[In the following essay, Pranger explains how Anselm's reading of Augustine illuminates the monastic mindset.]

In his recent book Augustine the Reader Brian Stock has drawn attention to a remarkable paradox in Augustine's thought. On the one hand, the act of meditative reading establishes, through the decoding of signs, the link between the reflective self and its ultimate goal and model, God, alias the Trinity. But on the other hand, the very same goal that acts as the incentive for the mind's search of both itself and its destination in the end proves to be beyond the reader's grasp. Stock summarizes his analysis of Augustine's use of texts (mainly in the Confessiones and De trinitate) as a means to come to terms with the self in its relationship to God and, so doing, with the “self itself” as follows:

The mind has a memory of itself which is unlike the manner in which we retain or recall such events; and it is within this memory, in which the mind, present to itself, remembers, understands and loves God, that it finds its image of him in itself. The mind, in recalling God, does not remember its original state of blessedness, but instead the words of God's prophets, which are passed on “through historical tradition.” These texts are reminders of the actions they record and of higher principles of conduct, permitting us to see them as “changeless rules” that are “written in the book of light called Truth.” In the Confessions, the reading of the first line of Deus creator omnium is an example of the inseparability of time from the memory of the observer: its reiteration becomes a proof for the establishment of the doctrine of experiential time as relational time. In De Trinitate, the example is not the reading of the text but the reader himself, as he attempts to ascend from scientia to sapientia with scripture as his guide. Time's relationship to eternity is therefore a question of purification in which applications of one's readings of scripture play the principal role in disciplined ascent. The word of God, a changeless truth, is thus incorporated into the changefulness of the time in which we live, taking on our mortality while retaining its immortality. In the vision at Ostia, this otherworld lies beyond reading; in De Trinitate 15, it lies beyond the reader.¹

Stock's final conclusions with regard to the extent to which Augustinian man is helped by textuality in his efforts to reach for the divine are quite unsettling, of course, and purposely so. Linguistic confidence and faith coincide with uncertainty and falling short. However, from a literary point of view—an aspect Stock does not deal with in his book—this situation gives us no cause for concern. For it is precisely the dynamics implied in Stock's conclusion, the intertwinement of eternity and time springing from the fathomless depths of memory, that keep Augustine's discourse going. Yet, in spite of the elaborate analyses of the workings of memory, will, and intellect, certain questions remain unanswered. Helpful though the notion of “reading,” in particular the reading of Scripture, may be in proceeding, as in De trinitate, “from outer to inner words, from the words we speak to the word of God” (p. 247), once the mind has turned inward with the help of those techniques, it also faces the pressure of the divine memory, intellect, and will, of which it finds itself to be the image and from which it is derived accordingly. Is the mind able to withstand that pressure so as to remain standing on its own feet? Nowhere does Augustine express his fear for such condensation of the human and divine. On the contrary, it is precisely the vast spaces of language, both outer and inner, that, waiting to be decoded, stand in between the human and divine minds and prevent the one from becoming absorbed by the other. Effective though the function of language and, more in particular, texts, may be, Augustine's Trinitarian focus in his De trinitate and other writings from his later period indicates, as Stock puts it, “that his thinking betrays some of the vicissitudes, misdirections, and unanswered questions of his earlier writings” (p. 278). Never will the mind, for example, be able precisely to articulate the difference between the workings of the Trinitarian network, including its own participation in it, and the “manner in which we recall events such as the experience of time in a ‘scientific’ sense” (p. 277). Illustrations of the latter mode are given in Confessiones XI, in which Augustine discusses the way we remember an artificial melody that, though its rhythm is understood through temporal intervals, exists outside time. “What is caught by the mind's gaze is stored in the memory, from which it is able to re-emerge as something learned [doctrina] in a branch of knowledge [in disciplinam]” (p. 277). Tied up with scientia (including reading?) as we are bound to be, we will never know exactly how scientia turns into sapientia—certainly not in scientific terms—even though we may participate in the process. What we do know is that in sapientia man enters into contact not with an object of memory, intellect, or will, but with the (textual) material from which and through which his mind, in the shape of memory's image—memory's memory—recalls memory, intellect, and will themselves. A bitter paradox for the searching soul that wants all, a blessing in disguise perhaps for the wanderer who prefers to keep going: notwithstanding its being incorporated into the mutability of time, that very same eternal Trinity stays aloof and—apart from the one, ecstatic moment as in the vision of Ostia—basically untouchable. As a consequence, the very sources of the self, the discovery of which would seem to raise high expectations regarding a possible return to its Ur-model, turn out to be beyond the owner's reach.

Let us now turn to Anselm and confront him with some of the problems raised by Stock. What about Anselm the reader? Surely, there is no doubt whatsoever that Anselm's thought is as text-bound as Augustine's. The monastic practice of rumination is entirely based on dealing with texts, and Scripture in particular. As a faithful follower of Augustine, the Benedictine monk takes in the words of Scripture in order to process them through the meditative machinery of his monastic memory. That memory being blanched in the process, the monk at once discovers and reforms his true self. So far so good. However, in one important respect Anselm seems to differ from the Augustinian approach. When stating, in the majestic opening lines of the Monologion, that “the supreme nature as well as all the other things we necessarily believe about God and his creation” can be proven “by reason alone” (sola ratione),² does Anselm, while claiming to refrain from an appeal to—inevitably written—authorities, imply that he can do without textuality as well? Let us next suppose that Stock's portrait of Augustine the reader striking a delicate balance between the accessibility and inaccessibility of God is indeed correct. In that case Anselm's refusal to operate on the basis of textual authority would seriously distort so fragile a picture. Things become even more complicated if we realize that Anselm, in the preface to the Proslogion, has advertised his Monologion and Proslogion as exempla meditandi de ratione fidei.³ Whatever ratio may mean here, so much is clear: not for a single moment does Anselm, when operating through reason alone, intend to leave the realm of rumination and meditation. But what, so one might ask, is there left to ruminate and mediate about?

As Anselm himself readily admits, there is nothing new to be found in his Monologion since all he does is repeat what Augustine has been saying in his De trinitate.

Frequently checking my text I was unable to find myself saying anything that would not be in accordance with the work of the catholic fathers, most of all, with those of Augustine. Therefore, if anyone thinks that in this work I have put forward something that is either too new or contrary to truth, I beg him not to call me instantly a presumptuous innovator or a defender of falsehood but, rather, to look diligently at the work of the aforementioned doctor Augustine, De trinitate. May he next judge my work accordingly.⁴

So, what the Monologion seems to be is not a reading of and a subsequent rumination on Scripture as a means to come closer to God. It is rather to be called a meditation on a meditation, a reading of a reading. It goes without saying that this introduction of an extratextual layer into the meditation, which further claims to produce a seamless reproduction of Augustine's thought, leaves the present reader altogether puzzled as to the status of the sola ratione.

Rather than being given the opportunity as promised by Anselm to join him in his rational-meditative enterprise, so as to start with him from scratch, the reader is presented with yet another text. Instead of finding himself at the dégré zéro proposed by his author he is invited to read a duplicated text. What then are we to make of the hypothetical ignorance to which, in the opening line of the Monologion, the sola ratione is linked?

If anyone, either by not having heard of it or by not believing, does not know of one nature and further happens to be ignorant of most of the other things we necessarily believe about God and His creation—that supreme nature that is the highest of all that is, autarchic in its eternal beatitude, giving and making through His omnipotent goodness the very being or the well-being to all other things—then I believe such a person, even if of a modest intellectual capacity, to be able to convince himself of the truth of most of all this by reason alone.⁵

Before we can resolve the questions raised by the apparent conflict of interest between Anselm's sola ratione and his fidelity to Augustine's De trinitate, we should test Anselm's claim to be faithful to Augustine and examine whether the Monologion can indeed be seen as a seamless imitation of De trinitate.

First, there are the facts. Augustine's De trinitate does indeed figure prominently in the Monologion, as is made abundantly clear by the many references in Schmitt's edition. But then it should be stated that such references are made for the benefit of the modern reader who knows how to distinguish between sources as historical data and their use. Such was clearly not Anselm's idea of fidelity to Augustine's text. For him, fidelity was to be linked to cogency, that is, to a certain degree of coherence between Augustine's text and his own. This coherence, in turn, is not supported by a tertium that might be used as a criterion of fidelity. Reading Augustine in Anselm's manner means to scrutinize the text in the hope that, by focusing intensely on it, dimensions may be brought out that lay in hiding, waiting to be revealed by the sympathetic reader. Of course, this notion of cogency does not suffice to explain the simultaneous occurrence in the Monologion of the principle of sola ratione and the prominent presence of Augustine's text. Yet, if it could be further developed, surpassing the external, authoritative dimension of Augustine's text, in order ultimately to encompass the subject matter itself, in other words, if Anselm's reading of Augustine's text would produce a rational cogency that could not be distinguished from the workings of the mind reflecting the divine nature, the very notion of cogency could bring together the dégré zéro of the hypothetical ignorance about the supreme nature and the fullness of what memory, intellect, and will have in store. Improbable though the chances of success would seem, it is only on the condition that this special degree of cogency is achieved that the sola ratione can be said to live up to its claim of delivering the intellectual presence of the supreme nature.

Augustine's reflections on the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit culminate in book XV of his De trinitate. However clear it may have become in the course of his argument that the human mind is created in the image of the divine memory, intellect, and will, Augustine here also points out the differences between the timeless memory of God and the time-bound memory of man. Consequently, the persons of the Trinity do not need one another to exercise their faculties of memorizing, understanding, and willing. In other words, the Father does not need the Son if he wants to understand or the Son or the Holy Spirit if he wants to love, nor do they need the Father in order to remember.

Anselm's chapter on memory in the Monologion is much along the lines of Augustine's argumentation.

What are we to think of memory? Should we say that the Son is the understanding of memory, or the memory of the Father, or the memory of memory? Further, since it cannot be denied that the supreme wisdom remembers itself, it is most becoming to assume that the Father is understood in terms of memory as is the Son in terms of “word.” And that can clearly be observed in our mind. For since the human mind does not always think in the same way it always remembers itself, it is obvious that the word it produces is born from its memory when it thinks itself.⁶

In this process of continuous remembering the Word that proceeds from the memory of the Father as a child from its parents takes on the latter's function, that is, his being memory. So, like Augustine, Anselm holds the view that it is not only the Father who remembers, the Son who understands, and the Spirit who wills. The Son also remembers, just as the Father also understands.

In the same way as the Son is understanding and wisdom of the Father, he also belongs to the memory of the Father. But what the Son understands in his wisdom he also remembers. The Son is, therefore, the memory of the Father and the memory of memory, that is the memory remembering the Father who is memory, just as he is wisdom of the Father and wisdom of wisdom.⁷

Like Augustine, Anselm realizes that this is not the way the human faculties of memory, intellect, and will operate:

For in that which is memory of itself [i.e., Christ being memoria memoriae], memory does not exist in its own memory in the same way as one thing exists in another, as, for instance, the things that are in the memory of the human mind. Those things exist in such a manner as to be not identical with our own memory.

The point Anselm makes here is that the objects of remembering and of the other faculties of the human mind are in a sense inanimate in that they do not actively participate in the process of remembering. The implication would seem to be that if we were able to understand correctly, we would understand and remember things as the Trinity understands and remembers itself, or, even, that we would understand things as Trinity. The last conclusion is not as far-fetched as it seems. In his treatise De veritate Anselm argues that whatever statement of truth we make in language, thought, and sense perception, it only becomes effective if seen as a statement of, and in, the supreme truth. It is only then that statements of truth on whatever level of knowledge (proposition, sense perception, etc.) are able to “do what they ought to do,” that is, to be true within their limited scope of being a true perception or a true proposition.

“If we were to understand correctly”: the problem is that in the practice of linguistic life we do not uphold so high an ideal. An example: as Anselm points out at the end of De veritate, we are used to speaking of the truth of “this and that.” In so doing we make a serious linguistic mistake. For when all is said and done, truth owes nothing to “this and that.” It is the other way around: “this and that” derive their being true from truth itself. They are in the truth just as we incorrectly speak of the time of “this and that” while in fact things are in time (De veritate, chapter 13).

For Anselm this concept of linguistic cogency is fundamental, and so is his awareness of the fact that we are quite unable to live up to its demands. Our language and thought are indeed governed by the supreme truth, which is supposed to be all-pervasive in whatever utterances the human mind makes. As the example just quoted demonstrates, in the daily practice of linguistic life we turn out to be inadequate in rendering this presence of the divine in words. In addition to the example of time, many other examples can be found in Anselm's works that lay bare the inaccuracies of human speech. Unless corrected through rational scrutiny, this improper way of speaking tends to obscure our view of truth. If we deal, for example, with the problem of free will and necessity, we should be careful not to interpret our way of speaking (the usus loquendi) in terms of literal truth. To say that “Hector can be conquered by Achilles” means, from a grammatical point of view, that Hector is the subject of the sentence. From the viewpoint of truth, however, the power does not lie in the person that can be conquered (Hector) but in him who conquers (Achilles). Since this example is found in the context of a discussion about necessity with regard to God,⁸ there is reason to assume that the problems Anselm cites concerning this issue largely derive from grammatical errors. These differ from the confusion about Hector and Achilles in scale rather than in principle.

Now we would seem to go beyond Anselm's search for linguistic purity if, in order to know things properly, that is, as they are in the supreme truth rather than as possessing truth themselves, we were to reduce them to, and reformulate them in, terms of the Trinity itself. After all, Anselm clearly states that “man requires materials or images from external sources to formulate his thoughts, whereas God is completely original and there is no distinction between his thought and expression.” Moreover, in his De veritate Anselm has outlined the process in which things become known in the supreme truth through his definition of truth as rectitudo mente sola perceptibilis,⁹ or, more specifically, as justice that is rectitudo voluntatis servata propter se.¹⁰ In practice this definition operates in the following way. Truth, being the implicit and unchangeable criterion of words and actions, is seen to make things true. Thus, although their being true is to be understood as being in the supreme truth, they are allowed to keep their own appearances rather than being absorbed and transformed according to the shape of God—the supreme truth—himself.

Yet this state of affairs does not rule out the possibility of “knowing things as Trinity.” If Stock is right in suggesting that Augustine could afford to leave the tension between the presence of timeless and time-bound truth unsolved, Anselm's position is much less comfortable. Because “the incorporation of the word of God, a changeless truth, into the changefulness of the time in which we live” is part of a broad pattern of ascent to be achieved by different acts and stages of reading, Augustine does not bother too much about precisely delineating the borders between time and timelessness, the more so since ultimately “the otherworld lies beyond reading and beyond the reader.” Anselm, however, stating right at the beginning of the Monologion his principle of sola ratione, does not have the luxury of leaving problems unsolved. His self-imposed demand for cogency now forces him to intensify his reading of Augustine's De trinitate, to eliminate the open spaces and address unresolved questions so as rationally to account for the incorporation of changeless time and truth into the changefulness of time. For the time being there seems to be no end to this drive for further and more stringent cogency. As a result this very same principle of cogency (sola ratione) invites Anselm not only to reread Augustine, but also to reread his own rereading of Augustine in the Monologion. Accordingly, it comes as no surprise that in the opening lines of both the Proslogion and the De veritate the inadequacies and implications of the Monologion are taken as a point of departure for further reflection and correction.

Since we believe that God is truth and since we speak of truth in many other things, I should like to know if, whenever truth is pronounced, we are bound to call that truth God. For in the Monologion you too prove, through the truth of proposition, that the supreme truth has neither beginning nor end. You state, “If someone is capable of doing so, let him think of the moment when the following statement has begun to be true or was ever untrue, namely, that something had a future existence; or, let him think of the moment when the following statement will cease to be true, namely, that something will have been in the past. And if neither of those two cases can be thought and either of the two ways of being true at a particular moment cannot exist without truth, then it is impossible to think of truth as having a beginning or an end. Therefore, if truth had a beginning and will have an end, then it would be true that there was no truth before it started to exist. And even after it had ceased to exist, it would still be true that there was no truth. However, all this cannot be true without the existence of truth. Thus truth should have to exist before truth existed and truth would have to exist after truth has ceased to exist. This a most inconvenient state of affairs. Therefore, whether truth is said to have a beginning or an end or whether it is understood to have neither, truth cannot be closed in by either beginning or end.” That is what you have said in your Monologion; reason why I expect from you a definition of truth.¹¹

Of course, there is a solution to the student's problem. In chapter 10 of De veritate Anselm explains that proving as he himself had done in the Monologion, by means of propositional truth, that truth is without beginning does not imply that every statement of propositional truth is a statement about God. The truth of statements about the future or the past depends on there really being something future or past. “And a future state of affairs does exist on the sole condition that it be in the supreme truth.” That truth is, in turn, by necessity without beginning or end. Here Anselm anticipates the aforementioned conclusion of his treatise that being true on whatever level of expression is to be understood as being in the supreme truth rather than belonging to the expression or to that which is expressed itself.

But what does all this tell us about cogency? So much can be said at present: unlike Augustine's concept of divine illumination as the guarantee of true knowledge, Anselm holds that truth is intrinsically present in the utterances of the human mind, not as the truth of “this or that,” but as rectitudo mente sola perceptibilis, that is, as independent truth. So, there certainly is a greater degree of density here than in Augustine. Now, the human mind being the ultimate vehicle able to perceive the (supreme) truth, the question arises as to its status vis-à-vis this truth. If the latter is without beginning or end, what about the mind itself, which is supposed to catch truth's undivided and all-pervasive presence?

To find an answer to this question, we must return to the problems of textuality and cogency. If Anselm, in the preface to the three treatises De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli, describes their content as pertinentes ad studium sacrae scripturae, he keeps the reader puzzled with regard to the shape this textual study is supposed to have taken. Nowhere in the treatises—apart from some scarce scriptural references—do we find a discussion of biblical texts proper. Is this scriptural study with a lack of scriptural language itself to be seen as the principle of cogency at work in its most effective form? In reducing our everyday language to its true structure, thus laying the foundation for the presence of intrinsic truth, Anselm simultaneously reads Scripture. Even though the student's conclusion with regard to the Malebranche-like presence of God in language may be a bridge too far, the human mind, in whatever activity, linguistic or empirical, is bound to perceive that presence. So, whether reading Augustine or Scripture, Anselm discovers one and the same truth mente sola perceptibilis. In so doing his principle of cogency is effective to such a degree as to reveal that one and the same truth dominates both reading and thinking. It is that undivided presence of truth that blurs the distinction between Scripture and the Fathers as external authorities on the one hand and the intrinsic degree of cogency on the other. Yet even so, textuality does not disappear: the search for cogency turns out to be the very study of Scripture itself.

Now that the student in the dialogue has been silenced, it is the reader's turn to object. For, although it is evident that the presence of the supreme truth is not to be understood as God being contained by, or identical with, a proposition, Anselm so far has failed fully to live up to his claim of cogency in that he left the relationship between the supreme truth without beginning and end, and the proposition—or, for that matter, other means of expression—stating that fact unaccounted for. All we know from the Monologion and De veritate is that the supreme truth is without beginning or end since nullo claudi potest veritas principio vel fine. What we as yet remain ignorant about is exactly how “changeful truth is incorporated into the changefulness of time.” There is a further problem resulting from the first one. Truth being without beginning or end, we do not know exactly what it looks like. In other words, the principle of cogency, although producing the presence of truth, does not reveal its face, unless, of course, one would duplicate the present studium sacrae scripturae and appeal to the text of Scripture as an external source of information.

It is in the Proslogion that Anselm offers the final solution to our questions. As mentioned before, that treatise too is characterized by Anselm, in one of the most moving prefaces ever written, as a rereading of an earlier work, the Monologion. The unum argumentum by which Anselm proves the existence of God—id quo maius nihil cogitari potest—is well known. This argument is so self-supporting that it can do without a further reference to the fact that the God thus proven is without beginning and end. Only when criticized by Gaunilo, who defends the possibility that id quo maius nihil cogitari potest does not exist, does Anselm demonstrate the absurdity of that thesis by pointing to the fact that, if that were to be the case, “it could be thought to have a beginning and an end,” just to add, “That, however, is impossible. For if someone says that id quo maius nihil cogitari potest does not exist, I [Anselm] maintain that, so thinking, he either thinks or does not think id quo maius nihil cogitari potest. If not, he does not think that what he does not think does not exist. However, if he does think the id quo maius, he thinks something that cannot be thought not to be.”¹²

Here we can observe Anselm's principle of cogency in full swing. Complicated though his argumentation against Gaunilo may seem, the argument reduced to its bare self is amazingly simple. In reply to another objection by Gaunilo, who had read the id quo maius as maius omnibus, “thus allowing room for thinking something greater than maius omnibus, even if that does not exist,” Anselm boasts that id quo maius utterly excludes so evasive a flight into thought. By implication, the appeal to id quo maius as having neither beginning nor end is to be seen as a result of rather than as an indispensable part of the argument. The latter is self-sufficient. All one needs is to hear it being spoken: “The maius omnibus is in need of another argument than itself. In the case of id quo maius, however, all that is required is that quo maius cogitari non possit sounds.”¹³ Here Anselm hits the linguistic nail on its head. Although Augustine's concept of language and reading, like Anselm's, has its point of departure in the sound of language, the former moves beyond language in search for changeless truth both underlying and transcending it where the latter finds it in the performative sound of language itself.

Now for Anselm cogency is indeed the instrument that does the trick. Correcting and redirecting the ever-widening perspective of the maius omnibus, cogency makes the formula id quo maius self-performative: it speaks and proves itself. Thus changeless truth, at once being introduced and kept at bay, is established in language as an auto-pronunciation. That auto-pronunciation is, of course, performed by the image of the changeless truth itself: the human mind living in the changefulness of time. But the cogency of the formula id quo maius, containing a comparative that respects the independence of the two poles of the comparison, the thinking mind on the one hand and the changeless God on the other, while at the same time having them united in one and the same performative formula, is such as to produce the presence of God through the sound of language, thus offering the observing and listening mind a glimpse of what He looks like.

But what about the spatial and temporal dimensions of reading? What about the text of De trinitate being reread by Anselm in the Monologion, and the text of the Monologion being reread by Anselm in the Proslogion?

First, it should be noted that the id quo maius itself is a text, or rather a textual trick performed on another text: “the fool says in his heart: there is no God.” That fool turns out to say something that cannot be thought: he does not know how to read properly and, therefore, he does not think properly. In short, he is a fool. That is all there is to it. Once the id quo maius is pronounced, it inevitably proves itself as well as the fool's silliness.

Next, it should be realized that the very notion of cogency is rooted in memory. As such, taking on the shape of sola ratione and, even more economically, of unum argumentum, it once more maps out, by way of condensation, the text of Augustine's De trinitate and Anselm's own Monologion. But, however dense and perhaps invisible the ratio Anselmi may be, the route this argument follows is the route of the Trinity and its reproducing image. Here we have perhaps the best-kept secret of Anselm's trick: the unum argumentum, rather than being just reason, consists of memory, intellect, and will. Reason performing a perfect operation, and, therefore, being by necessity a kind of perfecta similitudo of its source, how could it be otherwise? As such, the unum argumentum is an act of reading and rereading. Or, to put it more correctly, it is a perfect example of reciprocal reading, reading as reading ought to be. Nowhere does Anselm put this point so clearly as in the preface to the Proslogion:

After I had published, at the compelling request of some of my fellow brothers, a little work as an example of how to meditate about the structure of faith—acting as a person who, through silent reasoning with himself, examines what he ignores—I considered that work to be too much assembled out of a multitude of arguments. That is why I began to ask myself if it would be possible to find one argument, which was in no need of another one except itself to prove itself, and that alone would suffice to prove that God truly exists and that there exists a supreme good that does not need anything else whereas all other things, in order to be and to be well, do need the supreme good, as well as all the other things we believe about the divine substance. I kept focusing my attention on that issue. And one moment it seemed as if I could grasp what I was looking for. But the other moment it totally eluded my mind. In the end, I became so desperate that I wanted to stop my search for an argument that could not be found. However, the very moment I wanted to banish that thought from my mind altogether, lest it would prevent my mind from making progress in other fields when it kept occupying itself in vain with this particular issue, it increasingly started to impose itself upon me with a certain impertinence, against my will and opposition. One day when I was extremely tired, resisting with all my power the very thought that forced itself upon me against my will, that which I despaired about presented itself right in the middle of the turmoil of my thoughts so as to make me embrace eagerly the very thought that I had taken care to reject.

Joyful about what I had discovered, I thought that it might please some reader when it was written down. It is about this subject and about some others that I have written the present little treatise in the guise of a person trying to erect his mind in order to see God, and of a person who seeks to understand what he believes.¹⁴

In a sense this preface can be read as foreshadowing the unum argumentum itself. When Anselm finally discovers his argument, it is after a long battle between its elusive and tentative appearances and the restless mind. But in the end all it had to do was sound. Thus, retrospectively, considering the simplicity of the solution, the mental struggle becomes almost ironic. And ironic it is, absorbed as it is now by the clarity of the outcome. This is precisely what Anselm's cogency produces. Correcting language and thought and reducing it to its proper shape and proportions, it lends meaning, drama, and relief to former circumlocutions. A similar element of retrospective irony makes itself felt when Anselm, concluding his preface in which he had announced the most daring thought experiment ever undertaken, adds timidly that he has put his name to the treatise on the order (auctoritate) of Bishop Hugh of Lyon.

In other words, the vertical coup performed by the unum argumentum springs from memory and recharges the past, including past readings and writings, without erasing them altogether. On the contrary. For since it has become clear that reading and writing, undercut and redirected as they are by the unum argumentum, are a mere matter of reciprocity—a struggle in hindsight, a cause for boundless joy at present—the gaudium plenum thus achieved provides both the past and the future with such stuff as rumination is made on: sweet memories and high expectations.

By way of conclusion we should once more face the question: does this Anselmian concept of cogency, consisting of memory, understanding, and will, imply that in the last resort the human mind works according to the same principle as those through which the persons of the Trinity communicate? Are, for example, the products of our memory such as our thought about God and His creation eventually to be seen as “memory of memory,” as part of a reciprocal process of knowledge? As we have seen above, in terms of a general theory of knowledge, the answer has to be negative. Yet from the viewpoint of the enclosed space of his monastic ruminations, there is a sense in which Anselm can be said to reread Augustine as well as his own Monologion by applying his principle of rational cogency to human language and thought. So doing, he does not deprive the human mind of external sources to articulate its thoughts. Instead, he firmly reduces those thoughts, once formulated, to their agents, to the mind producing them, to the memory of the monastic mind in search of God, which is intellect as well as will. This then appears to be the ultimate meaning of Anselm's concept of cogency. In the light of this conclusion it may make sense to reread the opening of the Monologion.

If anyone, either by not having heard of it or by not believing, does not know of one nature and further happens to be ignorant of most of the other things we necessarily believe about God and His creation—that supreme nature that is the highest of all that is, autarchic in its eternal beatitude, giving and making though His omnipotent goodness the very being or the well-being to all other things—then I believe such a person, even if of a modest intellectual capacity, to be able to convince himself of the truth of most of all this by reason alone.

If we ruminate on this text, it turns out to present us with a precise itinerary of the monastic mind. Whatever part of reality is touched by the mind, the sola ratione, culminating in the unum argumentum, reveals this reality, in spite of the latter's obscure provenance from the realm of images and insufficient reason—remember Anselm's turmoil in the preface to the Proslogion—to be part of “the supreme nature and the other things we necessarily believe about God and His creation.” To think of that nature and of those “other things” sola ratione means to draw them from memory right through the oblivion caused by the inaccuracies of our normal speech habits. If, then, in the Monologion and the Proslogion Anselm proves, in different ways and with an ever-increasing degree of cogency, the existence of God, he does so by reducing the vague and obscured knowledge we have about God from our (sense and image) experience to a “memory of memory,” that is, “to an activity of the mind remembering being remembered by God.” Ultimately, it is in the complete reciprocity between the mind and its object, and between the object and “its” mind, that the sola ratione brings out the presence of God. This presence embraces both the forgetfulness of the mind caught up in the sinful obscurities of language and thought, and the happiness it enjoys after it has completed its mission of remembering God and his creation.

Notes

1. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 277-78.

2. Monologion, ch. 1; SAO [S. Anselmi opera omni. F. S. Schmitt, ed., 2 vols. Stuttgart-BadCannstatt: Frommann-Holzbog, 1968], vol. 1, 13.

3. Proslogion, preface; SAO, vol. 1, 93.

4. Monologion, preface; SAO, vol. 1, 8.

5. Monologion, ch. 1; SAO, vol. 1, 13.

6. Monologion, ch. 48; SAO, vol. 1, 63.

7. Monologion, ch. 48; SAO, vol. 1, 64.

8. De veritate, ch. 8; SAO, vol. 1, 186-88.

9. De veritate, ch. 11; SAO, vol. 1, 191.

10. De veritate, ch. 12; SAO, vol. 1, 196.

11. De veritate, ch. 1; SAO, vol. 1, 177.

12. Responsio editoris, ch. 3; SAO, vol. 1, 133.

13. Responsio editoris, ch. 5; SAO, vol. 1, 135.

14. Proslogion, preface; SAO, vol. 1, 93-94.