I. To Ralph.
St. Anselm The Devotions of Saint Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury I To Ralph.221
BROTHER Anselm to his dear brother Ralph. Although you have forbidden me in your letters to address you at the beginning as Dom Ralph, yet my sentiments towards you constrain me to show myself in the rest of my letters your obedient servant. For I am ready to be the obedient servant of Dom Ralph in the same spirit of love in which I love him as the brother, not of my flesh, but of my soul. And so if you bid me not call you what notwithstanding, in virtue of your superiority of character you really are (if I speak my mind candidly) to me, let me at any rate follow my original wish of calling myself what I really am to you. I will then no longer address you as Dom Ralph and sign myself Brother Anselm, but will address you as Brother Ralph and sign myself your obedient Servant, Anselm.222
As to your charitable desire that you should be with me wherever I am, that comes to the same thing as my own hearty wish to be with you wherever you are. And as you ask me for advice how this may be, I pray God to help us so that it may be impossible for it to be other wise. For, if God shall vouchsafe to hear us, may our life together be by His assistance such that so long as life shall last it may be all one act of thanksgiving to Him. But since neither you nor I are our own; for whether we live or die we are the Lord's;223 if He, who knows better than we what is pleasing to Himself or expedient for us, shall dispose of us otherwise than we wish, let us endure in patience whatever we perceive to be His pleasure concerning us, if we have resolved not to displease Him.
For our life is short, and therefore the time is near when we shall rejoice together in an everlasting union with Him and with one another, if by His grace we take care to pass this brief life in submission to His will in all things. Nevertheless, in the meantime, in whatever places we may be, however near to one another or far from one another, may love ever make our spirits one. As to that, however, which you so anxiously entreat me to beg of Archbishop Lanfranc when he comes from England,
This is Letter XI. of Book I. in Gerberon's edition. The person to whom it was addressed was, as it would seem, a monk of the abbey of Bec (of which Anselm was at the time of writing Prior, but not as yet Abbot) who was detained by Archbishop
Lanfranc in England on some ecclesiastical business.
This passage has been difficult of translation, owing to the absence of any term in modern English exactly corresponding to the dominus, the use of which as addressed to himself Ralph had desired Anselm to discontinue. It was the ordinary term of respect, used to persons of a certain position, and still commonly prefixed, in the shortened form Dom, to the names of Benedictine monks. But preserving its proper meaning of lord or master it immediately suggested the antithesis of servant which Anselm here insists on using of himself, even though he consents to call his correspondent brother.
Rom. xiv. 8.