Anselm of Canterbury

History

Life

Anselm was born at Aosta, a Burgundian town on the edge of Lombardy. His father Gundulf was a Lombard who had settled there; his mother Ermenberga came of an old Burgundian family, and he learned his religion from her (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Anselm”, 1907, secondary). He quarrelled with his father after his mother’s death, crossed the Alps around 1056, and wandered in Burgundy and France for three years.

What stopped him was Lanfranc, the Lombard scholar teaching at the abbey of Bec in Normandy. Anselm became his best pupil and then his colleague in the school, and in 1060 took the habit. He was prior of Bec by 1063 and abbot from 1078, and he wrote his two most famous works there: the Monologion and the Proslogion, the latter containing the argument that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”

Lanfranc had meanwhile become Archbishop of Canterbury under William the Conqueror. When he died in 1089, William Rufus left the see vacant for four years and took its revenues. Anselm was finally made archbishop in 1093, against his own strong resistance, and spent the rest of his life fighting the crown. He insisted on recognising Pope Urban II when the king had not, and went into exile in 1097. Abroad he attended the Council of Bari in 1098 and defended the Filioque against Greek bishops, and he heard the papal decrees against lay investiture at Rome, which shaped the rest of his career.

Rufus died in 1100 and Henry I recalled him, then quarrelled with him over the same question: whether a king may invest bishops with ring and staff. Anselm went into exile a second time, from 1103 to 1106, and the dispute ended in the compromise of 1107, in which the king gave up investiture but kept homage. Anselm died at Canterbury on 21 April 1109.

Influence

Anselm is usually called the father of scholasticism, because he was the first since Augustine to argue theology as a connected chain of reasons rather than a catena of authorities. His programme was fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding: he does not reason his way to belief but tries to see why what he already believes must be so.

The Proslogion argument has had a stranger afterlife than anything else he wrote, rejected by Thomas Aquinas, revived by Descartes and Leibniz, demolished by Kant, and revived again in the twentieth century by Norman Malcolm and Alvin Plantinga in modal form.

Cur Deus Homo did the deeper work. It reorganised Western thinking about the cross, passed through Aquinas into Catholic teaching on satisfaction and merit, and supplied the structure that John Calvin and the Protestant confessions refilled with the language of law and penalty to produce Penal Substitution. Anselm was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1720.

Key ideas and contributors

That than which nothing greater can be conceived. The Proslogion (1078) argues that even the fool who says there is no God has the idea of such a being in his understanding; and a being that exists in reality is greater than one existing only in the understanding; so the being than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist. Anselm’s fellow monk Gaunilo of Marmoutiers objected on the spot that the same reasoning would conjure a perfect island into existence. Anselm replied that the argument works only for a being whose non-existence is inconceivable, which no island is.

Faith seeking understanding. Anselm’s method is to assume the content of faith and then ask what necessity holds it together. He states it at the opening of the Proslogion: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.”

Sin is a debt of honour. Cur Deus Homo (1098) begins by clearing away the ransom account: the devil is a rebel creature with no rights God must honour, so a price paid to him is no price at all. What sin takes is taken from God, whose honour is the order of the universe.

Only the God-man can pay. The debt is measured by the dignity of the one offended, so it is infinite. Humanity owes it and cannot pay, since everything we have is already owed; God can pay and does not owe. The payer must therefore be both God and man, which is the answer to the book’s title question.

Satisfaction, not punishment. Anselm’s Christ offers satisfaction instead of being punished — he owes no death of his own, so his freely given life is a surplus that discharges the debt. The distinction matters: it is what separates his theory from the Reformers’ penal version.

Key controversies

The ontological argument. Gaunilo’s reply is printed with the Proslogion in most editions, which is itself unusual and says something about Anselm. Aquinas rejected the argument on the ground that we do not have the kind of access to God’s essence that it requires. Kant’s objection — that existence is not a predicate, so adding it to a concept adds nothing — was long thought decisive; it is argued over again in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Is the feudal frame a distortion? Adolf von Harnack charged that Anselm read the honour code of Norman feudalism into the gospel, and the objection has been repeated ever since. Defenders answer that “honour” in Anselm means the order of justice itself, not social rank, and that the argument stands without the imagery.

Why could God not simply forgive? Peter Abelard raised this within a generation: God tells us to forgive freely, so a God who cannot would be less merciful than his creatures. Abelard’s alternative — the cross as the supreme act of love that awakens love in return — remains the main rival account.

Satisfaction or victory? Gustaf Aulén argued in Christus Victor (1931) that Anselm replaced a dramatic story of God defeating evil with a transaction carried out from the human side, and that the West has been the poorer for it. Eastern Orthodox theologians make a related complaint: the focus on debt sidelines the resurrection and Theosis. Defenders answer that Anselm’s God is not subject to an external justice but acts according to his own nature.

The investiture fight. Anselm’s refusal to accept bishoprics from the king’s hand made him a hero to the Gregorian reform party and an obstacle to two English kings. Historians still divide on whether his stand was principled churchmanship or a Norman import that weakened the English church’s relation to the crown for a century.