44. TO ALBERT, THE: Physician.
The Letters of St. Anselm
44. TO ALBERT, THE
PHYSICIAN.
Anselm thanks Albert, the physician, for curing his friend Maurice and once more, as in Ep 36, tries to persuade him to become a monk.
TO LORD ALBERT, HIS BROTHER AND FRIEND CHERISHED IN CHRIST
AND DESIRED FOR CHRIST: BROTHER ANSELM WISHES THAT HE
MAY DESPISE EARTHLY GOODS FOR THE SAKE OF HEAVENLY AND
RECEIVE THE GOODS OF HEAVEN IN EXCHANGE FOR EARTHLY
ONES.
I ADMIT THAT I AM NOT ABLE even to offer you a re ward, let alone thank your piety according to your deserv ing and my desire, for the mercy you deigned to show my beloved brother Maurice during his illness.1 Yet I can thank you in another way, even though I cannot repay you ade quately: it would seem unjust to me if I failed to do what
I can. Therefore, I express my thanks as much as I can, but I leave the reward to be paid to you much more lavishly by Christ who by his own testimony was the sick man you cared for in his servant.21 pray therefore, just as you will not recoil from accepting full recompense in due time, so you shall not shrink from achieving the healing now un derway with as much effort as you can.
Having with these words expressed the great thanks I owe you, those which follow will be about the explanation I still owe you. For previously, when I replied to the letter of your love, I did not express everything I had pondered in my thoughts. In order to make what I wrote more acceptable to your wisdom I wrote it in only a few words. What this present letter contains below refers, therefore, to that same reply.3
When I see that your grace, whom I dearly love, ardent ly strives for the affection of a vile little man—in a word, mine—indeed I confess that over such an entreaty you deserve more than just my love. But since I have nothing greater than my love to give you, this I want to demonstrate
The Letters of St. Anselm as well as I can according to my capacity. Indeed I think nobody could demand more love of me than that I love him as much as I love myself. This is why I give you the advice
I gave myself when I was in the same situation you are now in; for you know that I deliberated single-mindedly, after deliberating I came to a decision, I love what I decided on and by my habit I profess what I love and rest my whole life on it.4 Judge for yourself whether you can afford to re fuse what I am painstakingly laying out to you and what you so earnestly begged me for. Moreover, the very authori ty of our venerable lord and father, the archbishop, whose judgement does not permit his wisdom to fail or his justice to falter, this authority, I say, will judge whether it is suit able for you or good for me for you to claim to give satis faction to our love for you by longing for ours, and yet to show, by despising the exercise of it—where it is even more sincere—that the very same love is displeasing to you.
But even though what I want to achieve is not hidden from you, yet I am not reluctant to disclose my advice, in deed not mine but God's, more clearly. If, therefore, you have already realized: that everything that is in the world is the desire of the flesh, desire of the eyes and vanity of life, and they come not from the Father but from the world;5 if you al ready know that the world and its desire will pass;6 if you read that the friend of this world becomes the enemy of God;1 if you believe that anyone who leaves his home or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my Name's sake will receive a hundredfold and will obtain everlasting life;* then I exhort you: love not the world or the things of the world,9 but give everything up and follow Christ's poverty, that you may receive a hundredfold in exchange and may obtain everlasting life. Amen, so be it. c. 1073/74.
NOTES 1. Albert seems to have responded to what Anselm (see Ep 36) and his friends at Canterbury had asked him to do; see Epp 32, 33, 34.