Monologion: The Perfection of Language in the Word
Language Straining Toward God forced by reason to admit the necessity of His existence."50 To put it another way, faith is the belief that reason can forge a link—and is the passionate, motivating desire for an unbreakable link—between words and things; to seek understanding is to move toward joining word and thing.
There is an important sense in which Anselm both assumes nothing and everything in a way that the characterizations of Stock and Pranger make clear. For a "received text" is one already possessed; memory already contains that which we seek to find there; the words we speak are expressions of realities already contained in the understanding. We already have and have always assumed what we are seeking, Anselm is claiming.
But it must be uncovered and claimed as such, and for that task Anselm asks his reader to begin the excavation with only his bare hands, setting to work on a surface from which all the clues about where the treasure can be found have been erased. Finding out how and how much Anselm can uncover with these most basic tools is the task we turn to next.
Monologion: The Perfection of Language in the Word The opening lines of the Monologion, propose, as noted above, to reveal to one ignorant of it the nature of God, in this way setting up the beginning and end points of the meditation. There is someone who does not know or chooses not to believe at one end and the "many things we necessarily believe about God and creatures," on the other. Anselm's task is to start from ignorance in the "irrational" stance of his persona and to move "by reason" towards understanding which grasps its conclusions as necessary. Moving from ignorance to certainty is to go from nothing to everything, structurally parallel to the path in the prayers from sin to beatitude. The Monologion is particularly striking in this regard, moving back and forth repeatedly between bafflement and certainty at every step for each of the attributes of God, a pattern common to the other works but most pronounced as it originates here.
Divine Goodness and Being Anselm begins only with the question: given different things that are good, are they good through one thing or through different things?51 Anselm concedes that different things are said to be good with regard to different qualities; a horse is good because it is swift or strong, for example, while a strong, swift thief would be evil. Nonetheless, he argues, there
50. Pranger, "Sic et non," 278.
51. Mono. 1, S I, 14, 5–9.
Language Straining Toward God is a single scale of usefulness and excellence on which these diverse objects (with their diverse features) is ranked, as more or less useful, more or less excellent. We judge things (both as a whole and in terms of their qualities) to be good and evil because and to the degree that they are useful or excellent. The predication of goodness, Anselm claims, is the implicit construction of a scale of values. It does not matter whether we have or can agree on how to arrange things on this scale of value for Anselm's argument. His claim is only that, even if our claims are mistaken or incomplete, such judgments would be unintelligible (and not just mistaken) without such a scale and the scale itself would be unintelligible without a summit. This diversity of goods and their comparison would not be possible without there being one thing through which all those particular goods are good and that thing must itself be good and, unlike all other things, be good through itself.52 Anselm concludes, "There is, therefore, some one being which is the highest good and the greatest, that is, the highest of all thing that are."53
Moreover, Anselm continues, not only are all good things good through some one thing but all things exist through some one thing. To justify this conclusion, Anselm considers the contrary possibilities. All the many things might either exist through nothing or through some plurality of beings. But something cannot come to be through nothing, and, by the same logic from which the many good things were reduced to one goodness through which all good things are good, every plurality can itself be reduced to that one power or nature through which even those things which exist per se come to exist per se.54
This argument, as was noted in the discussion of Anselm and universals, has moved some to claim that Anselm is a realist, positing the existence of goodness in which good things participate.55 For Marilyn
Adams, for example, though Anselm does not posit the separate and independent existence of universals, he is a realist in this text in the sense that he takes universal entities to be "conumerable" with particular entities.56 This is both right and wrong. On the one hand, the supreme good in virtue of which all other good things are good must exist as lesser and 52. Mono. 1, S I, 15, 4–7. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate VIII, 3, 4–5.
53. Mono. 1, S I, 15, 11–12.
54. Mono. 3, S I, 15, 27–16, 28.
55. See chapter 3, 101–5.
56. Marilyn Adams, "Was Anselm a Realist? The Monologium," Franciscan Studies 32 (1972):
5–14. Adams is responding to D. P. Henry's interpretation of Anselm on universals. The criterion of "conumerability" is Henry's, and Henry argues that Anselm is not a realist in De grammatico or the Epistola de incarnatione Verbi but that the Monologion takes no definitive position. See Henry,
Logic of St. Anselm, 99–107.
Language Straining Toward God unequal goods do; otherwise, the argument would not function as an argument for God's existence. Not only does Anselm number God among the existing goods there are, but he takes the argument showing the connection between goods and the good to be indubitable. First, he contends that the gradation of goods is given and cannot be rationally rejected.
Thus, he says, anyone who doubts whether a horse is superior to wood, and a man superior to a horse "cannot truly be called a man."57 Second, he maintains that anyone concluding the series is infinite, that is, without a first "than which no higher can be found," could only fail to be regarded as "absurd" by one who was himself "very absurd."58 There, must, in other words, be a first good arrived at from consideration of the gradation of goods which is also good.
On the other hand, Anselm immediately moves from this conclusion to a discussion of the nature of God's existence, an existence so different from that of other things that the attempt to explicate it gives rise to a number of paradoxes Anselm must go on to resolve. The necessary and completely independent existence of the highest good seems, on closer examination, to be nonexistence: "For that which does not come to be from someone making or from matter or by means of some external assistance is either nothing or, if it is something, it exists through and by nothing."59 Anselm finds that following out the logic of the perfect, absolutely good, absolutely existing being seems paradoxically to lead to the conclusion that it cannot be called perfect, good, or even existent. Thus, the highest good seems not to be good or existent, or rather is not so as other things are good.
Anselm presents this difficulty somewhat apologetically, explaining that he has undertaken this meditation in the spirit of stating openly and attempting to address "almost any foolish objection."60 The reason
Anselm gives for his unstinting reflection is exactly the motive underlying his logical writings. Anselm considers these objections, he explains,
"in order that by leaving no ambiguity in my previous discussions, I may with more certain strength proceed to the rest."61
Anselm takes up the conclusion that the highest being is not good or existent, which seemed to reduce his argument to absurdity, and reduces it to absurdity. Since this being exists so perfectly and completely, Anselm argues, it can derive its existence neither from something nor from nothing.62 "How, then," he asks, "is it to be understood that this thing is
57. Mono. 4, S I, 17, 1–2.
58. Mono. 4, S I, 17, 7–8.
59. Mono. 6, S I, 19, 10–12.
60. Mono. 6, S I, 19, 14–17.
61. Mono. 6, S I, 19, 17–20.
62. Mono. 6, S I, 19–20.
Language Straining Toward God through itself and from itself if it neither made itself nor came to be of its own material nor assisted itself in any way to be what it was not? It seems it cannot be understood at all unless, perhaps, it is understood in the way in which it is said that the light lights or is lucent through itself and from itself."63 Within this one sentence response, turning on "unless, perhaps," Anselm goes from the view that the existence of the supreme being seems impossible, contradictory, and unintelligible to the view that its existence is transparent and self-evident.
"God exists" as analogous to the statement "the light lights through and from itself" hovers somewhere between a tautological statement
("the light lights"=A is A) and the more problematic claim that the source of existence exists itself and is "conumerable" with the other things it brings into existence. As a tautology, the analogy between the being of the supreme substance and the light through which light lights shows how something can exist through itself. Anselm is arguing that the existence of the supreme being is not unintelligible but in fact supremely and simply intelligible. As in the famous Proslogion argument, here Anselm argues that God's being is not just understandable but necessary and that his necessary being flows from the logic of the supreme being.
Taking the claim "God exists" as more than a tautology but as predicating being of that which is the source of being is more than problematic; it is paradoxical. Anselm spends not only the next few chapters but the rest of this work and the bulk of the Proslogion explicating the paradoxes which follow from God as both source and most complete possessor not only of being but of all perfections. Anselm is committed both to the claim that God's being is conumerable with other being and to its rejection. He needs it to be conumerable in order to prove God's existence.
But just as surely Anselm must reject it, pointing out how God's being is of such a type as to be absolutely different from other kinds of being.
Creation and the Word The same pattern of argument recurs in the discussion of the relation of creatures to God. First, Anselm argues that it is impossible that anything that exists not derive its existence from the supreme being. Since nothing else can exist through itself, or from another like itself, it must exist through God. But things cannot derive from the "matter" of God,
Anselm argues. He seems to mean by this that things cannot be of the same substance as God because, since things change and corrupt, God's substance would be, as source of theirs, likewise mutable and corrupt63. Mono. 6, S I, 20, 10–15; my emphasis.
Language Straining Toward God ible.64 Hence Anselm concludes that "it is most clear" that things derive their being from the supreme being, and that "nothing could be clearer" than that the supreme essence produced the multitude of appropriately diverse, beautiful, and ordered creation from nothing.65
This solution, however, only leads to a further paradox. Anselm begins by stating the obvious problem: if things come from nothing, "how could that which had no being assist in anything coming into being?"66
The view that things are created from nothing seems to make less sense than that they are created from something. Hence, just after declaring triumphantly in the previous chapter that what is created is created from nothing, Anselm retreats: "Whether, then, nothing is something, or nothing is not something, it seems to follow, that whatever is made is made from something."67 (If nothing is something, then things are made from something. If nothing is not something, since something cannot come from nothing, whatever is must come from something rather than nothing.) Anselm exaggerates the difficulty by noting how the issue also invalidates the preceding arguments: "Hence, since what was nothing will be something, that which was something in the highest degree will be nothing."68 That which is "something in the highest degree," God, will be nothing because Anselm's conclusions about this being have come to nothing. If creation is from something, in other words, then the supreme being is not anything Anselm has argued it to be. The pattern of the argument is like that for the being of the highest being. Anselm first argues for the necessity of creation from nothing and then displays the paradoxical character of this claim. He then resolves this paradox in a way that leaves a new paradox to defend.
The solution is found by examining language and its ambiguities.
"Creation from nothing" has two senses, Anselm explains. There is a sense of "creation from nothing" that implies neither the nonexistence of created beings nor the nonexistence of the creator. In this sense "creation from nothing" means not that "nothing" is somehow the matter, the that from which creation comes; rather it means that "those things which before were nothing, are now something."69
Anselm uses language as the analogy for the way creation comes forth from God. In order to make the analogy work, Anselm has to adjust both the notion of ordinary language and the notion of the Word. There are
64. Mono. 7, S I, 21.
65. Mono. 7, S I, 22, 5–10.
66. Mono. 8, S I, 22, 18–19.
67. Mono. 8, S I, 22, 26–27.
68. Mono. 8, S I, 22, 32 – 23, 2.
69. Mono. 8, S I, 23, 6–8.
Language Straining Toward God three kinds of words: the spoken word, the word thought but not spoken, and the expression of "the things themselves inwardly in our mind."70
Words of the last type Anselm calls "natural" words, common to all human beings; these are words in the truest sense, closest to the thing itself, the sine qua non of spoken language.71 Anselm equates these words with the exemplars in the divine mind: "Such an expression of things was with the supreme substance before they were, so that through it they might be made; and are now when they have been made, so that through it they may be known."72
Anselm thus stretches the notion of a word in human language until it touches the divine word. It remains for him to clarify and qualify that point of contact. God has no sources for the exemplars from which he creates, while human beings create from their ideas and internal words of external objects. Human expressions are, Anselm explains, "neither the first, sole, nor sufficient cause" for the works we create as artists, while God's expressions are all three.73 Something created through God's word is all and only what it is through that word, while that brought about through human expressions would not exist at all "unless it were something that it is not through this expression itself."74
Anselm draws the conclusion that the expression of the supreme substance is identical to the supreme substance but postpones examining this topic in order to work out more of the aspects of the supreme being in terms of its relationship to and difference from that which it creates and sustains in being. This ordering of topics, the exploration of some aspects of the Trinity before working out the divine attributes which apply to the essence as a whole, shows Anselm understands the logic of the divine nature accessible to reason as implying the Trinity and that he thinks of the role of reason in its explication is no different than when it turns to the essence of divine nature. We also see what theologians always notice but philosophers tend to miss (the few who read the Monologion at all rather than stick to the Proslogion): that this is a work on the Trinity.75
70. Mono. 10, S I, 25, 1–4.
71. Mono. 10, S I, 25, 12.
72. Mono. 10, S I, 25, 25–27. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate IX, 7, 12. Augustine contrasts the spoken word with the interior word but does not add a third type of word. Augustine's internal word may be most like Anselm's "natural word" since it is the source of true knowledge, though Augustine does not focus, as Anselm does, on the way in which the natural word more closely resembles and most perfectly expresses that of which it is the word.
73. Mono. 11, S I, 26, 19–20.
74. Mono. 11, S I, 26.
75. Cf. Paul Vignaux, "Nécessité des Raisons dans le Monologion," Revue des sciences philos-
Language Straining Toward God Deriving the Divine Names Notwithstanding the work's character as a De Trinitate, Anselm postpones the completion of his trinitarian analysis for an examination of the divine names.76 From the notion that the supreme being is that which creates and sustains (and excels, limits, and pervades) all other beings,
Anselm sets out to derive what can and cannot be said of it substantively. This project precipitates the next set of difficulties and paradoxes Anselm lays out and then resolves. Since relational predicates (including comparative and superlative terms) cannot tell us anything substantive
(such terms like supreme and greater or greatest would be inapplicable if nothing else than the supreme being existed, yet it would not be less good or great), Anselm then considers non-relational predicates and argues that the supreme being must have all those properties it is in every respect better to be than not to be.77 Hence, the supreme being must "necessarily be living, wise, powerful and all powerful, true, just, blessed, eternal and whatever similarly it is better to be than not to be."78
However, problems arise almost immediately. Predicates like "just"
(and any of the other predicates Anselm has derived) are attributes. All things are just (or any other quality) by participating in justice and are not just per se but per aliud. But the supreme being cannot be just per aliud since whatever the supreme nature is, it is through itself not through another.79 Hence, Anselm concludes that the supreme being is not properly said to have justice but rather to exist as justice and able both to be just and to be justice.80 The same holds true for all the other attributes; thus it is "highest being, highest life, highest reason, highest salvation, highest justice, highest wisdom, highest truth, highest goodness, highest greatness, highest beauty, highest immortality, highest incorruptibility, highest immutability, highest beatitude, highest eternity, highest power, highest unity." It is both highest life and living, wisdom and wise, power itself and powerful, and so forth.81 Here we see in stark terms that Anselm is unwilling to restrict the highest being to being conumerable ophique et théologiques 64 (1980): 4. Vignaux makes this case, as I do, on the basis of the structure of the work, pointing out as well that Honorius of Autun, a disciple of Anselm, glossed Anselm's title,
Monologion, as "De Trinitate." See PL 172, col. 232.
76. Frederick van Fleteren suggests that this section, chapters 13–26, was added by Anselm as part of his reworking of the text in response to Lanfranc's criticism. Frederick van Fleteren, "The Influence of Augustine's De Trinitate on Anselm's Monologion," in Saint Anselm—A Thinker for Yesterday and Today, edited by Coloman Viola and Frederick van Fleteren, Texts and Studies in Religion
90. (Lewiston, N.H.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 418.
77. Mono. 14–15, S I, 27–29.
78. Mono. 14, S I, 29, 29–31.
79. Mono. 16, S I, 30, 4–13.
80. Mono. 16, S I, 30, 19–31.
81. Mono. 16, S I, 31, 3–8.
Language Straining Toward God with other beings or not, not just in regard to being but any other predicate. He declares without hesitation that this being is both just and justice, wisdom and wise. He is willing to embrace the conclusion that that which is the origin of these perfections is that in which others participate, and that it can share with its participants the same predicate. There is not only a form of justice and wisdom in which other things participate in order to be called just or wise, but the form itself, that which is the source, is itself able to receive that same predicate. Justice is just; the supreme being is just and justice, Anselm maintains.
However, once again, Anselm's solution to one problem causes a further problem. If this being is all these goods, "will it not be many goods?"
Anselm asks. Will it not be composed rather than simple?82 In this case Anselm does not linger over the possibility that this objection might hold but rejects it immediately: "the whole which was earlier revealed as necessary truth destroys and overwhelms this impious falsity by clear reasoning."83 But in order to respond more completely he must take the difficult position that all the different predicates—just, living, and the like—signify the same thing whether taken one by one or together as a whole.84 In this, Anselm is following Augustine's notion of divine simplicity; in De Trinitate, Augustine argues that God's greatness is identical with his wisdom, goodness, truth, and so on.85 However, Anselm takes a step which Augustine does not explicitly take. Anselm adds that all these predicates signify the same thing; thus, it is exactly the same to say
God is good as God is wise or God is good and wise and just. This does not give him pause, though it is perhaps worth noting that others were not so sanguine. Aquinas, for example, goes out of his way to reject the equivalent signification of all predicates as a consequence of God's noncomposition. He avoids taking Anselm's position by making a distinction between the way in which they signify one thing but under different aspects, reflecting the origin of our understanding of these notions from their divided and distinct way of being in creatures.86 Anselm, by 82. Mono. 17, S I, 31, 13–5.
83. Mono. 17, S I, 31, 20–21.
84. Mono. 17, S I, 31, 23–26.
85. Augustine, De Trinitate VI, 7, 8. See also William Mann, "Anselm on the Trinity," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 259.
86. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, part I, q. 13, a. 4. Editors of Aquinas have taken
Aquinas's target to be not Anselm but Alan of Lille, but Anselm does here express the view Alan takes up and expresses even more paradoxically. Cf. Alan of Lille, Regulae caelestis iuris, edited by N. M. Häring, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 48 (1981): 97–226, reg. 8. On Alan's embrace of this view, see Eileen Sweeney, Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), 132.
Language Straining Toward God contrast, seems ready to accept not just this metaphysical view of divine simplicity but a theory of theological predication in which "God is just" signifies the same thing as "God is wise."
Anselm turns next to the consideration of the highest being in relation to space and time. This being is without beginning or end and is always and everywhere, he concludes, for it cannot come into being from another (then it would not be the highest being) or from nothing (internally contradictory or inconsistent with being the highest being). Nor can it have an end as incorruptible and immortal, characteristics of the highest being. Moreover, as true being and Truth itself, it can have no end. For if truth had a beginning or end it would still be true both before and after that there was no truth.87 However, Anselm sees immediately that these arguments, and all his arguments thus far are, paradoxically, threatened by "nothing": "But here again "nothing" rises up and whatever reason explained up to now, having been attested to in accord with truth and necessity, it asserts to be nothing."88 If nothing will preand postexist the highest being, if it exists from and will come to nothing, "what," he asks, "was erected (molita) by such an elaborate structure
(moles) of arguments, if nothing so easily demolishes their endeavors (molimina)?"89 Anselm draws out his construction metaphor, describing the "whole structure of necessary reasons" as "assaulted by nothing." Not only will his reasoning become a house of cards knocked down by nothing, but the highest being will itself be lost "for nothing," Anselm concludes dramatically.90
Anselm resolves the difficulty with a distinction between two meanings of the claim "nothing existed before and will exist after the highest being" not unlike the distinction he introduced earlier for understanding the notion of "creation from nothing."91 "Nothing existed before the highest being" could mean either that there was a time before the highest being existed when nothing existed, or that "before the highest being there was not anything."92
What is puzzling is why Anselm, not once but twice, allows his argument to be derailed by "nothing." It is in one sense a fairly trivial verbal problem which he is clearly conscious of as he plays with the term "nothing": "Therefore let us assert, if we can, that nothing was not before nor 87. Mono. 18, S I, 32–33. Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 134, 6. Augustine, discussing the name God gave to Moses at Sinai, glosses it as signifying what is eternal, as what is true and true without beginning or end.
88. Mono. 19, S I, 33, 26–27.
89. Mono. 19, S I, 34, 8–9.
90. Mono. 19, S I, 34, 12–14.
91. Mono. 8, S I, 23.
92. Mono. 19, S I, 34, 18–22. Cf. Augustine, Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum V, 31–32.
Language Straining Toward God will be after the highest being rather than, while giving place to nothing before or after being, through nothing to reduce to nothing this being which through itself brought into being that which was nothing."93
Anselm is chasing these paradoxes; they do not quite come find him.
Through them, Anselm is exploring the Parmenidean paradoxes of language of being and nonbeing found in the Fragments.94 Predicating anything of nothing seems to make it something, and predicating anything of being (the highest being) seems to imply that it is not in some sense, that it has attributes and, therefore, composition.
The next several chapters set out to explain another set of claims that seem to contradict each other. Anselm's chapter headings are as follows: that the highest being exists in every place and time; that it exists in no place or time; that it exists in every and no place and time.95 The structure is striking. Anselm argues against both sets of claims, and then argues that both are true. It is especially striking as Anselm's chapter titles were designed not to go in the text but to precede it as a list. In that form the contradictory theses of the set of chapters is highlighted even more.
As Anselm opens his discussion that this being is in every and no place and time, he makes clear that he is aware of his strategy and wants to alert his reader. He asks, "How therefore will these [claims] harmonize (convenient) [given that they are] so contradictory according to the utterance and so necessary according to the proof?"96
Anselm's arguments that the highest being exists in all places and times (and in no places and times) are thorough reductiones ad absurdam, where contrary assumptions lead to conclusions Anselm calls "repugnant" and "unreasonable."97 As Anselm makes his argument for the claim that the highest being cannot be in space and time in the way material, finite beings are, he makes reference several times to the reasonableness of this conclusion and the unreasonableness of rejecting it. However, he also gestures toward the complexity of this reasonable view, highlighting that it does not sound reasonable even though it is:
"it is not unreasonably said that no place is its place and no time is its 93. Mono. 19, S I, 34, 15–18.
94. See chapter 3, 94–95, 100, 107–8.
95. Mono. 20–22. My emphasis.
96. Mono. 22, S I, 39, 3–4.
97. Mono. 20, S I, 35, 14; 21, S I, 37, 7. On God as eternal and outside of time, cf. Augustine, Confessiones XI, 11. On God as not limited in space but still as everywhere, cf. Augustine, Confessiones
V, 2; VI, 3; Sermo 277, 14; Sermo 53, 8. Compared to Augustine, Anselm makes the negative claims sharper, that God is in no space and no time, and spends much time on logical contradictions implied in attributing predicates of space and time to God. Augustine's language is more the language of superabundance rather than negation; whereas Anselm has more scholastically separated affirmative and negative predications, resolving to a third and different sense of God's relationship to space and time.
Language Straining Toward God time."98 Still Anselm exclaims the unreasonableness of holding that it is in a place and time; it is, he writes, "shameless ignorance (impudentia imprudentiae) to say either that place circumscribes the magnitude or that time measures the duration of the highest truth, which is not subject to any greater or lesser spatial or temporal extension."99 Anselm tries using repaired or amended language to express the peculiarity of this situation in order to avoid the kind of paradoxes he has pointed out. The highest being might more appropriately be said to be with rather than in place and time; we could say that, that is, if common speech (usus loquendi) permitted it, which, Anselm reminds us, it does not.100 Alternately, he argues it might be more appropriate to say that the highest being is "everywhere (ubique)" but not "in every place (in omni loco)" and "always" but not "in every time." The problem here is that, until he has time to gloss it, these are distinctions without a difference, and even with the gloss, matters are not perfectly clear. Anselm explains that the highest nature is in all things that exist (not as contained but containing) rather than in all places, and is always, meaning that it is in time as a whole as eternally existing.101
Similar but less elaborate arguments are deployed to show that the highest being is greater than others (a relation) (even though having no accidents, like relation, that would subject it to change) and is substance (even though unlike other substance having no differences).102 At one and the same time, Anselm both attributes predicates of the highest being which are common to created beings—this being is just; is somewhere, is greater than others, is substance—and shows these predicates to be, when taken in the ordinary sense, impossible to apply to God.103
Anselm concludes, "Hence if [the supreme being] ever has any name in common with other beings, surely without doubt a different signification is to be understood."104 The distance, for example, between God's being and the being of other things, is so great, Anselm contends, that other
98. Mono. 22, S I, 39, 20–21.
99. Mono. 22, S I, 40, 2–5.
100. Mono. 22, S I, 41, 1–2.
101. Mono. 23–24, S I, 41–42.
102. Mono. 25–26, S I, 43–44. On God as substance or essence without accidents, cf. Augustine,
De Trinitate V, 2, 4–5.
103. On God as substance, cf. Augustine, De Trinitate VII, 5. Because being a substance implies being a subject to further attributes, Augustine argues that God is more properly called essentia rather than substance, whereas Anselm keeps the term substance while shifting its meaning in order for it apply more appropriately to God. Moreover, Anselm takes this opportunity to state the more general principle, that all names applied to the highest being must be taken in a different sense. For Boethius's account of how all the categories shift when applied to God, see Boethius, De
Trinitate, in The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy 4, 16–21.
104. Mono. 26, S I, 44, 17–19.
Language Straining Toward God things are "almost non-being, and hardly are at all."105 This is simply the inverse of the paradox about the highest being that arose from proving its necessary being, that is, that its being is so different from other things that it can hardly be said to be at all. Ultimately, the two claims come to the same thing: that which must exist as the condition of the possibility of finite being contradicts everything we know about (finite) being, such that if one can be said to be, the other cannot.
Anselm is not composing what is nonsense in ordinary language in order to approximate a technical, symbolic language he lacks the tools to create, as Desmond Henry argued. However, Anselm is willing to come very close and very self-consciously toward claims that seem on the face of them nonsensical. Two ends are served by this language, one having to do with the nature of the highest being, the other having to do with those inquiring into that nature. First, Anselm is paving the way for his ultimate conclusion—that the highest nature is and is in space and time in a radically different way than creatures. It is true, as Visser and Williams point out, that Anselm's task has been to outline God's "metaphysical uniqueness" and to offer solutions to the difficulties he exposes in such stark and troubling ways, but it is too much to conclude, as they do, that Anselm is "not withdrawing or even qualifying the epistemological and semantic optimism that prevailed earlier in the Monologion."106 Anselm is pushing reason toward aporiae as the only way of moving toward a sense of that metaphysically unique being. As a pedagogical matter, Anselm wants to bring his reader to realize that they are in what Augustine called "a region of unlikeness;"107 his language of God becomes more and more unlike ordinary language as a way of bringing the reader to some sense of the gulf separating the material world from the divine being.
This is operative not just as Anselm poses the paradoxical dilemmas that mark each new attribute but in the solutions which themselves are difficult and problematic. Anselm proceeds not by holding back the reins of reason but by letting them go, confident not that reason will complete its task but that it will by its own logic come to its limits and gesture beyond them. For it is crucial to Anselm's notion of reason that his conclusions about the supreme being, though paradoxical, describing what is ultimately ineffable, emerge not against but from reason. Just as it is within the logic of faith to push toward understanding for Anselm, it is within the logic of reason that to push beyond reason.
105. Mono. 28, S I, 46, 3. Cf. Augustine, Confessiones VII, 11; In Iohannis evangelius tractatus 38, 10.
106. Sandar Visser and Thomas Williams, Anselm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
114, 117.
107. Augustine, Confessiones VII, 10.
Language Straining Toward God Deriving the Trinity Having worked through these attributes of the highest being, Anselm returns to the relationship between the highest being and its expression.
This relationship is a relationship of perfected language, of the complete identity of the thinker with the thought and thing thought. First, Anselm argues for the identity of thinker and thought: "This expression itself can be conceived of as nothing else than the intelligence of this spirit, by which he conceives [intelligit] all things."108 Then he argues for the identity of thinker and thing thought: "If this being made nothing except through itself, and whatever was made by it was made through that expression, how will it be anything else than what this same being itself is?"109 Conceiving is identical with expressing for divine but not human language, Anselm explains, because the highest being, unlike humans, never fails to express what it conceives.110
When Anselm considers the resemblance between expression and thing, he begins by noting the difference between human expressions, which are a mere likeness of the thing, and the expression of the highest being. The problem, Anselm points out, is that this expression cannot be both identical with the speaker and with the thing itself. If it were, then the highest being, like things, would be subject to change. But if this word is not identical with the thing, then it is not the perfect word but is, like human expressions, a mere likeness of the thing.111 The problem is resolved by reversing the ordinary understanding of which is more real, which the essence of a thing, and which is its image. Anselm argues that the expression of the highest being is the essence of the thing, and that what is normally called the thing itself is "an imperfect imitation of the true essence."112
This solution, however, leads to further difficulties. For the Word does not seem to be a word in any ordinary sense since it is not a word corresponding to an object as ordinary words are. Ordinary words depend on the things to which they correspond, and, therefore, these words would not exist unless things existed. If this were true of the Word, it would mean that either the highest being would not exist unless the creature existed (clearly false), or that the highest being would exist without the Word. But if the latter were the case, God would neither express nor conceive anything, including himself: "If it did not understand anything, then the highest wisdom, which is nothing other than this spir108. Mono. 29, S I, 47, 19–21.
109. Mono. 29, S I, 47, 9–11.
110. Mono. 29, S I, 47, 22.
111. Mono. 31, S I, 48, 17–19.
112. Mono. 31, S I, 50, 7–10.
Language Straining Toward God it, would be understanding nothing, which is most absurd. What then?
If it did not understand anything, how could it be the highest wisdom?
And if nothing in any way existed outside of itself, what would it understand? But would it be unable to understand itself?"113 Surely not, Anselm concludes, as even we, as finite but rational creatures, remember, understand, and distinguish ourselves from both the supreme being and irrational creatures.114
The chain of argument in this discussion of the Word is the same in structure as that found in the exploration of the nature of the highest being and its creation. Anselm stakes out a position worthy of the highest being, but further reflection on that position shows that there is an (apparent) absurdity that follows from it. That absurdity is resolved by explication of a further attribute of God, which in turn results in more
(apparent) absurdity. In this case the absurdities follow from the exploration of the existence of the Word and the assumption that God is the seat of perfect language, perfect self-understanding, and perfect creativity. Anselm resolves this difficulty by arguing for the identity of the word by which God creates with the word by which God knows and expresses himself. Since the word of creation and self-expression are identical with the supreme being, they are identical with each other.115 But, once again, Anselm asks the relevant and very difficult question that follows: "How can things so different, namely the creative and the created being, be said to be one word, especially since that word itself is said to be co-eternal [with the speaker], while the created world is not coeternal with him?"116
In response, Anselm repeats that the Word is not identical with the world, but that the world is the mere image, and that the world in the Word is the essence of the world.117 This gives rise to another apparent paradox, this time in reflexive form: what is "most manifestly comprehended" about how things exist in the Word and how things are known and expressed by the Word is that these things "cannot be comprehended by human knowledge."118 Anselm explains why this is so: things "exist more truly in themselves than our knowledge" and more truly in the 113. Mono. 32, S I, 51, 2–6.
114. Mono. 32, S I, 51, 9–12.
115. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate XV, 14, 23. Anselm takes the same position as Augustine, arguing for the identity between the highest being and its expression (the Father and the Word/Son) and what is known, the exemplars through which God creates. What is noteworthy is that Anselm arrives at these conclusions propelled by logic, from what seemed contradictory and impossible to what must be, barring absurdity, true.
116. Mono. 34, S I, 53, 15–17.
117. Mono. 34, S I, 53–54.
118. Mono. 36, S I, 54, 16–18.
Language Straining Toward God Word than in themselves. "How," Anselm asks, "would the human mind comprehend the character of that expression and that knowledge, which is so much higher and truer than created substances, if our knowledge is as far surpassed by these [created substances] as their likeness is distant from their being (essentia)?"119
There are two noteworthy things about this discussion. First, there is the tension between how this is comprehended (manifestissime) and what is comprehended: that it cannot be comprehended. Second, the conclusion in the form of a rhetorical question places human knowledge twice removed from comprehension of the reality of things; we cannot understand created substances as they exist in themselves but only their similitudes, and, worse yet, we are incapable of grasping them as they are more truly in the creating being. It is an explanation not of what we know but of what we do not and cannot know, but couched in terms of certainty.
What we are certain of is the great distance between what we know and what is the most real and true.
Even though Anselm has argued for the identity of God and his Word, he also notes that the "supreme spirit" and the "Word" must be distinct for reasons just as necessary as the reasons why they must be the same.
Anselm draws the conclusion on the basis of characteristics of language:
"For the word, in that it is a word or image, is related to the other, only because it is the word and image of something."120 The word and that of which the word is an expression must be distinct. This is the paradox at the heart of language: that words must capture their objects and be distinct from those objects. About the divine and the divine word, Anselm concludes, "Therefore, it is established that it cannot be explained why the supreme spirit and the word are two, although given certain properties of each they are required to be two."121 As Anselm puts in the chapter heading and repeats in the body of the chapter, however, "it cannot be said what two they are" for they are not two spirits or two creatures, nor two words or images. They are not two of anything in terms of their essence, their relation to creatures, or even their relation to each other.122
Reason has led to that to what seems like a dead end. Anselm rationally 119. Mono. 36, S I, 55, 6–10.
120. Mono. 38, S I, 56, 24–26.
121. Mono. 38, S I, 56, 28–30. Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 68, sermo 1, n. 5. Augustine asserts the distinction between Father and Son; however, he does so on the basis of the relations, that is, father cannot be father and be the same as son. What is significant in Anselm is the agnosticism he expresses here about how it is that these are two and one. Anselm moves in the next chapter to the language of the Word as begotten and to the analogy of the relationship to parent and child, an understanding which he shows also has its limitations.
122. Mono. 38, S I, 56, 21–24.
Language Straining Toward God derived two of the three persons of the Trinity but also has no options left for saying what it is these two are.
What is striking here is the pattern of Anselm's arguments. Just as the paradoxes have led to necessary conclusions, almost as often his attempt to draw out further necessary consequences from those conclusions lead to further paradoxes. Anselm summarizes his progress in a chapter entitled, "Retractio of what is common to both and proper to each" and describes his results as follows: "Having discovered so many and such significant properties, properties in which an amazing plurality, as ineffable as is inevitable, are shown to exist in the highest unity, it seems especially delightful to me to reconsider (retractare) more often such an impenetrable secret."123 Anselm's assessment of where his project ends repeats the same tension he described above: the many things discovered are balanced by the object of his investigation as both "the highest unity" and "an amazing plurality;" it is an "impenetrable secret," whose properties are both "ineffable" and "inevitable." The whole text thus far is an alternation of the hidden and revealed, of that which is most clear and that which is most impenetrable. An interplay, Anselm tells us, in which he takes delight.
There is, however, more. Anselm leaves aside what these are, the spirit and its word, and turns to understanding their relationship. Like the relationship of sign to signifier, the relationship of parent to child is also both realized to perfection and contradicted by the relationship between God the Father and Son. On the one hand, "the word of the supreme spirit is so completely from this same sole essence and is so uniquely like it, so that no child ever is as completely from its parent's essence alone or so similar to its parent." Thus, nothing seems more appropriately related as parent and child than the spirit and its word, and they most truly (verissimus) have the properties of parent and child.124
Anselm continues, Although it is so impossible that he who begets and he who is begotten be the same, as [it is impossible] for the parent and the son to be the same, that it is necessary for the begotten and the one begetting to be different and for the father to be different than the son; however, it is so necessary that he who begets and he who is begotten be the same, that it is impossible that the begotten be other than the one begetting or that the Father [be other] than the son.125
Relationship, like language, requires both identity, in the sense that the relationship is closer to perfection the closer it is to identity, and dif123. Mono. 43, S I, 59, 15–17.
124. Mono. 40, S I, 58, 1–6.
125. Mono. 43, S I, 59, 18–22.
Language Straining Toward God ference, for there is no relationship unless the related things are actually distinct, at least in some respect. This is the paradox Anselm continues to reflect on for the remainder of the chapter, that the highest being and its expression are so different they cannot be called by the same name but so identical that the essence of one is always in the other.
After showing that spirit and word as father and son are the same essence, Anselm goes on to argue that one can only be the essence of the other in a very special sense. "It cannot be understood that the father should be the essence of the son, or the son the essence of the father, as if the one could not subsist through itself but through the other."126 An identity such that one subsisted only through the other would be an imperfection because it would make one dependent on the other. Anselm solves this problem not by qualifying the notion of a shared essence but by taking it one step further, positing a kind of super relationship between father and son: "in order to signify how they have in common an essence supremely simple and supremely one, it may consistently be said and conceived, that the one is so identical with the other that the one possesses the essence of the other."127 To possess the essence of the other,
Anselm points out, is to be the other. Because the identity is so complete, one cannot be dependent on the other since the one is the other.
Anselm then derives more of the names of the Trinity and their relationship as memory and understanding, which allows him to derive the third person as the love of father and son.128 However, as Anselm stops to gather these conclusions about what can be said of each of the persons separately and together, he finds a difficulty. If father, son, and spirit are all individually memory, understanding, and love, then it seems that father is also son and spirit. Anselm responds this relying on the relational character of the father, son, and spirit, noting that father is understanding, but not son "because [he is] not understanding begotten from another" and is not spirit because he is not "love proceeding from another."129 However, problems remain. If each speaks himself and the other two, there seem to be multiple words, each speaking a begetting a son and sending forth a spirit.130
126. Mono. 44, S I, 61, 16–18.
127. Mono. 44, S I, 61, 18–21. Cf. Augustine, Epist. 170, 8. Augustine here discusses the equality of Father and Son and the ways in which their generation does not involve passion as human generation does, but he does not reflect on the paradox of identity and difference between father and son.
128. The trinity of memory, understanding, and love comes, of course, from Augustine's De
Trinitate. See De Trinitate X, 4. On the way in which all three are all one and yet are distinct, see De
Trinitate XV, 7, 12; 17, 28.
129. Mono. 61, S I, 71, 18–19.
130. Mono. 62, S I, 72, 6–13.
Language Straining Toward God Anselm describes in near contradictory terms the status of these truths and his own explanation. For on the one hand, he claims to have given "necessary reasons" to support his conclusions on the divine nature, even though "the intellect can not penetrate [these truths] such that they can be explained by words."131 Still, he adds, "their certainty does not waver."132 How exactly this is so, Anselm declines to explain, concluding, "if the above consideration rationally comprehends [comprehendit] that it is incomprehensible [incomprehensibile] how the highest wisdom knows the things it has made, of which we necessarily know so many, who could explain how it knows and expresses [dicat] itself, of which it is only possible for human beings to know nothing or very little?"133 Anselm is too careful a writer not to have consciously placed comprehendit next to incomprehensibile, describing his task (again) as comprehending that it is incomprehensible, wanting the reader to notice the tension between what is comprehended and how it is comprehended.
In the chapter that follows these comments come some of the most pessimistic statements in all of Anselm's writing about the possibilities of knowing God, raising (yet again) questions about the viability of any of the foregoing conclusions. "How therefore has anything true of the highest being been discovered if that which has been discovered is so alien to it?"134 It is one of a series of questions raising doubts about whether anything has really been discovered about this highest being.
He explains the difficulty in terms of language. The paradox is that although it has been established that God is "above and beyond all natural beings," the words used to prove those claims are the same ones applied to those very natural beings. "If, then, the usual sense of words is alien to [the highest being] whatever I have reasoned does not pertain to it. How, then, can anything we have discovered about the highest being be true if 131. Mono. 64, S I, 75, 8–10.
132. Mono. 64, S I, 75, 10.
133. Mono. 64, S I, 75, 11–14. Cf. Augustine, Sermo 52, 16. "If you have been able to comprehend
[what you have said of God], you have comprehended something other than God. If it is as if you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you. This he is not if you have comprehended it; if however he is this, you have not comprehended. What therefore do you want to say that you have not been able to comprehend?" Cf. Augustine, Sermo 52, 23. "That which is in you, you can know. That which is in he who made you, what he is, whatever that is, when will you be able to know that? And if you will be able to, you cannot yet. However when you are able, will you be able to know God in the way
God knows himself?" These passages appear right before and then right after Augustine explains his analogy between the Trinity and memory, understanding and will. The incomprehensibility of God, noted in the first passage is Augustine's justification for looking for a created trinitarian analogue, memory, understanding, and will, what he reminds the reader is "something in you" which can be known. Nonetheless, he ends with a reiteration of the limits of human knowledge of the Trinity. Anselm shortens and sharpens the paradox in comprehending that it is incomprehensible.
134. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 8–9.
Language Straining Toward God what was discovered is so far from it?"135 This is a reprise of the question posed back in chapter 26,136 now returned with new urgency. For though in one sense, it is just another in a very long series of arguments to resolve apparently irresolvable problems we have seen throughout the Monologion, in another sense it "threatens to evacuate all his arguments," and "undermine his entire project."137
Anselm does offer a kind of solution, but it resolves less than it promises. Anselm argues that we often see and describe things not "properly, as the thing is itself, but through some likeness or image," such that "one and the same thing we say (dicimus) and do not say, we see and do not see."138 In the same way, then, we cannot say what this highest being is, in other words, but we can say what it is per aliud, by reference to what it is like: "Whatever words seem to be able to be said of this being, do not so much show it to me by what is proper to it as hint (innuunt) at it through some likeness."139
This is in many ways a moderate and thoroughly Augustinian solution to the dilemma of talking about God; we cannot say what he is directly but can say what he is like. But Anselm goes on to formulate the solution in ways that draw attention to what his words and arguments fail to do rather than succeed in. For the words we use for the highest being come from creatures and bring to mind something "much less" and "very far from" that which, by means of the "tenuous significations," we are seeking to understand.140 He concludes by making explicit the tension between what he has proved and the real nature of the highest being, "so therefore this nature is ineffable since neither in words nor by any other means can it in any way be penetrated [intimari], and it is not false if what is taught by reason be understood [aestimari] through another, as in a riddle [aenigmate]."141
How are we to understand the status of Anselm's claims given this almost fatal qualification on everything that has come before? For it is both Anselm's strong claims for what he will achieve at the outset and his insistence here that whatever this apparent qualification means, his arguments are still true (or at least "not false") that create the difficulty.
The kind of understanding that results through a likeness, this kind of knowing as, seems, at least as Anselm describes it, to suspend the law of the excluded middle ("we say and we do not say . . ."), resulting in claims
135. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 6–8.
136. Mono. 26, S I, 44, 15–19.
137. Visser and Williams, Anselm, 118, 111.
138. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 11–17.
139. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 22–24.
140. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 26–29.
141. Mono. 65, S I, 77, 1–3.
Language Straining Toward God that are neither true nor false in a sense and are both true and false in a sense. And even if we can make out this claim in a noncontradictory way by taking it to mean that Anselm's claims about the highest being are partially true, true in a certain respect, as true as any claims about it can be, it seems, belatedly, to move the bar a great deal lower from what
Anselm set out to achieve: necessary, indubitable truths about the highest being, and to be a move to a kind of moderate middle ground Anselm himself seems to refuse to occupy.
We seem to be left with simultaneous apophaticism and rationalism.
And that is what is left if we remember that apophaticism is not the view that nothing at all can be said about God, that the task can never be begun, but rather it is the place one arrives at last, having worked through and then exhausted the resources of language and reason.142 From this position, the gap between the results of rational argumentation and what we are seeking to grasp remains, in such a way that both progress has been made (the highest being is seen as "metaphysically unique") and the gap has become more yawning, has been understood to be more deeply untraversable. And that too, is its own kind of progress. For having followed out the logic of the supreme being in the search for necessary reasons, Anselm concludes with a necessary truth: that the clearest comprehension of the supreme being is of its incomprehensibility.
Because he has failed to give a fully illuminating account of the supreme being, Anselm returns to the language of memory, understanding, and love, but now as analogy, similitude. Thus, Anselm reoffers a very abbreviated version of Augustine's analogy between the three persons in the Godhead and the human trinity of memory, intelligence, and love. Since the highest being cannot be known in itself, it must be known through something else. The best image for it is the rational mind in its tripartite structure. The path to this conclusion seems somewhat different than Augustine's to a similar conclusion in De Trinitate. For having arrived at the "ineffable trinity of memory, understanding and love,"
142. Visser and Williams are right that Anselm's claim that God is ineffable is not "a vague gesture towards apophaticism" but says "something very specific about the limitations of our thought and language about God." Anselm, 121. However, Anselm can be, and is, I maintain, apophatic without being vague, and apophatic without giving up his rationalism. Their solution that words used of God keep their original meaning, derived from creatures, but apply to God per aliud, may nominally avoid equivocation but still leaves the problem Anselm is focused on here, that what we say about God is only obliquely, enigmatically true, that God is called wise and existing, etc. but is not wise and existing as creatures are. Thus we say things about God that are true (in a sense) but they do not get to the thing we want to know, do not reveal what he really is. "These words," as Visser and Thomas admit, "can establish only a tenuous connection between the human mind and the utterly unique God" (122).
Language Straining Toward God Anselm concludes that, given that the human mind too can remember, understand, and love, it is most like the supreme being.143 Thus he has discovered first memory, understanding, and love in the supreme being; next, he found that, however, this trinity in it is ineffable, and then turned to find these same features, originally argued for as necessary features of the supreme being, in the finite mind. What Anselm has not done is begin with the human mind and extrapolate from its features of memory, understanding, and love to these as features which then ought to belong to the Trinity. He argues rather that because these are features of the supreme being, the creature that possesses them is taken to be the truest image of the supreme being and the highest of its creations. The other ground for its role as closest analogue is reflexive. Since the rational mind mounts of an investigation of the supreme being, the mind, as that through which that investigation takes place, must itself be that which mirrors the highest being most closely.144
What Anselm is able to see in that "mirror" is not so much an image of the divine, as the human mind's necessary connection to the divine.
The rational power, Anselm maintains, is the power to distinguish "the good from the not-good, the greater good from the lesser." This power is useless unless its distinctions are true and unless it then love the greater good over the lesser, and, ultimately, the supreme good above all others.145 It cannot be that the soul created for this good could lose it, either freely or by force, Anselm argues. If it could lose it freely, it would have been created to come to reject that for which it was created; if it could lose it by force, it would lose its good unwillingly. Since both of these are impossible, contradicting the goodness and justice of creation, the soul's enjoyment of that good must be endless and it itself must be without an end.146 The creature that loves and desires the supreme being will be satisfied by nothing else than the possession and enjoyment of the supreme being.147 It cannot be, Anselm concludes, that "he who is most just and most powerful makes no return" to the being who loves that which he was created to love.148
In the final chapters mapping out the connection between the mind and God, the language is again that of necessity and indubitability, but it is the necessity and indubitability of hope for their union rather than
143. Mono. 67, S I, 78, 3–5.
144. Mono. 66, S I, 77, 17–19. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate XIV, 12, 15. The trinity of memory, understanding, and love in the human soul is an image of the divine not because it remembers, understands, and loves itself but rather because it remembers, understands, and loves God.
145. Mono. 68, S I, 78–79.
146. Mono. 69, S I, 79.
147. Mono. 70, S I, 80.
148. Mono. 70, S I, 80, 9–11.
Language Straining Toward God union achieved. This is true even at the same time Anselm acknowledges that human vision is only through a glass darkly and speech only as close as riddles to the plain truth it attempts to reveal.149 Just as in the prayers, this certainty is not grounded on any merit of Anselm's (in this case, of his arguments) but on the reasonableness of the belief that God could not deny himself to one who feels the need of him so strongly.150
The only bridge between Anselm's certain arguments and the truth he seeks, but has not reached, is constructed by the hope and striving for the supreme being.151 Because the human mind cannot exercise itself toward an end it despairs of reaching, Anselm observes, "Just as much as devotion to it is useful, so much is hope of attainment necessary."152 Anselm continues by glossing faith itself as including the notion of striving, of actually moving toward that goal. "Believing in (credere in)" the supreme being, Anselm explains, includes both the notion of striving for and believing certain things.153 "Believing in" captures this sense of movement toward God better than "directing belief to (credere ad)" God, Anselm argues.154 The latter is too static and indirect while the former gives a sense of motion and also the intimacy envisioned as the goal, which is to go in to God rather than simply believe things about God from a distance. In other words, simply having God as goal must be supplemented by the belief that one can achieve that end; orientation is not enough; a sense of progress toward the goal internally and emotionally is equally important. To the faith in and hope for reaching the highest being, Anselm adds, of course, love. Love, which Anselm glosses as living faith, issues in works, he argues, proved on the basis only of this: that if one love "the highest justice, nothing just can be condemned and nothing unjust permitted."155
Between Anselm's derivation of the responses of faith in, hope and love for the highest being and his conclusion that this being is indeed
God Anselm declares that this being is "three I-know-not-whats (tres nescio quid)" though it can be called "one essence and three persons or substances."156 Anselm's unwillingness to take up "person" as the proper language for the Trinity is sometimes seen as a weaknesses of the trinitarian theology of the Monologion only overcome in the later De processione.157 And in his own time, as the prologue makes clear, Anselm was taken to task for his willingness to accept either persons or substances for 149. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 11–14; 70, S I, 80, 31–81, 1.
150. Mono. 70, S I, 80, 9–11.
151. Mono. 74–75, S I, 83–84.
152. Mono. 75, S I, 83, 11–13.
153. Mono. 76, S I, 83, 23–25.
154. Mono. 76, S I, 84, 1–2.
155. Mono. 78, S I, 84, 20–22.
156. Mono. 79, S I, 85, 14; 86, 14.
157. See chapter 7 for my discussion of De processione and comparison of it to the Monologion.
Language Straining Toward God what is three in the Trinity, even though he is in this following Augustine and Boethius.158 For even when Augustine expresses a preference for the language of persons over substances he does so for lack of anything better: "three persons is said not in order to say that but in order not to keep silent."159 The Monologion's conclusion that God is three "I-knownot-whats" is the fruit of long meditation and reflection that has moved through and beyond "person," "substance," etc., to an agnosticism that represents a tremendous spiritual achievement. Anselm has not failed to reach an adequate trinitarian formulation but has rather reached through and beyond one.
Anselm nonetheless concludes in certainty of something: "it appears, then, or rather, it is unhesitatingly declared that what is called God is not nothing; and that only to this supreme essence the name 'God' is properly given."160 Anselm now, at last in the final chapter, names the "highest being" as "God." Why, when he has not made this inference before, can he make it now? "All who say that God exists, whether one or many, understand nothing other than a certain substance, which they judge to be above any nature which is not God, worshipped by men because of its eminent dignity and entreated in the face of imminent need."161 It is only the supreme being Anselm's meditation has adumbrated who is worthy of worship and prayer. "It would be," Anselm continues, "exceedingly inappropriate (nimis inconveniens) if it were supposed that not this being but rather some lesser good or mere chance ruled the things made by that highest being."162 The God men worship and pray to is one they believe controls their world, who can be entreated and should be praised, and this being is identical with the being of Anselm's reflection. Not unlike Aquinas after him, Anselm concludes, in effect, "and this all men call God."
The last chapter is full of exuberance, overflowing with superlatives both for the highest nature itself and the clarity of his vision of it: liquidissimum is how Anselm describes his conclusions—meaning both most clear and flowing smoothly without interruption.163 The exuberance comes not from the completeness of this vision—the last words of the text are "ineffable God, three and one"—but from the completion of the task. He began sub persona of one relying only on reasoning and reflection but emerges after eighty chapters of rational investigation into 158. Mono. Prol., S I, 8, 14–18. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate VII, 4, 7; see nn. 24, 103.
159. Augustine, De Trinitate V, 9. In De processione, Anselm supports the language of persons but only as Augustine does, for lack of anything better. See chapter 7.
160. Mono. 80, S I, 86, 17–18. My emphasis.
161. Mono. 80, S I, 86, 19–22.
162. Mono. 80, S I, 87, 2–3. My emphasis.
163. Mono. 80, S I, 87, 8–9.