concludes his first chapter: "I do not attempt, Lord, to penetrate your profundity, since I in no way compare my understanding with that, but I desire in some way to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For neither do I seek to understand so that I might believe, but I believe so that I might understand."40
38. Augustine, Confessiones I, 7.
39. Pros. 1, S I, 100, 9–11.
40. Pros. 1, S I, 100, 15–19.
Language Straining Toward God The question, then, is what sort of faith Anselm assumes and what sort of understanding he hopes to conclude in. Anselm seems to concede the opposition between faith and understanding in his reply to Gaunilo, giving up the meditative thought experiment of thinking "in the persona
(sub persona) of one endeavoring to raise his mind to the contemplation of God."41 For Anselm opens his reply to Gaunilo by saying that he will reply not to the fool in whose name Gaunilo writes but to the Catholic that Gaunilo is, implying that Gaunilo's objections have forced him to throw off the fiction that his argument is sola ratione and reveal his reliance on faith rather than reason.42 To Gaunilo's objection that he can have no idea of the being than which none greater can be conceived, Anselm gives two replies. One is to the fool (relying on the ability of the mind to order greater and lesser goods), and the other is to the "Catholic" (appealing to Romans 1:20, "the invisible things of God are seen through the things that are made").43 On the one hand, Anselm will use reason to respond to the fool, who does not accept scripture. To reject the notion that reason can order things, better to worse, is to reject the possibility of making any kind of criticism, including, of course, criticism of Anselm's argument. On the other hand, Anselm's appeal to Romans and the path from visible to invisible things, is aimed at shaming Gaunilo into remembering that as a Christian he accepts the possibility of moving from the world to God in accepting scripture and that his attempts to block this path contradict St. Paul. Thus, strangely, we find that what Gaunilo the Catholic must believe in is the capacities of reason, reason that St. Paul has found among the Greeks, which is to say, among philosophers. So it is faith in reason that Anselm upbraids Gaunilo for lacking. In other words,
Anselm is bringing Gaunilo back to his Catholic commitment to rationalism; he is not appealing to something other than reason to ground his enterprise, but to the faith that reason can see in the world its source.
Reason should seek, prompted and guided by faith, and it will find, Anselm reminds Gaunilo, appealing to the exhortation found in Matthew,
"seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you."44
The Monologion and Proslogion begin from faith, then, in several senses. It is clear from Anselm's practice that he does not mean by faith the presupposition of all or even some of the basic principles of Christian faith articulated in the creed. He does presuppose faith in the sense that faith poses the questions for which he seeks understanding, such as the existence of God, the nature of God or the logic of the Incarnation. Fur41. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 3–4.
42. Resp., S I, 130, 3–5.
43. Resp. 8, S I, 137, 28–30; 138, 1–3.
44. Matt. 7:7.
Language Straining Toward God ther, he presupposes faith in the sense that faith entails an intense desire to know about the subjects he explores by reason.45 What makes the Proslogion possible is the passion expressed in its opening prayer. It moves
Anselm to shake off the torpor of the mind and awaken in it the desire to love God; as we saw in the prayers, this first movement toward God is for Anselm the sine qua non of the journey to God. The faith from which Anselm's pursuit issues is not just belief in but desire for the substance of things hoped for. Thus the discontent, the restlessness, and drive toward understanding is not from reason as the serpent whispering in faith's ear but from within faith itself. Lastly, Anselm presupposes faith in the concepts and rational processes of the human mind. 46 As Marion puts it,
"intelligence proceeds from faith, because rationality consists mainly in recognizing in faith the permanent and radical condition of the possibility of thinking; in that sense, intelligence needs not merely faith, but explicitly specified faith—belief in exactly this: that reason has to believe in order to achieve understanding."47 To reject those concepts and processes, which is what Gaunilo attempts in the name of the fool, is to be irrational, Anselm contends, to have rejected even one's own ability to think and argue. Assuming that the mind is rational, like assuming the desire to reach God, is for Anselm to assume something so basic that one cannot truly deny it.
In Brian Stock's problematic, the development of literacy, faith is to understanding as the oral is to the written. Thus, Stock describes faith as "a received text," and understanding as "an established text;" thus
"faith seeking understanding" is going from a received text to an established one.48 Pranger says something similarly insightful, that to think from faith toward understanding "means to draw [the truths about God] from memory right through the oblivion caused by the inaccuracies of our normal speech habits."49 What we find, then, is that "rather than being at liberty to deny the existence of God as language suggests, man is
45. Cf. Adolf Kolping, Anselms Proslogion-Beweis der Existenz Gottes (Bonn: Bouvier, 1939), 15–
20; and Barth, Fidens Quaerens Intellectum, 17.
46. Cf. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 125.
47. Jean-Luc Marion, "Is the Ontological Argument Ontological? The Argument according to Anselm and its Metaphysical Interpretation according to Kant," Journal of the History of Philosophy
30, no. 2 (Apr 1992): 207.
48. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 343.
49. M. Burcht Pranger, "Sic et non: Patristic Authority between Refusal and Acceptance: Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux," in vol. 1 of The Reception of the Church
Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, edited by Irena Backus, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill,
1997), 279.