Proslogion: The Interpenetration of Prayer and Argument
Language Straining Toward God the realm of worship and prayer. His task has been to connect what Pascal would call "the God of the Philosophers" to "the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob." The ascetic bracketing of everything but reasoned reflection breaks through to the light of a God who evokes love, works of justice, worship, and prayer.
Anselm joins three different things in the last three chapters: the chain of necessary reasons on the nature of the highest being, the truth of the language appropriate to this highest being as "triune unity and unified trinity (trinam unitatem et unam trinitatem)," and the reconnection of both of these to the theological virtues and to worship and prayer.
Nonetheless, that which truly grounds language and worship, the reality of God, is not known except obliquely and enigmatically, and most certainly, in desire.
Proslogion: The Interpenetration of Prayer and Argument, Logic and Rhetoric The difference between the Monologion and the Proslogion, Anselm famously wrote, is that while the Monologion relies on multiple arguments, the seeking of the Proslogion was for unum argumentum. However we understand the exact reference of argumentum—Anselm's notion of "that than which none greater can be conceived," the arguments of chapters 2 and 3 concluding in the necessary existence of such a being, or the work as a whole insofar as it is the exploration of the original formula—it is clear that Anselm was not fully satisfied with the Monologion's chain of arguments and wants not to proceed up a series of steps but to move directly and with a kind of single motion of the mind toward the divine. 164
164. There has been great debate about whether the "unum argumentum" of the Proslogion means the formula "that than which none greater can be conceived," the arguments of chapters 2 and 3 proving the existence and necessary being of God, or the derivation of the major attributes of God that occupies the whole text. While it is clearly anachronistic to think of the argument for God's existence as the "single argument," in the end I am not sure it matters whether we think of the argument as the original formula or the formula together with the conclusions that follow from it, for Anselm thinks of the attributes as following as necessarily as existence from the original formula.
On this point, cf. Barth, Fidens Quaerens Intellectum, 13–14. For a full account of the literature taking these different views, as well as an account based on the notion of argumentum in medieval dialectic, specifically Boethius's notion of argument, see Toivo J. Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology in the Eleventh Century (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 133–45. Holopainen takes Anselm's arguments (in the modern sense) to be syllogistic rather than by equipollent propositions, and thus the formula for him is a "middle term" joining the subject, God, and other predicates derived from the formula in the Proslogion. On the form of the argument as hypothetical syllogism, see Suzanne J. Nelis,
"The Boethian Anselm," Haskins Society Journal 3 (1991): 131–39, and for further discussion of Anselm's knowledge and use of dialectic, see Holopainen, Dialectic and Theology, 52–59; see also chapter 3 and chapter 6. It is worth noting, as Holopainen does but Nelis does not, that Anselm does
Language Straining Toward God The "Argument": Conceiving the Inconceivable God Anselm's interlocutor, the fool who says in his heart there is no God, is derived from scripture, from the content of faith, but, as we noted above, Anselm reinterprets the fool's unbelief not as sectarian but as generic and rational. Similarly, the instrument Anselm devises to confront that opponent, the notion of "that than which none greater can be conceived," also has sources in both faith and reason. The Psalms contain many descriptions of God which Anselm's formula seems to echo. Psalm
77:13, for example, asks, "who is so great a God as our God?" and Psalm 25:3 declares, "The Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods."165
Augustine is another possible source. Augustine describes God as "that to which none is superior" in De libero arbitrio.166 But it is Seneca whom
Anselm seems to echo most exactly. In response to the question, "What is God?" Seneca replies that God is a magnitude "than which none greater can be conceived (qua nihil maius cogitari potest)."167 Though there is no conclusive proof that Anselm knew the Seneca text, it is found in Bec's library, though perhaps from a later date.168 The closeness of Anselm's formula to Seneca's—both share the use of maius rather than melius—makes it tempting to posit a direct link between them even though convincing positive evidence is lacking.169 It would also be especially fitting that a not present his argument in the clear technical form of hypothetical syllogism (even if that is its true logical form), and some have argued that Anselm, like Lanfranc, wants to avoid overly technical dialectical language and forms in theological argumentation. For more on Anselm's relationship to dialectic and his reflections on it in the Epistola de incarnatione Verbi, see chapter 6.
165. Paul M. van Buren, "Anselm's Formula and the Logic of 'God,'" Religious Studies 9, no. 3
(1973): 280.
166. Augustine, De libero arbitrio II, 14.
167. Seneca, L. Annaei Senecae naturalium quaestionem libri viii, edited by Alfred Gerke (Stuttgart, 1907), 5. Cited in Schmitt, S. Anselmi opera omnia, vol. 1, 102. Schmitt also cites Boethius as a source in the Consolation where Boethius speaks of the "common notion of all human minds" of God as that than which "nothing better can be thought." Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, 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), book III, prose 10, 276.
168. There was a copy of Seneca's Quaestiones naturales at Bec, as noted in Becker's catalog.
See Southern, Portrait in Landscape, 129; and Gustav Becker, Catalogi Bibliothecarum antiqui (Bonn,
1885). However, Marcia Colish's examination of the manuscripts of the Quaestiones naturales shows that none can be dated before the twelfth century. See Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1985), vol. 1, 18. See also Ian Logan, Reading
Anselm's Proslogion: The History of Anselm's Argument and its Significance Today (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 92–93.
169. See Logan, Reading Anselm's Proslogion, 92–93. Logan cites the work of G. Ross, "Seneca's
Philosophical Influence," in Seneca, edited by Charles D. N. Costa (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1974), 116–65; and Klaus D. Nothdurft, Studien zum Einfluss Senecas auf die Philosophie und Theologie des zwöflten Jahrhunderts (Leiden: Brill, 1963), 194ff.
Language Straining Toward God phrase without clear biblical or Christian origins would become the cornerstone of an argument designed to address the "fool" understood as generic and rational skeptic. It is even more fitting and consonant with the feel of the text that Anselm should have been inspired by all these sources—Hebrew, Roman, and Christian—and that Anselm should hear them all speaking with the same voice.170
What is particular to Anselm is not the project of faith seeking understanding, but, as we saw in the Monologion, a sense of the completion of that journey as both ineluctable and impossible. No part of Anselm's work exemplifies his particular way of shaping of the trajectory from faith to understanding more than the Proslogion's "that than which none greater can be conceived." The formula, "that than which none greater can be conceived," functions as what is believed but also is what reason proposes about God and is that through which reason establishes understanding. Thus, it embodies faith, reason, and the project of moving from faith to understanding. We can see this if we go back through the way in which the different ways of describing faith seeking understanding operate in the Proslogion.171 The description of God as that than which none greater can be conceived is, Anselm writes, what he believes God to be and wishes to understand.172 Faith in another sense, we argued above, functions as that which proposes the problems for reason to solve. In the Proslogion's opening prayer, the task faith gives to reason is both to establish the impossible and the self-evident, for it describes the goal of understanding God as, on the one hand, accessing the inaccessible and comprehending the incomprehensible, and, on the other, as making visible what is always present and locating what is everywhere. Anselm thus not only creates a chasm for reason to cross but also claims that in the formula it has already been crossed, or rather that there is no chasm at all, that what faith seeks is already given in the very thinking of that than which none greater can be conceived. The equivalence of the paradoxical with the necessary accomplished in the Monologion in different steps, the Proslogion accomplishes in one step in the thinking of the formula.
Faith in a third sense discussed above, as the desire to traverse the 170. For a more complete list and analysis of possible precursors to Anselm's formula, including Hermes Trismegistus, Cicero, Homer, the New Testament, Boethius, and the PseudoAugustinian, De decem categoriis, see Coloman Viola, "Origine et portée de la formule dialectique du
Proslogion de Saint Anselme. D'l "argument ontologique" à l' "argument mégalogique," Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica 83 (1992): 342–64.
171. For the discussion of the different sense of faith seeking understanding, see this chapter,
122–24.
172. Pros. 2, S I, 101, 3–5.
Language Straining Toward God gap between what faith believes and what reason understands, is also expressed in the attempt to think "that than which none greater can be thought." For to think it is to reach God via a single, long extension of the mind upward, the shape of the ascensus mentis ad deum which pervades
Anselm's writing. Thus, the formula itself describes faith, for it describes the striving of the mind to transcend itself, to grasp what is beyond it. The aim of Anselm's argument is to show that the object of his desire actually exists, and he inscribes that desire in the language he uses to make the transition from desire to possession, that is, in the formula itself. The formula thus unifies almost perfectly the two parts of the analogy Anselm sets up between the human desire for God and the word's desire for the thing.
Prayer describes the desire of faith to make what it believes present, and the formula also captures, as Aidan Nichols points out, the essence of prayer. For in prayer "one must never be content with one's current images of God but strive constantly to transcend them towards a reality which is of its nature semper maior."173 This is exactly the path on which the notion of "that than which none greater can be conceived" sets the mind.
Anselm has captured in his formula the essence of a religious sense of God, Paul Van Buren argues, for "religion consists in going to the limit of language, to the edge of nonsense."174 Prayer is, as we saw in Anselm's prayers, the point of intersection of language and desire in a special way.
For the project of prayer is to reach God in words; prayer both expresses the desire for God and aims to effect union with him. Thinking "that than which none greater can be conceived" does all these things at once.
It represents succinctly the paradox of prayer, which simultaneously expresses the infinite distance between the human mind and God and traverses it.
Lastly, as noted above, the faith that Anselm begins from is faith in reason. Anselm's argument, like any kind of reasoning, Anselm would claim, assumes the ability of the mind to form concepts and reason to conclusions which are not mere fictions but which capture and reveal reality, at least to some degree. And it is, of course, on this level, as discerned by reason, not as an expression of desire in prayer or of that which faith wishes to understand, that Anselm's formula and the conclusions he draws from it have been so controversial. The formula has
173. Aidan Nichols, "Anselm of Canterbury and the Language of Perfection," Downside Review
103 (1985): 207.
174. Van Buren, "Anselm's Formula and the Logic of God," 285–86. Van Buren contends, however, that the formula works on the religious but not the rational or philosophical level. Yet Anselm clearly intends for it to do both.
Language Straining Toward God been grasped and critiqued in many ways: where the notion of "that than which none greater can be conceived" comes from—reason alone or revelation, what kind of grasp we can have of it—merely subjective imagination or direct experience, whether and to what degree it is adequate to God's nature—as completely negative and empty of content or as capturing the divine essence.175 As one astute commentator remarked, "the argument is like one of those inns in Spain to which each person brings his own food and drink."176 What I attempt here is not a defense (or critique) of Anselm's argument against all or even most objectors and supporters but rather try to see it as Anselm intended it and in light of its links to the rest of his corpus.
Attempts to understand the crucial phrase as either taken from and accepted as revelation (Barth) or given by direct mystical experience or as innate idea (Kolping, Evdokimov, DeWulf, and others) clearly fall afoul, of Anselm's explicit statements in the text.177 Anselm writes clearly, against Barth's view, that the notion of "that than which none greater can be conceived" is in the fool's and not merely the Christian's understanding. Equally clearly, Anselm maintains that there can be no experience or adequate comprehension of God. Aquinas, of course, famously commented on the notion of God's nature being naturally known or his existence self-evident, that human beings cannot have an notion of God's essence adequate to draw existence from it, a view which, indirectly at least, he attributes to Anselm.178 Many have been quick to point out, quite correctly, that Anselm very explicitly rejects the view that his notion or any account of God in any way suffices to reveal the divine nature. Anselm is quite clear about this in the Monologion, noting that the designation of the highest being as highest or as greater than others does not designate its "natural essence [naturalem essentiam]," "does not sig175. See Arthur C. McGill, "Recent Discussion of Anselm's Argument," 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), 71–104. See also the lengthy and clear account of the reception of Anselm's argument by a wide variety of thinkers from the Middle Ages to the present in Logan, Reading Anselm's Proslogion, 129–96.
176. Paul Endokimov, "L'Aspect apophatique de l'argument de S. Anselme," in Spicilegium Beccense (Paris: J. Vrin, 1959), 234. Translated and cited in McGill, "Recent Discussions," 104.
177. In order to take this position, Barth must understand Anselm as only engaging the fool in the same question as the believer and work only in opposition to him; further he must reinterpret the phrase "that than which none greater can be conceived' as an "injunction inculcated on the believer's thinking by the revelation . . . not to imagine anything greater than God." Barth, Fidens Quaerens Intellectum, 62–69, 103. Cf. McGill, "Recent Discussions," 93–102. For a description of some of the accounts asserting a direct contact with God on which the notion and proof is based, see McGill,
"Recent Discussions," 71–79.
178. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, part I, q. 2, a. 1.
Language Straining Toward God nify absolutely [simpliciter] this being [essentiam] which in every way is greater and better than whatever is not what it itself is."179 In this passage, Anselm shows that he is, on the one hand, constrained to use the language of comparison—highest, greater, better—but that, on the other, he does not in any way think of such terms as coming close to an essential or substantive predication.
It is for this reason, Jean-Luc Marion argues, that Anselm's argument cannot be described as "ontological." Kant defined an argument as ontological when it proved existence from a pure concept of the essence, something Anselm clearly does not do.180 Marion writes, "the syntagm 'id quod majus cogitari nequit' claims neither to define God by a concept, even in a negative way. . . . It only indicates the limits felt by all possible efforts towards any conception of God. . . . [It] deals more with our finitude than with the conception of God. More precisely, it deals with the impossibility of any conception of God."181 Marion's concern is to acquit Anselm and his argument from the charge of engaging in "metaphysics" in the sense critiqued by Heidegger; Anselm does not proceed from a concept, he argues, but rather "Anselm's argument infers God's existence from the very impossibility of producing any concept of God or His essence. . . . God is known as existent inasmuch as he remains unknown through the concept of his essence."182 Michel Corbin puts forward a similar view, claiming that Anselm's formula does not express the Cartesian idea of perfection but is an interdiction of idols, by showing the impossibility of thinking that which is greater than God.183 Marion attempts to turn what is an apparent weakness of the argument, that its notion of God is not specific or complete enough, into its virtue, into precisely that which makes it work, in effect claiming that this being must exist in re because it cannot exist in the mind.184 While it is true, clearly, for Anselm that the human mind cannot conceive God, it is equally true that the formula is not an interdiction but rather, as Coloman Viola puts it, "an invitation to research."185
Thus just as Aquinas goes too far in interpreting Anselm's formula as 179. Mono. 15, S I, 28, 4–22.
180. Marion, "Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?" 203.
181. Marion, "Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?" 209.
182. Marion, "Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?" 213. My emphases.
183. Cited in Viola, "Origine et portée," 340–41, n. 6.
184. Marion, "Is the Ontological Argument Ontological?" 211–12.
185. Coloman Viola, "Saint Anselm est-it le Père de l'Argument ontologique? Le Proslogion confronté à Kant," 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,
1990), 142.
Language Straining Toward God an affirmative (though failed) attempt to name the divine essence, Marion and Corbin go too far in the other direction, understanding Anselm's strategy as thoroughly negative. It is surely true that, as others have noted, there is a sense in which the formula is a merely subjective notion, that is, that it tells us more (or even only) about our own inability to conceive rather than anything about objective reality.186 For this reason a number of commentators have insisted that the formula itself is neither a concept nor a name, and this is true, especially if what is meant by having a concept is having a specific idea corresponding to the divine essence.187 But in a certain sense the name or formula is no different from any other human conception; all conceptions are the sum of what we think something to be but claim to be about the thing itself. This particular conception is more expressly and more perfectly both a statement about the human mind and its limits at the same time that it, again more expressly and more perfectly, purports to refer beyond itself to the thing itself. For, on the one hand, the formula is empty of any content directly about the thing itself, referring only to the limits of human conception; on the other hand, unique among all conceptions, this one, Anselm contends as his argument proceeds, is guaranteed to have a reference, to capture as real and necessary the object it picks out. The genius (or trick, depending on one's perspective) of Anselm's formula and the reason why it fulfills Anselm's desire to accomplish in one step what the Monologion accomplished in many is exactly what has maddened its critics: that it is both utterly unspecific and formal and at the exact same time perfectly descriptive in the sense that it is guaranteed to refer to one and only one object.188 The formula, more succinctly and more perfectly than any other place in the Anselmian corpus, exemplifies the narrative stretch of Anselm's spiritual and intellectual project to start with nothing but end with everything.
We see this same tension played out in the body of the text. On the one hand, as an affirmative statement, the formula serves as the key to understanding its necessary existence and attributes: because this being is that than which none greater can be conceived, it is everything it is better to be than not to be. Hence, it serves as the ground for reasoning to a whole host of divine attributes—power, justice, mercy and so forth.189
186. McGill, "Recent Discussions," 69.
187. See among others, Viola, "Saint Anselme est-it le pére," 109–11; 132–38.
188. Viola expresses a similar view in focusing on the Proslogion formula's difference from that of predecessors and the Monologion itself in its attempt to base itself solely on the notion of greatness or magnitude. See Viola, "Origine et portée," 363.
189. Cf. Augustine, Confessiones, VII, 4. Augustine argues from the notion that there is nothing
Language Straining Toward God But, on the other hand, as a negative statement, echoing the Monologion,
Anselm shows that following out the implications of this same notion leads to the conclusion that almost nothing can be said about the being whose existence it shows. In his reply to Gaunilo, Anselm is forced into the verbal version of this paradox. For after responding that even the fool must conceive of something when he says "that than which none greater can be conceived," Anselm argues that even if this being is inconceivable, it can be conceived as inconceivable: "In a certain way 'inconceivable' can be conceived although that cannot be conceived of which it is appropriate to say [that it is] 'inconceivable.'"190 "Nothing prohibits 'ineffable' better than God to the notion that since the incorruptible is better than the corruptible, God must be incorruptible. There is an echo also of Augustine's De libero arbitrio II, 39 when Augustine concludes that there is something, truth, which is higher than the human mind, which is, then, either itself God or if there is something higher than truth, then that is God. Anselm's originality, as he himself points out, is that he has with the formula "that than which none greater can be conceived" found a way to make this ascent to God in one step.
190. Resp. 9, S I, 138, 7–8. Dazeley and Gombocz contend that Anselm has here created two levels of language by claiming both that x is unthinkable and that "x is unthinkable" is thinkable.
They argue that this creates a problem for Anselm's argument. Although they explain the problem in multiple ways, I think the simplest way of understanding it is to say that if Anselm can claim by this maneuver that the being than which none greater can be conceived is thinkable and on another level unthinkable, Gaunilo can claim the same thing, that is, that he can think the formula in so far as he understands the words, but that he cannot think it at the level of understanding how existence must be predicated of it. See Howard L. Dazeley and Wolfgang L. Gombocz, "Interpreting
Anselm as Logician," Synthèse 40 (1979): 86–90. Anselm cannot, then, as he does later in his reply, claim that Gaunilo contradicts himself, they argue. I think Anselm's response would be that there are different levels of language and of grasping the significance of the formula and that one must move through them in the order in which he does in the Proslogion itself. For it is only because he understands the formula that he can derive its attributes and then understand the sense in which he cannot understand that which is named by the formula. To put it in a way Anselm might appreciate, one can and one must understand the formula to understand why that which it points to cannot be understood. Moreover, he would add, Gaunilo cannot appeal to levels of understanding in the same way because understanding the words, using them significatively, not as mere sounds, is at the same level as grasping its esse in re. This, of course, is exactly the point at issue between Anselm and Gaunilo so in the end, Dazeley and Gombocz are simply restating Gaunilo's objection, not revealing a further flaw in Anselm's reasoning. For commentators, the claim in the reply that this being is ineffable is related to Anselm's claim in chapter 15 that this being is greater than can be conceived (Pros. 15, S I, 112). Anthony Kenny, Logan notes, "asks whether it is 'self-refuting' to speak of an inconceivable God" and Brian Leftow, though he defends Anselm in general, writes that this claim "casts a pall over Anselm's whole method." Brian Leftow, "Anselm's Perfect Being
Theology," in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 141. See Logan, Reading Anselm's Proslogion," 195–96, and Anthony Kenny, The Unknown God: Agnostic Essays (London: Continuum, 2004), 29. As Logan concludes,
"this does not mean that He is outside the limits of our thought, but that He extends beyond those limits. . . . Just as when water is poured continuously into a small jug, there is still water in the jug when it overflows" (Logan, 196). Kenny argues that all language about God is ultimately metaphorical, which means "that we don't really know what the metaphors are about" (Kenny, 45). Logan is perhaps too optimistic about what we can know and say about God, and Kenny, who thinks that at bottom predications about God are metaphorical and, hence, do not offer much of anything, is too
Language Straining Toward God from being said," Anselm explains, "although that cannot be spoken of which is said to be 'ineffable.'"191 Thus the formula repeats the paradox of the opening prayer in which God is both self-evident and inaccessible; it is thus both uniquely opaque and uniquely revelatory of its object; as a piece of language it is both uniquely impoverished and uniquely powerful.
There have been, if anything, more interpretations of and objections to the way in which Anselm draws existence from his formula, than to the formula itself. Again, the task here is not to defend Anselm against these centuries of objections (nor even to enumerate them) but to try to understand the argument (in the modern sense) in context. The most famous, and until recently, one of the most accepted emendations was the claim made by Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, and others, that Anslem makes two independent arguments, one in chapter 2, concluding that than which none greater can be conceived exists, and another in chapter 3, concluding that it exists necessarily. For Malcolm, the first argument is invalid for the reason Kant gave, that it makes of existence a predicate, but the second is valid, because necessary existence, having existence such that nonexistence cannot even be thought, is a perfection or predicate.192 For Barth and Stolz too, Anselm's real destination, whether technically separate or not, is chapter 3's claim about the inconceivability of that than which none greater can be conceived's nonexistence. What is adumbrated in this notion is precisely God's otherness, that God does not exist in the way that things other than God exist. We must, however, grant that Anselm's intention (whether successful or not) is clearly to demonstrate that this being exists, as well that it cannot be thought not to exist, and that it is greater than can be thought. As in the Monologion, Anselm's ambition is to show that this being exists both in some sense as other things do and that it exists in a way so distinct from them it can hardly be called existence. And this is simply to say in another way that its existence is both necessary and paradoxical, that the argument drawing out the consequences from the formula, like the formula pessimistic. Though there is much more that can and should be said on this issue, I would at least reply to Kenny that even among metaphors we can distinguish between those that are more or less illuminating. For Anselm, the formula, though assuming no more than a basic and widely shared notion of God, get us to existence, power, justice, etc. and beyond any of our notions and attributes.
191. Resp. 9, S I, 138, 6–7.
192. Norman Malcolm, "Anselm's Ontological Arguments," Philosophical Review 69 (1960):
41–62, reprint, The Many-Faced Argument, 301–20. Cf. Charles Hartshorne, "What Did Anselm Discover?" Union Seminary Quarterly Review 17 (1962): 213–22, reprint, The Many-Faced Argument, 321–
33. For the original objection in Kant see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965, c1929), A598; B626, A598; B627.
Language Straining Toward God itself, is intended by Anselm both as a piece of affirmative and negative theology.
For a time, it seemed that simply mentioning that existence was not a predicate was all that was needed to defeat the argument, but a number of recent commentators no longer find that this objection is a serious threat to the argument's success. Davies, sounding like Anselm himself, argues that what Anselm is claiming is not that existence is a predicate but that "something only in intellectu cannot be thought of as something than which nothing greater can be thought."193 For Logan, "it is not so much that existence adds anything to the concept of God, but that existence subtracted from the concept of God (X) leaves one with a concept of something else (not-X)."194 Campbell glosses Anselm's claim that being in reality is greater than being only in thought helpfully, noting that Anselm
"is not basing his inference on saying that the concept of an existing X is different from the concept of an X. He is basing it on the different valuations ascribable to the thing depending on whether we think that it exists or not."195 These formulations, though helpful, are at the level of language. They claim, in other words, that what Anselm is claiming can be said in such a way as to be defensible. However, it is helpful to look a bit more deeply at what it means to accept these claims even as reformulated.
There are two things at stake in Anselm's claim that it is better to exist in re than only in intellectu: that there is a difference between thinking of something only in the mind vs. in reality, and that one is better than the other. And, there is a third, even more basic one implied by these: the notion that some things are better than others and that we can say with some certainty what some of those are. To take the last of these first, Anselm is, though in a complex way to which we will return, relying on the ability of the mind to distinguish and order greater and lesser degrees of being; it is faith in what Louis Mackey calls the "logic of hierarchy."196
Anselm makes this reliance explicit in his reply to Gaunilo. Contending that Gaunilo can and does conceive of this being, Anselm argues: "For anything which is less good, in so far as it is good, is similar to the greater good. Hence it is clear to any rational mind whatever that by ascending from the lesser goods to the greater good from which something greater
193. Brian Davies, "Anselm and the Ontological Argument," in Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Davies and Leftow, 170–71.
194. Logan, Reading Anselm's Proslogion, 159–60; 189–91.
195. Richard Campbell, From Belief to Understanding: A Study of Anselm's Proslogion Argument on the Existence of God (Canberra, Australia: The Australian National University, 1976), 86.
196. Louis H. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word: Essays in Medieval Philosophy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 79–80.
Language Straining Toward God can be known, we can make a fairly good conjecture about that greater than which nothing can be conceived."197
Some claim that Anselm cannot make this appeal that is essentially an appeal back to the argument of the Monologion about proceeding from lesser goods ordered hierarchically to that which is the highest and the source of goodness, without contradicting his claim that the Proslogion argument alone can prove what is believed about God.198 However, the formula itself, more specifically understanding the formula, which is crucial to Anselm's argument, already contains within it the notion which is laid out explicitly in the Monologion and in the reply to Gaunilo: that we can order things from lesser to greater, less to better as a condition for the possibility of understanding the formula.199 We do not have to be agreed in all cases about what is better than what. Figuring out what is greater or better occupies large parts of the Monologion and Proslogion and, thus, is clearly something about which Anselm takes it we have to reason. Anselm does seem to think that we can come to some basic agreements about what is better than what. His stance is much like
Augustine's in his argument for God's existence in De libero arbitrio. Augustine argues that we can all agree on some principles, for example, that the incorrupt is better than the corrupt, the eternal better than the temporal, that it is better to live justly than not, and so forth.200 Anselm makes a similar set of claims to Gaunilo, that good without beginning and end is better than one that is limited by time, that something unchanging is preferable to something changing.201 Anselm's reliance on this notion is only formal in the construction of the formula; no particular claims are made about what is better or worse, lesser or greater, but clearly he takes real understanding of the formula, attended to with understanding, to entail a grasp of at least some things that are better and some things worse. As Anselm makes clear to Gaunilo, the possibility of ordering things as greater and lesser is something one gives up only at the cost of being able to participate in this argument or any other.
197. Resp. 8, S I, 137, 14–18.
198. McGill, "Recent Discussions," 102–4.
199. Cf. Viola, "Origine et portée," 367–69. As Viola makes clear there is a sense in which experience plays a role here, though not a specific experience. There is a need for "internal experience" of the one who thinks and whose thought is drawn along a "dialectic of greatness" toward higher and higher things, but this dialectic also must have some external reference to our experience of things as greater and lesser. For Viola this shows another way in which Anselm's argument is not ontological, because it is not a priori in Kant's sense. See also, Viola, "Saint Anselme est-it le pére," 120–26.
200. Augustine, De libero arbitrio, book II, 28. Cf. Mackey's similar claim, Peregrinations of the Word, 80.
201. Resp. 8, S I, 137, 18–28.
Language Straining Toward God This logic of hierarchy is what supports Anselm's rejection of Gaunilo's claim that he could apply the logic of Anselm's argument to prove that a perfect island exists. Anselm guffaws at this suggestion, promising to give Gaunilo the island if he can successfully use Anselm's argument to prove it exists.202 Anselm seems stung by the criticism, responding sarcastically, but it is a stretch to claim, as Woltersdorff does, that this is because he has no answer. It seems more likely that it is because he finds
Gaunilo's position ludicrous and is annoyed to have his argument caricatured so wrongly. Though he does not answer as directly as he might, we can piece together the full argument from what Anselm does say. He takes the conclusion of the "lost island" argument to be that it, like the being than which none greater can be conceived, "cannot be thought not to exist." His response is that only that which is captured by the formula cannot be thought not to exist, for he says that whatever can be thought not to exist can be thought to have a beginning and an end.203 He has also already explained earlier in his reply that whatever can be thought not to exist can be thought to begin to exist; similarly with anything that can be thought without some of its parts; anything (like an island) which is composite can be thought without some of its parts; hence, it can be thought not to exist.204 Thus, Anselm's response to Gaunilo is that "that which none greater can be conceived" is the only thing whose existence
"is incompatible with being an existent but possibly non-existent being or with its being surpassable by some other being."205
On the most famous objection to the argument, that existence is not a predicate (and therefore cannot be a perfection), a number of commentators have pointed out the anachronism of the objection. The notion of existence at stake in the view that existence is not a predicate is the view that "existence in space and time is a brute thereness, too immediate to be thought and too real to need explanation."206 This way of 202. Pro insip. 6, 128, 14–32. Resp. 3, 6–9. Nicholas Woltersdorff takes Anselm to be nonresponsive to Gaunilo here and takes Gaunilo's objection to be devastating. Nicholas Wolterstorff,
"In Defense of Gaunilo's Defense of the Fool," in Christian Perpsectives on Religious Knowledge, edited by C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 87–111. See the discussion of Woltersdorff's argument in Visser and Williams, Anselm, 78.
203. Resp. 3, 133, 15–17.
204. Resp. 1, 131, 2–5; 18–132, 2.
205. Visser and Williams, Anselm, 87–88. Visser and Williams thus take it that "instead of saying that existence is a great-making property, Anselm is saying that certain great-making properties entail existence" (91). They hope in this way not just to defend Anselm from Gaunilo's lost island objection but to relieve Anselm of the burden of having to hold that existence is a perfection.
While I agree with their analysis of Anselm's response to Gaunilo, I do think Anselm clearly does claim that, in some sense at least, for that being, existence is better than nonexistence .
206. McGill, "Recent Discussions," 88.
Language Straining Toward God understanding the claim that existence is a predicate is how Hume approaches the issue in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Cleanthes asserts that whatever we can think of as existing we can think of as not existing. Hence, there can never be (as he takes Anselm to assert) a contradiction in asserting the nonexistence of anything (including that than which none greater can be conceived).207 However, Hume merely asserts this claim, based on examples of things we experience empirically.208
Thus, Hume assumes the point at issue: that we cannot make any inferences concerning the existence of things but only know the existence of that which we experience or at least can experience through our senses.
Hume's empiricism—that any ideas which are not traceable to a sense impression are either fictions or mere relations of ideas—is an assertion from which he begins, not something he argues for.
It is sometimes claimed that Anselm has another, Neoplatonic notion of existence in mind that allows him to think of it as a perfection, which can function as a predicate and which is better than existence only in the mind.209 There are two different notions of existence, existence as admitting of degrees (the Neoplatonic notion) and the more modern
"radical on/off notion of existence," which something has or does not have (clearly assumed by Hume's objection).210 The so-called on/off notion, Campbell argues, actually has its origins in the notion of creation in which, over against Gnostic views, the existence of all things was asserted to be good, combined with the notion that "since God had either created a thing or he had not, it either existed or it did not."211 In one sense, Anselm is working with the on/off notion in the way he takes up the challenge from the fool, so that he can consider "whether such a nature as he believed God to be was merely thought up or whether it should be acknowledged to be in reality too, independently of people thinking of it."212 Anselm does not, then, reject the notion that existence is an either/ or, but he does reject the notion that we cannot ever reason to existence, and that existence in reality vs. only in the mind cannot be ordered as better to worse. We could say that Anselm is closer to the roots of the no207. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by Henry D. Aiken (New York:
Hafner Press, 1977, c1948), part IX, 57–60. Cf. Logan, Reading Anselm's Proslogion, 160.
208. Logan, Reading Anselm's Proslogion, 160, 192–93. Logan's strategy against a number of objections, including this one, is to argue that whatever the value of these objections if applied to things other than God, Anselm makes quite clear that the being than which none greater can be conceived is a unique case not necessarily subject to this criticism.
209. Southern, Portrait in Landscape, 134.
210. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 74–77.
211. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 76.
212. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 76.
Language Straining Toward God tion of existence as an on/off switch derived from the notion of creation than Hume. However, Anselm retains as well the notion of existence as a good admitting of degrees.
However, that Anselm maintains that existence in re is better than existence only in the intellect does not mean that Anselm's argument is irretrievably tied up with assumptions that are either or both Neoplatonic or Christian (grounded in the idea of creation) notions of existence, for which there can be no independent support. Anselm's claim is essentially that, as Campbell explains, "the truth of a positive existential judgment means not only that a preferred predicate is true of the subject but that that subject is consequently to be more highly thought of."213 To oppose this claim is to hold that "actual" (or "real") simply means "occurring in this world" (as opposed to in other possible worlds), Campbell argues, such that to say that something is real or really exists means only
"to refer to the world in which the utterance occurs" and does not give the thing that exists in my world as speaker any more value in itself, but only in relation to the one who is speaker.214 Anselm clearly has what Meinong called a "prejudice in favor of the actual," but the difficulty in defending him on this score might not be because such a stance is so rare or controversial, but because it is so basic, some have argued.215 It is not hard to reject the view that the value of the actual is equivalent to and merely relatively more valuable than the possible. As Robert Adams puts it, "we do not think that the difference in respect of actuality between Henry Kissinger and the Wizard of Oz is just a difference in their relations to us."216
Campbell concurs, noting, "it is because what can be thought, even if it is not real, is nevertheless thought on the basis of what is real, that reality has absolutely the special status we normally ascribe to it."217 Louis
Mackey makes essentially the same point without going through and beyond possible world theory. Both the atheist and theist in their dispute effectively agree that real existence is greater than ideal being or else they would have no significant dispute; "it is," Mackey concludes, "a presup213. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 79.
214. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 80–81. He is explaining and arguing against the view put forward by David Lewis in "Anselm and Actuality," Nous IV (1970): 175–88.
215. Alexius Meinong, "Über Gegenstandstheorie," in Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, edited by Alexius Meinong (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1904), 1–51, §§2, 11. Cited in Campbell, From Belief to Understanding. Meinong, of course, as Campbell notes, was not in favor of the prejudice. See Johann Marek, "Alexius Meinong," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2009 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2009/entries/meinong/.
216. Robert Merrihew Adams, "Theories of Actuality," Nous VIII (1974): 215.
217. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 83.
Language Straining Toward God position that could only be denied at the cost of trivializing the point at issue."218
Even more basic to Anselm's argument than the ordering of the actual to the possible as better to worse is the ordering of word to thing. "Unless we can rely on the bonding of language to reality, none of the other hierarchies we imagine—all of which purport to represent the aggregate of things in an array of words—can be trusted."219 Since in this one (and only one) case, that to which the name refers must exist, the argument proves the possibility of ordering lower to higher in the form of the order of words to things; it is like the point of pyramid uniting language and being. Though language and being are more distantly related further down the pyramid, they are nonetheless perfectly joined at the top as the notion perfectly captures its object. The formula "locates[s] the moment of linguistic soundness, the plenitude of presence from which other language may deviate but to which it is always bound."220 In other words, we use language with a kind of faith that it points more or less roughly and more or less most of the time to the things we intend. But there is no necessary connection between words and things and, of course, as happens not so infrequently, we find we are not making ourselves understood to others or reaching towards the things in the world, their features and relationships accurately. In the formula, in this one and only one case,
Anselm argues, however, words necessarily capture their object; its connection to reality is guaranteed by its meaning. Intension leads inextricably in this one and only one case to extension. No wonder, of course, that the argument is so maligned by those shaped by modern logic and its project of reducing intension to extension.
Gaunilo attempts to "drive wedges" between word, thought, and thing, which are linked in the argument, arguing that he can say the words but has no conception or understanding to go along with it. 221 He grasps it, he says, only "according to the word," that is, "as by one who does not know it and only conceives according to the movement of the mind produced by hearing the word and attempting to fashion for itself the signification of the perceived word."222 In his response to Gaunilo, Anselm must rejoin word, thought, and thing. Anselm refuses to let Gaunilo make the claim that he has no understanding of the formula. For, Anselm argues, if he understands the words, he understands, and if he understands, the notion is in the understanding. And if in the understanding, it is understood.223
218. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 82.
219. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 80.
220. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 81.
221. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 89.
222. Pro Insip. 4, S I, 127, 19–21.
223. Resp. 2, S I, 132, 11–20.
Language Straining Toward God Moreover, Anselm reminds Gaunilo, if he conceives at all on hearing the formula, then he conceives of a being which cannot even be conceived not to exist, and if he does not conceive, then he cannot conceive of the nonexistence of that being any more than its existence.224
For all that, however, there must be a distinction as well as a necessary and unbreakable connection between the words of the formula and the conclusion that what it names must exist. Conceiving and understanding the formula must be distinct so that Anselm can get to his conclusion without assuming it, without, in other words, making his argument either unnecessary or fallacious, even though they must be inextricably linked so that once the notion is conceived the being it names is understood to exist. While Gaunilo chides Anselm for failing to distinguish when he should (between "conceiving" and "conceiving according to the word"), he also complains that Anselm inserts distinctions without justification. Anselm, for example, claims that conceiving the nonexistence of the being greater than which none can be conceived is different from conceiving the nonexistence of any other object, but Gaunilo asserts that they are exactly the same.225 Gaunilo has claimed that it makes sense to hold that God's nonexistence (like that of any other real object) cannot be understood but can be conceived, as Gaunilo or the fool himself does. Anselm counters that we can conceive but not understand the nonexistence of anything that actually exists, but of the being than which none greater can be conceived, we can neither conceive nor understand its nonexistence. Moreover, Anselm adds a yet finer distinction.
For he says that in one sense no existing object can be conceived not to exist, because then one would conceive existence and nonexistence at the same time. On the other hand, he says we can conceive of the nonexistence of objects we know to exist because we can conceive of their nonexistence, while we know their existence.226 Thus Anselm not only distinguishes between understanding and conceiving the nonexistence of real objects, he adds a distinction between two different ways of conceiving the nonexistence of real objects.
The simplicity of the original argument becomes, in the debate with Gaunilo, a web of complex and fine distinctions. Anselm's reply to Gaunilo combines identifications too obvious to be doubted (sounding at times
224. Resp. 3, S I, 133, 14–15.
225. Pro Insip. 2, S I, 125, 14–20.
226. Resp. 4, S I, 134, 10–18. Anselm seems to know his distinctions are very fine and have to be considered carefully to be grasped, for after making it, he adds, "If one will distinguish between the two senses of the statement," as if to say that it is no small feat to understand his distinction
(Resp. 4, S I, 134, 13–14).
Language Straining Toward God like arguments which have the form, "these must be the same because they are the same") and distinctions so fine they seem almost without a difference. The reply, like the original text, wavers between the plainly obvious and the hopelessly obscure. In that sense, Anselm keeps repeating the original experience of his search for the formula. That single argument was, he writes in the prologue, both tremendously elusive—in despair he almost gave up his search for it as it kept escaping him—and almost perfectly self-evident—so clear that it forced itself upon him.227
Southern captures Anselm's original hope as he set out to find his argument in the intuition that "if God exists, there must be a level of experience at which it is impossible to think of God as not existing." The debate with Gaunilo and others is about the "level [at which] this impossibility
[can] be made to appear." "Must," he asks, "the demonstration await the experience of the Beatific Vision? Or can it, at the very opposite extreme, be made out at the level of linguistic-logical analysis?"228 Southern quite rightly concludes that Anselm claims the latter and Gaunilo the former.
Anselm cements that perception in his claim that for someone to reject his argument amounts to saying that he cannot conceive or understand what he says. "If such a one is found," Anselm concludes, "not only should his word be rejected but also he himself should be condemned."229
However, it is also true that in some sense Anselm also claims the opposite, postponing indefinitely any demonstration of God's existence and nature. He does so explicitly in the passages I have already cited (and to which I will return below) where he concedes that God is greater than can be understood. But further, there is a kind of recognition of it in Anselm's direction that Gaunilo's objections and his reply must be included in any further publication of the work.230 By Anselm's own decree, the possibility of the argument's rejection is given along with his assertion that it cannot be rejected.231 This does not mean that Anselm thinks his own arguments in response to Gaunilo are failures or that they cannot be
227. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93, 10–19.
228. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 135–36.
229. Resp. 9, S I, 138, 13–15.
230. 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, 1962), book I, xix, 31.
231. Gasper argues for an at least additional motive for Anselm's wish to include Gaunilo's objections and his reply. If, as Gasper argues, Anselm's early versions of the text were destroyed twice by someone who disapproved of Anselm's project, Anselm's response to Gaunilo's written and reasoned objections, including them in future versions of the work, then Anselm could be understood as making of Gaunilo's response of reasoned objection and engagement in the reasoning process a model for other objectors to follow, using reason instead of reactionary attempts to censor the work. Gasper, "Envy, Jealousy and the Boundaries of Orthodoxy."
Language Straining Toward God persuasive to Gaunilo or others. Rather, the fact that he must make them at all is a failure to achieve that to which he originally aspired in the Proslogion. Gaunilo's very objections show that the nonexistence of God can be thought in some sense (even though not truly or consistently). If Anselm's ambition for the project was not just to prove his conclusion but to prove it simply, elegantly, and indubitably with one "single argument," by those standards, Anselm has not succeeded and admits as much.
But perhaps Anselm's ambition was something different. Or to put it somewhat differently, it might have been what he hoped but not what he expected. For as the debate with Gaunilo makes clear, the argument demands that the words of the proof be said or read with understanding. Gaunilo's protest that he can say the words without understanding but still depend on language to function is what Anselm argues to be impossible.232 The denial of the argument's conclusion, that God exists, is not strictly internally inconsistent or impossible, but what Gaunilo asserts is, Anselm argues, inconsistent with the fact of his asserting it.
This form of argument, called redarguitio elenchica or retorsive argument, Anselm uses, as Mackey writes so elegantly, "to expose the atheists' folly by showing that the principles they hold are incompatible with the acts by which they enunciate them."233 The atheists may say, "there is no God" and Gaunilo may protest that he does not understand "that than which none greater can be conceived" and so cannot infer existence from it. Anselm's reply is that the objection is either meaningless
(if Gaunilo understands nothing of the formula, his denial is vacuous) or inconsistent (he understands but claims not to understand). In order to make his objection, Gaunilo must break down the connections between words, thoughts, and things. This, of course, he can do; however, Anselm points out that when he does, he also "dismantle[s] the conditions of all rational belief" because he dismantles the possibility of meaningful discourse.234 Not just religious faith is undermined but the faith in language to refer to things generally, a faith (not knowledge or certainty) without which we can neither speak nor function. On this account, Mackey concludes, "atheism is not credal recalcitrance but verbal nihilism."235
This view of Anselm's argument falls somewhere between the notion that the argument should work of and on its own, completely disembodied and abstracted from any speaker, and the view that the argument
232. Cf. Visser and Williams, Anselm, 83.
233. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 91.
234. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 92.
235. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 93.
Language Straining Toward God functions only for those who accept the terms of a certain kind of language game in which "God" is a necessary being.236 The latter makes the argument a fairly egregious case of petitio principii, but the former claims too much, for then the argument should command immediate and universal assent. Campbell argues, rightly I think, that the argument relies on the conditions for the possibility of our shared public discourse:
"there are limits to how the public language we in fact possess can be employed, limits which constrain both the fool and the believer."237 The faith in this language, a faith which cannot be independently grounded or verified, is the faith that the believer and the fool share, Anselm points out. The fool's problem is that he fails to recognize the faith that makes his argument with Anselm possible.238
Following the Logic of Perfection Anselm's text does not, of course, stop with the conclusion that God exists. Anselm goes on to follow out the logic of the being than which none greater can be conceived, deriving the rest of the divine attributes from the original formula. In each case, Anselm begins with the notion that God must have that quality because it is better to have it than not, but he always ends up showing that there is some contradiction in attributing that quality to God. Sensibility seems to require a body; omnipotence seems to include the capacity to do evil, being compassionate seems to mean being subject to passion, and being just seems to exclude mercy.
By way of a solution to these problems, Anselm crafts a different sense of each perfection, one which can be attributed to God. Hence, God can perceive but in a higher way, without going through a corporeal sense.239
God is compassionate such that, he explains, "when [God] sees our suffering, we feel the effect of mercy but [God] does not feel the affect."240
God cannot be corrupted, cannot lie, and cannot make what is true false, because, Anselm explains, to do those things is impotence rather than power. These things are called capabilities by "another manner of speaking [alio genere loquendi]."241 Echoing his analysis of the Fragments, An236. The latter is Malcolm's reflection in "Anselm's Ontological Argument," in The Many-Faced
Argument, edited by Hick and McGill, 314–15. See Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 198, who points out this element of Malcolm's interpretation.
237. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 197.
238. Cf. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding, 198. Campbell credits Hayen with the insight that Anselm is able to address the believer and the fool with the same discourse not because (or not just because) of the reason but also the faith they share, though it seems that Hayen means something a little closer to religious faith that is shared. See Hayen, "The Role of the Fool," 178.
239. Pros. 6, S I, 105, 4–6.
240. Pros. 8, S I, 106, 11–12.
241. Pros. 7, S I, 105, 12–16.
Language Straining Toward God selm explains that we say something is when it is not (saying "it is so" to confirm a statement about what is not the case) and call something a doing or action when it is a kind of inactivity (e.g., sitting or resting).242 In these cases Anselm exposes the deceptiveness of the surface of language which hides a deeper and sometimes opposite meaning. But he does not stop there. Anselm, true to his tendency to turn the paradoxical into the necessary and vice versa, gives a paradoxical twist to his solution: "since the more one has this power [to do evil, lie, etc.], the more powerful are adversity and perversity in him and the more powerless is he against them."243 Anselm distinguishes two senses of power which resolves the original paradox of God lacking the power to do some things though he is omnipotent, but then uses the term in two different senses within the same sentence, calling attention to rather than moving cleanly beyond the original paradox of omnipotence.244
Justice poses a problem both in itself and in terms of its consistency with mercy. In the course of working to solve the problem of how God can be just when he saves the wicked, Anselm seems to make it worse.
"For you save the just because justice goes with them, but the damned you free by justice. Those [the just you save] supported by their merits, these
[the unjust you save] in opposition to their merits. Those, knowing the good you have given, these, ignoring the evil you hate."245 When mercy is added to justice, the conundrum deepens. Anselm reasons that if God is merciful because good, and good because just, then he is merciful because just.246 But how is God merciful because just? "Help me," he prays,
"so that I may understand what I say."247 The solution requires a distinction only slightly less problematic sounding than these intensifications of the problem. As in the case of mercy, which required a distinction between what we experience versus what God feels, Anselm explains that God is just not because of what is appropriate to the judged but because of what is appropriate to God as the highest good.248
The derivation of these attributes follows the pattern we found in the 242. Pros. 7, S I, 105, 18–23. See LF, 25–26.
243. Pros. 7, S I, 105, 26–27.
244. Cf. Augustine, Sermo, 113, 2; 114, 4. In Sermon 113, Augustine does describe the way in which being almighty means that there is a list of things God cannot do, but he does not create a paradox by using "power" in two different senses in the same sentence.
245. Pros. 9, S I, 107, 24–26.
246. Pros. 9, S I, 108, 5–7.
247. Pros. 9, S I, 108, 8–9.
248. Pros. 10, S I, 109, 4–6. Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 147, 13. Augustine asserts that God is just both when he condemns and when he shows mercy but he does not explore the tension between justice and mercy as thoroughly as Anselm, nor attempt to given any further explanation. See also Contra Faustum Manicheum 21, 2–3 where Augustine is more negative, noting the "hiddenness" of God as "most just" in both damning and justifying the impious.
Language Straining Toward God Monologion. Anselm moves from paradox to resolution to further paradox. These chapters manage to bring to mind both later scholastic developments and more mystical theology. For, on the one hand, his opening discussion of each attribute essentially lays out the reasons on both sides of the question of whether the attribute can belong to God; Anselm then goes on to resolve the question in the manner of a responsio. On the other hand, Anselm tends to run together the reasons pro and contra something as a divine property. Both objections and responses sound less like dialectical arguments and more like attempts to get beyond reason and language, to move toward their breakdown as a way of more closely representing the unrepresentable. What is most striking about Anselm is that he takes both scholastic and mystical projects to be the same. Following out the logic of the divine being leads him to conclusions which are indubitable, found in the identity of word and thing, subject and predicate, and paradoxical, signifying the gap between reason, logic, and language, on the one hand, and what Anselm is seeking, on the other.
In the second half of the text, the pendulum swings and stays on the side of negative theology. The attributes of sensibility, omnipotence, justice, and compassion follow from the understanding of God as everything that is better to be than not to be. But in chapter 11, there is a shift. From here on, understanding can no longer be a positive guide; the chain of argument can no longer be from what we think it is better to be to God. Anselm must abandon this line of reasoning as he realizes that it is God who defines what is better and what those "better" attributes consist of: "For that alone is just which you will; and that alone unjust which you do not will."249 After a short survey of the attributes which are by definition the excess of those things in human experience (infinity in time and space),
Anselm reflects on the ambiguous "progress" his argument has made thus far. 250 God is, he concludes, found and not found, seen in part but not wholly.251 His conclusion, now attempting to escape the limits of his own experience, is that God is not that which none greater can be conceived but is a being "greater than which can be conceived."252 Anselm pauses to note the paradox of his position vis-á-vis God: "O whole and blessed truth, how far you are from me, who am so near to you! How remote you are from my sight, though I am so present to yours."253 He concludes more negatively, "Everywhere you are wholly present, yet I do not see you . . . in you
I am moved and I am, yet I cannot come near you."254 Anselm's quest has 249. Pros. 11, S I, 109, 18–19.
250. Pros. 12–13, S I, 110–11.
251. Pros. 14, S I, 111, 11–14.
252. Pros. 15, S I, 112, 16–17.
253. Pros. 16, S I, 112, 27–113, 1–2.
254. Pros. 16, S I, 113, 2–4.
Language Straining Toward God what Clayton calls "a paradoxical outcome": "The nearer he comes to understanding God the more he sees that God is not to be understood."255
Anselm struggles to lift himself out of this darkness by attempting to understand the way in which God possesses the perfections he has thus far enumerated. The incompleteness of his vision of God, he concludes, is due to his inability to grasp all of these perfections at once as attributes of a single, perfect being.256 This conclusion leads to the paradox true for all divine attributes, that they are not parts of God's being "but all are one; and each of these is the whole which you are, and which all the rest are."257 The problem is especially pointed in the attempt to articulate the nature of divine eternity. "You were not yesterday, nor will you be tomorrow; but yesterday, today, and tomorrow you are. Rather, you are neither yesterday nor today nor tomorrow but simply you are, outside all time. . . .
For nothing contains you, but you contain all things."258 Anselm concludes, God and only God is wholly what he is and "He who is."259 Thus, the philosophical name of God has led to the biblical name. Anselm has gone
"from what we call him to what he calls himself."260 Anselm appends to this name of God a brief derivation of the second and third persons of the Trinity. The Word of God can be nothing other than God himself; nor can the love between God and Word be anything less than God or the Word, since God loves himself and the Word to the same degree that they are.261
These names, like all the others, are identical with the divine being, perfectly derivable and substitutable for the other names.
Anselm seems to end his journey in triumph, having found what he sought when he writes, "this is the one necessary being in which is every good, or rather which is all and the only and the whole and only good."262
A closer look, however, reveals that the ecstasy is only projected rather than achieved, not grounded in the present enjoyment of God but only in anticipation of it. Anselm writes, "if individual goods are delectable, conceive in earnestness how delectable is that good which contains the pleasantness of all goods. If created life is good, how good is creative life?"263 Anselm admits that he cannot describe or fully conceive this joy which "eye has not seen nor ear heard."264 Instead he prays for the increase in his desire for it: "Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole substance desire it, until I enter into 'the joy of 255. Clayton, "The Otherness of Anselm," 138.
256. Pros. 18, S I, 114, 24–115, 1.
257. Pros. 18, S I, 115, 1–4.
258. Pros. 19, 115, 11–15. Cf. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 89, 3.
259. Pros. 22, S I, 116, 15–16.
260. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word, 99.
261. Pros. 23, S I, 117, 12–14.
262. Pros. 23, S I, 117, 20–22.
263. Pros. 24, S I, 117, 26–118, 4.
264. Pros. 26, S I, 121, 6–9; 1 Cor 2:9.