[In the following excerpt, Southern describes the content of Anselm's early works, the Monologion and Proslogion, the latter of which features his arguments concerning the existence of God.]

THE EARLY TREATISES

Until he became archbishop, Anselm's life for over thirty years was one of monastic peace disturbed only by the occasional enmities inseparable from the life of men living in close proximity in a small community, and by material cares which weighed less heavily upon him, as some thought, than they ought to have done. All his writings of this period are the witnesses of this peace: his intimate correspondence with friends at Canterbury and elsewhere, his prayers and meditations, his Proslogion and Monologion—themselves meditations on the nature of God—and his philosophical and theological dialogues, which were the product of his teaching in the cloister. In all this body of work there is scarcely a word of controversy. The only controversy was with the remarkable Gaunilo over the argument of the Proslogion, and it was conducted with such mutual regard and identity of purpose that it is hard to realize that a new philosophical issue had suddenly sprung into existence. Nothing could be more peaceful or more withdrawn from the storms and controversies which, in the realm of government, were rending the Empire and Papacy of Henry IV and Gregory VII, or which, in the realm of theology, in 1079 produced the final condemnation of Berengar of Tours. The idea that the task of the theologian was to reconcile apparent contradictions arose from the controversies of this time. It influenced the future in countless ways. But this was not Anselm's method: there is never in his works a moment of indecision, of poise between two opposites, and a final resolution of the point at issue. If ever there was a moment of irresolution we are not allowed to see it: in all his writings, he appears on the field already a victor, ready to explain, perhaps to demonstrate, but not to fight. None of the paraphernalia of pro and contra, of distinguo and respondeo had any place in his thought. For him the points about which others argued were the points which were settled before arguments began.

It may therefore seem strange that so much of his work was cast in the form of dialogue, which of all forms seems most to suggest the existence of opposing points of view. It was not so with Anselm. Indeed when Anselm came up against two concrete opponents, Roscelin and the Greeks, he dropped the dialogue form. For him, the dialogue was a form of art, used, as Plato had used it, to draw out his meaning and to give structure to thoughts which might otherwise have seemed to tumble out with too little disposition towards a system; it was not an expression of two rival bodies of thought. The protagonists in his dialogues were always a master and his pupil, never the representatives of two schools of thought.

Although most of the treatises which Anselm wrote at Bec are in dialogue form, the two earliest works, written shortly after the main body of his prayers and meditations, are extended meditations. They grew out of the earlier writings and have many similarities with them. They could be read, and to some extent they must be read, as religious exercises: we shall have especially to remember this in discussing the argument of the Proslogion, which begins in the manner of one of Anselm's earlier prayers:

Come now, little man, put aside your business for a while, take refuge for a little from your tumultuous thoughts; cast off your cares, and let your burdensome distractions wait. Take some leisure for God; rest awhile in him. Enter into the chamber of your mind; put out everything except God and whatever helps you to seek Him; close the door and seek him. Say now to God with all your heart: ‘I seek thy face, O Lord, thy face do I seek.’¹

But, however strong their connexions with his earlier prayers, the treatises we are now to examine were much more ambitious than anything previously attempted by Anselm. They place him at once in the front rank of theologians and philosophers, and despite all his depreciatory gestures it is impossible not to see that he knew this.

The passage in which Eadmer describes Anselm's first appearance as a theologian is the best introduction to these treatises. Eadmer's words at this point have almost the authority of autobiography, for there can be no doubt that Anselm was their source, and it is very likely that he read and at first approved what Eadmer had written:

He also composed another small book, which he called the Monologion because in this he alone spoke and argued with himself. Here, putting aside all authority of Holy Scripture, he inquired into and discovered by reason alone what God is, and proved by invincible reason that God's nature is what the true Faith holds it to be, and that it could not be other than it is. Afterwards it came into his mind to try to prove by one single and short argument the things which are believed and preached about God—that he is eternal, unchangeable, omnipotent, omnipresent, incomprehensible, just, righteous, merciful, true, as well as truth, goodness, justice and so on; and to show how all these qualities are united in Him. And this, as he himself would say, gave him great trouble, partly because thinking about it took away his desire for food, drink and sleep, and partly—and this was more grievous to him—because it disturbed the attention which he ought to have paid to Matins and to Divine service at other times. When he was aware of this, and still could not entirely lay hold on what he sought, he supposed that this line of thought was a temptation of the devil and he tried to banish it from his mind. But the more vehemently he tried to do this, the more these thoughts crowded in on him. Then suddenly one night during Matins, the grace of God shone on his heart, the whole matter became clear to his mind, and a great joy and jubilation filled his inmost being.²

The two works thus described, the Monologion and Proslogion, belong to the years 1077 and 1078. They are closely related in plan and subject-matter. They both consist, broadly speaking, of proofs of God's existence followed by meditations on God's qualities. But whereas the first, the Monologion, is concerned with the qualities of the Trinity, and is closely dependent on Augustine's De Trinitate, the Proslogion is chiefly concerned with the qualities of God as Unity; it is only very slightly dependent on Augustine, and it is altogether more personal and more vivid in expression than the earlier treatise.

There is also a notable difference in Anselm's intellectual posture in the two works: although they both contain proofs which Anselm regards as wholly convincing, the Monologion is a philosophical soliloquy, while the Proslogion is a prayer. The distinction is important. The Monologion was in form a highly original work, but in substance it had the authority of Augustine behind it. In it Anselm speaks, with the confidence of a man with all the best cards in his hand, with a secret source of authority; there is in his opening words a youthful confidence, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to prove, even to those of mediocre intelligence, that those things which we believe about God are necessarily true.³ But in the Proslogion he was on his own; he had reached the furthest limits of his thought; he still trembled with the awe of a new discovery. The Proslogion contains Anselm's most original contribution to philosophy, but it should be approached, as Anselm approached it, through the Monologion.

(I) THE MONOLOGION

The first words of the Monologion laid down a principle of inquiry from which he never afterwards departed.

Some of my brethren have persistently asked me to write down some of the things which I have proposed to them in talk for meditation on the divine essence and certain associated topics … with this condition that I should persuade them of nothing on the authority of scripture, but plainly and simply put down whatever the argument might require, without overlooking any objections, however fatuous.⁴

It would be hard to imagine a more complete break with the past than this. To Lanfranc, the whole enterprise appeared misguided. Yet the younger spirits were ready for the change. Anselm was not a reformer speaking odious truths to a generation unwilling to listen to him. He was a conservative, reluctantly writing what he would have preferred to leave to the spoken word, speaking perhaps what he would have preferred to leave unsaid, driven on by eager pupils. That the pupils were eager there is every reason to believe: their existence was not a literary fiction. They only needed the signal for a freer and more speculative approach to the problems of theology.

Anselm himself assumed an attitude of indifference towards the fate of his work. He sent it to Lanfranc asking him, as if casually, to approve it or to destroy it; and if he approved, to give it a name.⁵ The casualness was deceptive. Lanfranc did not approve, though he did not condemn outright. He made suggestions which would have altered the whole nature of the work. Anselm did not follow them. Nor did Anselm destroy the work. Instead, he himself turned to the question of giving his treatise a name. Ostensibly, he had left the work without a title and without an author's name because it was unworthy of such ornaments; but another reason seems to have been the difficulty of finding the right name. At first he called it an ‘Example of meditating about the substance of faith (de ratione fidei)’, but he still left it anonymous. Then he called it a ‘Monoloquium on the substance of faith’. Finally he dropped the descriptive phrase and, introducing a literary refinement after the fashion of the time, abandoned the hybrid Monoloquium in favour of the more elegant Monologion.⁶ And so, with many hesitations, but also with a considerable show of firmness, not to say obstinacy, this first treatise was launched into the world.

The work was quite unlike any other of recent times and substantially unlike any other work of any earlier period. The most striking point which separated it from other writings of this period was its entire lack of any quotation of authorities. This omission was not designed by Anselm as a tour de force: it was a deliberately chosen method and it sets him apart from all his contemporaries, except those who came under his immediate influence, and from the main line of development of medieval scholastic thought. By nature Anselm was anything but a rebel, but in this one respect he may be accounted one. The whole articulation of medieval thought came about through the collection of authorities, through the work of arranging and examining them, and through the task of harmonizing the vast and confusing mass of authoritative texts. The process of accumulation, of arrangement, and even—though as yet only feebly—of criticism, had already begun. It was against all this that Anselm set his face. There is no one in these centuries more conscious of his philosophic mission: he will not repeat other men's words.

Anselm at first called the Monologion an example of meditating about the substance of faith, de ratione fidei. This is an ambiguous phrase, and he soon dropped it from the title of his work. Nevertheless it was a phrase to which he reverted on several occasions and it contains the best description of what he was trying to do throughout the whole of his writings. It therefore requires careful examination.

First of all then the Monologion is an exemplum meditandi, a meditation. This was a form of writing which Anselm made peculiarly his own. ‘Meditatio’ and ‘meditare’ are words which occur very rarely in the Rule of St. Benedict, and then with a sense very different from that in which they are used by Anselm: they refer to such activities as learning the Psalter, or preparing the Lessons or the music for the Offices, not to the free excursion of the mind among problems of theology.⁷ St. Augustine also has very little to say about meditation. It is not until the twelfth century, and especially among writers of the Cistercian school, that meditation came to have a well defined place as a philosophical activity.⁸ But we need not go into the technical meaning attached to the word to see that it suggests a form of reasoning which claims a certain freedom of development, letting the mind take what turns it will, ignoring the exigencies of scholastic debate. All this is well brought out by the twelfth century writer Hugh of St. Victor in his account of the place of meditation among the arts:

Meditation has its foundation in reading, but it is constrained by no rules or order of reading. It rejoices to run freely in an open space where it can fix its gaze on the truth without hindrance, and investigate now this, now that problem until nothing is left doubtful or obscure.⁹

It was Anselm who did more than anyone else to fix this later, freer tradition of meditation, and to use it as a basis both for extended private prayer and for philosophical inquiry. The inquiry was scarcely distinguishable from the prayer, since the aim of both was to shake off the torpor of the mind and see things as they are in their essential being.

Secondly, the Monologion is a meditation de ratione fidei. What this phrase means is not very easy to say. It comes from St. Paul, who in the Epistle to the Romans admonishes his readers, if they have the gift of prophecy, to prophesy secundum rationem fidei.¹⁰ St. Paul seems to mean by this that their words are to be accommodated to the measure of their faith, but this cannot be Anselm's meaning. Perhaps the best translation would be ‘a meditation on the rationale of the Faith’, and this is a fair description of most of Anselm's theological works.

Anselm soon dropped the phrase de ratione fidei from the title of his work. He probably did so only for reasons of literary elegance. But he must have known that the conjunction of the two words ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ raised a problem. It was inevitable from the nature of his inquiries that he should soon say something about the relations between them, if only to allay the misgivings and suspicions which his method and the absence of authorities in his work aroused.

FAITH AND REASON

This is a subject on which a great deal of confusion can be avoided by making an immediate distinction between two senses of the word ‘faith’: in the first sense it is a mode of knowledge, an activity; in the second, it is an object of knowledge, a state of affairs capable of being expressed in a set of propositions. We know ‘by faith’ and what we know is ‘the Faith’. About faith in the first sense Anselm has very little to say. He has no psychology of belief; he feels no difficulties. The holding of the propositions of the Catholic faith was an obligation on all who had been baptized:

Our Faith is to be defended by reason against unbelievers, not against those who profess to rejoice in the name of Christians. From the latter, it may justly be demanded that they hold inviolate the pledges made for them in baptism … The Christian ought to progress through faith to understanding, and not through understanding to faith. Let him rejoice if he is able to attain understanding; and if he cannot, let him revere what he cannot apprehend.¹¹

This is a blunt statement of his position and should be kept in mind, but it is open to some misunderstanding. It suggests that knowing by faith is a mere passive act of receptivity; but it is this only at a very low level of understanding. The man who believes is impelled to raise his mind to God. He does this by means of reason. But reason is itself a spiritual gift, by which man is made in the image of God: reason is not a machine for performing a plodding series of mechanical acts; it is a kindling of the spirit, a throwing off of the chains of the flesh, a rising above the world of material things. Hence it is not inappropriate that Anselm uses in his philosophical discourses the same phrases of mental excitation which he uses in his prayers. This is most evident in the Proslogion. Here prayer and philosophy are most intimately combined; yet the philosophical starting point is strictly a problem of grammar and logic, and not one of faith in the narrow sense at all. It was not an accident that he chose this moment to assert the necessity of faith for understanding, and to coin the famous phrase which better than any other describes his theological programme: Fides quaerens intellectum.¹² Reason is the activity of faith. Hence, at the most primitive level, those who fail to discern the reality of universals fail before they begin to think: they are slaves of their corporeal images; they are like bats disputing with the eagle about the rays of the noonday sun; they are incapable of ascending to the plane of rational truth, which is the plane of incorporeal essences.¹³ Indeed it is clear that if the objects of reason are incorporeal essences inaccessible to the senses, some sort of act of faith is necessary before the processes of reason can begin at all. If anyone does not admit the existence of such essences, he lacks both faith and an object in which to exercise his reason. Nothing can be done about him except oblige him to keep silence. One way of achieving this was by authority; the other way was to convict him of a logical contradiction in asserting that something is not, which by logical necessity is. Anselm hoped that he had achieved the second of these results. But whether or not he was justified in this hope, it is plain that faith and reason, considered simply as activities, are much more closely related than the dogmatic statement which has been quoted would suggest.

Similarly, the objects of faith and reason are the same. St. Augustine expressed this identity of aim in two images when he said that reason is to the heart as the eye is to the body, and faith glows in the eye of the heart as gold in the eye of the body.¹⁴ Reason, therefore, is the eye of the spirit, and faith is the most glorious of the objects presented to it. But, just as the eye does not change the nature of the object presented to it, so the nature of faith is not altered by the scrutiny of reason. This view, with all the consequences which follow from it, is also Anselm's, and his attitude is sharply distinguishable from that of St. Thomas Aquinas. Professor Gilson has remarked that for St. Thomas when something has been proved it ceases to be an object of faith; it is an object of demonstration. For Anselm it is not so. Reason makes faith intelligible; it does not supersede it. Faith becomes intelligible in two ways. In the first place, the interrelation between the various tenets of faith becomes plain: system emerges from a mass of details. Secondly, the rationality of faith is established: that is to say, what is known by faith is shown to be rationally necessary.

Why then is faith not swallowed up in demonstration? For two reasons. Firstly, because (as we have seen) the demonstration is only convincing to a man in a state of spiritual elevation, which if not identical with faith is closely related to it. Secondly, because the demonstrations of reason are in varying degrees provisional. In Anselm's theology they are provisional in the same way that explanations in natural science are provisional. If the explanation accounts for all observed events in the field it purports to explain, it may be said to have a high degree of probability. But, even supposing that no unobserved events could exist, and that all observed events have been correctly observed, it would still be possible for another explanation to fit them and for the other explanation to be the right one.

Of course, scientific explanations are doubly provisional, because the facts are never either complete nor reported with complete accuracy. Anselm would not have admitted that the theologian was faced with this double hazard: the Faith, enshrined in the dogmas of the Church, is certain, and, within the limits of its subject-matter, complete. But to compensate for this, it is supremely difficult to grasp intellectually, and full of apparent contradictions between God's foreknowledge and man's free will, God's mercy and God's justice, the goodness of the Creator and the existence of evil, and so on. The distance by which any explanation, however bound together by ‘necessary reasons’, falls short of giving a complete explanation of these apparent contradictions in the Christian faith, is the measure of the provisional character of all reasoning on these subjects.

(II) THE PROSLOGION

When Lanfranc failed either to approve or give a name to the Monologion, Anselm's reaction shows that the author in him in some degree predominated over the monk. He neither altered nor destroyed the work. Instead, he straightway wrote another which not only had the characteristic which Lanfranc had found offensive in the Monologion—an absence of all authorities—but even went further in the same direction, in that it could not be said in any sense to provide a simplified account of St. Augustine's thoughts. It is on this work that Anselm's philosophical, as distinct from his theological, reputation will always chiefly rest. It was written in a state of philosophical excitement which (it is probably safe to say) had never before been experienced so intensely in any Benedictine monastery, and was probably never again to be repeated in Benedictine history.¹⁵ This excitement is chiefly to be associated with the first three chapters of the treatise in which the famous, so-called ontological, argument for the existence of God is set out. Although everything Anselm wrote is stamped with his personal quality, these chapters are in a special sense his own. The proof they contain was his own discovery; and it is the only philosophical discovery of the early Middle Ages which has survived to excite the interest of modern philosophers who have no other interest in the period.

Whether it is true or false, nothing is more surprising than the way in which this proof has united, at least temporarily, men of the most diverse temperaments and outlooks—a tenuous link across vast seas of spiritual difference. Among living philosophers none is perhaps further removed from Anselm in outlook, though perhaps not so far in qualities of mind, than he who remembers:

the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as I caught it: ‘Great Scott, the ontological argument is sound’.¹⁶

Leave out Trinity Lane, the tobacco and the ‘Great Scott’ (delightful evocation of an age more remote in spirit than the eleventh century) and substitute Bec, Matins, and Deo gratias, and it was just so that the argument came to Anselm in 1078:

Behold, one night during Matins, the grace of God shone in his heart and the matter became clear to his understanding, filling his whole being with immense joy and jubilation.¹⁷

We can well believe that the argument came, as Eadmer describes, in a flash of illumination after days or weeks of frustrated gropings and reluctant distraction in the midst of the daily offices. Yet it did not come from nowhere. Its distant ancestor must be judged to be St. Augustine, but only in a remote and ineffectual way. Its immediate parents are the grammar and logic of Anselm's day, but applied with an otherwise unknown subtlety. As we shall see, what Anselm needed for this argument was a definition of God on which he could build a logical structure of a peculiar kind. He did not find this in Augustine, whose language—so similar to that of Anselm in some respects—lacked the precision of the logician. He could find in Augustine that:

God is not really known in the sound of these two syllables (Deus), but this sound, when it strikes the ears of all who know Latin, moves them to thinking of some most excellent and immortal nature. … For when God is thought of, our thought tries to reach something than which nothing is better or more sublime.¹⁸

This has the germ of what he needed—the concentration on the word Deus, and the connexion between this word and a nature ‘than which nothing is better or more sublime’. But there is no basis here for a proof of God's existence. Strangely enough, the form of words Anselm needed for his proof were lying in a most unlikely place. He may have noticed them. In the Introduction to Seneca's Quaestiones Naturales—a rare book, but a book of which there were two copies at Bec in the twelfth century¹⁹—there is a definition of God: ‘God is that than which nothing greater can be thought’.²⁰ Seneca used these words in a sense very different from Anselm: he was speaking only of physical magnitude, and was certainly innocent of any philosophical intention. But for Anselm, whether he found this phrase in Seneca or coined it himself, these words were full of exciting possibilities. They gave him a starting-point for his argument.²¹

He begins with the Fool, described by the Psalmist as one who thinks ‘there is no God’. What, Anselm asks, is God? He is ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought’. The Fool, then, has this something ‘in intellectu’ but denies that it exists ‘in re’.

Let us suppose the Fool is right. Then God does not exist outside the mind. But still it would be possible to think of another Being, also having the quality of being ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’, who exists not only in the mind but also outside the mind. Such a Being would be greater than the Being existing only in the mind. The Being existing only in the mind is therefore not ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’; such a Being therefore is by definition not God. Thus the Fool asserts that ‘God is not-God’, which is nonsense. God, therefore, exists not only in the mind but also outside the mind.

Now we can go a step farther. God exists both ‘in intellectu’ and ‘in re’. But many other things exist outside the mind which do not exist necessarily. There is no logical necessity in the existence of physical objects. Not so with God: he exists outside the mind, and cannot be thought not to exist outside the mind.

The Fool is now reduced to a very pitiable state. He thought he understood the meaning of words like ‘God’ and of sentences like ‘God does not exist’. But if the argument is valid, it has been shown that he uses words without understanding the things to which they refer, and constructs sentences without understanding the verbal contradictions they contain. Not only has he no understanding of things, but he does not even grasp words and sentences in their basic grammatical and logical connexions. Although Anselm nowhere says so formally, we can see in the progression of his argument that there are three stages of knowledge:

cogitatio at the level of words and sentences (grammar and logic);

intellectus at the level of entities, the things to which words refer (philosophy);

sapientia in the apprehension of the Supreme Being (theology).

The Fool of course lacked sapientia, being by definition insipiens. Anselm has tried to show that he consequently lacks intellectus and even the power of cogitatio: he must be silent like a beast. Meanwhile, the right-thinking person has risen from understanding the word ‘God’ (cogitatio), to understanding the thing for which the word stands ‘God outside the mind’ (intellectus), to a knowledge of God's necessary Being (sapientia).

It has been necessary to express the well-known argument in this way in order to bring out its grammatical and logical foundations. For it is clear that though Anselm's argument is to be placed in the same class as that of Descartes, yet Anselm's presuppositions, his method of proceeding, and even his conclusion is different from that of his successor. It is only in a careless way that Anselm's proof can be called a proof that God exists. It is rather a demonstration of the manner of God's existence; for that he has some kind of existence, the mere fact that it is possible to attach some meaning to the word ‘God’ is sufficient to show. What the proof undertakes to show is that the existence of God is external to the mind, and that it cannot be thought of in any other way.

That the argument can be refuted has been shown again and again. But the argument continues to attract defenders and opponents, and this suggests that the refutations are never quite complete, or that the argument has some hidden source of life. Instead, therefore, of entering on a refutation, we may ask what conditions would have to be satisfied for the argument, as Anselm states it, to be valid. In this way we may hope to discover something which, whether or not of any philosophical value, is of value for understanding the mind and presuppositions of Anselm.

It is evident at once that there are two conditions which have to be satisfied before the argument can have any claim to validity. The first condition is that when we say that something is ‘greater’ than something else, we can mean—and in this context do mean—that it is ‘greater’ in having a greater degree of being; and that ‘existence only in the mind’ and ‘existence both in the mind and outside the mind’ are related in respect of degrees of being. If this were not so, then the criticism of all who have attacked the argument from Anselm's day to the present would be clearly justified: God in re would not be greater than God in intellectu. He would just be something entirely different, even though the same word ‘God’ is used, in different senses, in both phrases. There must therefore be degrees of being, such that ‘being in the mind’ and ‘being in the mind and outside the mind’ are related as lesser to greater. Moreover, Anselm evidently attaches a special degree of being to that which not only exists in intellectu et in re but also cannot be thought of as not existing. The degrees of being are thus, in ascending order: esse in intellectu ‹ esse in intellectu et in re ‹ esse in intellectu et in re et non posse cogitari non esse.

The second condition is a consequence of the first: in the phrases ‘it exists in the mind’ and ‘it exists outside the mind’, it must be possible for the subject to be really, and not merely grammatically, the same in both sentences. If this were not so, we should be talking about different things in the two sentences; and to arrange them in series, as if the second sentence referred to the same thing as the first, would be to fall into the simplest form of blunder arising from an identity of grammatical structure.

For Anselm there is only a difference of degree between the existence of a thing and the existence of the idea of a thing. The idea in the mind and its object outside the mind are strictly related as ascending powers in a scale of existence. But this interchangeability between idea and thing is only plausible if there is a still higher degree of being, of which both the idea and its object are lower powers; and this higher degree of being can only be in the mind of God himself. We know from the Monologion that this is in fact what Anselm thought: things have their highest degree of being in the mind of God; a lower degree in their own objective existence; a still lower degree in our idea of them.²²

This is of course a form of Platonism. There seems to be no proof that Anselm had read even that amount of Plato which was accessible in his day, but he had imbibed the elements of Platonic thought from St. Augustine, and there can be no doubt that his essential philosophical ideas are Platonic—so much so that he seems to think that any other type of philosophy must not only lead to heresy but even gives evidence of hopeless intellectual blindness.

The Proslogion is intended both as a meditation for the believer and a proof for the unbeliever. The proof for the unbeliever does not, as has sometimes been thought, depend upon the previous acceptance of certain theological truths, but it does depend on a previous acceptance of certain philosophical principles which appear on analysis to commit the unbeliever to a view of knowledge which necessitates the existence of God. A proof which demands, in however subtle and roundabout a way, assent to its conclusion before it begins will rightly be thought to be no proof at all in the ordinary sense of the word.²³

Whether Anselm was conscious of this limitation in his argument we cannot tell. He seems to have thought that the account of knowing which his argument presupposed was the only possible one and that since the unbeliever could produce no other he would effectively be reduced to silence. This is a possible and—despite many difficulties of which Anselm could not have been aware—a consistent point of view: consistent both in itself and within the framework of the theological programme announced at the beginning of the Proslogion: Fides quaerens intellectum. The argument returns, and must always return in Anselm's thought to its point of origin, the Faith from which it starts. But, for the purpose of this argument, the Faith is not the Christian faith but a philosophical faith which Anselm seems, wrongly, to have thought an essential part of any coherent system of thought.

To most people all these preliminary conditions will appear unacceptable, and all refutations of the argument are based on the rejection of these preliminaries. In the common view, horses exist and unicorns do not exist; and it does not seem an adequate description of the difference between the existence of the one and the non-existence of the other to allege that both exist, but one more than the other, because one exists in re et in intellectu while the other exists only in intellectu. Similarly most people who believe that God exists will not think that the existence of God is in any way affected by our ability or inability to think of Him as not existing. But since Anselm certainly himself accepted these preliminary conditions of his argument, we must ask what the status of the argument will be if his conditions are accepted. The answer is clear: the argument will then be irrefutable, but irrefutable only because it requires the conclusion to be accepted before the argument starts.

Anselm's philosophical outlook was not destined to command any wide body of assent, at least for a long time to come. It was not until the thirteenth century that the proofs for the existence of God engaged the serious attention of theologians and the weight of opinion was then against the validity of Anselm's argument.²⁴ Among Anselm's immediate friends and disciples no one except Eadmer so much as mentions the argument. Of the others Gilbert Crispin repeats the definition on which the argument was based, but he did not build upon it. We know that Lanfranc disapproved of the Monologion; we do not know what he thought of the Proslogion, but it is hard to think that—if he ever read it—he approved. In the immediate future the peculiar mixture of linguistic analysis and Augustinian philosophy on which the argument, as Anselm stated it, was based was replaced by newer methods and by a different conception of the purpose of theological study. Yet if Anselm's argument did not meet with acceptance, the two treatises Monologion and Proslogion made his name known far and wide. In 1085 he could no longer have spoken of himself as he did ten years earlier as a man unknown to the world. Within a year or two of their composition the two works were known not only in Normandy and in Canterbury, but at Poitiers, Tours, and Lyons.²⁵

It is very common for authors to say that they have been obliged to write by the demands of their pupils, but there is no reason to doubt that Anselm is telling the truth when he says this. At Bec and elsewhere he had an eager audience. A generation had grown up in the monasteries of men who were connoisseurs in theological debate. Yet it did not produce monastic successors to Anselm. Philosophical interests soon became centred on the universities and the age of Anselm remained the highest point of philosophical culture in the history of the Benedictine Order. Unlike the later schoolmen, the monastic philosophers and theologians have left comparatively little record of their interests. Anselm's first critic therefore deserves a special mention. Gaunilo, monk of Marmoutier near Tours, is entirely unknown except for three or four pages in which he criticized Anselm's argument. These pages also would no doubt have been lost if Anselm had not given directions for the inclusion of the criticism and his reply to it in all future copies of the Proslogion. Since all the earliest copies include Gaunilo's criticism, it must have been written very soon after the composition of the treatise. It is so familiar a text that it is hard to realize how unlikely it was to survive. It is a very notable piece of writing. Though not quite conclusive as an attack on Anselm, it is urbane and intelligent, and strikingly anticipates later lines of attack on the ontological argument. Its existence is a warning against underestimating the level of philosophical cultivation in communities which have left little trace of their intellectual attainments.

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the one which Anselm first formulated is the most refined and the least capable of a finally satisfactory statement. It draws its strength from an ambiguity, which appears to be an ambiguity in language, but is more deeply an ambiguity in human experience. If God exists, there must be a level of experience at which it is impossible to think of God as not existing. But at what level can this impossibility be made to appear? Must the demonstration await the experience of the Beatific Vision? Or can it, at the very opposite extreme, be made out at the level of linguistic-logical analysis? Whether valid or not, the first three chapters of the Proslogion were the first piece of writing in which this problem was raised and a solution proposed which will probably never be finally buried. It may be agreed that Descartes put it better, because more simply and with fewer philosophical presuppositions. He had the advantage, which Anselm lacked, of inheriting, if only to reject, a long philosophical tradition. The Augustinian and grammatical background of Anselm's thought, which made it possible for him to formulate the argument, also burdened it with limitations. But these pages of Anselm must be placed among the most deeply interesting pieces of reasoning ever written The early chapters of the Proslogion, in which the argument was first expressed, will never be read without excitement, nor thought about without appearing to be more cogent than they are. For the most extraordinary thing about the argument is that it loses nothing of its power, its freshness, or even in a curious way its persuasiveness, by being refuted. The Proslogion may not set forth a valid argument for belief in God, and even if it were valid it is doubtful whether it would ever persuade an unbeliever; but in its subtlety, and in a certain unsubstantial, ethereal quality which antagonizes men of robust common sense, it perfectly reflects the quality and mystery of Anselm's personality.

The Monologion and Proslogion were the product of two remarkable years in Anselm's life, 1077-8, his last years as Prior of Bec. In sheer force of philosophical originality he never rose to these heights again. For the next fifteen years before he became archbishop of Canterbury he was occupied in monastic administration and in the composition of four works (all of them Dialogues) which display his talent and originality, but could not in themselves have formed the basis of his reputation, as the Monologion and Proslogion standing by themselves could have done. They were years in which his reputation in the world slowly grew, in which the number of his pupils—men who had become monks at Bec mainly because of his influence and presence—increased, and in which his monastic peace was disturbed only by necessary journeys to courts and synods and tours of inspection of his lands in England.

Notes

1. Proslogion, cap. 1.

2. VA 1, xix.

3. Monologion, cap. 1.

4. Ibid. prologus.

5. Ep. 72 [i, 63]. Lanfranc's letter of criticism does not exist—it is interesting that Anselm, who preserved some other letters of Lanfranc, should not have preserved this—but its contents can be gathered from Anselm's reply, Ep. 77 [i, 68].

6. For the stages in the development of the title, see VA i, xix n.

7. Regula, cap. 8, 48, 58. (See the note on these passages in B. Linderbauer, S. Benedicti Regula Monachorum herausgegeben und philologisch erklärt, 1922). For the use of the word ‘meditation’ in this sense, see Bede, Hist. Eccl. iii, vi: ‘meditari … id est, aut legendis scripturis, aut psalmis discendis operam dare’ (ed. Plummer, p. 136).

8. See, for example, Alcher of Clairvaux, De Spiritu et Anima (printed among the works of St. Augustine, PL xl, 779) cap 28: ‘Sensus parit imaginationem, imaginatio cogitationem, cogitatio meditationem. Meditatio acuit ingenium, ingenium rationem; ratio conducit ad intellectum, intellectus ad intelligentiam, intelligentia per contemplationem ipsam veritatem admiratur, et per caritatem in ea delectatur.’

9. Didascalicon, iii, 10 (ed. Buttimer, p. 59).

10. Romans xii, 6.

11. Ep. 136 [ii, 41].

12. This wonderful phrase was the original title of the work. It was later dropped for the more enigmatic title Proslogion, but the programme is expressed in the body of the work, though less attractively: ‘Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam.’

13. Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi, i (Schmitt, ii, p. 8).

14. Dedit tibi Deus oculos in corpore, rationem in corde (Hom. 32, 11); Sicut lucet aurum ad oculos corporis, sic lucet fides ad oculos cordis (De decem chordis, x); Fides gradus est intelligendi, intellectus meritum fidei (Hom. 32, 1). Many similar passages can be found in which this union of faith, reason and understanding is expressed in various ways.

15. For the history of the discovery, see VA 1, xix.

16. Bertrand Russell, My mental development, in P. A. Schilpp, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944, p. 10.

17. VA 1, xix.

18. De Doctrina Christiana, I, vii.

19. G. Becker, Catalogi Bibliothecarum antiqui, p. 202, no. 104; p. 266, no. 136. Of these two volumes, the first came to Bec in the twelfth century; but the second may have been there in Anselm's time. The only other reference to this work in the catalogues printed by Becker is at St. Gall in the ninth century (p. 35).

20. I am indebted to Schmitt, i, 102 n. for this quotation: ‘Quid est Deus? quod vides totum et quod non vides totum. Sic demum magnitudo sua illi redditur, qua nihil maius excogitari potest’ (Senecae Opera, ed. F. Haase, i, 159).

21. The following paragraphs summarize the argument of the first four chapters of the Proslogion. I have tried to preserve what, for want of a better word, may be called Anselm's tone, but it is more difficult to do this here than in any other part of Anselm's writings.

22. Monologion, xxxvi: Restat igitur ut (creatae substantiae) tanto verius sint in seipsis quam in nostra scientia … Cum ergo et hoc constat, quia omnis creata substantia tanto verius est in Verbo, id est in intelligentia creatoris, quam in seipsa. …

23. There is, however, at this point an interesting affinity between Anselm's argument and G. E. Moore's proof of an external world, which—having the same problem of arguing from what is ‘inside the mind’ to what is ‘outside the mind’—ends in the same predicament; the proof is only a proof for those who, in the last resort, accept as a premiss the conclusion which the argument purports to prove (G. E. Moore, Philosophical Papers, 1959, p. 150).

24. The essential texts for the thirteenth century are collected in A. Daniels, Gottesbeweise im xiii Jahrhundert mit bes. Rücksicht auf dem ontologischen Argument (BGPM, viii, 1909).

25. Epp. 83 [i, 74], 109 [ii, 17].