Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism | St. Anselm of Canterbury - Richard Campbell (essay date 1979)

Richard Campbell (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: Campbell, Richard. “Anselm's Theological Method.” Scottish Journal of Theology 32 (1979): 543-48.

[In the following excerpt, Campbell asserts that critics of Anselm's ontological argument have misrepresented his point, which is simply to demonstrate “that it cannot be said that God is not.”]

The study of Anselm's Proslogion argument on the existence of God which I recently undertook¹ emerged out of a growing conviction that commentator after commentator had been guilty of serious misrepresentation of its structure. Traditionally, Anselm has been taken as presenting in Proslogion 2 the first version ever to be formulated fully of the ‘Ontological Argument’. The reasoning in Proslogion 2 was—and often still is—supposed to proceed from an alleged definition of God as something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought, through inferences designed to...

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