25. TO LANFRANC,: Archbishop Of Canterbury.
The Letters of St. Anselm
25. TO LANFRANC,
ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
Anselm thanks Archbishop Lanfranc for his continual love and esteem for Bee, displayed by his sending his nephew, Lanfranc, to Bee, and apologizes for the delay in the copying of the Moralia in Job.
TO HIS LORD, HIS FATHER, TO BE LOVED WITH REVERENCE, AND
REVERED WITH LOVE, ARCHBISHOP LANFRANC, EMBRACED BY THE
UNIVERSAL MOTHER': BROTHER ANSELM, WHO IS IN EVERYTHING
TOTALLY HIS.
WE ALWAYS OWE THANKS especially to your paternal love by which you always keep us in mind; but though we cannot always express our thanks, we certainly ought at least not be silent about it. For you abound with such a full ness of this same love that you showed it very recently, by an irrefutable proof to be both very complete—which even we knew—and you confirmed it by a most dear pledge also to be indestructible—which we had likewise hoped for. Just as it is not credible for anybody to want to entrust the per son he loves most2 to those he does not love, so it is not normally possible for him not to love the place where the person he dearly loves lives. By this action of yours you have demonstrated not only that the constancy of your love towards us endures, but also—for which we are no less thankful—that you are certain of our love for you.
Therefore we give thanks first of all to him from whom all good comes,3 then to your paternal highness, because you love us so; thanks because you trust us so, thanks be cause you entrust such a pledge to us. May these things be said not only on my behalf but also on behalf of our whole community. May I, however, speak briefly for myself to one who understands, because recently you lightened not a lit tle the disproportionate burden with which you once heavily loaded me by considerably increasing your own.4 And when my feeble soul groaned under the burden, you caused me—I do not say to be willing, but almost unwilling—to lay down what oppressed me.
The Letters of St. Anselm Regarding the Moralia in Job: it was not executed as I told you. There is disagreement, I do not quite know about what, between the scribe and those with whom he came here. For this reason Dom Helgot5 and Dom Ffernost6 came and spoke with the scribe of Brionne as you ordered, in the presence of Dom Abbot, but we did not achieve anything. I also asked our aforenamed brothers, your faithful subjects from among the scribes of the monastery, to examine his writing and ability; but there was not one among them who did not either disapprove his handwriting or condemn his unex pected slowness. And so they are returning to Caen, tak ing with them our book, which they had brought in the hope of finding a scribe. c. summer 1072.
NOTES 1. Matri catholicae may either refer to Canterbury as the mother of the Church in England or to the Church Universal.
2. The person referred to is Archbishop Lanfranc's nephew Lanfranc, who came to Bee about Easter 1072 (see VA, 16) and later became a monk there. He is hundredth in the Bee profession-roll. See also Ep 31.
3. Jm 1:17.
4. Anselm was made prior of Bee in 1063 when Prior Lanfranc left for Caen to become abbot at Saint Stephen's. Anselm considers young
Lanfranc's arrival a relief of his burden; see Ep 30.
5. Helgot was prior at Saint Stephen's, Caen, from 1075 until 1092 when he became abbot of Saint Ouen, Rouen, where he died in 1112; see
Ep 407; OV IV: 308-9.
6. See Ep 1.