Introduction. The Problem of Anselm: The Coincidence
Introduction The Problem of Anselm The Coincidence of Opposites The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism Anselm is an important and early source of two key themes in western thought and spirituality. First, in his development of rational arguments, expressed in long chains of logical inferences and elaborate linguistic analysis, he appears to be the prototype for the model of pure, neutral rationality. The audacity of Anselm's willingness to submit not just the existence of God but the Incarnation, Virgin birth, and filioque controversy to the bar of reason, seeking necessary and indubitable conclusions is unparalleled. His faith in reason and in the power of words and arguments is seemingly boundless. Second, Anselm is far ahead of his time in creating an intensely personal and passionate spirituality in his prayers, meditations, and letters of spiritual direction. His letters display such emotional anguish at separation from fellow monks that they have been taken as evidence of Anselm's homosexuality, and his prayers and meditations describe a psyche deeply submerged in conflict and selfloathing. In these writings Anselm does not rely on independent reason but, feeling himself utterly worthless and dependent, throws himself wholly on the mercy of God. At least a century before we see these trends in wider circulation, Anselm focuses on the gruesome details of the crucifixion, takes on the persona of Mary Magdalene, uses female imagery to describe his attachment to Jesus, and throws himself, diseased and wounded, at the feet of Mary.
When these elements are placed together in the complete Anselmian
The Problem of Anselm corpus, the result for modern readers is a study in contradictions. Anselm, the medieval author who comes closest to the definition of philosopher in modern terms, is also the creator of some of the most emotional, personal, and elaborate prayers of his time, focused not on coolly convincing the intellect but on arousing the passions and will toward love of God. Anselm puts forward modern-sounding descriptions of his projects as the use of "reason alone" to prove the existence of God, the construction of arguments according to the "necessity of reason" "clearly shown in the light of truth," and the use of "plain reasoning" to show the necessity of the Incarnation.1 These arguments appear to be purely philosophical because they lack of explicit reference to the authority of scripture and tradition and their determined succession of formalizable arguments. The prayers by contrast exhort not, as philosophers are wont, the calming of the passions but rather the stirring up of feelings of love, hope, longing, and sorrow.
Even in the more argumentative texts, Anselm moves between similar extremes. On the one hand, Anselm famously describes his argument in the Proslogion as "that single argument which would need nothing else to prove itself than itself alone, and alone would demonstrate that God truly exists."2 The arguments of the Monologion, Anselm asserts, are meant not only to be independent of revelation but to be beyond the possibility of rejection. Anselm's ideal argument is one that concludes in such a way, he writes, that its contrary is absurd and can only be rejected by someone who was himself "absurd."3 That God exists should follow just as light lights, Anselm concludes.4 In the reply to Gaunilo, Anselm claims 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."5 Cur Deus homo sets for itself a two-part task: first, to prove the impossibility of salvation without Christ, addressed to the infidels who claim the Incarnation is contrary to reason; second, to show by reason how salvation is achieved through the Incarnation.6 Toward the end of the second book, his dialogue partner, Boso, claims that he now understands the whole of the Old and New Testaments, exclaiming, "I receive such confidence from this that I cannot describe the joy with which my heart exults."7
Yet there are equally compelling passages that seem to contradict 1. Mono. Prol. S I, 7, CDH, Praef. S II, 42.
2. Pros. Prooem., S I, 93.
3. Mono. 4, S I, 17.
4. Mono. 6, S I, 20.
5. Resp. S I, 138.
6. CDH I, Prol., S II, 42.
7. CDH II, 19, S II, 131.
The Problem of Anselm these, claiming it is all a matter of faith rather than reason, of divine grace rather than human effort. In the Proslogion, Anselm places on God the responsibility both for seeking and finding Him. Since, trapped by the limits of his own nature, Anselm cannot seek that which he cannot know because it is so radically distant from him, God must perform both the act of moving Anselm toward God and of revealing Himself to Anselm. Hence, Anselm prays, "Teach me to seek you, and show yourself to me seeking you, for I cannot seek you unless you teach me, nor find you unless you show yourself."8 On this note Anselm concludes his first chapter in prayer, "I do not attempt, Lord, to penetrate your profundity, since I in no way compare my understanding with that, but I desire in some way to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves.
For neither do I seek to understand so that I might believe, but I believe so that I might understand."9 What Anselm writes in the form of prayer to God in the Proslogion, he writes in more polemical terms in the Epistola de incarnatione Verbi, "Indeed no Christian ought to dispute how the things which the Catholic church believes with its heart and confesses with its tongue are not the case, but always holding those things by faith as indubitable, loving and living according to them, can ask humbly how they are the case."10 Having confidence in human reason, however, makes one more likely to uproot his own horns (of reason) than move the rock of faith, and those who try to begin their assent by understanding without the ladder of faith fall into many errors.11
Moreover, just as there are passages that proclaim with great joy and certainty to have produced indubitable conclusions, there are others that express despair and confusion. The Monologion falters having reached the heights of ineffable being, as Anselm asks, "How therefore has anything true of the highest being been discovered if that which has been discovered is so alien to it?"12 Similarly in the Proslogion Anselm asks, "if you have found him, why is it that you did not feel that you have found him?"13 He finally exclaims, "I tried to rise to the light of God, and I have fallen back into my own darkness. Rather, I have not fallen into it, but I feel myself to be enveloped in it."14 Midway through Cur Deus homo Boso
8. Pros. 1, S I, 100, 8–10. Cf. Augustine, Confessiones, 1, 1; 1, 4; 1, 5; 1, 24, and passim. This and all works of Augustine cited from Corpus Augustinianum Gissense, electronic edition, edited by Cornelius Mayer (Basel: Schwabe, 1995).
9. Pros. 1, S I, 100, 15–19. Anselm here is, of course, following Augustine. For one of a number of places Augustine describes his inquiries along these lines, see Augustine, De libero arbitrio
1, 1–2.
10. EDIV 1, S II, 6, 10–7, 2.
11. EDIV 1, S II, 7.
12. Mono. 65, S I, 76, 8–9.
13. Pros. 14, S I, 111.
14. Pros. 18, S I, 114.
The Problem of Anselm is caught in complete despair over the apparent impossibility of the reconciliation between God and humankind.15
The emotional mood of Anselm's writing swings between ecstasy and despair, mirroring Anselm's evaluation of the success or failure of his arguments and prayers. Anselm, the proponent of arguments confidently derived from his own reason also reflects the "sinful, damnable, fruitless and contemptible" character of his own life, contemplating a soul so immersed in misery that (like the divine nature) any words to describe it fail.16 In the lament for lost virginity, Anselm resorts to the reversible oxymora of "marvelous horror" and "horrible marvel" to describe the perversion of his own will and its plunge into the "inferno of horrible iniquity."17
The difference between the rhetoric of these prayers and spiritual meditations and the Proslogion and Cur Deus homo is not that the former embody the dark side of Anselm's spirituality while the Proslogion and Cur Deus homo express optimistic rationalism. Within the Proslogion,
Anselm travels from the same devastation of loss, confusion, and loneliness to the ecstasies of discovery, insight, communion, and back again.
He moves from reflection on his wretchedness as "one of the miserable sons of Eve, distant from God" and overwhelmed by his own iniquities to thankfulness for the divine illumination of his understanding of what he formerly believed only to fall again into his own darkness, into confusion, grief, and need. Yet still he finds his way to joy that is "full and more than full."18
Similar extremes characterize Anselm's letters and logical works.
Like his prayers, Anselm's letters of friendship are emotional and full of the rhetoric of self-abasement and praise: Anselm writes in exaggerated tones of his anguish at separation from friends, and of the complete communion of spirit and feeling he either has or wants to achieve with them. In the logical works, there is considerably less directly expressed emotion, but extremes of intellectual conviction and doubt are explored in them, as Anselm's careful analysis brings the student from smug certainties to confusion and self-doubt as tautologies turn into paradoxes, identities into opposites.
Though I have laid out the problem in emotional and poetic terms, it is not merely a problem of varying moods or styles. There are real divisions in the interpretation of Anselm, depending on which of these voic-
15. CDH I, 22, S II, 90.
16. Med.1, S III, 76, 78.
17. Med. 2, S III, 81.
18. See the following passages to trace this complex emotional journey: Pros. 1, S I, 99; Pros. 4,
S I, 104; Pros. 18, S I, 113; 114; Pros. 26, S I, 120–21.
The Problem of Anselm es is given prominence. Philosophers and systematic theologians carry off parts of his corpus, while those interested in spirituality take others. Anselm is claimed by partisans of scholastic, monastic, and mystical theology. One of the most vexed questions in Anselm scholarship is its disciplinary location. Though the question of whether Anselm's work is philosophy or theology is ultimately anachronistic, the extreme positions that have been taken on this question reveal something about how incompatible the elements of Anselm's corpus seem to modern sensibilities. It is telling, for example, that Gilson criticized Anselm for being, in effect, both too philosophical and too theological. On the one hand, Anselm's work is not philosophy "because this inquiry, as purely rational as it may be, forbids itself any object other than that of faith and agrees with it entirely."19 On the other hand, Gilson objected that Anselm inappropriately used reason alone to explore theological topics. Thus Gilson writes that Anselm is "recklessly" rationalistic, his pretensions for reason "indefensible" in attempting to prove "by conclusive dialectical arguments, not only the Trinity of the Divine Persons . . . but even the very Incarnation of Christ, including all its essential modalities."20 For Gilson, Anselm fails by not drawing a line between what reason can establish (that God exists) and what it cannot (that God is triune and became incarnate) and by brashly considering it all by the same purely rationalistic method. While we can easily understand Gilson's conclusions as projecting back on to Anselm Aquinas's notion of the boundaries between philosophy and sacra doctrina, the debates over Anselm's disciplinary location continue, with one recent commentator describing it as "philosophical theology" and another as "theological philosophy."21 Conversely, Karl Barth famously asserted the character of Anselm's oeuvre as theology—not hybrid natural or philosophical theology—from start to 19. Etienne Gilson, "Sens et nature de l'argument de Saint Anselme," Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 9 (1934): 49. Though Gilson's claim is specifically about the Proslogion it seems a fortiori to apply to Anselm's other work. On Gilson's views of Anselm see Gregory B.
Sadler, "Saint Anselm's Fides Quaerens Intellectum as a Model for Christian Philosophy," The Saint
Anselm Journal 4, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 32–58. See also Eileen C. Sweeney, "The Problem of Philosophy and Theology in Anselm of Canterbury," in Medieval Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle
Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, edited by Kent Emery and Russell Freidman, 487–514. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters. (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
20. Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1948), 26.
21. Gregory Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic: Anselm's Early Writings (West Lafayette,
Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994), 300. "Theological philosophy" is Schufreider's characterization of the appropriation of Anselm by Thomas Morris but Morris's description of his work as "Anselmian in the two-fold sense of seeking to develop an exalted conception of God and striving to attain results altogether consonant with distinctively Christian commitments" sounds close to Schufreider's presentation of him. Thomas V. Morris, Anselmian Explorations: Essays in Philosophical
Theology (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 7.
The Problem of Anselm finish.22 But even Barth had difficulty understanding how Anselm's project could be addressed to nonbeliever and believer alike without simply standing on the neutral ground of reason shared by nonbeliever and believer.23
Anselm's work invites and just as strongly rebuffs the question of its disciplinary location and not just because of readers' anachronistic projections. Anselm's confreres reacted to his writings in ways that show they, too, were both attracted to and puzzled by a kind of reflection in them they had not seen before. Lanfranc famously refused to lend his imprimatur to Anselm's Monologion, partly because, we can gather, of its lack of reference to patristic authority.24 Gaunilo felt moved enough by Anselm's ambitions in the Proslogion to respond to it in the name of the fool, and a number of Anselm's works open with prefaces complaining that copies had been made and circulated in a form he did not intend and full of worry that he had been misinterpreted. Clearly, his works created a stir and their genre was misunderstood even in their own time.
Scholars in the fields of philosophy, religion, and theology have been largely content to compartmentalize these different elements. Philosophers ignore Anselm's spiritual writings and theologians and historians of religion and spirituality subordinate Anselm's arguments to faith and prayer. Anselm, however, sees his works as all of a piece. Anselm insists that he offers the same arguments to objectors, infidels, and unbelievers of various stripes that he offers to believers piously seeking to understand their faith.25 Moreover, both of his most famous works, the Monologion and Proslogion combine mood and method. As meditations, they are imbued with the spirituality found in the prayers, and as arguments, they are assays not just of "reason alone" but aim to convince even those unwilling to believe.26 We cannot make sense of Anselm as a thinker or of his place in western intellectual and religious history without making sense of this enigma.
Richard Southern argued that there is a connection between An22. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, translated by Ian W. Robertson (London:
SCM Press, 1960), 58.
23. Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, 69–71.
24. We have only Anselm's request to Lanfranc that he approve and name the work or suppress it (Ep. 72, S III, 193–94), and Anselm's reply to Lanfranc's apparent refusal to do either (Ep. 77, S
III, 199–200). In his reply Anselm notes, as does his preface to the Monologion, that he had not intended to say anything different than scripture or Augustine. On this exchange and its importance for Anselm's relationship to Lanfranc, see chapter 2. See also Richard Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 60.
25. CDH I, 3, S II, 50.
26. Pros. 4, S I, 104.
The Problem of Anselm selm's intellectual and devotional projects in the monastic practice of meditation, a practice Anselm reconfigured to make his own. In the Benedictine rule, the function of meditation was for "learning the Psalter, or preparing the Lessons or the music for the Offices." In Anselm's hands, it becomes the means to "the free excursion of the mind among problems of theology," Southern explains, and the very personal and anguished longing and self-examination in prayer.27 Thus, meditation becomes "a basis both for extended private prayer and for philosophical inquiry," Southern argues, and the two aims are intertwined. "The inquiry," Southern continues, "was scarcely distinguishable from the prayer, since the aim of both was to shake off the torpor of the mind and see things as they are in their essential being."28 Southern's claim is, then, that all these moods and methods are the fruit of introspection, one kind guided by the intellect and the other by the emotions, one leading toward God and the other toward horror of the self.
For Southern, however, there are two different trajectories: one descending toward the abasement of the self, the other ascending upward toward God, and they are sequential, the first, the obliteration of selfwill in the prayers, which is followed by seeking knowledge of God in speculative argument.29 Like Southern, Thomas Bestul, lays out the importance of understanding the integration between Anselm's devotional works and his works of "rational theology" but still sees their relationship as one of tension and complementarity, the tension of "triumph and debasement, victory and defeat, doubt and certainty."30
The thesis of this book is that Anselm's corpus, from his earliest prayer to last treatise, is a single project in which knowledge of self and God are inextricably linked. These are not for Anselm, as they were not for Augustine, different projects but one and the same: the project (in a literal, etymological sense) is union of the self with God. What links the 27. Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought
1059–c. 1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 53.
28. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 53–54.
29. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 104.
30. Thomas H. Bestul, "Uncertainty in the Meditation on Human Redemption," in Anselm and Abelard: Investigations and Juxtapositions, edited by Giles E. M. Gasper and Helmut Kohlenberger (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2006), 66. Some attempts at a more unified reading of Anselm can be found in Gregory Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic; Jean-Robert Pouchet,
OSB, La Rectitudo chez Saint Anselme: Un itinéraire Augustinien de l'âme à Dieu (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1964); and Ermanno Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense: The Case of Anselm and his God
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). None of these important contributions to a more integrated understanding of Anselm engage with the complete corpus and all make narrower claims for their interconnection than I do here.
The Problem of Anselm parts of Anselm's corpus is the union they strive for with such intense desire, the union of soul with God. The construction of the problems and solutions that describe the distance and effect the reunion are carried over into all of Anselm's speculative work, not just the ones engaged with the nature of God, but also logical writings, the dialogues on truth and free choice, and the letters.
The project of union so informs Anselm's writing that it is present not just in the content but in the structure of his arguments. In the great speculative treatises, arguments that reach necessary and indubitable conclusions—epitomized by the Proslogion's verbal formula that guarantees its own reference—bring about that union. In the logical works Anselm's questioning of ordinary language, exposing its ambiguities in search of clearer and more precise language, is the logical, grammatical version of the search for perfect union. In the letters, Anselm seeks the total union of souls with his beloved fellow monks such that there can be neither conflicting wills nor the real absence of one from the other. And in the prayers he pleads not just for salvation but for intimate union with God, Mary, and the saints as lover, son, and brother.
There is, of course, a sense in which all writing, not just philosophical and theological writing, is about joining word with thing, and all argumentative writing has a kind of implicit narrative in which the story is that of crafting premises that join subject and predicate in the proposed conclusion. However, Anselm's works shape this narrative in a very particular way. The path toward perfect union is a journey that begins at nothing, fueled only by desire. The emotional line begins in the immobility of sin, moved not yet toward God but to the recognition of one's sin and the impossibility of approaching God. The intellectual journey begins with nothing except reason and the objections of fools and infidels, without explicit reliance on revelation or authority. This is not at all to say revelation and authority are truly absent but rather that Anselm takes care not to make them visible as separate from his own engines of transport. His rumination so completely digests them that they are indistinguishable from his own reflection, blended into the single movement of thought and will stretching toward God.
Anselm not only portrays himself as beginning with nothing except desire but further presents the obstacles to progress as insurmountable; at the same time, he hopes for and promises success, both in prayer and reasoning; the goal is complete intimacy with God and others, complete certainty and indubitability in his conclusions. Over and over again, in all his works, Anselm creates impossible situations and then, in a way that astonishes his reader, manages to escape the existential straightjack-
The Problem of Anselm et that is, for him, the human condition. In the prayers Anselm takes the most extreme steps to debase himself and elevate his addressee, creating the widest possible gap between his starting point and his goal. The paradoxical resolution is that the very greatness of God, the absolute and infinite goodness that so separates the sinner from God, opens up the possibility of union with God. In parallel fashion Anselm also creates impossible problems in his arguments. He exacerbates problems into contradictions and then, in astonishing reversals, transforms those paradoxes into claims that are not only true but necessarily true. In the prayers and letters sins that cannot be forgiven are forgiven, irremediable separation and conflict are overcome in the pure presence of perfect spiritual community. In the same way, in Anselm's arguments the will divided between justice and advantage becomes one for justice and gains all possible advantage, the freedom that seems to exclude grace is understood to require it, God who seems as if he cannot exist must exist, who cannot be just and merciful is the source of justice and mercy, who cannot do things is all-powerful, and the unity of God is not compromised but intensified by the Incarnation and procession of the Holy Spirit.
Anselm's version of the spiritual narrative of the soul straining toward God stretches the path from a beginning at nothing and arcs toward a point of complete consummation and completion. From his starting point at nothing, Anselm makes one giant leap, powered, on the one hand, by anguished pleas for mercy and grace, and on the other, by language and argument aimed at naming and knowing God. Some journeys of spiritual ascent are taken in small, measured steps (as in Boethius or Aquinas), but Anselm's, though laid out in many different works and on different topics, has the shape of a single arc upward. The end point of the narrative of the spiritual project is not just making it to God but to intimate union with God. In the arguments of his speculative project, the goal is not just words that represent things but words that guarantee their referent, not just validity and soundness but indubitability and necessity, convincing to doubters and opponents actively antipathetical to their conclusions. The path Anselm maps and then sets out to traverse extends as far as possible at both ends, from nothing to everything. The shape of the journey of the soul toward God, from nothing to everything, is that of reason as well as desire for Anselm. His arguments and emotions, in other words, are mapped on to the same narrative line formed by desire, desire both as lack and need, and desire as the impetus toward the beloved.
I make my case for this view of Anselm's corpus by reading its parts roughly in their order of composition. The letters of spiritual direction
The Problem of Anselm and the prayers are Anselm's earliest writings; they lay out in the clearest terms the problematic and trajectory found in Anselm's other works.
Chapter 1 lays out the narrative pattern of Anselm's prayers. The prayers uniformly begin in the depths of sin, but they work toward the point at which the sins that separate Anselm from an infinitely unreachable God are forgiven by a God whose very transcendence transforms the sinner, who is absolutely other than God, into an intimate.
Chapter 2 takes up Anselm's letters, which like the prayers, begin in anguish over separation, this time of beloved friends from each other, expressing intensely passionate, unsatisfiable longing. While the grace and goodness of God overcomes the gap between Anselm and the satisfaction of his desire in the prayers, in the letters Anselm achieves union by foregoing physical closeness for spiritual communion. Anselm redescribes the intimate physical presence he desires and is entreated to provide as spiritual communion with and through God. Thus, the letters move from the fallen language of sorrow at physical separation and anguish at human conflict to the redeemed language of perfect union in the spiritual community of those dedicated to God and to each other united in God.
Chapter 3 considers Anselm's logical, grammatical writings: De grammatico and the Lambeth Fragments. They are driven by the same intense scrutiny, now of language rather than the sinful self, to reveal the problems, asymmetries, and gaps that separate words from things. If the scrutiny leads to insight into differences and problems, the desire that drives it is, as it is in the prayers and letters, for unity, for linguistic unity and integrity. In this sense, though the whole of the narrative can be found in these small works, the first step, the acknowledgement of distance and difference, is most completely explored in them. In the prayers, examination results in consciousness of sin; thus realization of one's separation from God is the necessary condition for unity with Him. In the logical works, the painstaking analysis of language serves an analogous pedagogy: to achieve union, in this case, of words with things. But one must begin with the reality of separation. Just as in the prayers the first movement is the realization of one's separation from God, in the logical writings, learning how words only imperfectly map onto things is the first step toward creating the chain of terms that can carry the mind from the world up to God. The famous arguments of the Proslogion and Monologion are forms of argument in which one equivalent term is substituted for another in order to make inferential progress, but one must learn which substitutions can be made legitimately and not be misled by apparently common verbal forms.
Chapter 4 is an examination of the arguments for God's being and at-
The Problem of Anselm tributes in the Monologion and Proslogion. In these works examination of the divine results in contradiction and paradox (untraversable distance) and are resolved into necessary conclusions (perfect union). Thus in the Monologion, Anselm argues for claims worthy of the highest being, but further reflection on those claims show that there are (apparent) absurdities that follow from them. These absurdities are resolved by explication of further attributes of God, which in turn result in more (apparent) absurdity. This pattern recurs in the Proslogion as Anselm moves from the apparent necessary absence to the necessary presence of God as existing, powerful, just, and compassionate.
The fifth chapter explores the relationship between Anselm's method of linguistic analysis and the problems of truth and the will in the three dialogues: De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli. What is carried forward from the earlier writings is the search for linguistic integrity, for certain, clear formulations of necessary truths coming out of equally impenetrable paradoxes. What is different is that the subject is not the divine nature but the nature of created being and the finite and fallen will. Thus the source of difficulty is not the transcendent God beyond partial and fragmented reason but the fragmented character of finite and fallen being. Anselm thinks so deeply about key passages from scripture, he not only transforms them into probing questions, but the notions discussed in these passages become seeds of a philosophical and theological anthropology—on the nature of truth and freedom, of giving and receiving, on created vs. creative natures. The question of De veritate is that posed by Parmenides, how finite things can be said to be. It is concerned with maintaining the being and truth of creatures alongside a Creator, who is Being and Truth. The second and third dialogues are the exploration of both how the will can and naturally does accord with that truth (De libertate arbitrii), and can, nonetheless, fail to do so (De casu diaboli). De libertate's argumentative goal is to maintain the purity and unity of the unfallen will together with the opposite irretrievability of uprightness of the will once lost. De casu diaboli attempts to understand the apparently inexplicable transition from upright to fallen will. De casu's series of complicated distinctions concerning causality, ability, possibility, and evil are connected to the division in the will itself (the will for happiness vs. that for justice) and the world of finitude and becoming.
Chapter 6 takes up Anselm's three works on the Incarnation: Cur Deus homo, De incarnatione Verbi, and De conceptu virginali. These works are linked to the three dialogues discussed in chapter 5 in the sense that they take up the next point in the Christian narrative. After creation and the fall comes salvation through the Incarnation. In these works, the
The Problem of Anselm methods of linguistic analysis and the search for necessary reasons continue to be employed, as in the earlier works, in the service of conclusions that are portrayed first as paradoxical and then as necessary. These works mark an important development in Anselm's work from an intensely intimate setting and audience in the monastery to a more public engagement with the language, debates, and polemics of the outside world. However, Anselm takes those public debates with external objectors and makes them intimate and internal. In Cur Deus homo, the objections of "infidels" become those of Boso as individual and believer who experiences his own perdition in the absence of Christ. In De incarnatione Verbi, Anselm takes the outrageous objections of Roscelin and tames them until they become the lack of understanding of the believer whom he attempts to move toward understanding.
Chapter 7 discusses Anselm's last works: De processione and De concordia. The more intimate, existential tone almost disappears in these pieces and what predominates is the public voice engaged with the larger world. This stance was forced on Anselm in De processione by Pope Urban, who asked Anselm to speak on the difference between the Roman and Greek churches on the procession of the Holy Spirit. However, it is a role
Anselm takes up in earnest, no longer eschewing the traditional language of persons he had in the Monologion, where he concluded that God is "three I know not whats." These works immerse the reader in careful linguistic analysis but contain only distant echoes of the magnificent speculative leaps and spiritual introspection of the earlier works. Missing from the later works is some of the grandiosity of the intellectual gesture and proportionate emotional response in Anselm's best-known work. Anselm sees De concordia and De processione as speaking where scripture is silent, addressing problems that are internal to and implied by the creedal principles of Christianity. Perhaps as a consequence, their rhetoric and goals are less grand. They begin with more (not the nothing of the Monologion and Proslogion) and end with conclusions internal to Christianity, not probative of its basic beliefs. Where the earlier treatises are equal parts argument and affect, these works privilege the academic over the devotional. Nonetheless, they share with the early works the desire for unassailable conclusions, the perfect match between words and things. We thus see within Anselm's corpus the transition to the scholasticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The Prayers Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing Though the basis for the collection of Anselm's letters as it appears in Schmitt's critical edition are manuscripts derived from the collection of prayers and meditations Anselm sent to Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, in around 1104, most of the prayers were written between about 1063 and 1078, during his time as prior of Bec; thus, the form in which the prayers appear in the modern edition is somewhat artificial.1 The manuscript tradition shows that Anselm's prayers were collected in a variety of ways, early on anthologized with prayers by others and without attribution to Anselm.2 In this period, it was unusual for prayers to be attributed to any author and when they were, it was never a contemporary or even near contemporary but a saint from an earlier period.3 More significant, perhaps, is the manuscript tradition in which Anselm's prayers and meditations were collected independently; these manuscripts identify Anselm as author and include a prologue on how the prayers and meditations were to be used. According to Thomas Bestul, this manuscript tradition is evidence of the development of "the notion of a single individual as an 1. An abbreviated version of some of the elements of this interpretation of Anselm's prayers appears in Eileen C. Sweeney, "The Rhetoric of Prayer and Argument in Anselm," Philosophy and Rhetoric 38, no. 4 (2005): 355–78. See Ep. 325, S V, 256–57; see also F. S. Schmitt, Prolegomena seu
Ratio Editionis, in vol. 1 of S. Anselmi cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, 132–50; and A. Wilmart,
"Le recueil des prières de S. Anselme," in Méditations et prières de Saint Anselme, translated by A. Castel, Collection Pax 11 (Paris, 1923), xix–xxxiii.
2. Thomas H. Bestul, "The Collection of Private Prayers in the Portiforium of Wulfstan of Worcester and the Orationes sive meditationes of Anselm of Canterbury—A Study of the anglonorman devotional tradition," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des XIe–XIIe siècles: études anselmiennes, IVe session: Abbaye Notre-Dame du Bec, Le Bec-Hellouin, 11–16 juillet 1982, edited by Raymonde Foreville, Spicilegium Beccense II (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1984), 357–60.
3. Bestul, "Collection of Private Prayers," 360.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing active spiritual guide, one who composes prayers to meet specific devotional requirements." Linking this thesis with evidence from Anselm's letters, Bestul argues that that "[Anselm] must have acquired a reputation as a spiritual guide or leader."4 Anselm's collection "in its form, organization, and method of distribution is equally as revolutionary as [it is] in style," he concludes.5
Richard Southern first described Anselm's prayers as part of an "Anselmian revolution" in St. Anselm and His Biographer in 1963, and the claim of their distinctiveness has never been gainsaid, though there are, as Southern and others have found historical precedents for elements of Anselm's prayers.6 The prayers draw on traditions from the Carolingian period of private prayer and are, in important ways, an outgrowth of monastic and liturgical practices. In the life of a monk of the eleventh century, centered on the recitation of the divine office, the practice and language of prayer, especially from the psalms, is as natural as breathing. A glance at the footnotes of Anselm's prayers in Schmitt's critical edition show that they are saturated with the scriptural references, most frequently from the psalms. Moreover, the saints to whom the different prayers are addressed were recognized in the liturgical calendar in use at the time.7 Carolingian prayer collections in the growing practice of private devotion focused on elaborating the psalms and placing them in a Christian context, often with litanies of the saints. These litanies were expanded to include more details about the particular saint, their stories and special role, and extended calls for aid and mercy beyond the simple,
"have mercy on us."8 In addition, there was a growing trend toward the composition of prayers to Jesus and Mary.9
Anselm's prayers, addressed to Jesus, Mary, and the saints clearly fit into these developing traditions; however, like his letters, they are clearly something new on the scene.10 They are much longer and much more elaborate versions of these earlier practices. What in other prayers amounted to 4. See also Bestul, "Collection of Private Prayers," 360.
5. Bestul, "Collection of Private Prayers," 361.
6. Richard W. Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059– c.1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 38–47.
7. Benedicta Ward, "Introduction," in The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm, edited and translated by Benedicta Ward (London: Penguin Books, 1973, repr. 1988), 29–34.
8. Ward, "Introduction," 37–38. Some of these prayer books can be found in Precum Libelli
Quatuor Aevi Karolini, edited by A. Wilmart (Rome: Ephemerides Liturgicae, 1940).
9. Ward, "Introduction," 38–40. Prayers addressed directly to Christ began to appear despite a ban on such prayers in the liturgy dating back to the Arian controversy in the fourth century and the Council of Carthage in 397, Ward notes.
10. See Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 109–12.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing a line or two added to the litanies' plea to a saint to "pray for us" and "have mercy on us" becomes in Anselm 238 lines in the prayer to St. Paul and almost 200 in the longest prayer to Mary.11 Such a quantitative change becomes, especially as effected by Anselm, a qualitative one. The detailed exploration of the saints' experience and his own relationship to it is the fruit of extended meditation on the condition of both, and the result is an intense, emotional, and intimate form of prayer truly different in kind from its predecessors.
The aim of this extended and emotional exploration, as Anselm says in his prologue, is to stir up the mind to the love or fear of God or to selfexamination, and the prayers are composed to model that desired result.12 In contrast to earlier Carolingian prayers, which tended to exhibit a certain emotional restraint, Anselm's prayers are full of anguished love, longing and despair.13 It is as if Anselm has taken the moment in the Confessions in which Augustine describes his tremendous struggle to convert, weeping and pulling his hair and clothes, and turned it into the dominant mood of his prayers.14 As it is in this moment in the Confessions, in Anselm's prayers the will is the problem, unable to rouse itself even to know its own sin. Benedicta Ward connects this kind of moment in the Confessions with the doctrine of compunction important not just to Augustine but also Gregory the Great. A wonderful passage from Gregory captures the mood of Anselm's prayers perfectly: "A man has compunction of one kind when he is shaken with fear at his own wickedness, and of another when he looks up to the joys of heaven and is strengthened with a kind of hope and security"; there is, thus, a "two-edged sword of compunction, piercing with terror and tenderness, fear and delight."15
However, though Anselm's aim is to evoke the kind of compunction described by Gregory, it is still Augustine to whom we can trace the way in which Anselm composes his prayers.16 As Bestul notes, Anselm takes up
Augustine's technique of inner dialogue, exemplified in his early Soliloquies (a term Anselm clearly had in mind in the subtitle of the Monolgion as "id est soliloquium".17 Moreover, the kind of exclamations and "succes11. The average length based on a glance-through is around 100 lines, with the seventeen-line prayer to God (no.1), the shortest by far.
12. Ora. Prol., S III, 3.
13. Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer, 34–47.
14. Augustine, Confessiones 8, 19–22. This and all works of Augustine are cited from Corpus Augustinianum Gissense, electronic edition, edited by Cornelius Mayer (Basel: Schwabe, 1995).
15. Ward, "Introduction," 55, quoting Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, book 23; PL 76, 292.
(Ward's translation.) 16. Thomas H. Bestul, "St. Augustine and the Orationes sive Meditationes of St. Anselm," Anselm
Studies 2 (1988): 597–606.
17. Pros., Proem, SI, 94. See also Bestul, "Orationes sive Meditationes," 598.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing sions of agitated questions" used in the Confessions are ubiquitous features of Anselm's prayers.18 Thus, though the rhetoric of the prayers owes much to the psalms, Anselm emphasizes and exaggerates their anguish considerably, and the figures addressed and the stories they tell of the soul straining toward God are not from the Old Testament but the New.
All Anselm's prayers are concerned explicitly with the Incarnation and its consequences, not more generically with God, as are, for example, the prayers in Boethius's Consolation. There is also in the prayers a tremendous elaboration and expansion both of emotional responses and of details of biblical stories designed to provoke those emotional responses.
Anselm's prayers anticipate the twelfth century opening up of the emotional life in the flowering of romantic love; the "personal passion" and "emotional extravagance" expressed in them are picked up in later medieval spirituality.19
In what follows, Anselm's prayers are examined in order to reveal how these elements—extreme emotion, dense concrete detail, inner dialogue, self-examination, and compunction—are put in the service of their most striking feature: the demand for union with God and the saints. This end shapes the emotions and narrative structure of Anselm's prayers in ways that make the problem of union with God parallel the problem of the union between word and thing. The narrative structure described in the introduction as peculiar to Anselm appears in the prayers in its purest form. That narrative as Anselm constructs it is the project of joining two absolutely disparate things: the sinful soul and God. But this problem, no less than the attempt to derive God's existence and attributes, is a problem of language. How can one whose sinfulness so thoroughly falls below what can be expressed find the words to address one whose goodness, holiness and integrity so thoroughly exceeds the speaker? As Anselm prays, he gives full voice to the impossibility of words to do what they are intended to do: successfully address the heavens for salvation.
In this sense, the prayers are an exercise in "pure persuasion" or, in other words, pure rhetoric. Louis Mackey describes the interface of rhetoric and prayer in the following way:
As the use of language to persuade, rhetoric posits a hierarchic relation between the persuader and persuadee: the persuader locates himself (at least verbally) beneath the persuadee. In prayer the worshiper abases herself absolutely before God, who is absolutely elevated. . . . By means of paradox, an18. Bestul, "Orationes sive Meditationes," 599.
19. Brian Patrick McGuire, "Love, Friendship and Sex in the Eleventh Century: The Experience of Anselm," Studia Theologica 28 (1974): 150–52; Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer, 47.