41. To The Monk Gundulf.
144 The Letters of St. Anselm
41. TO THE MONK GUNDULF.
Anselm demonstrates to his friend Gundulf that bodily separation cannot lessen their ardent mutual love.
HIS OWN TO HIS OWN, FRIEND TO FRIEND, BROTHER TO BROTHER,
ANSELM TO GUNDULF: WISHING HIM PERSEVERANCE IN HOLINESS
FOR THE LOVE OF HAPPINESS AND AN ETERNITY OF BLISS AS THE
REWARDS OF HOLINESS.
BOTH MY GUNDULF AND YOUR ANSELM are witness es that you and I have no need whatever to declare our mutual affection to each other by letter. Since your soul and my soul can never bear to be absent from each other but are incessantly entwined together, nothing of ourselves is lacking to the other except that we are not present to one another physically. But why do I describe my love to you in a letter when you keep the real image of it carefully in the ark of your heart? For what is your love for me but the image of my love for you? Your will, which is known to me, therefore invites me to write something to you because of our bodily separation; but since we are known to each other by the presence of our souls I do not know what to say to you except: may God do with you what he knows to be pleasing to himself and profitable to you.1 Farewell. not later than 1077.
NOTES 1. Brotherly love towards fellow-monks, together with submission to God's will, absolute obedience to the abbot and ascetic rejection of the world are the recurring themes in Anselm's letters and writings.
They express Anselm's attitude towards life, e.g. Epp 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 16, 51 and Prayer 17. For the development of Anselm's relation ship to Maurice see B. McGuire, 'Love, friendship and sex in the eleventh century: the experience of Anselm', Studia Theologica (1974)
128-31; idem., Friendship and Community (Kalamazoo, 1988) 217-221.