4. Karl Barth's St. Anselm
I N T R O D U C T I O N
St. Anselm, then, was unable to express clearly and distinctly
what he wanted or intended to say about the relations between faith and reason. However, what his intentions were in this
matter are now sufficiently clear ; and for our purposes here
what is important is that one of the things St. Anselm intended
to say was that reason was to some extent capable of under
standing God and the things of God prior to faith and inde
pendently of faith. The relevance of this conclusion for a right appreciation of the Proslogion will be obvious.
4. Karl Barth's St. Anselm Our conclusion, that St. Anselm implicitly allows the possi
bility of a rational approach to God, logically prior to and independent of a properly theological approach, has the mis
fortune directly to contradict the view of St. Anselm's system proposed by the celebrated Swiss theologian, Karl Barth.1 And
Barth's interpretation of St. Anselm is so persuasive and has been so influential that we must give some consideration to it.
For Barth, Anselm allows no place of any kind for 'philo
sophical theology', prior to and independent of faith and con cerned with establishing the 'credibility' of faith. The task of
the theologian is not to justify in any way the articles of faith but, as Barth says, to investigate the 'how' of the articles of faith ; in other words, reason operates within the context of
faith and always presupposes faith. 'A science of faith', so Barth says, 'which denied or even questioned the faith (the Credo of the Church) would ipso facto cease to be either "faithful"
or "scientific". '2 The only knowledge of God is that of faith
given as a grace by God, so that unaided reason is powerless in this realm. 'For Anselm right knowledge is conditioned by the prevenient and co-operating grace of God. This general con sideration and also the fact that this grace must ever be sought
by prayer already imply that the ultimate and decisive capacity for the intellectus fidei does not belong to human reason acting
on its own but has always to be bestowed on human reason.'3
For Anselm to allow reason any justificatory office in this realm would be in effect to 'create a substitute for the knowledge of faith', and would mean that man has 'some kind of power of
' See his Fides Quaerens Intellectum, English trans., I 960.
2 p. 37.
3 p. 57·
KARL BARTH ' S ST. ANS E L M
his subjective ratio existing from creation and not obliterated by the Fall'.1 It is, then, only if the unbeliever is prepared to grant the Christian theologian's premisses that any communication
between them is possible. 'It would have been quite impossible',
Barth concludes, 'for Anselm to write a Summa Theologica as well
as a Summa Contra Gentiles; a volume of Dogmatics as well as a Philosophy of Religion or the like.'z It is within this general context, Barth goes on to argue, that the Proslogion argument must be appreciated. The Proslogion argument is not meant to be a rational proof of the existence of God, of the same kind as Aquinas's 'five ways', for example.
The major premiss of the Proslogion argument is a datum of a faith and valid only within the context of faith, and the aim of the argument is not in any way to demonstrate the existence of God to the unbeliever by unaided reason. The aim of the Proslogion is rather to explicate all that is implicitly contained in one of the revealed 'names' of God, that is, God named as 'that than which nothing greater can be thought', implying that we are prohibited from thinking that there is anything greater than He. 'Should the creature fail to hear this Name of God and the prohibition it contains then that can only mean that he has not yet understood the Creator as such nor himself as creature. It is in faith that he understands Him and himself within this relation and so hears His Name and the prohibition against conceiving anything greater than He.'3
· This, then, is Barth's interpretation of St. Anselm's position, an interpretation which makes Anselm into a fideist of a very
rigorous kind-in fact, into a precocious Barthian. Now, what is to be said of Barth's view ? First of all, we may say that Barth's interpretation is too good and too consistent to be true, for it supposes that Anselm had, as it were, faced the question of the relationship between faith and reason and had resolved it unequivocally in a neo-Barthian way. However, as we have already seen, if we approach St. Anselm's texts prepared to take the confusions and unresolved ambiguities in his position as they occur, without trying to explain them away, then we cannot interpret Anselm either as a rationalist, or as a fideist, or, for that matter, either as a neo-Thomist or as a neo-Barthian. The most we can say is that his thought lends itself, so to speak, to a l p. 7 1.
3 p. 153.
INTRODU C T I O N
development in one direction rather than another, and, as we have seen, the evidence suggests that, if anything, a develop ment in the direction of Aquinas's position would do least violence to St. Anselm's intentions.
Second, the obvious objection to Barth's interpretation is that it seems to disregard Anselm's own professed theological aim. In the Cur Deus Homo, as we have seen, Anselm declares his purpose to be to convince the unbeliever 'by reason alone'
('sola ratione') . As Boso puts it, 'In proving necessarily that God became man, leaving aside what is in the Bible-namely, about the Three Persons in God and about Adam-you convince not only the Jews, but alsu the pagans by reason alone.'1 Again, in his reply to Gaunilo, Anselm explicitly distinguishes between the appeal his proof will have to the believer on the one hand, and to the unbeliever on the other hand. If the believer
('Catholicus') alleges that it is not evident that the formula 'that than which nothing greater can be thought' has a sense, then we may appeal to his 'faith and conscicnce'. 2 However, if the unbeliever alleges this, we cannot appeal to his faith, but we can nevertheless use rational means to show him that the definition of God as 'that than which nothing greater can be thought' is a meaningful one. As Anselm puts it, 'There is, then, a way by which one can get an idea of "that-than-which a-greater-cannot-be-thought." In this way . . . the Fool, who does not accept the sacred authority [of Revelation] can be easily refuted if he denies that he can form an idea from other things of "that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be thought" .'3
St. Anselm's counter-reply to Gaunilo represents, in fact, the crucial objection to Barth's whole interpretation. For, if Barth is correct, then Gaunilo's criticisms of the Proslogion must rest upon a 'sheer misunderstanding'4 of Anselm's point and purpose in that work. In other words, on Barth's interpretation,
Gaunilo's attack is not simply invalid or inconclusive but rather
1 11. xxii ; 1 33· See also Eadmer's account of Anselm's intention in the Monologion :
'Fecit quoque libellum unum quern Monologion appellavit. Solus enim in eo et secum loquitur, ac, tacita omni auctoritate Divinae Scripturae, quid Deus sit sola ratione quaerit et invenit, et quod vera fides de Deo sentit invincibili ratione sic nee aliter esse posse probat et astruit.' Vita, r. xix ; Southern, p. 29.
2 The Author's Reply to Gaunilo, p. 169.
3 Ibid., p. 187.
4 Barth, op. cit., p. 1 3 1 .
KARL BARTH ' S ST. ANS E L M
wholly irrelevant and pointless, for Gaunilo, in criticizing the Proslogion argument as a rational argument for the existence of
God, is in fact criticizing it for something which St. Anselm never intended it to be. However, if Barth sees Gaunilo's attack as being a complete misunderstanding of St. Anselm's position, this is certainly not the way in which St. Anselm him self sees it. In his reply to Gaunilo he does not, in fact, anywhere complain that Gaunilo's criticisms are irrelevant or beside the point, but he confronts Gaunilo's objections on Gaunilo's own ground and attempts to show that they are invalid. In short, what is obvious in St. Anselm's counter-reply is that he agrees completely with Gaunilo's reading of the Proslogion argument as a rational proof of the existence of God.
These objections to Barth's interpretation of St. Anselm are reinforced by circumstantial evidence of an historical kind.
First, as we have noted, Anselm saw himself as a follower of St. Augustine and his thought is in fact impregnated with Augustinian ideas and themes. Now, as our discussion showed, although St. Augustine's position on faith and reason is not a clear-cut one, it is nevertheless not a fideist position, nor a position identical with that which Barth wishes to read into St. Anselm. If Barth's interpretation is correct, then St. Anselm must have been breaking, in a pretty radical way, with St.
Augustine and the whole Augustinian tradition on this question.
But of course there is not the slightest evidence to suppose that St. Anselm was consciously parting company with St. Augustine, nor that Anselm's contemporaries saw him as an innovator on this question of the relationship of faith to reason.1 In fact, his
contemporaries saw him as the pillar of orthodoxy. So, for example, at the Council of Bari ( 1098) Anselm was given pride of place by the Pope. If, then, Barth's interpretation is correct,
Anselm's neo-Barthianism was accepted without demur by the whole of the early twelfth-century Church, from Pope Urban II
' For Lanfranc, indeed, St. Anselm was something of a theological innovator, but for reasons quite contrary to those proposed by Barth. For Lanfranc it was
St. Anselm's emphasis on 'reason' and his neglect of 'authorities' which represented a new, and perhaps dangerous, departure ; see on this Anselm's Epist. 77; Schmitt, iii; 199-200. See also \Villiam of Malmesbury's later testimony, De Gestis Ponti jicum, Rolls Series, Iii. 76. For William it was Anselm's appeal to reason and
rational argument, where others had appealed merely to the credulity of their audience, that was his main claim to fame.
INTRODUCTION
downwards ! Oddly, and ironically, the view of theology that
Barth wants to read into St. Anselm is displayed in a very pure form in the anti-Aristotelian movement in the early years of
the thirteenth century. One of the most notable representatives
of this movement was Pope Gregory IX, the author of the
celebrated warning (in 1 228), to the theological masters at the University of Paris about the dangers of introducing Aristo
telian philosophy into Christian theology.
'The "intellectus theologicus" ', Gregory wrote, 'must not be corrupted by an
earthly ferment, that is by philosophy. To introduce philo
sophical reason into the heart of faith is to make faith useless
and senseless and to deprive it of all merit.' 1
Again, in our discussion of St. Augustine's position, we saw
that there is a strong rationalistic side to his thought, and this 'rationalism' is reinforced in St. Anselm by the profound
influence that Aristotelian and Boethian logic had upon him.
As St. Anselm puts it in the Monologion, it is by his reason that
man is 'the image of God', 2 and as we remarked, this is a
commonplace in the later Augustinian tradition. From this
point of view Barth's reading of the Lutheran doctrine, that reason is completely corrupted by the Fall, into St. Anselm does
violence both to the history of eleventhand twelfth-century thought and to St. Anselm.J Finally, a study of the writings of Anselm's own immediate disciples, Rodulfus and Gilbert Crispin, shows quite clearly
that they did not interpret their master's thought in a fideist or neo-Barthian way. In fact, if anything, they accentuated the
rationalistic side of St. Anselm's thought. Thus, in his Dispu
tatio Christiani cum Gentile de Fide Christi,4 Gilbert Crispin de scribes a debate at a kind of philosophical society which met in London at an inn.s A Christian engages in a discussion with
1 Text in Chenu, La TMologie comme science au XIII• siecle, p. 3 r .
2 lxvi ; 77.
3 More genetally, Barth's whole conception of St. Anselm's approach to theology is equally questionable. See the excellent studies of J. Mcintyre, St. Anselm and his
Critics, and the essay, 'Premises and Conclusions in the System of St. Anselm's Theology', in Spic. Bee., PP• 95-101 .
4 Ed. C. C. J. Webb, in MARS, iii, 1 954, 58-77s C. C. J. Webb rather romantically sees this as evidence of an underground movement of freethinkers in London: Studies in the History of Natural Theology,
Oxford, 1 9 1 5, pp. 94 ff. R. W. Southern, however, interprets Gilbert's dialogue as an allegory where 'Christianus' is meant to represent St. Anselm himself.
KARL BARTH S ST. ANSELM
an unbeliever over the credibility and rationality of the Christian faith and they both agree to leave aside all appeal to the authority
of the Scriptures.1 In other words, Gilbert (and this is confirmed
by the further course of the dialogue) clearly acknowledges the possibility of a rational 'apologetic' of the Christian faith.
The same 'rationalistic' strain emerges in the work of another disciple of St. Anselm, Rodulfus. For instance, in his dialogue
between 'Peccator' and 'Ratio', Rodulfus declares that 'those who live according to reason rightly advance upon the right road, and if they make their way always with reason they will come finally into the company of the saints' . 2 Again, in his dia logue between 'Sciens' and 'Nesciens' , Rodulfus elaborates a causal proof of the existence of a First Cause of life. The proof is constructed independently of faith in order to persuade 'N esciens'
who doubts whether God exists inasmuch as one cannot believe anything which cannot be seen with one's own eyes.J
To sum up : If Barth's interpretation of St. Anselm's position on faith and reason is correct, St. Anselm must have been out of step with the whole Augustinian tradition of his own time ; he must have been misunderstood and misrepresented by his contemporaries, including his own close disciples ; and finally
St. Anselm himself must have been unaware of the revolutionary
character of his own views. We conclude then that, even though Barth's view of St. Anselm contains many valuable insights, his
interpretation must be rejected. In other words, St. Anselm cannot be interpreted as having denied in principle the possi bility of a 'natural theology', a rational approach to God,
logically prior to and independent of faith.4
1 'Omittamus igitur Scripturarum nostrarum auctoritatem', Webb, p. 60.
2 Again, he says, 'God indeed is supreme reason and in Him exists the sure source of all reasons' : cited, R. W. Southern, MARS, i, 1 941, 14, n. 2.
3 Libellus primus de nesciente et sciente, cited ·webb, MARS, iii, 1 954, 59.
• This conclusion also goes against Gilson's interpretation of St. Anselm's thought. 'In so far as philosophy for us means an investigation which starts from rational premisses in order to end in rational conclusions it can be said that St.
Anselm did not write a single work of philosophy' : Etudes de philosophic midievale,
Strasbourg, 1 92 1 , p. 14. As against Gilson, H. Bouillard, Spic. Bee., p. 206, has this to say : 'The Pros logion proof, discovered within faith in order to support faith does present a theological aspect ; but because it is meant to work independently of faith, it also has a philosophical character.' Dom M. Cappuyns, 'L'Argument de saint Anselme' in Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale, vi, 1 934, 3 1 3-30, also holds
that Anselm intended the Proslogion argument as a rational demonstration valid even for the religious unbeliever.
INT R O D U C T I ON
Once again, it is obvious what importance this conclusion has if we are to interpret the Proslogion according to the inten
tion of its author. In the Proslogion, as in the Cur Deus Homo, Anselm addresses both believers and unbelievers. For the
believer the proofs Anselm offers will enable him to penetrate more deeply into the mystery of the Godhead and to understand what he believes ; but for the unbeliever the proofs will serve to convince him of the existence of God and give him understand ing so that he may come to believe.
P H I L O S O P H I C A L C O M M E N T A R Y