SOURCE: Nichols, Aidan. “Anselm of Canterbury and the Language of Perfection.” Downside Review 103, no. 352 (July 1985): 204-17.

[In the following essay, Nichols investigates the biographical context of Anselm's Proslogion and defines the work's fundamental aim as the search for a “language of perfection” that would allow one to articulate the transcendent nature of God.]

The aim of this article is to reconsider the Proslogion of St Anselm in its historical setting, and to suggest, in the light of recent Anselmian studies, that its basic argument is only acceptable if one shares the ‘fiduciary’ view of language represented, in different ways, by S. T. Coleridge and Martin Heidegger.

THE PROSLOGION IN CONTEXT

Anselm of Canterbury is the typical monastic philosopher, so much so that his principal contribution to the philosophical tradition is today most easily available in English dress as part of an anthology of his prayers and meditations.¹ This is as it should be. Anselm's life is unintelligible except in terms of search for transcendence, itself regarded as the heart and goal of the metaphysical enterprise by traditional philosophy in the West. At the same time, his philosophy cannot be placed until we recognize that we are dealing with a monk, a man of prayer and brotherhood. In his prayers which are formal and highly structured but nevertheless deeply felt set pieces that initiated a fresh devotional style in the Latin Church, it is characteristic of Anselm, as Professor Sir Richard Southern has pointed out, that he ‘moves from inertia to a vivid apprehension of the being and love of God’.² This also happens to be the programme of his philosophical masterpiece, the Proslogion, which he wrote in a single gust of inspiration in 1078.

Anselm was fortunate in his biographer, a member of what became eventually his own monastic family at Christ Church, Canterbury.³ Eadmer's account of the political events of Anselm's episcopate, the Historia Novorum, has been hailed as ‘the first major Latin historical work in England since Bede and … one of the greatest achievements of Anglo-Norman historiography’.⁴ In a more personal chronicle, the De Vita et Conversatione Anselmi Archiepiscopi Cantuarensis, Eadmer gives us a childhood image of Anselm which is evidently meant to serve as a parable of the whole man. In his childhood in the Alpine foothills Anselm imagined heaven perched atop the snow-capped mountains around Aosta: once in a dream, he scaled them and was graciously received at table by God, imaged as a great king.⁵ As a youth, he took the way of many Italians in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, crossing the Alps to Burgundy, France and Normandy in search of higher education. Here he would find litterae humaniores but also theology.⁶ It is conjectured that Chartres and Fleury-sur-Loire may have been his magnets, but in time the reputation of his fellow Italian, Lanfranc, who was master of the Norman Benedictine school of Bec, drew him farther north to the area of Rouen, then governed by Normandy's most celebrated Duke, William the Conqueror.⁷ Over thirty years later as abbot of Bec he would be brought to Canterbury as archbishop by the Conqueror's son William Rufus. He accepted with a reluctance which, in a monk of a house in the buoyancy of its founding generation, was probably not simulated. By this date, 1093, he had behind him his ‘published’ prayers, identified from an anarchic manuscript tradition by the labours of Dom André Wilmart,⁸ and his philosophical writings, among which was the Proslogion. The later theological writings were produced in interludes of quiet in the turbulent political-ecclesiastical history that followed the struggle over the episcopate's freedom of spiritual action or ‘Investiture Contest’.⁹

For the intellectual resources Anselm brought to the search for transcendence we may look to the school of Bec itself as well as to his own writings. It is known that Lanfranc had offered a generous formation in the humanities, with a particular stress on logic.¹⁰ The researches of D. P. Henry have shown that Anselm was familiar not only with the logica vetus, consisting of Aristotle's Categories, Topics and De Interpretatione, but also the logical works of Boethius. The latter's logic, as expressed in his commentary on the Isagoge of Porphyry, and therefore, in effect, a commentary on Aristotelean logic at one remove, was much concerned with ‘modal’ concepts of possibility and necessity which would exercise Anselm also.¹¹ Anselm's theological master was undoubtedly Augustine.¹² The combination of sources is piquant and instructive. In the contemporary struggle between dialecticians and antidialecticians, Anselm was very much on the side of the former, those who saw the need for a rational exploration and systematization of the materials of revelation, against those for whom theology was simply a paraphrase of Scripture in the light of the Fathers.¹³ The curious thing is that, while this is true, his proof of God's existence nonetheless issues from prayer and terminates in prayer.

The Proslogion is one of Anselm's Norman works, composed while Prior at Bec. A prior's office was essentially that of domestic administrator, far removed from the international concerns of Anselm's later period, concerns reflected in correspondence with, among others, the King of Scots and the Crusader rulers of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.¹⁴ The human background of an Anglo-Norman house of this period would be very much that described by Dom David Knowles in his Monastic Order in England—a highly organized conventual round of study, labour, liturgy and fraternal co-existence.¹⁵ This background is exceedingly relevant to the presuppositions of the Proslogion's argument.

In the preface to the Proslogion, Anselm explains that, once finished with the brief treatise known as the Monologion, it occurred to him that this latter work ‘consisted in a connected chain of many arguments’. He began to ask himself

if it would be possible to find one single argument, needing no other proof than itself, to prove that God really exists, that he is the highest good, needing nothing, that it is he whom all things need for their being and well-being, and to prove whatever else we need to prove about the nature of God.¹⁶

After describing the mental struggle whereby at first he groped in vain for this ‘unique argument’ and subsequently spent his energies in keeping the problem from tyrannizing over all his waking thoughts, Anselm goes on:

One day, when I was tired out with resisting its importunity, that which I had despaired of finding came to me, in the conflict of my thoughts, and I welcomed eagerly the very thought which I had been so anxious to reject.¹⁷

It is Eadmer who records that the timing of this moment was the Office of Matins in the monastic liturgy at Bec.

Suddenly, one night during Matins, the grace of God illuminated his heart, the whole matter became clear to his mind, and a great joy and exultation filled his inmost being. Thinking therefore that others also would be glad to know what he had found, he immediately and ungrudgingly wrote it on writing tablets and gave them to one of the brethren of the monastery for safe keeping.¹⁸

In the light of what has been said above concerning Eadmer's integrity as an historian, this section of the Vita can hardly be dismissed as conventional pious ornament. The Proslogion belongs in one sense, therefore, with the devotional writings which were written largely, as Southern remarks, for Anselm's fellow-monks, though also to meet the increasingly articulate needs of lay-people with the time, inclination and (presumably) financial wherewithal to adopt the religious practices of the monastic life.¹⁹

Of course the word once written takes on a life of its own beyond the control or even expectations of an author. The audience which the Proslogion eventually commanded was provided by the history of philosophy, rather than a monastic conventus. The significance of Anselm's discovery escaped his contemporaries, apart from the immediate reply it evoked from a fellow-monk, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers,²⁰ and a reminiscence in the writings of Abbot Gilbert Crispin of Westminster.²¹ As M. J. Charlesworth put it:

St Anselm's Proslogion might have fallen stillborn from the scriptorium for all the influence it had upon his own intellectual milieu.²²

The thirteenth century, however, more than made up for the twelfth's lack of acumen in Anselm's regard, and a host of writers studied his ‘unique argument’: William of Auxerre, the Dominican Richard Fishacre, the Franciscans Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure, through whom it became known to St Thomas. In John Duns Scotus's version it passed into the mainstream of early modern philosophy, to Descartes and Leibniz. It was this third- or fourth-hand paraphrase, it seems, which Kant attempted to refute, since when, and until fairly recent years, the argument came to be viewed as ‘a quaint and naïve mediaeval conundrum’.²³ Once again, however, an Anselmian renaissance has succeeded an age of neglect, both in Continental and British writing. Its celebration is the inter-disciplinary and international collection, Spicilegium Beccense, published in Paris on the nine-hundredth anniversary of Anselm's arrival at Bec.²⁴

PRAYER OR PHILOSOPHY?

Several of the defenders of the ‘unique argument’, and notably Dom Anselm Stolz, have been at pains to rescue the Proslogion from the ravages of philosophical critics by claiming that its intention is essentially spiritual or mystical.²⁵ It is, they say, an essay in mystical theology, in the understanding, then, of the practice of prayer. To discover God as necessary perfection, as Anselm does, is to offer crucial counsel on how to pray. In praying, one must never be content with one's current images of God but strive constantly to transcend them towards a reality which is of its nature semper maior. It is true that prayer is the vital context of the argument. Indeed, as we shall see, to sever the argument entirely from this context is to lose its strictly philosophical force. The first and last chapters of the Proslogion, in particular, are entirely characteristic Anselmian meditations. Thus for instance, from Proslogion 1:

Lord, I am not trying to make my way to your height, for my desire is in no way equal to that, but I do desire to understand a little of your truth which my heart already believes and loves. I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand; and what is more, I believe that unless I do believe I shall not understand.

But is it not a modern fallacy to suppose that a monastic and spiritual concern, such as Anselm's undoubtedly was, must necessarily exclude a philosophical and rational concern? We need not surrender to impaling on the horns of the dilemma which would have the Proslogion to be either spirituality or philosophy but on no account both. Professor E. L. Mascall has well said of Anselm in this connection:

He believed by faith that God is supremely rational, and it therefore seemed obvious to him that, if only one could find out how to do it, it must be possible to prove the existence of this supremely rational being. He believed that God had shown him how to do this, and he could never thank him sufficiently for it. I think, therefore, that one key at least to the Proslogion is to be found in the fact that it could never occur to Anselm that there was anything irrational or anti-rational about faith and revelation.²⁶

The relationship between faith and reason in Anselm is a complex one, partly because the question has not yet become a topic of discussion in its own right. He wished to hold les deux bouts de la chaîne, maintaining both that reason has a role to play prior to faith and within the realm of faith, but also that faith transcends reason, from which it follows that it cannot be on purely rational grounds alone that the mysteries of the faith are given lodging in the mind.²⁷

Looking for confirmation more widely in Anselm's writing, we find him affirming in the Soliloquies that he accepts the teachings of Scripture in the hope that he will come more and more to understand them.²⁸ This is the classic sense of the Augustinian adage, credo ut intellegam.²⁹ Reason serves the life of faith by exhibiting the intelligibility of God and his decrees. In the Cur Deus homo, on the other hand, a novel and distinctively Anselmian note is struck. The interlocutor here is a monk who is not so much seeking reasons to confirm faith as gaudium, a joy that flows from one's realization that faith accords with reason, a spiritual joy of the intellect delighting in the truth.³⁰ And departing further still from the root Augustinian meaning of credo ut intellegam, the terms of the command ‘Believe that you may understand’ which Anselm addresses to the monk in the Cur Deus homo may in fact be transposed at certain points. We thus find instead: ‘Understand so that you may believe’. The sceptic is challenged to understand that God exists (the Proslogion), that he is supremely good and just (the Monologion) and that he has made provision for man's salvation in the only way possible (the Cur Deus homo). Jasper Hopkins warns that when we find Anselm saying that reason can never conflict with Scripture we should not take him to be asserting in doctrinaire fashion that he would not recognize any such conflict if brought to his notice.³¹ Rather, he is making a prediction based, Hopkins suggests, on three factors. First, Anselm has, in fact, found himself able to resolve prima facie conflicts between reason and the Bible when he found them. Secondly, he recognized that adjudication in such conflicts is itself a rational undertaking. Thirdly, he believed that human reason cannot, in principle, comprehend the full mystery of the Godhead revealed in Christ. He also works on the presupposition, noted by Mascall, that a rational God cannot reveal to man anything intrinsically irrational. And so the notion that reason and revelation never conflict is a structural principle for Anselm, set to work to interpret all the data of theology. Only if the consistent interpretation of those data by that principle became too costly would it be abandoned. Anselm never found it necessary to abandon it.³² The Proslogion may very well be both prayer and philosophy.³³

THE LANGUAGE OF PERFECTION

The fundamental objection, or at any rate the main feeling of discomfort, shared by readers of the Proslogion concerns the notion that an argument to God's existence could be deduced from a mere definition—the definition of God as necessary perfection, or in Anselm's own words, ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’. It smacks of the conjuror drawing a triumphant rabbit from a top hat. But ‘How did he do it?’ is the response of a person who feels tricked by sleight-of-hand, rather than of the genuinely convinced enquirer. In recent years, however, it has been questioned whether this view of the treatise really corresponds to Anselm's intentions as embodied in the Proslogion as we have it.

At the start of the argument, Anselm attempts to identify the God to whom he is in the course of praying with what he calls ‘something than which a greater cannot be thought’. But the point of the argument, in the first instance, is precisely to confirm this identification. As Richard Campbell has shown in his study of the Proslogion, the idea of necessary perfection cannot be construed as a definition playing its part in the logic of the argument as it unfolds, since it is itself one of the conclusions towards which the argument is to proceed.³⁴ Further, Campbell points out that the passage I have cited above from Proslogion 1, a passage which immediately precedes the ‘unique argument’, is scarcely an example of the way a man arguing from a definition of God would be likely to speak. And finally, before ending the Proslogion, Anselm says in so many words that he must pass beyond this characterization of God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ since even this has proved inadequate to what he has found to be true in prayer.

Lord, you are then not only that than which nothing greater can be thought; you are something greater than it is possible to think about. For since it is possible to think that this could exist, if you are not that thing, then a greater than you can be thought; and that will not do.³⁵

Throughout the treatise, in fact, ‘God’ is a proper name, a subject of address, and proper names do not have definitions. If definitions give the meaning of terms, proper names have no meaning. Their office is to refer, and this referential function is not necessarily connected with any descriptive import that some given proper name might (as in ‘Guggles Radziwill’) or might not (as in ‘Joe Smith’) convey. And so:

While Anselm says to God, ‘You are that than which a greater cannot be thought’, that assertion cannot reasonably be taken as an answer to the absurd question, ‘Who or what is meant by “you”?’³⁶

Years ago, Stolz had realized that the celebrated Anselmian identification is no definition but rather a conclusion. But for him, as we have noted, it was no philosophical conclusion but rather the mystical issue of the monk's prayer-life. For Stolz, Anselm simply presumes God's existence, wishing to pass over from pure believing to an experiential encounter with the ever-present God affirmed by faith.³⁷ But we have found already that this will not serve as an account of Anselm's view of the relationship between faith and reason. Moreover, it ignores the fact that the Proslogion is simply littered with argumentative connectives.

What then is the true starting-point of Anselm's thought about God's existence? The Anselmian argument is founded upon the language of perfection. In the public realm, we use and find meaning in a language about perfection. We do not regard this use of language as utterly baffling, although it may sometimes strike us as curious or provocative. At the opening of the ‘unique argument’, Anselm's interlocutor, the ‘Fool’ of the Psalter (he who ‘has said in his heart: “There is no God”’), overhears Anselm praying in this language. He is speaking of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, the unconditionally perfect. The Fool

understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his mind, even if he does not understand that it actually exists.³⁸

Anselm's ‘speech-act’ involves limit-language that may be mysterious, but yet is not totally incomprehensible. The Fool himself makes good use of this same language in formulating his objection to Anselm. As Ludwig Wittgenstein might comment, a person who knows how to use the language of perfection but denies that he can understand its significance does not know what he is saying.

Just as language allows us to speak of the unspeakable, so thought allows us to think of that which, in itself, surpasses the ability of thought to comprehend.³⁹

Anselm will go on from his initial speech-act to argue that the whole realm of discourse which permits one to speak of God as that than which a greater cannot be conceived rules out the possibility of intelligently denying God's existence. He claims, in effect, that the use of the language of perfection opens up a path down which all language-using and meaning-laden beings are pointed, a path leading to the mystery of God.

In coming to understand that the Fool's challenge to faith oversteps the limits of what can be thought, in this becoming aware of the bounds of the creativity of human thought, one finds faith and reason working together to point towards the pre-containing creativity of God who transcends human thought.⁴⁰

How then does Anselm propose to show that the Fool's construction of the language of perfection is impossible, whereas his own imposes itself? The words ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ serve to specify an ‘intentional object’, what Anselm calls something ‘in the mind’, in intellectu. This object is not regarded as a mental item with some arcane autonomous existence of its own but simply as an intellectual mediation of some possibly existing reality.⁴¹ Concepts are that by which we grasp the real, not mental impressions parallel to it. Anselm now goes on to claim that this ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ is not only in intellectu but also in re, in existence.

Surely that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist in the mind alone. For if it exists solely in the mind even, it can be thought to exist in reality also. …⁴²

The crucial thing here is the meaning to be attached to in re. By in re Anselm means belonging to experience as a whole, which experience cannot but be informative about the realm of the real. It has become a commonplace here to drag in a cannon bearing the name of Kant with which to shoot down Anselm's enterprise. But curiously enough as Campbell has shown, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason may here be turned to defence of the Proslogion's argument in its authentic form. For while Kant was indeed to argue that existence is not a determining predicate (if it were, that which we say ‘exists’ would no longer be the same something as what we spoke of before we made that assertion), nevertheless he did not regard the predicative use of ‘exists’ as simply meaningless, mere vibration of the air. He saw it as a special kind of relational predicate whose task it is to locate what is thought of, or spoken of, in the context of experience at large.

Though in my concept nothing may be lacking of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is lacking in its relation to my whole state of thought. Therefore through its existence (the object) is thought of as belonging to the context of experience as a whole.⁴³

And so that than which a greater cannot be thought can be thought to exist in reality also, and this, Anselm now adds, ‘is greater’. Existence is a valuational relationship, not just a brute fact. We have a preference for the actual, if only to complain of it.

If then that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in the mind alone, this same that than which a greater cannot be thought is that than which a greater can be thought. But this is obviously impossible. Therefore, there is absolutely no doubt that something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the mind and in reality.⁴⁴

Given the meaningfulness of the speech-act from which we started, it appears self-contradictory to say that that than which nothing greater can be conceived is in the understanding only. It does not make sense to deny the purchase on reality of the language of unsurpassable perfection.

But which thing, or things, answers, or answer, to this description? To secure the identification of God with such a reality, Anselm must show that there is some characteristic true of this reality which is true only of God. And this he finds to be the unthinkableness of its not existing. Whatever this thing is, it is characterized by the sheerest ontological independence. If it failed to exist, or came into existence, or passed out of it, it must be dependent on something greater still, and that is contradictory. If it exists, and Anselm has by now established to his own satisfaction, that it does, then it cannot not exist.

And this is you, O Lord our God. You therefore so truly are, O Lord my God, that you cannot even be thought not to be. …⁴⁵

The God who is the Lord of the Church is also the God of the enquiring mind.

THE FIDUCIARY APPROACH TO LANGUAGE

Since the starting-point of Anselm's argument is language-in-use, the Proslogion is not to be seen as an exercise in impersonal, purely logical, demonstration of the existence of God. In so far as Anselm sets out from the actual performance of a speech-act his conclusions cannot be said to be either impersonal or logically entailed. Not all exhibition of the rationality of beliefs takes the form of logical demonstration. Campbell draws an instructive parallel here with a passage from the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations.⁴⁶ The comparison concerns language about external objects. Since language of its very nature inhabits a shared public realm, any denial of the existence of reality beyond the self, that is, of the existence of such a public realm, is at bottom unintelligible, precisely because any such denial must itself be made in language. In saying this, it is not being claimed that the existence of external reality is logically entailed by the language we use. Nevertheless, we are showing forth the reasonableness of our belief in that external reality. Similarly, in the Proslogion, Anselm shows how our capacity to use the language of absolute perfection makes it unintelligible to deny that such language opens out onto the realm of the real.

Our response to Anselm will depend, accordingly, on the degree of willingness we feel to take language on trust, to accept what Doctor John Coulson has called its ‘fiduciary’ demands.⁴⁷ Language may have developed as it has just because of its aptness for disclosing features of reality. It always implies a commerce between the language-user and the real itself. This need not mean that every description formulated in language must necessarily describe some real thing. But it will mean that using language involves, in and of itself, a turning to the real. Thus openness to learn from what is said something of what there is can be commended as a rational posture. Linguistic formulae can present us with distorted pictures of the real, but in the case of the language of perfection we can come to see, through the argument of the Proslogion, that the formulae of this language, at any rate, are not systematically misleading but rather the contrary.

As Doctor G. R. Evans has shown in her recent studies of Anselm, Anselm regarded language as divine in its origins and function.⁴⁸ The self-subsistent Word, which is God himself, is the ultimate and universal ‘language’ from which ordinary speech is derived. In the Monologion Anselm proposes that all language ultimately derives from the great universal words in the divine Mind. The various languages which men use are doubtless derived from these words in complex and tortuous ways. Nonetheless, they gain their meaningfulness from their relation to the universal verba.⁴⁹ Such an archaic ontology of language naturally predisposes Anselm to that fiduciary view of language which thinkers as diverse as S. T. Coleridge and Martin Heidegger have embraced in very different ways. We are dealing here with a ‘fundamental option’ of a kind which is capable of commendation but not of coercive proof, for the very good reason that it helps to establish the conditions on which what is to count as argument will obtain. The ‘option’ is the view that language is in itself ‘hermeneutic’, revelatory of a world; that its action is comparable to that of symbol or sacrament in presenting in a concrete medium a reality otherwise inaccessible.

In Coleridge and Heidegger, the lingua communis grants us access to what is most fundamental in reality. In Coleridge's case, the fact of such a fiduciary approach to language is more striking than any great clarity, or even perhaps originality, in the way it is presented.⁵⁰ Heavily indebted as he was to German Romantic Idealism, Coleridge's formulations are frequently more obscure than in their original sources. In the Preface to Aids to Reflection he produced, nonetheless, the lapidary statement that

Words are not Things but Living Powers, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined and humanized.⁵¹

Coleridge had already found the supreme exemplification of this idea in the verbal symbols of the Scriptures. In The Statesman's Manual the divinely inspired language of the biblical revelation is described as

the living educts of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are conductors.⁵²

But in this the divine action simply raises to a higher power the capacity of language to disclose the ‘things of most importance to mankind’ which Coleridge would discuss in Aids to Reflection, itself a manifestly philosophical rather than theological work, conceived, indeed, as a pocket version of the Coleridgean synthesis of German and English philosophy. Coleridge's theological affirmations rarely lack a philosophical correlate, or mirror-image, in just this kind of way.⁵³ But the point here is that for Coleridge language, as the most sensitive of all the instruments of the human mind, most fully realizes mind's basic relation to reality, which is at once projecting—and to this extent, we must be critical towards language, and yet also receptive—and to this extent, we must trust language to disclose the real and not to conceal it.⁵⁴

The affinity of Coleridge with Heideggerian thought has been noted by George Steiner.⁵⁵ But Heidegger's reflections on the epiphany of being in and through speech-acts come from a writer with greater powers of prose organization. Although Heidegger's concern with language as the logos of being is a pervasive feature of his work, his central discussion of a fiduciary approach to the word is that found in the essay-collection, Unterwegs zur Sprache.⁵⁶ Pointing out that the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel has licensed ancient Christian thinkers in speaking of the divine origin of language,⁵⁷ Heidegger develops his own account of the primacy of the logos over man, in conjunction with the philosophers and poets of German Romanticism and their Symbolist successors. For Heidegger, ‘man succeeds in speaking only in so far as he coresponds with language’.⁵⁸ Language is the ‘house of being’, as Heidegger insists in his conversation ‘Between a Japanese and an Enquirer’.⁵⁹ Thus the wider realm of being in which man's life is set is not subordinate to man, but quite the contrary. Man is man through his awareness of the logos, the language of being.

The being of man is brought into its own by language, in such a way that it remains tributary to the very nature of language, the sound of silence. This happens in so far as language of its very nature as the sound of silence needs the speech of mortals in order to make the sound of silence audible to mortal hearing.⁶⁰

For Heidegger, we need the poet to purify our sense of language so that we may find in it the self-disclosure of reality itself.

My fragmentary discussions of two such complex thinkers are meant only to highlight the kind of approach to language on which the argument of the Proslogion makes most sense. We find the ‘language of perfection’ in possession, in both Church and society. With the logos as with the law, possession must count for a very great deal. It is true that there are trivial and parasitic uses of the language of perfection in currency. For a rather gushing guest to tell his hostess that the Coupe Melba was ‘absolute perfection’ is of no more metaphysical interest than it would be of religious interest had he told her it was ‘simply divine’. Nevertheless, the language of perfection is not wholly debased in the secular community of speech. While our world is flatter than that of the mediaevals, a scala perfectionis still stands. Only the rungs—sub-atomic particle, atom, molecule, cell, organism, man, society—are differently placed. And so long as the language of perfection remains a feature of our linguistic world, the Anselmian approach to God will remain of outstanding fascination.

Notes

1. B. Ward (ed.), The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm (Harmondsworth, 1973).

2. R. W. Southern in, B. Ward (ed.), op. cit., p. 12.

3. See R. W. Southern, St Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1962).

4. N. F. Cantor, Church, Kingship and Lay Investiture in England: 1089-1135 (Princeton, 1958), p. 39.

5. Eadmer, De Vita et Conversatione Anselmi Archiepiscopi Cantuarensis I, 19.

6. See G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology. The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford, 1980).

7. M. J. Charlesworth, ‘St Anselm: Life and Times’ in St Anselm's Proslogion (Oxford, 1965), pp. 9-10.

8. A. Wilmart, o.s.b., Auteurs spirituels et textes dévotes du moyen âge (Paris, 1932), pp. 147-216.

9. For the problems of dating Anselm's writings, see F. S. Schmitt, o.s.b., ‘Zur Chronologie des hl.Anselm von Canterbury’, Revue Bénédictine, 44 (1932), pp. 322-50.

10. A. J. MacDonald, Lanfranc. A Study of his Life, Work and Writing (Oxford, 1926).

11. D. P. Henry, The Logic of Saint Anselm (Oxford, 1967).

12. Anselm, Monologion 1; cf. F. J. Thonnard, ‘Caractères augustiniens de la méthode philosophique de saint Anselme’, in Spicilegium Beccense (Paris, 1959), pp. 171-84.

13. M. J. Charlesworth, St Anselm's Proslogion, op. cit., p. 25. See also A. J. MacDonald, Authority and Reason in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1933).

14. J. F. A. Mason, ‘Saint Anselm's Relations with Laymen: Selected Letters’, Spicilegium Beccense, op. cit., pp. 547-60.

15. D. Knowles, o.s.b., The Monastic Order in England (London, 1940), ch. xxvi.

16. Anselm, Proslogion, preface.

17. Ibid.

18. R. W. Southern (ed.), The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Eadmer, op. cit., pp. 28-31.

19. R. W. Southern, in B. Ward (ed.), op. cit., p. 9.

20. See Gaunilo, A Reply on Behalf of the Fool in M. J. Charlesworth, op. cit., pp. 156-67.

21. R. W. Southern, ‘St Anselm and Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster’, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, III (1954), pp. 78-115.

22. M. J. Charlesworth, op. cit., p. 3.

23. Ibid., pp. 6-7.

24. Spicilegium Beccense. Congrès international du IX^e centenaire de l'arrivée d'Anselme au Bec (Paris, 1959).

25. A. Stolz, o.s.b., ‘Anselm's Theology in the Proslogion’ in J. Hick and A. McGill (ed.), The Many-Faced Argument (London, 1968), pp. 183-208.

26. E. L. Mascall, The Openness of Being (London, 1971), p. 40.

27. Cf. M. J. Charlesworth, op. cit., p. 37.

28. Anselm, Soliloquies II, 271, 5-8.

29. Anselm, Proslogion I; cf. Augustine, De libero arbitrio II, 2.

30. Anselm, Cur Deus homo II. 15; cf. Proslogion XXVI.

31. J. Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of Saint Anselm (Minneapolis, 1972), p. 43.

32. Cf. G. R. Evans, Anselm and a New Generation (Oxford, 1980), pp. 63-68.

33. That the Proslogion was really meant to be philosophy rules out Karl Barth's claim, in Fides Quaerens Intellectum (London, 1960), that there is no natural theology anywhere present in Anselm's work. Were Barth's claim correct, Anselm would have been at odds with the whole Augustinian tradition in his time. On the questionableness of Barth's proposal, see J. McIntyre, St Anselm and his Critics (Edinburgh, 1954) where reference is made particularly to the Cur Deus homo. The significance of the latter work for Anselm's theological project as a whole is, in this context, its recurrence to the phrase rationes necessariae which suggests a rationalism equally far from Anselm's intention. The phrase in his use denotes sometimes logical demonstration, but at other times, as in Cassiodorus, it means any argument attaining to truth about a thing or event by whatever means. See on this A. M. Jacquin, ‘Les “rationes necessariae” de s. Anselme’ in Mélanges Mandonnet, II (Paris, 1930), pp. 67-78.

34. See R. Campbell, From Belief to Understanding (Canberra, 1976), to which my treatment of the Proslogion is much indebted.

35. Anselm, Proslogion XV.

36. R. Campbell, op. cit., p. 27.

37. A. Stolz, o.s.b., art. cit.

38. Anselm, Proslogion II.

39. R. Campbell, op. cit., p. 37.

40. Ibid., p. 203.

41. See P. Michaud-Quentin, ‘Notes sur le vocabulaire psychologique de saint Anselme’, Spicilegium Beccense op. cit., pp. 23-30.

42. Anselm, Proslogion II.

43. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B 628/9. Alternatively, one may espouse M. J. Charlesworth's formulation in St Anselm's Proslogion, op. cit., p. 67: ‘To function as a subject of predication in a real realm of discourse is greater than to function as a subject of predication in a functional or imaginary or conceptual realm of discourse’. This ‘translation’ makes it clear that ‘exists’ is not being used as a predicate in the ordinary sense, but that nevertheless some distinction and some comparison is being made between real and conceptual existence.

44. Anselm, Proslogion II.

45. Ibid., III.

46. R. Campbell, op. cit., pp. 177-8; cf. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953), especially 243-370.

47. J. Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition. A Study in the Language of Church and Society (Oxford, 1970), pp. 3-13.

48. G. R. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford, 1978), p. 49.

49. G. R. Evans, Anselm and a New Generation (Oxford, 1980), p. 86.

50. See N. Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (London, 1971).

51. S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (London, 1825; Edinburgh, 1905), p. xvii.

52. S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual (London, 1816), in W. G. T. Shedd, The Works of S. T. Coleridge (New York, 1853), I, p. 436.

53. The ground for this has been located in Coleridge's debts to German Romantic Idealism. As G. Hough wrote, ‘The aim of all Coleridge's religious writing is to show that all the central doctrines of Christianity … are deducible, with the aid of revelation, from the structure of the human mind itself’, ‘Coleridge and the Victorians’, The English Mind (Cambridge, 1964). It is difficult not to see in this a fundamental affinity with the later philosophy of Schelling, or even with Hegel's Phenomenology.

54. For Coleridge's account of the relation between mind and extra-mental reality, see S. Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth. The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge, 1970).

55. G. Steiner, ‘The House of Being’, The Times Literary Supplement (9th October 1981), p. 1143.

56. M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Tübingen, 1959).

57. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

58. Ibid., pp. 85-155. Heidegger had already spoken in similar tones in the Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt, 1949), p. 5.

59. Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 30.

60. One might consult further here the article ‘Language’ by F. Mayr in Sacramentum Mundi (London, 1968); for the period between the Early Middle Ages and the Romantics see K. O. Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (Bonn, 1963).