1. The Character Of St. Anselm's Thought
S T. AN S E L M ' S S Y S T E M
1 . The Character of St. Anselm's Thought WE cannot hope to understand the Proslogion and its argument without knowing something of St. Anselm's thought in general
and above all of how he conceived of the relationship between knowledge through religious faith and knowledge through unaided philosophical reason. The difficulty, however, is that
Anselm himself was not concerned formally and explicitly to demarcate the realm of faith and theology from the realm of
reason and philosophy, assigning to each its respective 'formal
object' and distinguishing the proper method of each, in the manner of Aquinas and the thirteenth-century thinkers. We
may, no doubt, distinguish between certain philosophico theological questions that interested Anselm-questions such as the existence and attributes of God, the freedom of the will,
the nature of truth, and so on-and properly theological ques tions such as the nature of the Trinity and the motive for the
Incarnation, with which he was also concerned. But Anselm, like St. Augustine, did not explicitly make such a distinction;
for him faith and reason were both parts of what we may call Christian wisdom, just as in the social sphere the Church and the temporal power were both parts of 'Christendom' for the men of his time.
Questions that forced themselves on Aquinas and his con
temporaries (for example, concerning the way in which 'natural reason' functions in the sphere of theology, and the proper demarcation of the realms of faith and reason) simply did not
occur to St. Anselm, and we cannot expect him to be answering questions that he did not, and in a sense could not, put to
himself. Anselm's ideas on this whole question are in an un crystallized state and we can be suspicious a priori of any
interpretation that offers a tidy and unambiguous explanation of his position on faith and reason.
At the same time it is legitimate and useful (though also a risky and delicate task) to analyse the virtualities or implicit
intentions of St. Anselm's thought and to try to discern whether
they lend themselves to development in one direction or
S T. ANSELM'S THOU GHT
another. For example, we might ask whether, if St. Anselm were to return among us, he would recognize Aquinas and M.
Gilson as his intellectual heirs ; or whether, on the contrary, he would extend the right hand of fellowship to Professor
Karl Barth ; or whether, perhaps, he might deny his paternity to all three? It can be helpful to ask such hypothetical questions of St. Anselm, provided always that they are asked with tact.
Before we go on to consider St. Anselm's position on faith and reason we ought to say something about the general character or style of St. Anselm's thought. The primary in fluence upon his mind, as St. Anselm acknowledges, was that of St. Augustine. At the beginning of the Monologion he says that he does not wish to hold any doctrine that does not accord with the teaching of the Fathers of the Church 'and above all with the writings of St. Augustine'.1 However, it would be a mistake to see St. Anselm simply as a servile plagiarist of St. Augustine, for, despite his declaration in the Monologion, he parts company with Augustine on several quite crucial points.z Again, as we shall see, Augustine's influence upon St. Anselm was crossed by a very strong logical and 'rationalist' strain, which he derives from Aristotle and Boethius.
From Augustine, together with Denys the Areopagite, and perhaps John Scotus Erigena, St. Anselm derived a general neo-Platonic 'world-view' characterized by a hierarchical conception of reality, where everything is graded or ordered according to different 'degrees of perfection',3 and by an 'exemplarism', according to which created beings in the world derive their being and perfection by way of 'participation' in a
Divine ideal or archetype or exemplar. And perhaps, though this is much more open to question, Anselm also shares some thing of the 'gnosticism' of the neo-Platonists, that is to say, their tendency to identify the end of philosophical speculation with the end of religious knowledge. John Scotus Erigena says, for example, that 'the true philosophy is the true religion and, inversely, the true religion is the true philosophy', and again
1 Monot. i; Schmitt, i. 8. See F. J. Thonnard, 'Caracteres augustiniens de la methode philosophique de saint Anselme', in Spic. Bee., pp. 171 ff.
2 For example, on Augustine's theory of the 'rights of the devil' over mankind.
See Cur Deus Homo, I. vii; Schmitt, ii. 56-57.
3 Monol. iv; Schmitt, i. 17.
I NTROD U C T I ON
'no one enters into heaven save through philosophy'.1 No doubt
it would be over-facile to see Scotus Erigena as a 'gnostic' in the
strict sense, but he certainly tends to hold that reason can bring us in the long run to what we believe by faith. And, as we
shall see, there are hints and suggestions of the same kind in
St. Anselm.
However, if St. Anselm's thought is neo-Platonic in this wide
and general sense, it is not so in any more specific sense. Once again it is instructive to compare St. Anselm with John Scotus
Erigena here. Erigena was a fully committed neo-Platonist, and
following Denys he constructed a vast and intricate system incorporating the classical neo-Platonic theses-the doctrine of 'emanation', the ineffability of the divine One and the method of 'negative theology', the antithesis between the spiritual and
material orders. But none of these particular neo-Platonic theses
is exploited in St. Anselm's works. What is striking, indeed, is St. Anselm' s lack of any really systematic metaphysics such
as that of Erigena; or even of a theory of knowledge such as
Augustine had attempted to develop. ·when, then, it is said
that St. Anselm is a neo-Platonist, this can only be accepted in a very broad and general sense, and we ought not to make too
much of this side of his thought.2
One can say, indeed, that it is not so much the neo-Platonic
elements in St. Anselm's thought that give it its distinctive cast
or style, but rather the dialectical or 'rationalist' strain that he derives from Aristotle and Boethius. This seemed to Lanfranc
and others the novel (and dangerous) element in Anselm' s 1 De Praedestinatione, r. i; Annotationes in Martianum, 38, ii. Cited by Cappuyns,
Jean Scot Erigene, sa vie, son IEUvre, sa pensee, Louvain-Paris, 1933, pp. 303-5.
2 Cf. A Koyre, L' !dee de Dieu dans la philosophie de saint Anselme, Paris, 1925.
Koyre says, p. vii, that his object is to show 'the links which connect St. Anselm to St. Augustine and, through the medium of this latter, to Plotinus and to the neo
Platonic philosophy' ; and, p. 60, 'We have the right to consider St. Anselm as a Plotinian'. See also C. Filliatre, La Philosophie de saint Anselme, Paris, 1920. Filliatre sees Anselm as continuing the tradition of Erigena and Proclus, and, beyond them, of the tradition of 'Christian gnosticism' represented by Clement of Alexandria,
Justin, Origen, and Augustine. There is, in fact, a passage by Clement of Alexan
dria, Stromata, vii. 57, that is curiously reminiscent of some of the things St. Anselm is to say later : 'Faith is, so to speak, an elementary and summary knowledge
("gnosis") of necessary things. "Gnosis" is a firm and stable demonstration of what has been received by faith. It is built up upon faith through the teaching of the Lord and passes into a state of intellectual surety and comprehension' ; cited Y.
Congar, art. 'Theologie', in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, xv, p. 348.
S T. ANSELM ' S THOUGHT
thought, r and it was this strain that became more and more pronounced in his thinking. It makes the Cur Deus Homo, for example, such an original work, and it is also significant that
his last work, the De Potestate, was a severely logical treatise. The
influence of Aristotle, or rather of Boethius' version of Aristotle,
is everywhere evident in St. Anselm's works, and he is quite
clearly within the 'dialectical' tradition that had been running an uneasy course during the half century before his time.
The conflicts in the early eleventh century between the
'dialecticians' and 'anti-dialecticians' were essentially con flicts between those who, on the one hand, saw theology as a matter of textual commentary and paraphrase of Scripture, and who wished 'not only to say nothing other, that is nothing different, from what is to be found in Scripture, but also to say nothing more' ;2 and, on the other hand, those who saw the
need for rational analysis and systematization of the various data of revelation. St. Peter Damian is a good example of an
'anti-dialectician' distrustful of admitting reason in matters of faith and anxious to minimize its use in theology. So, for instance, he says : 'Conclusions drawn from the arguments of dialecticians
or rhetoricians ought not to be lightly applied to the mysteries of divine power ; and as for the rules which perfect the use of the syllogism and the art of speech, let them cease to be obstinately
opposed to the laws of God and to claim to impose the so-called necessities of their inferences on the divine power.'3 On the other hand, the 'dialecticians' could appeal to the authority of St. Augustine's acceptance of dialectics as a weapon against
the errors of heretics, 4 and it would be quite wrong to think of
the 'dialectical' tradition as being in some way heterodox. It was a misfortune that, in the famous debate between Berengar r One can infer Lanfranc's attitude from a letter of Anselm, Epist. 77, Schmitt, iii. 199200.
" Y. Congar, art. 'Theologie', p. 347.
J Cited by Jean Leclcrcq, Saint Pierre Damien, ermite et homme de l'ifglise, Rome, 1960, p. 222. Leclercq points out, however, that Peter's position was in large measure a reaction against the excesses of the dialecticians of his time, and was also influenced by the fact that no systematic or autonomous body of philo sophical knowledge as yet existed. See also J. Gonsette, S. Pierre Damien et la culture prefane, Louvain, 1956, p. 60: 'Peter Damian does not absolutely deny the utility of dialectics in theology, but through lack of a systematic and coherent metaphysics is led to limit considerably its sphere of application.'
4 De Doctrina Christiana, ii. 3 1 ; P.L. xxxiv. 57-58.