8. If Anselm wants only intrinsic descriptions to fall out of (4), he is assum-
brian leftow reason it is trivially true that He is the creator of all good things other than He.
It might seem to follow from this that God's greatness requires Him to create. But it does not. Rule (2) selects this attribute given that God has created. Had God not created, it would not select this attribute. There are two ways to see this.
One way is that (2) is probably not designed to apply to this case.
Anselm probably understands "everything" statements to have existential import – that is, he would probably take it (for instance) that if God is greater than all things other than He, there are things other than
He. This was standard in the logic he knew, though today's orthodoxy disagrees. If this is how Anselm thought of it, he intended (2) to apply only if there are things other than God for "everything" to refer to. So his view would be that if there are no things other than God, (2) does not select being creator of all other good things. If (2) does not select this if God has not created, accepting (2) does not commit us to the view that God's greatness requires Him to create, even if (2) does select the attribute of being creator given that God has created.
Suppose on the other hand that (2) does operate if only God exists. If only God exists, then for any F God has, there are no non-Fs. If there are no non-Fs, there are no non-Fs greater than God. So (2) selects every F
God has. And so (2) tells us that if God has not created, it is greater not to be creator, while if God does create, it is greater to be creator. So if (2) operates if only God exists, the result is the same. (2) does not commit us to the claim that God's greatness requires Him to create, even if it does have some relational descriptions as outputs.
This will involve speaking as if God had many attributes. This is misleading, in discussing Anselm. As already noted, Anselm would say that God has none, strictly speaking. In a slightly looser sense, he would say that God has just one – that all divine attributes are identical with God's nature (Mon. 17). The only "many" involved in talk of God, for Anselm, are the many descriptions God satisfies. Still, with this problem noted, we can go ahead and speak with the vulgar.
If Anselm wants only intrinsic descriptions to fall out of (4), he is assuming that being of the highest kind and having all its improving attributes are intrinsic attributes. The assumption about kind is reasonable. It is at least plausible that all kinds are intrinsic attributes, though this has been denied (some argue that being human, for instance, entails having had a particular evolutionary history). Even if this is not true for kinds in general, if we take it that the highest kind is deity, this seems plausible in the particular case: surely God would be God if He had never created anything. Improving attributes for some kinds may not Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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Anselm's perfect-being theology
be purely intrinsic. But if we take those for the kind deity to be knowledge, power, and moral goodness, then it seems that God could have the highest degrees of these (omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection) even if He had not created.
9. The Latin here, cogitari, is neutral between "described" and "referred to." As Anselm eventually says that God is beyond our powers of description (Prosl. 15), "referred to" might seem more appropriate. But one can refer to something with a description, and Anselm wants to find descriptions for God: thus I choose "described."
10. While Anselm does not explicitly refer to possible things, he must intend this restriction. Otherwise it would be easy to describe "things" greater than God actually is – impossible things. For instance, there is some value to being the Devil. (Though down on his luck, he is an archangel.) If so, something that was both God and Devil would be greater than God: it would have all God's greatness plus all the Devil's.
But there cannot be something both God and Devil.
11. The text quoted does not mention this, but Anselm is obviously assuming it.
12. It thereby also justifies (3) if and only if having no non-perfections is a perfection. Absent this assumption, it is not clear that the Proslogion underwrites (3).
13. Obviously there is a point to be made here about levels of description. If we describe God by saying that He is beyond description, we do not contradict ourselves. Rather, we say (in effect) that He is beyond description in ordinary first-order language, language simply about God. This statement is itself second-order. That is, it is about the relation of language to God, not about God in Himself. Note, incidentally, that at this point we must read Anselm as talking about describing rather than referring to God. It is not clear that being beyond our powers of reference is an improving attribute, and if God were beyond our powers of reference, it would follow that Anselm had not in fact referred to Him. In that case Anselm could not have produced an argument for His existence: his attempt in Proslogion 2 would have failed.
14. For this sort of understanding of the logic of Anselm's argument, see, e.g., Robert M. Adams, "The Logical Structure of Anselm's Arguments,"
Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 28–54.
15. Proslogion 2's argument for God's existence speaks of some things as existing in reality and others as existing only in intellectu. But that argument treats things existing in intellectu as having attributes and degrees of greatness: someone who understands the description "that than which no greater can be conceived" has in mind, according to Anselm, a being with all the greatness that description entails. So the Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006