The Nature of Anselm's Spirituality
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing complete presence is in the individual, who averts his gaze and whose desires go astray; he loses God, in other words, God does not lose him.103
The Nature of Anselm's Spirituality Some of the elements of Anselm's prayers taken forward into the twelfth century—their familial metaphors of domestic familiarity with God and the saints, their confidence that no matter how great the sin it cannot exceed the power of God's love—are, scholars argue, part of a more optimistic spirituality.104 The maternal language "was peculiarly appropriate to a theological emphasis on an accessible and tender God, a God who bleeds and suffers less as a sacrifice or restoration of cosmic order than as a stimulus to human love."105 Anselm, though not the sole originator of these trends, is surely one of their most influential and highly wrought practitioners. What is noteworthy, however, is that Anselm's spirituality is both highly pessimistic and optimistic: it is impossible that he be saved because of his sinfulness, and unthinkable that he not be saved because it is contrary to God's goodness and power. Moreover, the optimism—that he can hope for salvation, that God cannot not be merciful—actually comes out of pessimism in the sense that it comes out of the yawning gap that separates him as sin-bound sinner from God, who is boundless mercy and power.
Thus equally important to Anselm's demand for entrance into the intimate family circle of Jesus, Mary, and the saints is the extreme self-abasement found in every single one of the prayers. The exaggerated attention to his supposed sinfulness seems to model a kind of self-deprecation that it is dissonant if not disturbing to contemporary ears. Before we turn away from what looks like a kind of backwardness on Anselm's part, there are several things to remember. Anselm is not writing about himself in some personal or specific sense but making a theological and general point about human nature. He is not characterizing any particular actual, living people, himself or others, in the prayers. Thomas Bestul takes the notion "that a text . . . does not so much express the inner thoughts of the author, but functions rhetorically by constructing a speaking exemplum than an audience can respond to or even model its conduct upon," which he associates with poststructuralism, as also a medieval idea.106 In medieval spiritual practice introspective self-examination was not undertaken
103. Baumstein, "Dark Night and Truth," 244–46.
104. See Javelet, Image et resemblance, vol. 1, 451–61.
105. Bynum, "Jesus as Mother," 133.
106. Thomas H. Bestul, "Self and Subjectivity in the Prayers and Meditations of Anselm of
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing to find "a particular self, a self unique and unlike other selves" but "human nature made in the image of God," that which is common to all human beings.107 Thus what is on display here is the human condition and a call to readers to find themselves in this picture of sinful and needy humanity. Anselm is clearly of the view, expressed so succinctly by Pascal, that "there are only two kinds of people, the righteous who think themselves sinners, and sinners who think themselves saints."108 The last specifically addressed prayer in the collection, to Mary Magdalene, makes that point most strongly, but it is an element found in all the prayers. The saints are saints and are revered because of their having been chosen and blessed by God, by their having been given a mission and the wherewithal to fulfill it by God, and by their own recognition of their sinfulness, not by their own effort or merit.
It is also worth remembering that these prayers are written by and to a large degree for the spiritually privileged. One might object to Anselm writing these kinds of prayers to and for the weakest of sinners, those lacking most completely a sense of their own worth and achievement. But this is not his audience. He sends his prayers to the privileged Countess
Matilda and composes prayers for his fellow monks, abbots, and bishops.
All these would have been most tempted to see themselves as spiritually advanced, as somehow already dwelling in the presence of God. Anselm reminds them that they too are sinners, sinners most particularly in their lack of compunction, their lack of urgency about their own sinfulness. One of the last prayers, the generic prayer for a bishop or abbot to the patron saint of his church, makes this point most obviously. Anselm finds it appropriate for any powerful spiritual office holder to enter into a profound meditation on his sinfulness and ineptitude, on his sin, which produces an "ignorant doctor, blind leader, and erring ruler."109
It is not altogether inappropriate to find an analogy to the first step of a twelve-step program to characterize this move in Anselm's prayers: that first step is a realization of one's powerlessness. For Anselm, human beings are all like addicts, unable to save themselves by their own grit
Canterbury," in Saint Anselm, Bishop and Thinker: Papers Read at a Conference Held in the Catholic University of Lublin on 24–26 September 1996, edited by Roman Majeran and Edward Iwo Zielinski (Lublin: The University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1999), 151. Bestul links this notion to poststructuralist criticism.
107. Caroline Walker Bynum, "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual," in Jesus as Mother, 87. John F. Benton, "Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, edited by Robert L. Benston, Giles Constable, and Carol D. Lanham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 263–95.
108. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), n. 562
(534).
109. Ora. 17, S III, 69, 24–5.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing and will power. It is also, to use a less contemporary analogy, a Socratic moment shifted into a Christian context. If Socrates's task is to show himself and his interlocutors first what they do not know in order that they might seek true knowledge, Anselm's is to show himself and fellow pilgrims what he has not mastered in his own desire.110 The appearance, even the provocation of, emotion in these prayers is not just a different view of the emotions than that of the Stoics, it is also a rejection of the moral goal of Stoicism: self-mastery and self-containment. Anselm is not advocating an attempt to protect oneself from vulnerability but a fundamental seeking of it. Anselm's spirituality is not about finding fulfillment in the self but outside and beyond not just the self but beyond the world of experience; it is fundamentally and in the etymological sense ecstatic, and thus any temptation to self-satisfaction is its greatest enemy.
Anselm's spiritual task in the prayers is, first, to produce discomfort in order that one be moved beyond and outside any port which seems to offer shelter, at the same time as his goal is perfect union from this near total alienation. The intellectual goal in his speculative works is, mutatis mutandis the same: grasping a problem in its most difficult aspects, setting it out as insoluble, in order to make his way toward the perfect mirror of reality in language. The gap the prayers work to close is between God and sinful humanity. This is for Anselm the central instance of the problem of uniting what is separate, and that for which the problem of uniting word and thing in language is a metaphor. But prayer is not just metaphorically related to the problem of language, it is language called on to perform its most difficult task: persuading the transcendent and inaccessible God to rescue the sinner ontologically and morally cut off from the object of his desire. The goal of language is to join lowly words to lofty being. In Anselm's prayers, the gap between desire and thing desired—the sinful soul and God—is the widest and most untraversable, but the structure of the problem remains the same in his subsequent works. Thus in the ontological argument, from a sense of God as inaccessible, Anselm seeks the name that cannot fail to refer to a necessarily existing reality. This pattern is carried forward in all his works to some extent, as he works toward arguments whose terms form a single chain of interlocking names and predicates along which one can pull oneself to the end without stopping. Intimacy and presence in the 110. Although the term "Christian Socratism," originated by Gilson, is especially associated with patristic figures and the twelfth century, it surely applies to Anselm as well. See Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, translated by A. H. C. Downes (New York: Scribner, 1936), chapter 11, 209 ff.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing prayers are the equivalents of necessary reasons and indubitable proofs in the speculative works; both are attempts to bring together extremes without remainder. In the latter, as we shall see, there is also a beginning in alienation—of word from thing, of knowledge from being—just as there is of sinner from God in the prayers. And, moreover, we shall find that the arguments, like the prayers, even after their greatest success, finding necessity beyond contradiction and paradox, do not end in satisfied completion but in the continual and renewed desire for union not yet achieved.