Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

The child of Aosta and the thwarted calling

Anselm was born around 1033 or 1034 at Aosta, an Alpine town then attached to the Kingdom of Burgundy, into a noble family of Lombard origin. His father Gundulf was a worldly man, harsh and dissipated; his mother Ermenberga, devout, gave the child his first Christian upbringing.^[6][7] Very young, his biographer Eadmer recounts, Anselm pictured God as a great king dwelling on the summit of the mountains overlooking Aosta, and dreamed of climbing up there to enter his service.^[8]

As a teenager, he wished to enter the monastery, but the local abbot refused to receive him for fear of his father. Then came a period of laxity: his mother's death, clashes with Gundulf, the taste of the world. Around 1056, having broken with his father, Anselm left Aosta, crossed the Alps and wandered for some years through Burgundy and France, until he heard of a master whose reputation shone over the whole of Christendom: Lanfranc, prior of Bec Abbey.^[9][10]

Lanfranc and the school of Bec

Around 1059-1060, Anselm arrived at Notre-Dame du Bec Abbey in Normandy, drawn by the teaching of Lanfranc of Pavia, one of the most brilliant minds of his age. There he found his vocation. Torn between the hermit's life, his paternal inheritance and the cloister, he referred the matter to the Archbishop of Rouen, who decided for the monastery. In 1060, at about twenty-seven, Anselm took the Benedictine habit at Bec.^[11][12]

His rise was swift, not from ambition but as a matter of course: when Lanfranc left in 1063 to head Saint-Etienne Abbey at Caen, Anselm succeeded him as prior of Bec, despite the jealousy of older monks whom he eventually won over by his gentleness. On the death of Abbot Herluin, the founder of the monastery, Anselm was elected abbot in 1078.^[13][14] These were the most fruitful years of his intellectual life: it was at Bec, in the silence of the cloister and in prayer, that he wrote his first masterpieces.

The spiritual master and friend

Before he was the embattled archbishop, Anselm was a spiritual master of rare humanity. His correspondence, one of the richest of the Middle Ages, bears witness to an ardent friendship for his monks and disciples. He guided souls with a tenderness his contemporaries did not expect from a superior; he preferred to persuade rather than constrain, convinced that virtue imposed by force is not virtue.^[15][16]

"Anselm did not like authoritarian methods: he liked to guide souls by persuasion rather than by constraint." — Benedict XVI, general audience of 23 September 2009, on Anselm's spiritual government^[17]

This gentleness was no softness: it rested on a profound conviction of the freedom of the person and the primacy of love. The same man would, at Canterbury, stand up to two kings without ever yielding on what mattered.

Credo ut intelligam

Anselm's great insight can be summed up in a formula that became the programme of all scholasticism: fides quaerens intellectum, "faith seeking understanding." Far from opposing reason and faith, Anselm orders them. Faith comes first: it is the starting point, the ground on which the intellect can then rise. But faith does not dispense us from thinking — on the contrary, it drives the intellect to seek, to understand, to taste what it believes.^[18][19]

"I do not endeavour, O Lord, to penetrate thy depth, for I can in no wise compare my understanding with it; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand." — Saint Anselm, Proslogion, ch. 1^[20]

This phrase, credo ut intelligam, is the exact reversal of rationalism. Anselm does not ask reason to ground faith; he asks faith, already received, to enlighten reason. Benedict XVI saw in him the theologian who shows that faith is reasonable and that the intellect, far from threatening faith, is its natural fruit when it is inhabited by love.^[21] It is this method — starting from revealed data, then seeking the necessary reasons — that makes Anselm the father of scholasticism, the distant ancestor of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure.

The Monologion: God sought by reason alone

Around 1075-1076, at the request of his monks, Anselm composed the Monologion ("soliloquy"). The challenge he set himself was a bold one: to prove the existence and attributes of God without recourse to the authority of Scripture, by the resources of reason alone. Starting from the degrees of goodness we observe in things, he ascends to a supreme Good, the source of all good, who is God.^[22][23]

The procedure was unheard of in his day: Anselm hardly cites the Fathers; he reasons. But this is not the rationalism of an unbeliever: it is a monk at prayer seeking to understand what he already believes. Yet the Monologion remained in his eyes too long, too diffuse. Anselm dreamed of a single argument that would prove everything by itself.

The Proslogion and the "single argument"

This single argument Anselm sought obsessively, to the point of losing sleep and appetite over it; he first took it for a temptation of the devil, then received it as a grace, in the middle of the night office. He set it out in the Proslogion ("address"), around 1077-1078.^[24][25] The work, written as a prayer addressed to God, contains in chapter 2 the most famous formula of all medieval philosophy: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought" (id quo nihil maius cogitari possit). Yet, Anselm argues, such a being cannot exist in thought alone: if it existed only in the mind, one could conceive of a greater one — one that exists also in reality. Therefore God necessarily exists.^[26]

"Assuredly, that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot exist in the understanding alone. For if it exists even in the understanding alone, it can be thought to exist in reality also — which is greater." — Saint Anselm, Proslogion, ch. 2^[27]

This proof has run through the whole history of thought: taken up by Descartes, contested by Kant, reformulated in modal logic by Alvin Plantinga in the twentieth century. Its technical exposition, its objections and its defences are the subject of a separate article on Ignispedia: The ontological argument (Anselm, Descartes, Kant, Plantinga). Faced with the Kantian objection — that existence is not a predicate added to a concept — Anselm's defenders reply that the argument does not concern one concept among others, but the very being whose essence is to exist necessarily.^[28] It suffices here to stress what posterity often forgets: for Anselm, this reasoning is not a school exercise, but an act of prayer — it opens and closes with a supplication.

"Teach me to seek thee, and reveal thyself to me as I seek; for I cannot seek thee unless thou teach me, nor find thee unless thou reveal thyself. Let me seek thee in longing, let me long for thee in seeking; let me find thee in love, and love thee in finding." — Saint Anselm, Proslogion, ch. 1^[29]

Gaunilo and the reply to the "Fool"

In Anselm's own lifetime, a monk of Marmoutier, Gaunilo, drafted an objection that has remained famous: the Liber pro insipiente ("On behalf of the Fool"). From my conceiving a perfect island, he wrote in substance, it does not follow that it exists; why should it be otherwise with God? Anselm replied with a Liber apologeticus in which he maintained that his argument holds only for the supreme being — the one whose non-existence is properly unthinkable — and not for a finite thing such as an island.^[30] Far from hiding the objection, Anselm insisted that it be copied after his book: the mark of a theologian who does not fear contradiction and seeks the truth, not victory.^[31]

A reluctant appointment

In 1093, the King of England William II Rufus, son of the Conqueror, had for years left the see of Canterbury vacant in order to pocket its revenues — a typical abuse that the Gregorian Reform was fighting. Having fallen gravely ill and fearing death, the king, in a fit of remorse, designated Anselm, who happened to be passing through England. The old abbot refused with all his might: he was nearly sixty, he loved the silence of Bec, and he foresaw the conflict. Eadmer recounts that his hand had to be forced open to slip the pastoral crozier into it.^[32][33]

"You are yoking together, under the same plough, an untamed bull and a feeble old sheep." — The image Anselm is said to have used to describe his forced teaming with King William Rufus^[34]

Anselm was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on 4 December 1093. From the outset he laid down his conditions: to recognize Urban II as the legitimate pope (against the imperial antipope), to recover the Church's property and to keep his freedom of conscience. The reign of a shepherd in the storm was beginning.^[35][36]

The first exile under William Rufus (1097-1100)

Conflict soon broke out. Anselm wanted to hold councils to reform the morals of the clergy and the court; he wanted to go to Rome to receive the pallium from the pope's hands. William, jealous of his authority, multiplied the obstacles: he claimed to forbid all contact with Rome without his agreement. In 1097, weary and deprived of the means to exercise his office, Anselm left England for exile.^[37][38]

He made his way to Rome, where Urban II welcomed him with honour, then withdrew to the south of Italy. What was at stake was the very heart of the Investiture Controversy: can the king dispose of the Church as a department of state? Anselm answered no — not from love of power, but because the Church, the bride of Christ, belongs to no prince.

The Council of Bari (1098) and the defence of the Filioque

It was during this exile that one of his finest hours came. In October 1098, Pope Urban II convened at Bari, in southern Italy, a council meant to bring Latins and Greeks closer together, then divided notably over the Filioque — the procession of the Holy Spirit "from the Father and the Son." Before some one hundred and eighty bishops, the pope called upon Anselm to expound the Latin doctrine. The exiled archbishop rose and, it is said, overturned the Greeks' objections by the sheer force of his reasoning.^[39][40]

From this intervention would come his treatise De processione Spiritus Sancti ("The Procession of the Holy Spirit," c. 1101-1102), a reasoned and serene defence of the Catholic faith on the Trinity, without contempt for the Easterners but without concession on dogma.^[41] The episode shows an Anselm at the service of the unity of the universal Church, well beyond his English quarrels.

The second conflict with Henry I and the settlement of 1107

On the death of William Rufus (killed while hunting in August 1100), his brother Henry I Beauclerc recalled Anselm. But the new king demanded that the archbishop receive from his royal hands the investiture of his office and do him homage — exactly what the Gregorian Reform had just forbidden at the Synod of Rome. Anselm refused to receive from a layman the spiritual insignia: the ring and the crozier signify espousal to the Church and the charge of souls, not a fief held from the king.^[42][43]

A second exile (1103-1106) followed. But Anselm, firm on principle, knew how to be flexible on arrangements. A compromise was found, sealed in 1107 (the "Concordat of London"): the king gave up investiture by crozier and ring — that is, the gesture that usurped the spiritual — while the bishop continued to render him homage for the temporal goods attached to his office. This solution, which distinguishes the spiritual from the temporal, foreshadowed the Concordat of Worms (1122) that would settle the quarrel for the whole Empire.^[44][45] Anselm had won what mattered: the Church's freedom in the conferral of spiritual offices.

The logic of satisfaction

Anselm's most influential theological work is Cur Deus Homo ("Why God Became Man"), begun during his exile and completed around 1098. In it Anselm asks a formidable question: why did God choose to save us precisely through the Incarnation and the Cross? Could he not have forgiven with a single word? His answer is the theology of satisfaction, which would structure Western thought on the Redemption for nearly a thousand years.^[46][47]

The reasoning is of an almost geometrical rigour. Sin is a refusal to render to God the honour due to him; yet an offence is measured by the dignity of the offended, and God is of infinite dignity. Man's sin thus creates an infinite debt. But man, a finite creature, can never repair an infinite offence: everything he could offer, he already owes to God. What is needed, then, is an infinite satisfaction, which only God can offer — but which only man ought to offer, since it is man who sinned.^[48]

"If therefore, as is certain, no one can make this satisfaction except God, and no one ought to except man, it is necessary that a God-man should make it." — Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, Book II^[49]

The conclusion follows: there had to be a God made man, Christ, both able (as God) to make an offering of infinite worth and bound (as man) to present it. The Cross is therefore neither a whim nor a cruelty: it is the meeting, in a single person, of justice and mercy.

A work that shaped the theology of the Redemption

Cur Deus Homo has been criticized — it has been reproached with too legal a framework, inherited from feudal law — but its central insight has endured: Christ truly makes reparation; he does not merely pretend. Salvation has a cost, and that cost is God's love unto total self-gift. Saint Thomas Aquinas would take up and correct Anselm by stressing fittingness rather than strict necessity; the Catholic spirituality of reparation — down to victim souls and devotion to the Sacred Heart — descends directly from it.^[50][51] For an accessible presentation of the mystery, see also how to explain the Redemption simply and how to explain the Incarnation simply.

The monk before the scholar

Anselm is often reduced to a logician. That is a misunderstanding: before being a thinker, he is a monk, a man of prayer and compunction. All his theology is born of prayer and returns to it. The Proslogion, which contains the most abstract argument in philosophy, is drafted as a continuous prayer, addressed to God in the second person. For Anselm, one does not think about God from the outside: one seeks him by loving him.^[52][53]

"Come now, little man, turn aside for a while from thy occupations, hide thyself for a time from thy disturbing thoughts. Cast away now thy burdensome cares and put aside thy toilsome business. Yield room for a little to God, and rest for a little in him. Enter the inner chamber of thy soul; shut out all things save God and what may help thee to seek God, and, the door being shut, seek him." — Saint Anselm, Proslogion, ch. 1 (invitation to prayer)^[54]

The Prayers and Meditations

The summit of his interior life is to be read in his Orationes sive Meditationes ("Prayers and Meditations"), a collection that had a considerable influence on medieval devotion. In it Anselm breaks with impersonal liturgical prayer for an affective, burning, intimate address to Christ, the Virgin and the saints. These prayers, copied and imitated throughout Europe, helped give birth to a personal piety that would culminate with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the mystics of the twelfth century.^[55][56]

"My languishing soul, awake; and thou, sinner, behold who it is that dies upon the cross, and with him die to sin." — Saint Anselm, Meditation on Human Redemption^[57]

Marian Doctor

Anselm holds a foremost place in the history of Marian doctrine — hence his surname Doctor Marianus. His prayers to the Virgin rank among the finest of the Middle Ages. Above all, his treatise De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato deepened the question of original sin and Mary's purity, preparing later developments on the Immaculate Conception. While Anselm himself did not affirm the Immaculate Conception in the sense in which the Church would define it in 1854, his reflection on the fittingness of the purity of the Mother of the Saviour — "it was fitting that the Virgin should shine with a purity than which no greater can be conceived under God" — nourished the tradition that would lead to it.^[58][59] For the logic of the dogma, see why the Immaculate Conception is logical.

Gentleness and firmness

The most striking trait of his holiness is the union of a rare gentleness with inflexible firmness. Gentle with persons — he loved children, the poor, animals, and corrected his monks by persuasion — he was unbending on principles: neither William Rufus nor Henry I could ever make him betray the Church's freedom. This balanced holiness — a great intellectual who remains a humble monk, a tender shepherd who does not bend before kings — explains the lasting admiration in which he has been held.^[60][61]

Death at Canterbury (21 April 1109)

Back from his second exile, Anselm spent his last years at Canterbury, aged and ill, still busy writing and governing his Church. On the morning of Holy Wednesday, 21 April 1109, surrounded by his monks who were reading to him the account of the Passion according to Saint Luke, he passed away gently, at about seventy-six years of age. Eadmer, his faithful companion, who had gathered his words for years, reports that he would have wished to live a little longer to resolve one last question, that of the origin of the soul — a touching detail of a man whose thought stopped only with his breath.^[62][63]

Veneration and canonization

Anselm's cult was established at once at Canterbury, where his successor Thomas Becket — another martyr archbishop — is said to have asked Pope Alexander III for his canonization at the Council of Tours (1163). No sources of a formal twelfth-century canonization have come down to us, but Anselm was very early honoured as a saint at Canterbury and beyond. The canonization is generally ascribed to Pope Alexander VI, around 1494, at the request of Archbishop Morton.^[64][65] His feast is fixed on 21 April, the day of his death.

Doctor of the Church (1720)

On 3 February 1720, Pope Clement XI proclaimed Anselm a Doctor of the universal Church, officially consecrating the doctrinal authority that had been recognized in him for six centuries. Tradition has given him two surnames that sum up his genius: Doctor magnificus, the "Magnificent Doctor," for the breadth of his thought, and Doctor Marianus, the "Marian Doctor," for his devotion to the Virgin.^[66][67]

The father of scholasticism

Anselm's legacy is immense. In method, he inaugurated theology as a science: a rational and ordered effort to understand the faith, which would culminate a century and a half later in the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In doctrine, he bequeathed two monuments: the ontological argument, endlessly discussed for nine centuries, and the theology of satisfaction, which shaped the Western way of understanding the Cross. In spirituality, his Prayers and Meditations nourished the affective piety of the whole Middle Ages.^[68][69] In this threefold capacity — thinker, theologian, man of prayer — Saint Anselm remains one of the living sources of Catholic intelligence.

"The whole theology of Anselm lies in this movement: to believe in order to understand, and to understand in order to love more deeply the one in whom one believes." — A synthesis of the Anselmian method after Benedict XVI, audience of 23 September 2009^[70]

• Principal biographical source: Eadmer of Canterbury, Vita sancti Anselmi ("Life of Saint Anselm") and Historia Novorum in Anglia — accounts by a direct witness, Anselm's secretary and companion. Reference edition: R. W. Southern (ed. and transl.), The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Eadmer, Oxford Medieval Texts, Clarendon Press, 1962.
• Anselm's works: critical Latin edition S. Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols., Edinburgh, 1946-1961. In English: Proslogion, transl. M. J. Charlesworth or T. Williams; Cur Deus Homo / Why God Became Man; in French: Sources Chretiennes no. 91, transl. R. Roques, Cerf, 1963.
• Reference study: R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge University Press, 1990 — a masterly biography that places the man in his age.
• Recent magisterium: Benedict XVI, general audience of 23 September 2009, devoted to Saint Anselm (vatican.va).
• Related articles on Ignispedia: the ontological argument (detailed exposition); the Investiture Controversy; the Gregorian Reform; victim souls and the theology of reparation; Saint Thomas Aquinas; Saint Bernard of Clairvaux; Saint Thomas Becket, his distant successor at Canterbury.