SOURCE: Collinge, William. “Monastic Life as a Context for Religious Understanding in St. Anselm.” American Benedictine Review 35, no. 4 (December 1984): 378-88.

[In the following essay, Collinge applies a Wittgensteinian concept of “seeing-as” (in this case: viewing through the paradigm of monastic obedience) to arguments in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and Proslogion.]

Is the study of monastic life of interest to philosophers as philosophers?¹ There is much in contemporary philosophy of religion to suggest that it can be.

One of the dominant tendencies of the philosophy of the past two centuries in the West is the effort to reintegrate the realm of thought, ideas, logic, with the realm of life, existence, praxis. This is reflected preeminently in Marxism, but also (partly derivatively) in existentialism, pragmatism, and, most important in the present context, the movement of linguistic analysis that grows out of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

WITTGENSTEIN ON RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

Wittgenstein's first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), had taken the opposite direction. Starting from the language of mathematical logic, he had asked, in effect, “What must the world be like if your only reliable mode of analyzing it is to take this logical form?”² Every proposition, according to the Tractatus, is a concatenation of names, and each true proposition pictures, by its concatenation of names, a concatenation of objects, which constitutes a fact. Only through its capacity to picture a fact can a proposition be meaningful.

This view eventually failed to satisfy Wittgenstein, and in the notes and lectures which culminated in the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953, he reacted against the Tractatus' “picture theory of meaning” in favor of an emphasis on the great diversity of ways in which language could be meaningful. Thus, he wrote, “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”³ Accordingly, philosophers may not proceed by stiuplating a criterion of meaning and dismissing all language that does not conform to it. Rather, they must seek to understand the patterns of meaning, the rules distinguishing correct from incorrect usuage, that actually are at work in a language. In doing this, they will inevitably be led to consider nonlinguistic practices as well as linguistic ones, for linguistic expressions are meaningful only in the context of a shared “form of life” which comprises more than language alone. (Suppose, for instance, that you want to know what it means to call a pitched ball a “strike.” This means knowing by whom and in what circumstances a strike can be called, and that in turn involves knowing a great many of the rules of baseball.)

Although he took a lifelong interest in religion and more than once seriously considered becoming a monk,⁴ Wittgenstein, except for a few cryptic remarks, such as “Theology as grammar,”⁵ did not write on the subject. Nonetheless, his work attracted a considerable amount of attention from theologians and philosophers of religion from the 1950s onward. The reasons for this interest were partly polemical. The logical positivists and others had claimed that religious statements are meaningless, because, at least in the case of basic doctrinal propositions such as “God exists” and “God loves us,” it is impossible to specify definite sense experiences which would verify or falsify them.⁶ The reply could now be made on Wittgensteinian grounds that this challenge represented an illegitimate attempt to impose on religion a standard of meaning which was appropriate to the language of science but not to that of religion. Beyond the scope of polemics, a broader aim of Wittgensteinian theologians and philosophers of religion has been to determine the standards of meaning, of appropriate and inappropriate usage, which do in fact govern religious language, and to show the relation of religious language to religious practice. Many apparent paradoxes in religious language begin to disappear when examined from this perspective.

Take, for instance, the claim, “Unless you believe, you shall not understand,” which Augustine and Anselm both take over from the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:9 and enjoin upon their readers. This can appear to be offensive and irrational—as one contemporary philosopher puts it, it is like saying, “Unless you really believe in fairies, you will never see any.”⁷ But, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, it makes considerable sense. Of course, before one believes, one must understand enough to know what it is that one is being asked to believe and why there is any point in believing it, but depth of personal understanding of a religious belief depends upon bringing it into relation with as much of the rest of one's life and knowledge as possible, and this is achieved by giving oneself over to a way of life which is based on and embodies what one believes. To put it in Augustine's words: “[T]here are those things which are first believed and afterwards understood. Of such a character is that which cannot be understood of divine things except by those who are pure in heart. This understanding is achieved through observing those commandments which concern virtuous living.”⁸ Living a Christian way of life, in other words, enables a person to recognize new significance in his or her experience and thereby to understand, in a personal way, the meaning of Christian language—to develop, in Wittgensteinian terms, distinctively Christian ways of “seeing-as.”⁹

AUGUSTINIAN BACKGROUND TO ANSELM

Augustine's De Trinitate can and should be read in this light, particularly the second half of it, in which Augustine seeks a “more inward” understanding of the Trinity by studying the human mind as image of the Trinity, with human knowledge and love, preeminently the knowledge and love of God, as images, respectively, of the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. To come to understand our own interior life as image of the Trinity is a spiritual as well as intellectual process, one which moves from faith to understanding through “prayer, inquiry, and right living.”¹⁰ In this process we deepen our knowledge and love of God, thus becoming more of an image of the Trinity. In coming to be aware of this knowledge and love, we experience them as an image which participates in the life of the Trinity.¹¹ We learn, through the new significance we perceive in our experience, something of what the Christian language about the Trinity means.¹²

In Augustine, then, faith leads to understanding through a conversion in the believer's way of life, and Wittgenstein assists us in explaining how it is that conversion leads to understanding. Now Anselm professes loyalty to Augustine,¹³ and Augustine's influence is pervasive in his thinking. Yet he seems to be at once a more and less promising subject than Augustine for the approach I am sketching. What makes him seem more promising is that he speaks from the background of a formally patterned way of life, life according to the monastic rule, and he has monks primarily in mind as his audience. Moreover, he took monasticism to be the most perfect form of the Christian life and was skeptical of the possibility that anyone other than a monk could be saved.¹⁴ Augustine too envisioned a monastic form of life as his ideal for Christian living, but he wrote for a much broader audience than did Anselm, and he does not seem to take one precise form of the Christian life as normative in quite the way Anselm does.

Immediately we encounter a difficulty: While Augustine's idea of understanding clearly has the existential element characteristic of the Platonic tradition, Anselm draws upon Aristotelian dialectic for his idea of understanding. “Understanding, for Anselm, means primarily conceptual apprehension. …”¹⁵ When we come to Anselm's arguments, we seem to be dealing with questions of what are the logical implications of terms and propositions—the individual who understands seems to drop out of the picture.

Actually, Aristotelian and Augustinian elements are in tension in Anselm's writings.¹⁶ Thus, in the Proslogion, immediately after quoting the text, “Unless you believe, you shall not understand,” Anselm presents an argument intended to convince even the “fool” who says, “There is no God,” that God exists. And in Cur Deus Homo, reversing the order, he announces that he will “prove by rational necessity—Christ being removed from sight, as if there had never been anything known about Him—that no man can possibly be saved without Him”¹⁷ and immediately, in the first chapter, appears to agree with Boso's statement that “right order requires that we believe the deep matters of the Christian faith before we presume to discuss them rationally.”¹⁸ Stressing one side at the expense of the other, we can arrive at a rationalistic or a fideistic Anselm; stressing both sides, at a self-contradictory Anselm. Here a Wittgensteinian approach can be helpful in making sense out of Anselm's work as a whole. More specifically, I suggest that the force that Anselm's arguments had for Anselm, and the force that he expects them to have for his readers, depends in part upon the background of monastic life.

I would like now to develop the approach I have been sketching by applying it to two of Anselm's central arguments. The first argument is from Cur Deus Homo; the second is the ontological argument of the Proslogion.

In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm offers “necessary reasons” to establish that, given the fact that man had sinned, God had to become man in order for man to be saved. Only a God-man, Anselm argues, can render satisfaction for man's sins. Why does man need to offer satisfaction for his sins? The answer to this question depends upon Anselm's conception of sin. Sin is the failure to render to God his due.¹⁹ And what is due to God is absolute obedience: “The will of every rational creature ought to be subordinate to the will of God.”²⁰ Man's failure to render absolute obedience violates God's honor: “Whoever does not pay to God this honor due Him dishonors Him and removes from Him what belongs to Him, and this removal, or this dishonoring, constitutes a sin.”²¹ This violation of God's honor demands satisfaction; if God were to forgive it without satisfaction, he would violate his own honor, which would be unjust. What is violated when God's honor is violated is “the whole complex of service and worship which the whole creation, animate and inanimate, in heaven and earth, owes to the Creator,”²² and this in turn is equivalent to the rectitudo that is so important to Anselm in this and earlier dialogues—the rightness or justice which is the divine order of the universe.

MONASTIC OBEDIENCE AS PARADIGM

This set of themes—the universe as an order of service and worship, the absolute obedience which man owes to God—suggests a monastic context. Monastic obedience can in fact be seen as the underlying spiritual theme which unifies Anselm's work from De Veritate to the end of his life, except for those writings occasioned by external circumstances (notably De Incarnatione Verbi and De Processu Spiritus Sancti). This work centers on themes involving the will, especially freedom, sin and necessity. Willing obedience to the will of God is the rational creature's way of honoring God, its uprightness or rectitudo, its veritas. It is also the fullest realization of human freedom. De Libertate Arbitrii defines freedom as “the ability to keep uprightness-of-will for the sake of this uprightness itself.”²³ The ability to sin is not a genuine part of freedom; rather freedom is found in complete obedience to the will of God. Disobedience, in turn, is the essence of sin. Satan's fall lay in his violation of rectitudo by refusing to obey the higher will of God.²⁴ In earthly life the closest one can come to total submission to the will of God is the perfect obedience required of a monk. Obedience is the dominant theme of Anselm's speech and writing about the monastic life. In De Similitudinibus, for instance, Anselm likens monks' obedience to their abbot as God's representative to a daughter's obedience to a governess appointed by her mother (voluntas divina voluntati abbati eorum supposuit).²⁵

For Anselm, it is the monk alone who fully acknowledges his debt to God. Through his vows, the monk completely surrendered to God; through his daily life of prayer, the monk daily renews this surrender.²⁶ Obedience to the abbot and stability in the monastery curb self-will and actually set one free by promoting a willing obedience to God.²⁷ Adherence to monastic discipline down to its smallest details, Anselm says, restrains the human spirit from vice, as a dam confines water only if it is completely without breach.²⁸ It is to a person whose way of life is based on this sort of ideal, I think, that Anselm's argument in Cur Deus Homo, with its reliance on the notions of God's honor and man's debt of perfect obedience, would be removed from the realm of “pictures painted on air” and acquire a degree of “fittingness” or coherency (convenientia) sufficient to take on the force of a “necessary reason.”²⁹

The monk's obedience, for Anselm, is of greater value than the daily work of prayer and liturgy.³⁰ The latter, however, though not a major subject in Anselm's theological treatises, is present in the background. Anselm's definition of sin as failure to render to God his due inverts a traditional definition of worship, a definition which has roots in Cicero. A monastic life of ordered worship (which is what monastic life was in the eleventh century) would be the clearest expression of human recognition of mankind's duty to God. The transition is quite natural in the “Meditation on Human Redemption” when Anselm passes from a résumé of Cur Deus Homo to an exhortation to unite God and man in the reception of the Eucharist.

Now let us turn to the ontological argument of the Proslogion—a “short passage,” says David Knowles, which “has been pored over and commented upon more than any other text of equal brevity in medieval philosophy.”³¹ Philosophers, noting that it seeks to convince the unbelieving “fool” that God exists, have tended to look upon the argument as a logical deduction, which attempts, as Kant said of later versions of the argument, “to extract from an idea the existence of an object corresponding to it.”³² Some philosophers and theologians, meanwhile, noting that the argument appears in the context of a religious meditation whose original title was “Faith Seeking Understanding,” have claimed that the argument presupposed faith. Karl Barth, for instance, contended that the argument used reason only to draw out the implications of one of the names of God which is accepted through faith. In context, the argument appears to be both a meditation within faith and a proof meant to convince an unbeliever. But how can it be both? If it presupposes faith, how can it convince an unbeliever? And if it succeeds in convincing an unbeliever, what need is there of beginning with faith?

Here again a Wittgensteinian approach can help make sense of things. In what sense can someone be said to understand “that than which a greater cannot be thought,” which is Anselm's definition of God? A person can understand it on a purely verbal level, the way that most of my students understand “that than which a greater cannot be thought” and do not understand “id quo maius cogitari nequit.” But this kind of understanding is no guarantee that the referent of the term is even logically possible. I can speak of “the largest integer,” and you can, after a fashion, understand what I say, even if you recognize that the very notion of “the largest integer” is self-contradictory. But if we cannot be sure that “that than which a greater cannot be thought” is even logically coherent, we certainly cannot go on to use the formula as a proof of the real existence of its referent.

Anselm himself recognizes this problem to some extent in chapter four of the Proslogion, where he observes:

[T]here is not merely one sense in which something is said in one's heart, or his thought. For in one sense an object is thought when the word signifying it is thought, and in another when what the object is is understood. Thus, in the first sense but not at all in the second, God can be thought not to exist. Indeed, no one who understands what God is can think that God does not exist, even though he says these words in his heart. … For God is that than which a greater cannot be thought. Anyone who comprehends this, surely understands that God so exists that he cannot even conceivably not exist. Therefore, anyone who understands that this is the manner in which God exists cannot think that he does not exist.³³

Who is it that “comprehends [bene intelligit] this”? Not the fool, since he denies God's existence. But then the fool lacks the sort of understanding necessary for the argument to succeed as a proof. Gaunilo makes this very point in his reply, “On Behalf of the Fool”: “When I hear someone speaking of God (or of something greater than all others), I cannot have Him in my thought and understanding in the way that I might have [an] unreal man in my thought and understanding. For although I can think of a non-existent man by reference to a real thing known to me, I cannot think of God at all except only with respect to the word.”³⁴ Against Gaunilo's claim not to understand God, Anselm rejoins, “I point to your faith and conscience as the strongest indicator of how false these inferences are.”³⁵ If “faith and conscience” meant simply an assent to a verbal formula, Gaunilo would go unanswered. But Gaunilo is a fellow Christian and (it is assumed) a fellow monk, and “faith” for him as for Anselm would be a commitment that shapes his whole way of life.

UNDERSTANDING THROUGH SURRENDER

Who, then, “understands what God is”? Someone whose “form of life” is based on the acknowledgement that God is that than which a greater cannot be thought, who recognizes the infinite greatness of God by complete surrender and obedience, whose daily life prefers no other good to God's greatness—someone, in short, who lives up to Anselm's ideal of the monk. Only for such a person would the ontological argument have force as an argument, for in him alone would the idea of God “exist in the intellect” in such a way as to render inescapable the affirmation that God exists in reality.³⁶ (Perhaps it is significant that the argument occurred to Anselm “during matins,” as Eadmer tells us, for it relies on that sense of the overwhelming majesty of God which is characteristic of the Psalms.)

Corroboration of the contention in the last paragraph can be found in the first part of the Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi. There Anselm states, “He who does not believe will not understand. For he who does not believe will not experience; and he who has not experienced will not know.”³⁷ It is through a life of obedience, Anselm says, that this experience³⁸ is acquired; “For it is true that the more richly we are fed on those things in sacred scripture which nourish us through obedience, the more precisely we are carried on to those things which satisfy through understanding.”³⁹ This is the only place known to me in Anselm's writings in which experience is explicitly said to mediate between belief and understanding. But it is not just an anomalous Augustinian holdover in Anselm. Rather, as G.R. Evans notes, this passage represents an approach to theological investigation which Anselm simply presupposed in his audience and did not need to make explicit until, as was the case with the Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi, he was writing for an audience composed not only of monks but also of secular dialecticians.⁴⁰

I would like to conclude with the two suggestions as to the broader theological bearing of the line of argument I have been undertaking. First, it offers an illuminating perspective on the development of doctrine, for the language of Christian doctrine would be seen as changing in meaning, depending on the “form of life” of which it is a part. “Form of life” here would refer not only to the special forms of Christian corporate life such as liturgy and monasticism, but also to the changing patterns of Christian life in the world, as Christians live out Christian lives in a great diversity of cultures. Secondly, if it is true that Christian language is today widely felt to be meaningless, both by philosophers and by ordinary people inside and outside the churches, the cause may lie not so much in the words of Christianity as in the ways Christians live.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Benedict Sesquimillennial Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin, October, 1980.

2. William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1978) p. 32.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell 1958) 1.43.

4. See the letter from Bertrand Russell to Lady Ottoline Morrell, December 20, 1919, quoted in Barrett, p. 31; see also W. W. Bartley III, Wittgenstein (Philadelphia: Lippincott 1973) p. 133, on Wittgenstein's summer at a monastery in 1926.

5. Wittgenstein, 1.373.

6. See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz 1936) and Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Flew and Alisdair McIntyre (London: SCM Press 1955) pp. 96-99.

7. Wallace I. Matson, The Existence of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1965) p. 28.

8. De Diversis Quaestionibus 83, 48, translation by David L. Mosher in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press 1982).

9. Wittgenstein develops the idea of “seeing-as” in Philosophical Investigations, 2.xi.

10. De Trinitate, 15.27.49.

11. On love, see De Trinitate 8.8.

12. See William Collinge, “De Trinitate and the Understanding of Religious Language,” Augustinian Studies, in press.

13. Monologion, preface. S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, edited by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson 1938-61) 1.8. References to this edition in footnotes below will give the volume and page number preceded by S.

14. R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge University Press 1963) pp. 101-02.

15. John E. Smith, The Analogy of Experience (New York: Harper and Row 1973) p. 12.

16. On this point, see especially Dom Cyprian Vagaggini, “La hantise des Rationes Necessariae de Saint Anselme dans la theologie des Processions Trinitaires de Saint Thomas,” Spicilegium Beccense I (Paris: J. Vrin 1959) 105-06. I am indebted to one of the readers of this paper for this reference.

17. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo [CDH], preface (S 2.42); translation by Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson in Anselm of Canterbury III (Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press 1976).

18. CDH 1.1; S 2.48.

19. CDH 1.11; S 2.68.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Southern, p. 113. See CDH 1.15.

23. De Libertate Arbitrii 3; S 1.212. Translation by Hopkins and Richardson in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. II.

24. De Casu Diaboli 4; S 1.242.

25. De Similitudinibus 89, quoted by R. W. Southern in a note to his edition of Eadmer, Vita Anselmi (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1962) p. 77.

26. Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer, p. 101.

27. Anselm, Ep. 37, quoted by Eadmer in Vita Anselmi 1.20.

28. Vita Anselmi 1.31. See the expansion of this image in De Similitudinibus quoted by Southern in a note to his edition, p. 55.

29. On the impreciseness of the boundary between convenientiae and “necessary reasons,” see CDH 1.10; S 2.67.

30. Vita Anselmi 2.11.

31. David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Vintage Books 1959) p. 101.

32. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press 1965) B 631.

33. Proslogion 4 (S 1.103-04); translated by Hopkins and Richardson in Anselm of Canterbury I (1974); this translation is used in the following, two quotations also.

34. Reply on Behalf of the Fool, 4 (S 1.127).

35. Reply to Gaunilo, 1 (S 1.130).

36. The general lines of this approach to the ontological argument were first suggested to me by Louis Dupré. See his A Dubious Heritage (New York: Paulist Press 1977) pp. 171-75. See also David Burrell, Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1974) pp. 45-79.

37. De Incarnatione Verbi I (S 2.9); translation in Hopkins and Richardson, vol. III.

38. On the use of experientia by medieval monastic writers, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press 1961) pp. 263-65. Leclercq notes, “This personal experience is closely linked with a whole environment; it is conditioned and promoted by the conventual experience of a community and it flourishes in the midst of a common fervor” (p. 264).

39. De Incarnatione Verbi I; S 2.8-9.

40. G. R. Evans, Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978) pp. 118-20.