96. Thus Martin Grabmann overestimates Anselm's adherence to patris-
Anselm on faith and reason
93. De Proc. 11 (S ii: 209.9–16. Cf. S ii: 208.1–11). Translation in Anselm of Canterbury: Trinity, Incarnation, and Redemption, ed. and trans.
Hopkins and Richardson, 120–21; cf. 118–19. Italics mine.
94. Cf. Epistola ad Lanfrancum archiepiscopum (S i: 5.2–6.14); and Prologus (S i: 7.2–8.26).
95. Cur Deus Homo 1.1 (S ii: 58.9–10).
96. Thus Martin Grabmann overestimates Anselm's adherence to patristic authority in his monumental study, Die Geschichte der Scholastischen Methoden, vol. i (5th edn.; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956 [first published in 1909]), 258–339; esp. 267–69, 289.
97. De Proc. 13–14 (S ii: 211.6–215.26).
98. Commendatio (S ii: 40.4–5).
99. Cur Deus Homo 1.1 (S ii: 48.16–18).
100. Commendatio (S ii: 40.5–7).
101. Cur Deus Homo 1.18 (S ii: 82.5–16).
102. Anselm offers one explanation in Cur Deus Homo 2.16 (S ii: 116.16– 122.21), and devotes the whole of De Conceptu Virginali et Originali
Peccato to the formulation of another.
103. Ward, Prayers and Meditations, 49.
104. For helpful discussions of this methodological evolution which, however, curiously omit Anselm's place in the story, cf. Bernardo C.
Bazan, Les Questions Disput´ees, Principalement dans les Facult´es de Th´eologie, de Droit et de M´edecine, part i (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985),
15–149; and Stephen F. Brown, "Key Terms in Medieval Theological Vocabulary," in Civicima: ´etudes sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du moyen ˆage, vol. iii: M´ethodes et instruments du travail intellectuel au moyen ˆage: ´etudes sur le vocabulaire (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991),
82–96.
105. Cur Deus Homo 2.22 (S ii: 133.12–13).
106. Cur Deus Homo 1.1 (S ii: 48.6–9).
107. Cur Deus Homo 1.18 (S ii: 83.28–29).
108. Anselm gives crisp acknowledgment to this procedure in De Proc. 1
(S ii: 177.15–17).
109. Mon. Prologus (S i: 7.10).
110. Mon. Prologus (S i: 7.10).
111. Prosl. Prooemium (S i: 93.4–10).
112. Responsio editoris (S i: 130.3–4); cf. sec. 7 (S i: 137.3–5); sec. 10 (S i:
138–39).
113. Cur Deus Homo 1.10 (S ii: 67.1–20).
114. Cur Deus Homo, Praefatio (S ii: 42.8–43.3); cf. 1 (S i: 48.2–5).
115. De Proc. 1 (S ii; 177.3–17).
116. De Inc. Verbi 1 (S ii: 5.22–6.4).
117. Anselm makes this explicit at the end of De Gramm. 21 (S i: 168.8–12).
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marilyn mccord adams 118. Praefatio (S i: 173.2–3).
119. Prosl. 4 (S i: 104.5–7).
120. Mon. 15 (S i: 3–7); cf. 16–25, passim.
121. Mon. 64 (S i: 74.30–75.16).
122. Prosl. 9–11 (S i: 106–11).
123. Prosl. 10 (S i: 108–109).
124. De Casu Diab. 23 (S i: 270.4–18).
125. Cur Deus Homo 2.11–13 (S i: 68.3–71.26).
126. See Cur Deus Homo 1.1 (S ii: 47.8–9; 48.16–17). Cf. De Inc. Verbi 1 (S ii: 6.10–17.6; S ii: 8.7–19; S ii: 9.5–8).
127. Prosl. 1 (S i: 100.18–19).
128. Victor Roberts, in his concern that Anselm should insist on prior faith as an epistemological necessity, mistakenly insists that "[n]ever in any of his writings does Anselm speak of bringing" the unbeliever
"to conversion by a process of reasoning" (in "The Relation of Faith and Reason in St. Anselm of Canterbury," The American Benedictine
Review 25 (1974): 494–512, esp. 511–12).
129. Cf. Desmond Paul Henry, The Logic of St. Anselm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), sec. 3, 64–67.
130. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (London: MacMillan Press, 1989).
131. Cf. Avery Dulles, S.J., Models of Revelation (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1983).
132. The great Anglican theologian Charles Gore outlined such a position in his influential essay "The Holy Spirit and Inspiration," Lux Mundi
(London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1890), 313–62. Gore's focus in this essay was on the impact of higher criticism on the Old Testament, and he was reluctant to follow his logic through to the New Testament, especially where the events mentioned in the creeds were concerned.
Cf. Arthur Michael Ramsey, An Era in Anglican Theology: From Gore to Temple (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960).
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gareth b. matthews
Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism introduction When Anselm completed his Monologion, he submitted it to his teacher, Lanfranc, for his approval.1 Although we do not have the text of Lanfranc's reply, it seems to have called for Anselm to give appropriate sources for his assertions. In response to Lanfranc's criticism, Anselm sought to justify himself this way:
It was my intention throughout this disputation to assert nothing which could not be immediately defended either from canonical Dicta or from the words of St. Augustine. And however often I look over what I have written, I cannot see that I have asserted anything that is not to be found there. Indeed, no reasoning of my own, however conclusive, would have persuaded me to have been the first to presume to say those things which you have copied from my work, nor several other things besides, if St. Augustine had not already proved them in the great discussions in his De trinitate.2
The deference to Augustine that Anselm expresses in this passage seems, in a way, quite fitting. After all, Anselm gives evidence throughout his own writing, and not just in the Monologion, of a detailed knowledge and a deep understanding of Augustine, especially of his De Trinitate. Although Anselm does not explicitly acknowledge his indebtedness to Augustine in his other works, he does so in his Preface to the Monologion:
In the course of frequent rereadings of this treatise I have been unable to find anything which is inconsistent with the writings of the Catholic Fathers, and in particular with those of the Blessed Augustine. If, then, someone thinks that I have said here anything which is either too modern, or which departs from the truth, I would ask them not to denounce me as an arrogant
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gareth matthews modernizer or a maintainer of falsehood. Rather I ask that they first make a careful and thorough reading of the books On the Trinity of the aforementioned learned Augustine and then judge my little treatise on the basis of them.3
Anselm seems to have used Augustine, not only as a doctrinal authority, but also as a model for his own literary style. R. W.
Southern has offered convincing evidence that the very cadences of Anselm's syntax, and not just the conclusions he reaches, give homage to Augustine.4
Yet there is a way in which Anselm's expressed deference to Augustine seems excessive. Anselm is a systematic thinker; Augustine is not. Even within the styles of academic philosophy, Anselm has a distinctive way of proceeding. In any case, he is important to us today, not perhaps so much for the novelty of his conclusions, at least not in philosophical theology, as for the fresh and rigorous way in which he reaches them.
I shall begin this account of Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism with a reconstruction of an argument for the existence of God that Augustine offers in Book 2 of his On Free Choice of the Will (De
Libero Arbitrio). We do not know whether Anselm actually read this particular work. But Augustine's proof offers a convenient summary of some of his most important ideas. It can serve as a useful basis for comparing his thought with that of Anselm.
After discussing some central points of comparison between these two thinkers, I shall move on to consider two additional topics central to the philosophy of religion, namely, the Divine Nature, and the Problem of God's Foreknowledge and Human Free Will. I shall conclude with some comments about how Anselm fits into the Platonic tradition more generally, a tradition to which Anselm and Augustine both clearly belong. augustine's proof of god in on free choice of the will If Anselm's remarkable ontological argument has any significant precedent in the history of philosophy, it is perhaps the argument
Augustine presents in Book 2 of his dialogue, On Free Choice of the Will. Reflecting on the similarities, some superficial, some deeper,
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between these two arguments may help us appreciate the fact that Anselm belongs to what we may call the Augustinian tradition in philosophy. Placing him in that tradition should not be allowed, however, to detract from his striking originality.
Augustine, in his dialogue, asks his interlocutor, Evodius, whether he is certain that God exists (2.2.5.12). Evodius answers that he accepts this by faith, not by reason. Augustine then asks Evodius what he would say to a fool who had said in his heart, echoing a verse from the Psalms, "There is no God."
Evodius responds to Augustine's challenge by suggesting an appeal to the evidence of the Scriptures. But Augustine is not satisfied with this response. Why then, he asks, should we not simply accept the authority of the scriptural writers on other matters, rather than engage in our own philosophical investigation. Evodius replies, "We want to know and understand (nosse et intellegere) what we believe"
(2.2.5.16).
Augustine compliments Evodius on his having grasped the nature of their joint project, which is to come to understand what they hold by faith. Appealing to the "Old Latin" text of Isaiah 7:9, "Unless you have believed, you shall not understand," as well as to the admonition of Jesus, "Seek and you shall find" (John 17:3), Augustine reaffirms their purpose of seeking to understand what they believe.
The first item on their agenda, Augustine says, is to answer this question: "How is it evident (manifestum) that God exists?"
(2.3.7.20). Augustine seems to be looking for a proof of the existence of God.
After listing two additional items in the search they are about to undertake, Augustine suggests they begin their inquiry with the question, "Do you yourself exist?" He continues: "Are you perhaps afraid that you might be deceived by this questioning? But if you did not exist, you could in no way be deceived."
The reader might be led by this move to expect that Augustine would try to develop a proof of God's existence based on the foundational certainty of one's own existence. But he does not do that.
Instead Augustine gets Evodius to agree that it would not be clear to him that he existed unless he were alive and also understood that he is alive. That move leads Augustine to introduce a scale of being, with inanimate things at the bottom of the scale, living
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gareth matthews beings higher up, and, among living beings, those with understanding higher than those that, even though they have perception, lack understanding.
Although it may not be immediately obvious to the reader, Augustine's aim in introducing the idea of a scale of being is to be able to specify God as a being who is so high up on such a scale that there is nothing higher. At the bottom of the scale Augustine places a stone, which is his example of an inanimate being. Above such inanimate things he places beasts, which are living things that lack understanding. Above the beasts he places human beings, who are both alive and have understanding (2.3.7.22–23).
A little later on, at 2.6.13.52, Augustine develops a parallel hierarchy of natures, or souls. In this parallel hierarchy he places on the bottom rung the (i) nature of a stone; the (ii) soul of a beast comes on the next level, and, finally, the (iii) rational soul or mind of a human being on the third level. Augustine asks Evodius whether, if they found something superior to our reason, he would agree that the entity they had found is God. Evodius says that being better (melius) than the best thing in him would be, just by itself, insufficient to guarantee that this being is God; to be God, he says, an entity would have to be something to whom nothing is superior (quo est nullus superior – 2.6.14.54). Thus we have the following definition of "God":
(D) x is God = if x is superior to the human mind (or rational soul) and nothing is superior to x.
With this definition secured, Augustine begins a long discussion of truth that culminates in the conclusion that truth is superior to our minds:
And so it is clear beyond any doubt that this one truth, by which people become wise, and which makes them judges, not of it, but of other things, is better than our minds.
Now you had conceded that if I proved the existence of something higher than our minds, you would admit that it was God, as long as there was nothing higher still. I accepted this concession, and said that it would be enough if I proved that there is something higher than our minds. For if there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, the truth itself is God. So in either case you cannot deny that God exists . . .
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Regimenting Augustine's argument somewhat, we could put it in this form:
(1) Anything that is more excellent than our minds and to which nothing is superior is God. [from Definition (D) above]
(2) Truth is more excellent than our minds.
Therefore, (3) Either truth is God or something superior to truth is God.
Therefore, (4) God exists.6 comparisons between augustine and anselm Faith in search of understanding Anselm, like Augustine before him, conceives his search for a proof of God's existence as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). Thus he tells us in the Preface to his Proslogion that he had first titled that work, "Faith Seeking Understanding." And he ends Chapter 1 with these very Augustinian words:
For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this also I believe, that, unless I believed, I would not understand.7
Moreover, he begins the next chapter (Chapter 2) with this sentence:
And so, Lord, you who give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you exist as we believe [that you do] and that you are what we believe [you to be].
I have already quoted a passage from Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will in which Augustine and his interlocutor express the idea of faith seeking understanding. But that idea can be found throughout Augustine's writings – not only in major treatises, but also in letters, sermons, and biblical commentaries. Somewhat ironically,
Augustine's admonitions to believe so that we may understand are almost always coupled with the quotation of Isaiah 7:9, the old
Latin text of which reads, "Unless you have believed you will not understand" (nisi crederitis, non intelligetis). Modern translations,
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gareth matthews based on a better Hebrew text, read this way: "If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established," which fails to make Augustine's point.
An obvious question to ask is whether one might gain faith through developing one's understanding, as well as gain understanding by developing one's faith. Augustine, in one of his sermons
(43.3.4), acknowledges, what is in any case obvious, that his hearers could not believe that what he was saying is true unless they understood his words. But it is one of the central claims of his philosophical theology that, at least in matters of religious or spiritual significance, faith must precede understanding. Thus in his Tractate 29 on the Gospel of John, he writes, "If you have not understood, I say,
'Believe!' for understanding is the reward of faith." He adds, "Therefore do not seek to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand" (ergo noli quaerere intelligere ut credas, sed crede ut intelligas).
Anselm expresses the idea of faith seeking understanding, not only in his Proslogion, but in other treatises as well, but perhaps nowhere more eloquently than in this passage from his On the Incarnation of the Word:
And so it happens that when beginners foolishly try to ascend intellectually to those things that first need the ladder of faith (as Scripture says:
"Unless you have believed, you will not understand" [Isaiah 7:9]), they sink into many kinds of errors by reason of the deficiency of their intellect. For they evidently do not have the strength of faith who, since they cannot understand the things they believe, argue against the same faith's truth confirmed by the holy Fathers. This is as if bats and owls, who see the heavens only at night, should argue about the midday rays of the sun with eagles, who gaze on the sun itself with undeflected vision. (De Inc. Verbi 1, Regan trans.) Responding to the atheist Another point of similarity between Augustine and Anselm is something that seems to be in tension with the idea that faith needs to precede understanding. Augustine directs his argument at an atheist, the "Fool" of the Psalms, who says in his heart that there is no God.
Anselm does the same in his Proslogion, Chapter 2. How can this Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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be, when each philosopher says that his reasoning begins with faith in search of understanding?
Certainly atheism cannot succeed in denying what faith believes unless the atheist shares with the believer an understanding of what it would be for something to be God. This point is explicit in Anselm, who says that, even for the Fool, something than which nothing greater can be conceived must be at least something in the understanding. "But certainly this very same Fool," Anselm writes, "when he hears this thing that I say (something than which nothing greater can be conceived) understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding."
As for Augustine, he mitigates the apparent tension between saying that his proof is directed at an atheist and characterizing his reasoning as faith seeking understanding by making his Fool an inquiring atheist. "If any fool who has said in his heart, 'There is no God,' should say this to you and not want to believe with you what you believe but [rather] to know whether your belief is true," Augustine writes, "would you leave the man in the lurch, or would you think he should be persuaded of what you firmly believe, especially if he were not to argue stubbornly, but wanted eagerly to know?" (2.2.5.13).
On the other hand, Augustine, unlike Anselm, does nothing to assure us that it is truly God that the Fool has in mind when he utters his words, "There is no God." More specifically, he does nothing to assure us that the Fool would accept the definition of "God" that Evodius later offers.
Understanding in search of faith?
Several of Augustine's earliest writings do not, in fact, begin with the assumption of faith, even when their conclusion seems to be clearly a matter of religious importance. Thus, for example, Augustine's little treatise On the Immortality of the Soul presents arguments very much in the style of Plato for the immortality of the soul. In fact, there are clear parallels in it to Plato's dialogue Phaedo. And yet, presumably, the work is meant to have religious significance.
Augustine's early dialogue The Teacher offers philosophical arguments for the conclusion that no human teacher ever teaches anyone anything. It is only by an inner illumination, he tries to show, that Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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gareth matthews we come to know what anything is. Augustine adds that illumination comes when we learn from Christ, the Inner Teacher (11.38).
Here again, it seems, understanding is meant to support faith.
By the time of his ordination in 391, however, Augustine seems to have settled on the clear priority of faith, even in matters one might otherwise have thought open to general philosophical investigation.
Thus, just before he begins his proof of the existence of God in Book 2 of On Free Choice of the Will, he writes: "For what is believed without being known cannot be said to have been found, and no one can become fit for finding God unless he shall have believed first what he afterward will have known" (2.2.5.18).
Even though Anselm also begins with faith, he seems, in contrast to Augustine, prepared to aim argumentation at unbelievers in the hope of at least preparing them for faith. Thus, after writing the moving account of faith in search of understanding quoted above from Chapter 2 of his Incarnation of the Word, Anselm writes this in Chapter 6:
But assuredly the holy Fathers (and especially blessed Augustine), following the apostles and evangelists, have argued with irrefutable reasoning that God is three persons and, yet, one unique, individual, and simple nature. Still, if anyone will deign to read my two short works, namely, the Monologion and the Proslogion (which I wrote especially in order [to show] that what we hold by faith regarding the divine nature and its persons – excluding the topic of incarnation – can be proved by compelling reasonings apart from the authority of Scripture) . . . (Hopkins/Richardson trans.)
The claim to have proved "by compelling reasons apart from the authority of Scripture" that God is three persons is certainly not a claim that Augustine makes in his De Trinitate. Nor would attempting to do that be congenial to what Augustine undertakes there. His project in the early part of that work is to establish the scriptural credentials of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Then in the last half of the work he tries to make sense of the idea that God is three-in-one, not prove it by "irrefutable reasoning."
Skepticism and the cogito As we saw above in the account of Augustine's proof in De Libero
Arbitrio, Augustine has Evodius begin his reconstruction of what is Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism
evident to him by reminding him that, most obviously, he exists.
After all, he could not be deceived about this, since he could not be deceived about anything without existing. This is a move we moderns associate with Descartes, but it is also a move Augustine makes several times in his writings.
Augustine does not, however, try to show that doubting or denying that God exists is similarly self-defeating. This is what Anselm does.
Having secured the agreement of the Fool to his definition of "God,"
Anselm then reduces the Fool's claim to absurdity, in fact, to the philosopher's favorite kind of absurdity, self-contradiction. Anselm's use of the Fool's skepticism in his argument to prove God's existence is thus a dramatization of that form of indirect proof known in logic as "reduction to absurdity" (reductio ad absurdum).
Anselm, in fact, shows no particular interest in addressing the threat of philosophical skepticism. By contrast, skepticism is, for Augustine, both a philosophical and an existential issue. In his
Confessions, at 5.10.19, he describes a period of his life in which he was strongly attracted to skepticism. What he found attractive was the skepticism of the "New Academy," to which he devotes his earliest extant work, Against the Academicians (Contra
Academicos).
In his De Trinitate (at 15.12.21) Augustine uses a cogito-like argument to refute the global or universal skepticism of the "Academicians" of the New Academy. And in his City of God he uses this anti-skeptical reasoning (including the famous line, si fallor sum –
"If I am mistaken, I am") to support an image of the divine Trinity:
We resemble the divine Trinity in that we exist, we know that we exist, and we are glad of this existence and this knowledge. In those three things there is no plausible deception to trouble us. (City of God 11.26)
Anselm gives no indication of being interested in this aspect of Augustine's thought. Thus when Gaunilo, in his reply to the Proslogion, "On Behalf of the Fool" (Pro Insipiente), uses the, to him, inconceivability of his own non-existence as a possible parallel to the Anselmian claim in Proslogion 3 that God (that is, something than which nothing greater cannot be conceived) cannot be conceived not to exist, Anselm is quite dismissive. Here is Gaunilo:
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gareth matthews Whether, however, I might be able to think that I do not exist, so long as I know most certainly that I do exist, I do not know. But if I can, why [can
I] not [conceive the non-existence] of whatever else I know with the same certainty? If, however, I cannot [do that], it will no longer be only God [whose non-existence I cannot conceive]. (Pro Insipiente 7)
Here is Anselm's reply:
Know, then, that you can conceive that you do not exist while you know most certainly [that you] exist. I am surprised that you have said you did not know [this]. For we conceive that many things do not exist which we know to exist and many things to exist which we know not to exist. We conceive
[them], not by considering [them] to exist, but by imagining [them] to exist in this way.
And indeed we can conceive something not to exist at the same time as we know it to be, because we can at the same time [imagine] the one and know the other. Also we cannot conceive to exist and not to exist at the same time because we cannot conceive [something] to exist and, at the same time, not to exist. If then one distinguishes these two senses of this pronouncement one will understand that nothing, as long as it is known to be is conceived not to be, and nothing whatever is, except that than which nothing greater can be conceived, even when it is known to be can be conceived not to be.
(Liber Apologeticus 4) Anselm here supposes that, except for something than which nothing greater can be conceived (that is, God), each thing that exists can be conceived (imagined) not to exist. Consequently, recognizing that I might have failed to exist, there is a way in which I can both
(i) know that I exist and (ii) conceive (imagine) my nonexistence.
What I cannot (coherently) do, Anselm adds, is assign to myself (or anything else) both existence and nonexistence.
In a way, this reply to Gaunilo is perfectly sensible. What is surprising is not so much what Anselm says as what he fails to say. The claim, (A1)I can be conceived [by someone] not to exist is problematic. To make sense of (A1) we would have to make sense of the idea that I might be merely a character in a work of pure fiction, or otherwise just a figment of someone's imagination. But much more problematic is this assertion:
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which is, philosophically, just about as problematic as any assertion could be. It is surprising that a philosopher of Anselm's acumen and sophistication would not give any indication that he recognizes this fact.
Proslogion 2 gives us some reason to think Anselm might have supposed that any claim of the form (B1) φ does not exist can be understood to mean (B2) Although φ exists in the understanding, φ does not exist in reality.
Anselm uses this translation schema to trap the Fool in contradiction. But, clearly, such a translation for (C1) I do not exist namely, (C2) Although I exist in the understanding, I do not exist in reality is philosophically just as troubling as the original. If "I" in (C1) is a genuine referring expression,8 then it is hard to understand how (C1) could be used to make a coherent assertion. But if (C1) is baffling, then so is (C2).
Without going any further into the fascinating problems of selfreference and self-identification, problems that have occupied a number of philosophers in recent decades, we can note that there is a nest of issues here that interested Augustine enormously, but, apparently, not Anselm. The larger point is that, whereas skepticism and how one might use skepticism against itself to generate knowledge is a significant feature of Augustine's thought, skepticism seems not to have gripped Anselm. the divine nature Attribute generation Having established in the Proslogion, that something than which nothing greater can be conceived, that is God, exists in reality
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gareth matthews turns in Chapter 5 and later chapters to consider other divine attributes. For each candidate, including the attributes of being supremely good, just, truthful, blessed, and so on, he asks whether that attribute should be assigned to God. In each case he concludes that whatever lacks the attribute in question would be "less than what could be conceived" (minus est quam quod cogitari possit), and so the attribute does indeed belong to God. Anselm's formula thus gives him a decision procedure for determining which are the divine attributes.
A problem with this procedure is, of course, that having one attribute traditionally assigned to God, say, justice, might turn out to be inconsistent with having another, say, mercy. Anselm tries to deal with this problem in Chapter 9.
Augustine never proceeds in such a systematic way to identify the divine attributes. But, in single cases, he does supply similar reasoning. One of the most significant of these is also one that anticipates
Anselm's ontological argument in other ways. It is this brief passage from Augustine's Confessions:
I had already discovered that the incorruptible is better than the corruptible, and so I confessed that whatever you are, you are incorruptible. For neither has any soul ever been able, nor will any ever be able, to conceive something that is better than you, who are the supreme and highest good. Since it is more true and certain that the incorruptible is superior to the corruptible, as I had already concluded, had it been the case that you are not incorruptible I could in thought have attained something better than my God. (Confessions
7.4.6) The most tantalizing expression in this passage is the phrase, "For neither has any soul ever been able, nor will any ever be able, to conceive something that is better than you" (neque enim ulla anima umquam potuit poteritive cogitare aliquid quod sit te melius). With this phrase Augustine comes very, very close to Anselm's "something than which nothing greater can be conceived" (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari potest).9 Moreover, Augustine, like Anselm, uses his formula to determine whether this candidate attribute, corruptibility, belongs to God. What Augustine does not do is to use his formula to establish the full nature of God.
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The Trinity In the last half of his great work on the Trinity, Augustine presents psychological analogies for the three-in-oneness of God. His idea is that when God is said in the Bible to make human beings in His image,10 it is, in particular, the human mind (mens) that presents images of the three-in-oneness of God. Here is one of Augustine's several psychological or mental analogies to God:
And so there is a certain image of the Trinity: the mind itself, knowledge, which is its offspring, and love as a third; these three are one and one substance. Nor is the offspring less, while the mind knows itself as much as it is; nor is the love less, while the mind loves itself as much as it knows and as much as it is. (De Trinitate 9.12.18)
Anselm, as he himself admits, was clearly influenced by Augustine's De Trinitate. He, too, speaks of the mind as the image of God (Monologion 67). And he seeks to illuminate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity by psychological or mental analogies, as in this passage:
Well, the supreme wisdom is undeniably conscious of itself. It would be most appropriate, therefore, to understand the Father in terms of consciousness and the son in terms of word. Words, after all, seem to be born from consciousness.
This can be seen more clearly in the case of the human mind. While the human mind does not always think about itself, it is always conscious of itself. So, at the moment when it does think about itself, its word must be born from its consciousness. (Mon. 48, Harrison trans.)
Divine simplicity One of the most difficult conceptions in Augustine's philosophical theology is his notion that God's essence or nature is perfectly simple. Augustine gives the rationale for this doctrine in the following passage from his work on the Trinity:
But God is not great by a greatness that is not that which He Himself is – as if God were, so to speak, a partaker in greatness when He is great. For in that case greatness would be greater than God. But there cannot be anything greater than God. Therefore, He is great by that greatness which is identical with Himself. (De Trinitate 5.10.11) Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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gareth matthews This idea of the divine simplicity in Augustine covers not only the attribute of greatness but all the divine attributes. God is essentially each of His attributes, and each one of them is identical with each of the others, as well as with God.
Anselm expresses the same idea in several passages, for example, in this one from his Monologion:
The supreme nature is what it is – good, great, existing – through itself and nothing else. And, if so, then what is more necessarily and clearly the case than that the supreme nature is justice itself? . . . (Mon. 16, Harrison trans.)
Indeed, as Anselm goes on to argue, God, the supreme nature, is not only justice, but supreme justice, supreme life, supreme goodness, supreme power, and so on, and, moreover, each one of these attributes is identical with God. the problem of foreknowledge and free will
It was Augustine who framed, for all later philosophy, the problem about how human free will could be compatible with God's complete foreknowledge of all that has happened and will ever happen. He does this in Book 3 of his treatise, On Free Choice of the Will. This problem was hardly a discovery of Augustine's. As he makes clear in Book 5, Chapter 2, of his City of God, he himself took the problem from Cicero. But it is not Cicero whom later medieval philosophers or modern philosophers read on this topic, but Augustine.
Since Augustine's discussion of this problem in Free Choice of the Will takes the form of a dialogue, it is sometimes difficult to be sure exactly what solution to any given problem Augustine himself means to opt for, or whether, in any given case, he means to settle on a single solution at all.
The Guarantor Solution One solution Augustine presents we may call the "Guarantor Solution." "Our will would not be a will," Augustine says, unless it were in our power. Therefore, because it is in our power, it is free . . . Nor can it be a will if it is not in our power. Therefore, God also has foreknowledge of our power. So the power is not taken from me by His foreknowledge, but because of His foreknowledge, the power to will will more certainly be present in me . . . (3.3.8.33–35)
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According to this reasoning, we can understand God's foreknowledge to guarantee our free action. For, necessarily, if God foreknows that we will voluntarily do something sometime in the future, we will, in fact, do it voluntarily, and so freely. Far from being incompatible with human free will, God's foreknowledge can guarantee its freedom.
The Guarantor Solution is also to be found in this passage from Anselm:
And whatever God foreknows shall necessarily happen in the way in which it is foreknown. So it is necessary that it shall happen freely, and there is therefore no conflict whatsoever between a foreknowledge which entails a necessary occurrence and a free exercise of an uncoerced will. For it is both necessary that God foreknows what shall come to be and that God foreknows that something shall freely come to be. (De Conc. 1.1, Bermingham trans.) The Divine-Case Solution A second solution to the problem of foreknowledge and free will we may call the "Divine-Case Solution." Augustine asks Evodius whether God foresees what He Himself will do. "Certainly if I say that God has foreknowledge of my deeds," Evodius answers, "I should say with even greater confidence that He has foreknowledge of His own acts, and foresees with complete certainty what He will do" (3.3.6.23). Augustine then points out that the same reasoning from God's foreknowledge that leads us to rule out human free will should lead to the conclusion that His own future acts will not be done voluntarily, but by necessity. However, if the Divine Case is to be rejected, then, it seems, the human case should be rejected as well.
The Divine-Case Solution is also to be found in Anselm. In fact, it is developed there in an admirably clear and effective way. "Now if God's knowledge and foreknowledge of itself enforces necessity upon all things He knows or foreknows," Anselm writes, then He Himself neither wills nor causes anything freely but necessarily, whether from the aspect of eternity or any conceivable time. If this conclusion is absurd even to suppose, we ought not to think that everything which God knows or foreknows to happen or not to happen thereby happens or Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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gareth matthews does not happen by necessity. Therefore nothing precludes God's knowing or foreknowing that something is caused in our wills or actions or is about to happen through our free will. (De Conc. 1.4, Bermingham trans.)
The Eternality Solution One might have expected Augustine to use the Divine Case to draw the same conclusion as Anselm draws. But he does not. Instead he has his dialogue character, Evodius, point out that nothing ever happens within God, since everything there is eternal (3.3.6.24). Thus there is in God no such thing as His knowing beforehand what He will choose to do, not because He is ignorant of what He will choose but because in Him there is no "beforehand." If, however, there is no "beforehand" in God, then, strictly speaking, God does not know before Adam sins that Adam will sin.
Neither Augustine nor Evodius, however, draws this conclusion in On Free Choice. Instead, they go on talking about God's foreknowledge. But Evodius's self-correction, that is, his withdrawal of his own claim that God sees beforehand what He will do, introduces the idea of God's eternal present, which Augustine describes eloquently in this passage from Book 11 of the City of God:
It is not in our fashion that God looks forward to what is future or looks directly at what is present or looks back on what is past, but in some other mode far and away different from our way of thinking. Indeed, He does not go from this to that by a change in thought but He sees altogether, unchangeably, in such a way that those things which come to be temporally – not only future things that are not yet, but also present things that are already and past things that are no longer – he comprehends them all in a firm and eternal present. (11.21) We can call the idea that there is no problem of foreknowledge and free will because there really is no foreknowledge in God the "Eternality Solution." One might well wonder, however, how effective this solution would really be. The idea of foreknowledge is especially troubling for free will, since it seems to "lock in" all future actions and leave no room for free choice. Yet the idea that an omniscient being knows timelessly what we will do also seems to "lock in" our (to us) future actions in a way that is at least as Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism
threatening to free will as genuine foreknowledge. Apparently that is Anselm's assessment. Thus, in the passage quoted above, he writes of God's knowledge "whether we speak according to the unchangeable present of eternity . . . or whether we speak according to the realm of time . . ." His idea seems to be that, if God's foreknowledge that I will commit a sin tomorrow did rule out my doing so freely (of course, Anselm thinks it does not), so would God's timeless knowledge that I will commit the evil deed.
The Modal-Placement Solution A fourth solution to the problem of foreknowledge and free will is what we might call the "Modal-Placement Solution." From (1) Necessarily, if God foreknows that Adam will sin, Adam will sin this does not follow:
(2) If God foreknows Adam will sin, Adam will necessarily sin.
Moreover, from (1), together with (3) God foreknows that Adam will sin we may validly infer (4) Adam will sin but not (5) Adam will necessarily sin.
If then the claim of necessity, as in (1), governs the connection between God's foreknowledge and the occurrence of what God foreknows will happen (what later medieval philosophers, including
Thomas Aquinas,11 call "necessity de dicto") God's foreknowledge will not preclude the possibility that, among the things God foreknows are free actions of human agents. On the other hand, if God is omniscient and all the things God foreknows will happen are themselves necessary events, as in (2) – what is later called "necessity de re" – God's foreknowledge will rule out human free will.
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gareth matthews Boethius seems to have been the first to mark this distinction clearly;12 but Augustine comes close. He asks Evodius whether, if he foreknew that someone was going to sin, it would be necessary that he sin. Evodius answers that it would be necessary (3.4.9.38).
Here Evodius seems to be relying on the assumption that all objects of foreknowledge are necessary events, things that have to happen, as in (2) above.
Augustine's reply, "You do not compel someone to sin whom you foreknow will sin, although without doubt, he will sin" (3.4.9.39), suggests a distinction between the necessity of the conditional (de dicto necessity), as in (1) above, and the necessity of the consequent
(de re necessity), as in (2) above. But Augustine does not express himself that way.
Anselm, however – even without using the de dicto/de re terminology – offers an ideally succinct and clear statement of the ModalPlacement Solution, for example in this passage:
Therefore, when we say that what God foreknows is going to happen is necessarily going to happen, we are not always asserting that it is going to happen by necessity but simply that it is necessary that what is going to happen is going to happen. (De Conc. 1.3, Bermingham trans.) platonism more generally Both Augustine and Anselm belong to the great Platonic tradition in Western philosophy. Augustine, in Book 7 of his Confessions, asserts that, through the mediation of a "proud" acquaintance, God brought to his attention "some books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin" (7.9.13). As he tells his life story, these Platonists, actually
Neoplatonists, played a significant role in opening up for him the possibility of conversion to Christianity.
Although Augustine seems to have received his Plato secondhand, from Neoplatonists and from Cicero, he reveres Plato above all other philosophers. He discusses Plato and Platonism at great length in Book 8 of his City of God. In Chapter 5 he remarks that no philosophers have "come closer to us" than the Platonists.
We cannot be sure that Anselm actually read any Platonic dialogues either.13 But he knew the works of Augustine so well that he may have become familiar with Platonic reasoning through Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism
the various accounts that Augustine and later medieval authors present.
Platonic Forms in the mind of God Perhaps the most obviously Platonic passage in Augustine is Question 46 from his Eighty-Three Different Questions, which includes this section:
[T]he ideas (ideae) are certain principal forms (formae) or reasons (rationes) of things, fixed and unchangeable, which are not themselves formed and, being thus eternal and existing always in the same state, are contained in the Divine Intelligence. And although they themselves neither come into being nor perish, nevertheless, it is in accordance with them that everything which can come into being and perish and everything which does come into being and perish is said to be formed. (De Diversis Quaestionibus
46.2) The idea that the Forms are located in the mind of God can, perhaps, be linked with Plato's suggestion, in his dialogue, Timaeus, that the creator looks to the eternal Forms as paradigms, or patterns, after which to create the material world (Timaeus 28a–29d). Anselm picks up that idea in the following passage:
But I seem to see something which demands that we distinguish carefully the sense in which it is possible to say that created things were nothing before being created. For a maker makes something rationally if, and only if, there is already something there in his reasoning – as a sort of exemplar. (Or perhaps terms like "form," "likeness," or "rule" are more appropriate.) The following then is clear: before all things existed, the manner, features and fact of their future existence already existed, in the reasoning of the supreme nature. On the one hand, then, before being made, what was made was, clearly, nothing, inasmuch as it then was not what it now is, and inasmuch as there was nothing out of which it was made. Yet on the other hand, it was not nothing as far as the reason of the maker was concerned. (Mon. 9,
Harrison trans.) Although Anselm's idea that the divine creator used forms as paradigms in creating the world is Platonic, his acceptance of the Jewish and Christian idea that God created the world from nothing is not.
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gareth matthews The Good Itself as ultimate cause Plato suggests in several places that he views the Good Itself as the ultimate cause of all there is. Here is one such passage: "Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power"
(Republic 509b, Grube trans.). Nevertheless, Plato seems to have been frustrated over his inability to explain how everything is for the good (see, for example, Phaedo 99b–d).
Anselm seeks to establish the ultimacy of the Good in a genuinely Platonic way. Thus he writes:
And who would doubt that that through which all things are good is a great good?
Because, then, it is that through which every good thing is good, it is good through itself. It therefore follows that all the other good things are good through something other than what they themselves are, while this thing alone is good through itself. But nothing that is good through something other than itself is equal to or greater than that good which is good through itself. The one thing, therefore, that is good through itself is the one thing that is supremely good . . . But what is supremely good is also supremely great. There is therefore one thing that is supremely good and supremely great, and this is of all the things that exist, the supreme. (Mon. 1, Harrison trans.) Evil as privation Obviously any philosophical theologian who claims that God is
Goodness Itself, as well as the cause of all that exists, faces a fundamental problem over the existence of evil. In one place Plato seems to be trying to solve the problem by simply retracting the assumption that God is the cause of everything. "Therefore, since a god is good," Socrates is made to say in Book 2 of the Republic, "he is not, as most people claim, the cause of everything that happens to human beings but of only a few things, for good things are fewer than bad ones in our lives. He alone is responsible for the good things, but we must find some other cause for the bad ones, not a god" (Republic
379c, Grube trans.).
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Anselm, Augustine, and Platonism
This solution seems inconsistent with Socrates' teaching at the end of Book 6 of the Republic that the Good Itself is the ultimate cause of all there is. In any case, the solution in Book 2, as it stands, is not a solution that either Augustine or Anselm can accept.
One solution they both propose is more properly Neoplatonic than Platonic. It is to say that evil is a privation. Here is Augustine's most famous statement of that view:
It was obvious to me that things which are liable to corruption are good. If they were the supreme goods, or if they were not good at all, they could not be corrupted. For if they were supreme goods, they would be incorruptible.
If there were no good in them, there would be nothing capable of being corrupted . . . If they were to exist and to be immune from corruption, they would be superior because they would be permanently incorruptible. What could be more absurd than to say that by losing all good, things are made better? So then, if they are deprived of all good, they will be nothing at all. Therefore as long as they exist, they are good. Accordingly, whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance . . . (Confessions 7.12.18) Here is one of many passages in Anselm on evil as a privation, specifically an evil will as a privation:
As long as the will originally given to a rational nature [was] simultaneously oriented to its rectitude by the same act with which God gives it . . . it was just. But when it distanced itself from what it ought and turned against it, it did not remain in the original rectitude in which it was created.
And when it abandoned it, it lost something great, and acquired in exchange only the privation of justice we call injustice and that has no positive being. (On the Fall of the Devil 9, McInerny trans.) conclusion As the comparisons above should make clear, there can be no serious doubt that Anselm studied the writings of Augustine carefully or that he was deeply influenced by Augustine's thought. Although he was an Augustinian philosopher, he was also a thinker of great originality. The clarity and rigor of his thought make him much more of a philosopher's philosopher than Augustine ever even aspired to be.
Both Augustine and Anselm were also, in a broad sense, Platonist philosophers, but not, apparently, from a study of Plato himself.
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gareth matthews Indeed, both philosophers seem to have absorbed Platonic ideas and doctrines only through intermediaries. Still, even at many removes from Plato himself, the Platonic stamp on each of them is difficult to miss. notes 1.
"Letter to Archbishop Lanfranc," Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited with an introduction by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–4 (hereafter Major Works).
R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 71–72. Southern's section, "The Influence of St. Augustine" (71–87), is worth reading in its entirety.
Major Works, 6.
Southern, Portrait, 73–77.
Thomas Williams's translation, in Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 58.
This argument is, of course, open to many objections. For example, Augustine has not ruled out the possibility of there being two or more entities, each superior to truth, but each such that nothing is superior to it. Nor has he here tried to make plausible the idea that God might simply be truth.
Translations from Anselm's Proslogion and further translations from Augustine, except for those from his De Trinitate, are my own. Translations from Augustine's De Trinitate are from Augustine, On the Trinity, Books 8–15, trans. S. McKenna, ed. G. B. Matthews (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002). Translations of other Anselm texts besides the Proslogion and the exchange with Gaunilo, come either from Major Works, with individual translators cited, or from Complete
Philosophical Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, trans. J. Hopkins and H. Richardson (Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000), cited as "Hopkins/Richardson."
For the claim that it is not, see G. E. M. Anscombe, "The First Person,"
Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 45–65.
A less close, but perhaps still significant, parallel is to be found in Book 1, Chapter 7, of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, which begins this way: "For when that one God of gods is conceived, even by those who form an idea of, invoke, and worship other gods, either in heaven or on earth, He is thus conceived as something than which nothing is better or more sublime."
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