The works by Augustine and Boethius offered to Anselm a model of philosophical theology in which dialectically based rational analysis is a central ingredient. From the same sources he inherited a firm confidence in the harmony of faith and reason. The Christian teaching and the human reason testify to the same truth. The truth that faith proclaims has an intelligible structure (ratio fidei, ‘‘reason of faith’’), and believers can and ought to use their reason to explore and uncover that structure as far as possible. To express this idea, Anselm coined the dictum ‘‘faith seeking understanding’’ (fides quaerens intellectum - this was the original title of the treatise better known as the Proslogion).
Anselm was convinced that it is possible to reconstruct important parts of the Christian view of reality from a purely rational starting point. In his first treatise, the Monologion, he works to show how this can be done (see below). Anselm later states that he composed his first two treatises, the Monologion and Proslogion, to show that ‘‘what we hold by faith regarding the divine nature and its persons - excluding the topic of incarnation - can be proven by compelling reasons without the authority of Scripture’’ (De incarnatione verbi 6). However, Anselm did not allege that the whole content of faith could be established in this way. In his later treatises, he typically takes some of his assumptions or premises from authority. For example, in Cur Deus homo he seeks to establish that it was necessary that God becomes man, given some general points about the background situation. Even so, rational analysis and rational arguments have a central role in all of Anselm’s works. He was dedicated to using reason under the guidance of faith: the content of faith provides fixed points that direct rational reflection. In the process, both reason and faith are transformed. On one hand, reason is led to scrutinize the validity of its own principles and at some points to qualify them. On the other hand, the items of faith that were formerly merely believed receive a rational grounding or at least become embedded in a network of rational connections that gives them intelligibility.
Anselm’s idea of faith seeking understanding is related to a Christian view of the human destiny. Man’s end is the vision of God in the life to come in heaven. In that vision, the chosen ones will see the truth (about all intellectual things) to the extent that God chooses to disclose it. Anselm characterizes understanding (intellectus) as ‘‘a middle-way between faith (fides) and sight (species)’’;
‘‘the more anyone advances to understanding, the closer he comes to the actual seeing for which we all long’’ (Cur Deus homo, Commendatio operis). In this overall framework, there is no fear that rational insight might make faith redundant. It is for their faith and not for their insight that the believers will get their reward in the life to come. What is more, the relevant kind of faith is not a mere holding true (‘‘dead faith’’) but an active striving (‘‘living faith’’): loving God and striving toward Him; loving the good and just and striving to put it into practice (Monologion 78). Faith’s quest for understanding is part of that striving.
Anselm’s methodological ideas have been seen as paradigmatic for medieval academic theology, and he has been called the ‘‘Father of Scholasticism.’’ On the other hand, Anselm was more confident about what reason can establish than the majority of his scholastic successors.
The Monologion
The rational aspect of Anselm’s theology gets its most pronounced expression in his first treatise, the Monologion. Anselm there offers a bold attempt at reconstructing the basic tenets in the Christian idea of God, and of the creation in relation to God, on a purely rational basis. The Prologue and the first chapter contain explicit and emphatic remarks about the rational method to be used. Anselm’s intention is to proceed ‘‘by reason alone’’ (sola ratione) and ‘‘nothing at all in the meditation would be argued on Scriptural authority’’ (even though the content of it is consistent, Anselm contends, with the teaching of the authorities). Anselm claims that even a person who has not heard Christian preaching can infer many of the central tenets in it by reason alone if he is of at least average talent. He writes the treatise from the viewpoint of a person who investigates things that he does not yet know, disputing with himself in a silent ‘‘meditation.’’ The original title of the treatise was Exemplum meditandi de ratione fidei (An Example of Meditating about the Reason of Faith); the title Monologion was introduced some years later. As the treatise markedly differs from Anselm’s three meditations properly so called, one may ask whether the characterization of the treatise as a ‘‘meditation’’ is Anselm’s attempt to appoint a legitimate place for his boldly rational endeavor in the monastic context.
The Monologion includes 80 tightly argued chapters. Anselm builds his argument on notions that any rational person in his view ought to accept, on one hand, and on claims that he has already established in the course of the treatment, on the other. Ch. 1-4 offer a series of arguments for the existence of a Supreme Being. For example, Anselm argues in Ch. 1 that all the things that are good are good through one thing which is good through itself, and this one thing is supremely good and the supreme of all existing things. Contrary to what is often alleged, Anselm did not see Ch. 1-4 as Four Ways of proving God’s existence. Instead, they are an initial phase in an extensive argument for the Christian understanding of God. It is only in the last chapter, Ch. 80, that Anselm considers God’s existence as proven. Before he arrives at this conclusion, he establishes to his satisfaction that the Supreme Being whose existence is proved in Ch. 1-4 has created everything else from nothing (Ch. 5-14). Further, it is established that the Supreme Being has properties of the kind that the Christian reader will recognize as the properties of the Divine Essence (Ch. 15-28). What is more, it proves to be the case that there is a Trinitarian structure in the Supreme Being, consisting of a ‘‘Father,’’ a ‘‘Son,’’ and their ‘‘Spirit’’ (Ch. 29-63, 79). Toward the end of the treatise (Ch. 68-78), the treatment is focused on the relation between the Supreme Being and creatures of a rational nature, i. e., humans and angels. Among other things, it is established that the Supreme Being is the proper object of human love, hope, and faith and that the final destiny of a human being depends on his or her relation to the Supreme Being. At the end (Ch. 80), the Supreme Being is identified as God. Even here, Anselm does not give up the rational point of view. He does not appeal to the Christian teaching about God but instead makes a claim about what people who postulate god or gods mean by the word ‘‘god’’ and then argues that the Supreme Being is the only being that can adequately meet this description.
World History
