Mapping the Extremes Part I: Lofty God
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing tithesis, and other techniques of verbal self-effacement, the seeker is humbled and God exalted. . . . The rhetorical act then proposes to reduce this distance. Its aim, as persuasion, is the communion of persuader and persuadee.20
For Kenneth Burke, prayer is "pure persuasion" because its audience, God, is ideal in the sense of absolutely unattainable, making the goal of the rhetorical act unachievable. The act is "pure" in the sense that it is divorced from any utilitarian goal and so, according to Burke, is a "sheerly formal use of such expressiveness."21 Anselm's prayers are "pure persuasion" in a way inspired by Burke but shifting his sense slightly. Anselm is not engaging in the linguistic act of prayer for the sheer pleasure of it, though enjoyment of language and the engagement with problem of language for its own sake is clearly part of it, as we shall see throughout Anselm's corpus. But Anselm is intensely and passionately committed to trying to bring about the union he seeks, even as he goes out of his way to construct and even exaggerate the impossible rhetorical and, for him, existential situation. Further, Anselm adds to prayer as described by Burke a paradoxical solution to its insoluble problem. The very greatness of God, the absolute and infinite goodness of God, which so separates the sinner from God, opens up the possibility of union with God. Because God is so great and so good, he can lift up the sinner who is so worthless and so mired in sin. In prayer, then, the sinner can make a giant leap from the depths of hellish despair to a sense of entitlement to heavenly communion. The entitlement, however, is grounded in the addressee's greatness and mercy rather than on the sinner's merits or even lack of demerits. The prayers end in the hope and desire for this communion and in grief at the sins that postpone it.
Mapping the Extremes Part I: Lofty God Anselm's first task is to depict the relationship between addressor and addressee, abasing himself and elevating God and the saints. This dynamic, repeated in every prayer, is perhaps expressed most succinctly in the prayer to St. Nicholas: "O your inundation of goodness, and my abundance of badness! How far they are from each other!"22 What An20. Louis H. Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word: Essays in Medieval Philosophy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 94. Cf. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 176–80.
21. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 34–35.
22. Ora. 14, S III, 57, 59–60.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing selm describes in different ways and in detail in the different prayers is this distance and exactly what creates this huge distance between him and the holy ones he beseeches for mercy.
The first aim, elevation of the addressee, is effected most simply and directly in elaborate praise. Thus, for example, Mary is addressed as second only to God; she is "queen of the angels, lady of the world [domina mundi], mother of him who cleanses the world [mundat mundum];" she is "generator [genitrix] of the life of my soul, nourisher [altrix] of the one who repairs my flesh, nursemaid [lactatrix] to the savior of my whole substance."23 Paul is the great apostle, coming after but exceeding the others in labor and efficacy; St. Nicholas is praised the world over for his miracles and advocacy, virtues, and powers, exceeded now that he is in heaven, and John the Evangelist is praised as the greatest (altissime) of the evangelists and the most beloved (dilectissime) of the apostles.24
However, Anselm is clear that no amount of praise is adequate to the goodness of God or his saints; hence, he not only praises them but argues that they are beyond his ability to praise. In the prayer to Christ,
Anselm describes his praise as far less than what Christ deserves: "However greatly inferior [my praises] are to your beneficence, however lacking in worthiness they are to your devotion, however exceedingly meager they are for the sweetest abundance of your love."25 The problem becomes most acute in the three prayers to Mary. A section of the last and longest of the three Marian prayers describes his unworthiness to speak of or to the Mother of God. He starts with a series of exclamatory praises and then stops; "What am I saying?" he asks. "My tongue fails (deficit); my spirit is insufficient (non sufficit)," he laments. He can think of nothing worthy and fears saying anything unworthy: "What can I say that I might worthily report of the mother of my Lord and God, by whose fecundity I am redeemed from captivity, through whose giving birth I am exempted from eternal death, through whose offspring I who was lost am restored and from miserable exile returned to the blessed homeland?"26 He also tries to approximate a sense of her status and function by characterizing her in the most paradoxical terms and her activity as closing the infinite gap between him as sinner and God. Thus Mary is "the mother of the Creator and Savior," "by whose virginity my soul falls in love with its
Lord and is espoused to its God."27 Thus as he attempts to make his praise more adequate, it becomes less intelligible.
23. Ora. 7, S III, 18, 15–16; 19, 28–29.
24. Ora. 10, S III, 33, 3–4; Ora. 14, S III, 56–57, 39–58; Ora. 11, S III, 42, 3.
25. Ora. 2, S III, 6, 5–7.
26. Ora. 7, S III, 19, 28–38.
27. Ora. 7, S III, 19, 34–35.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing In another prayer, addressed to the cross, Anselm praises it for defeating demons, renewing the world, raising the dead, and completing the heavenly city. "With what affection shall I glory in you?" Anselm asks, when, without the cross, he would have only the grief and misery of hell.
How can he praise with joy and rejoice with delight at the cross, when without it he would have neither joy nor delight?28 How can he praise that without which he would have neither anything to praise nor the emotional resources from which praise comes? It is, in other words, impossible to make a gift of his praise, to have it please the one he seeks to praise and persuade; he can only—at best—return a small portion of what he has received from them.
Because God is too lofty for him to speak to directly, he asks the saints to act as his intercessors. Hence, for example, in the prayer to St. Nicholas, he notes that the boundlessness of his sins requires an intercessor, and calls on Nicholas, a "great confessor," to hear his plea.29 Addressing his soul, Anselm writes, "As a beggar you prayed through another, since you were not confident to go before him yourself."30 However, though in prayers to the saints, as opposed to God directly, he begins with some hope of proportion or measure between his plea and its chances of success when addressed through an intercessor to God, this turns out not to be the case. Anselm depicts the saints, who are in principle as human as he is, in terms of their greatest intimacy with Christ and their highest office. He characterizes John the Baptist as the one who baptized God, who was born before God, who knew God before he knew people; St. Paul, as noted above, is the apostle who comes later but surpasses all the others; St. John the Evangelist "was his intimate, reclining on the glorious breast of the Most High," "the richest in love of those whom God loves;"
Peter is "prince of the apostles, prince among such great princes."31 In all these cases, Anselm characterizes the saints in terms of what makes them most unlike and most distant from him, again creating the greatest possible gap between himself and his addressee.
Like a good rhetorician, Anselm also crafts his plea to the particu28. Ora. 4, S III, 11–12, 24–33; 12, 42–47.
29. Ora. 14, S III, 55, 16–19. Though the prayer to St. Nicholas was supposed to be used for the transfer of a relic to Bec in 1090, making it among the later prayers if composed at that time, Southern argues that it doesn't seem to be particularly well suited for this purpose and seems much more like the earlier prayers. It is, he says, "filled to a degree unparalleled among Anselm's later prayers with the horror of hell . . . the fear of damnation." For this reason, Southern places it among the earlier prayers. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 111.
30. Ora. 12, S III, 49, 126–27.
31. Ora. 8, S III, 26, 3–6; Ora. 10, S III, 33, 3–5; Ora. 11, S III, 43, 7–8; Ora. 12, S III, 45, 6; Ora. 9,
S III, 31, 3–4.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing lar personality and position of the one he entreats, addressing each saint in terms that connect to the particular features of their life and work. In the prayer to John the Baptist, Anselm focuses on the cleansing of original sin in baptism, contrasted with his defilement in sin. He describes himself as "superimposing" the image of sin over the image of God, and compares himself negatively to Adam. Adam sinned without knowing its punishment while he, Anselm, sinned both knowing the consequence and having been forgiven and restored once. The last sections of the prayer address God but ask God to act "by the great merit of your
Baptizer," repeating multiple times the plea to "take away" his sins.32 In the prayer to Peter, Anselm uses the motif of Peter as shepherd and himself as lost sheep throughout. The longest prayer, to St. Paul, picks up the major themes of Pauline theology, moving from the theme of justice
(by which he is condemned) to mercy (by which he hopes to be saved) to the struggle to hope from faith, and the struggle even to hold on to faith, viewing himself as dead but called through Paul to new life. The two prayers to John the Evangelist focus on his love and friendship and on sin as the enemy. The prayer to Benedict uses as its basis three images from the Rule of St. Benedict: the king and his knight, the master and his pupil, the abbot and his monk.33
Anselm works not just to differentiate the prayers by the particular characteristics of each saint but to connect his personal story to theirs. Thus to Benedict he confesses his weakness as soldier, student, and monk. In the prayer to Stephen, he focuses on Stephen's prayer as he died, asking God not to hold the sin of his killers against them (Acts
7:60), finding in that prayer the possibility that Stephen might make the same prayer for him.34 The prayer to Mary Magdalene prays for compunction for his own sins and desire for God so that, like her, he may be forgiven.35
Anselm also takes care to make the significance of the distance separating him and the saints clear. These saints are so close to God that they, like God, seem infinitely distant; like God, then, they are too far away for his prayer to reach. Expressing this distance, Anselm addresses John the Baptist: "To you, sir, who are so great, holy and blessed, comes a wicked [scelerosus] worm, a wretched [aerumnosus] little man."36 Peter is "rich with many and great gifts, with many and great sublime honors" while
32. Ora. 8, S III, 26–27, 19–45; 28–29, 79–104.
33. See Ora. 9 to Peter, Ora. 10 to Paul, Ora. 11 and 12 to John the Evangelist, and Ora. 15 to Benedict. On the motifs related to Benedict, see Ward, "Introduction," 70.
34. Ora. 13, S III, 52–53, 57–102.
35. Ora. 16, S III, 64–67.
36. Ora. 8, S III, 26, 7–9.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing he, Anselm, is the poorest and weakest of men.37 Moreover, Anselm notes that their very closeness to God makes it impossible for them to have a different perspective than God. He writes to St. John, for example, that since he, Anselm, has sinned against God, the friends of God should also reject him.38 In a prayer to Mary, he reasons, "when I have sinned against the son, I have angered the mother, nor can I offend the mother without injuring the son." Since God has rejected him, there is nowhere else he can go: "[W]ho can reconcile me to the son if the mother is my enemy?"39
In the prayer to St. John, Anselm turns John's friendship with Christ against his own cause: "Beloved of God, since I have sinned against your beloved, I am certain that I have deserved your hatred also."40
In their very proximity and intimacy with God, the saints can take no other perspective than God's and Anselm is, in the end, just as far from them as God. Far from increasing his chances of being heard, then, addressing the saints rather than God seems to decrease them. Thus, though the saints are mediators occupying some place between the lowly Anselm and the exalted God, Anselm raises them up so that he still stands too far below them to be successful in his request for their intercession—at least not on the basis of his proximity to them. Whether it is the saints, Jesus, or Mary, Anselm speaks to them as flesh and blood creatures, highlighting the paradox that they are human, as he is, even though infinitely better. They are both those to whom he can expose his darkest corners and those to whom he cannot even bring himself to speak. In so far as they are closer to him, it only makes them as compared to God less able to make the great and infinite motion of lifting up the lowly sinner. Thus the prayers most often move from the address of the saint to the address of God, and in a reversal of roles, God becomes intercessor to his saints, entreated not just directly to help Anselm but to convince his saint to do so. Anselm, thus, shapes the emerging practices of addressing prayers not just to God but to the saints and to Jesus and Mary (rather than God the Father) as an act of humility.41 His unworthiness to approach God makes the mediation of Jesus, Mary, and the saints necessary, but even when he addresses the saints, he construes their position as still infinitely distanced from his.
Though it is difficult to convey in translation, Anselm shows a poet's 37. Ora. 9, S III, 30, 6–7.
38. Ora. 11, S III, 42, 19–22.
39. Ora. 6, S III, 16, 41–43.
40. Ora. 11, S III, 42, 21–23.
41. In the composition of prayers to Mary and the saints, Anselm is following a trend of the tenth and eleventh centuries, due partly, Southern speculates, to the dispersal of both authority and saintly relics. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 96–97. Southern also argues that Anselm's prayers to Mary mark a new development in Marian devotion. Southern, Portrait in a Landscape, 106.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing consciousness of the sound and shape and not just the meaning of words in the prayers. "Rhyme, assonance, antithesis, the frequent employment of parallel grammatical constructions and closely similar words to express opposing or complementary ideas—all these devices are very common" in the prayers.42 We see an example of this last, the use of words that have a similar sound but either literally or in context have opposite meanings, in the following passage: "If God looks down [despicit] on me, who will look up [respicit] to me? If God averts [avertit] his face from me, who will turn his toward [convertit] me? If God hates [odit] me, who will listen [audit] to me?"43 Thus Anselm contrasts God's looking down (despicit) and his looking up (respicit), God's inundantia of goodness with his own abundancia of evil, and God's aversion to him with his own desire for conversion. How, Anselm asks, in another contrast of dissimilar meaning with similar sound, might Stephen, who asked for mercy when "provoked (provocatus)," respond when "invoked (invocatus)?" How, he continues, "will he favor those humbled when he is exalted, who when he was humiliated give succor to those full of pride?"44 The use of related sounds but contrasting meanings in the parallel sets of verbs is a kind of verbal imitation of Anselm's way of creating tremendous rhetorical distance— the words sound the same or similar but in meaning they are the opposite.
Here, then, in clear way, Anselm's use of the poetic device serves his project of drawing attention to the gap between sinner and saint, human and divine, and the way it will be traversed by extremes of human desire and divine grace. Beyond the kind of aural echo of rhyme or assonance, every prayer repeatedly uses balanced contrasts which are variations on the basic one on which the whole notion of prayer is based: lofty saint, lowly sinner. He seeks something that will excuse (excuset) him and finds nothing that does not accuse (accuset); he seeks someone to pray for him and finds that everything is against him.45 "From these [miseries] piously redeemed [redemptus], in these [miseries] impiously destroyed [peremptus],"
Anselm writes, in a series of parallel contrasts between what God made him and what he has made of himself.46 For the prayer to Mary Magdalene, an inventory of the literary devices—interpellations, exclamations, interrogation, assonance, rhyme, repetition of inverse terms, parallelisms, antitheses—contains over fifteen antitheses and parallelisms, over twenty rhymes, over ten alliterations and assonances.47
42. Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer, 45.
43. Ora. 14, S III, 55–56, 20–22.
44. Ora. 13, S III, 52, 80–82.
45. Ora.10, S III, 35, 75–78.
46. Ora. 8, S III, 24.
47. Victor Saxer, "Anselme et la Madeleine: L'Oraison LXXIV (16), ses sources, son style et son influences," in Les Mutations socio-culturelles, 371–74.