Born in or near Aosta, in Piedmont, in 1033; 1060, pupil of Lanfranc, and an inmate of the abbey of Bec in Normandy; 1063, chosen prior; 1078, abbot; 1093, Archbishop of Canterbury; 1109, died April 21; buried next to Lanfranc at Canterbury. Wrote “Monologion,” “Proslogion,” “Cur Deus Homo.” His “Meditations” and “Letters” have also come down to us.
He was a second Augustin; superior to those of his age in the acuteness of his understanding and powers of logic; and equal to the most illustrious men of his day for virtue and piety.
The man who exerted the most important influence on the theological and philosophical turn of the twelfth century…. In Anselm, we see the different main directions of the spirit that actuated his times harmoniously combined; but the spiritual elements that were blended together in him became separated in the progress of the spiritual life of this period, and proceeded to antagonisms, which belong amongst the most significant appearances of the twelfth century.
Anselm was equal to Lanfranc in learning, and far exceeded him in piety. In his private life he was modest, humble, and sober in the extreme. He was obstinate only in defending the interests of the church of Rome, and, however we may judge the claims themselves, we must acknowledge that he supported them from conscientious motives. Reading and contemplation were the favourite occupations of his life, and even the time required for his meals, which were extremely frugal, he employed in discussing philosophical and theological questions. By his rare genius he did much towards bringing metaphysics into repute. He laid the foundation of a new school of theology, which was free from the servile character of the older writers, who did little more than collect together a heap of authorities on the subjects which they treated. The Monologium and the Proslogium are admirable specimens of abstract reasoning. His reading was extensive, and his style is clear and vigorous.
Scholasticism, of which Anselm was the first representative, freed the church from the yoke of royalty, but only to chain it to the Papal chair.
In what lively colours does the prelate’s last wish, his regret at being unable to finish a philosophical work, paint for us the active mind and firm will of the immortal philosopher! History offers no other example of a man sharing in such violent and multiplied contests, yet remaining throughout devoted to such metaphysical speculations as seem to require an undisturbed mind and a life of external calm. Amidst so much commotion and trouble, Anselm carried on side by side his theological and philosophical researches, and a correspondence of immense extent. In such a man no doubt the uprightness and simplicity of his soul doubled the powers of his intellect. His range of thought was as wide as his courage was invincible. Care for the good of individual souls was as powerful with him as his ardent zeal for the interests of the universal Church. Amidst the deepest tribulations of all kinds, Anselm guided with most scrupulous attention the conduct of his sister, his brother-in-law, and of his nephew whom he had the happiness of drawing into the cloister. With that tenderness of heart which was a secret of his time, he was neither limited to the narrow sphere of family life nor the wider one of a special church. He governed the consciences of a vast number of pious women, monks, and foreigners.
It is no disparagement to the powerful a priori arguments that have characterized modern Protestant theology, to say, that the argument from the necessary nature of the Deity, is unfolded in these tracts of Anselm with a depth of reflection, and a subtlety of metaphysical acumen, that places them among the finest pieces of Christian speculation…. Anselm is the first instance in which the theologian plants himself upon the position of philosophy, and challenges for the doctrine of vicarious satisfaction, both a rational necessity, and a scientific rationality.
Later centuries have cast down the whole structure that Anselm and the men of his day laboriously built up. But thought and nobleness of character are longer-lived than the causes which they consecrate; and it can hardly be fanciful to associate the peculiar virtues of the Anglican Church, sobriety of tone and independence of popular clamour, with the example of severe reason and fearless love of truth in the greatest of mediæval primates…. Anselm as a thinker may be placed by the side of Kant…. The philosophy of Anselm is, in a certain sense, the key-note to all mediæval literature.
He died, leaving a name equally illustrious as a scholar and as a divine.
St. Anselm, one of the most remarkable men and most attractive characters, not only of the Middle Ages but of the whole Christian history…. Anselm’s character, has joined his name at once with those who had stood for truth in the face of kings and multitudes, and with one who was the type of the teachers of children in the first steps of knowledge: the masters of thought and language in its highest uses and its humblest forms; with the seer whose parable rebuked King David; with the preacher who thundered against Antioch and Constantinople; with the once famous grammarian, St. Jerome’s master, from whom the Middle Age schools learnt the elementary laws which govern human speech, and out of whose book of rudiments Anselm had doubtless taught his pupils at Bec:
| “Nathan the seer, the metropolitan | |
| John Chrysostom, Anselm, and he whose hands— | |
| Donatus—deigned the primer’s help to plan.” |
The moral of the life of Anselm is the immortality there is in thought. Anselm the monk would long since have been forgotten with the multitude of other monks who said their quiet prayers in a thousand monasteries during the eleventh century. Anselm the Archbishop and Statesman might have been remembered longer, but only by historians and students of the by-ways of history. But Anselm the Thinker, who succeeded in thinking out a new theological argument and a new form of Christian doctrine, will have a name forever among the leaders of human opinion. His theory of the Atonement, mutilated, indeed, and dilapidated, is, nevertheless, still preached in numerous pulpits by honest men who think they have found it in the Bible,—not knowing that it came to them from the brain of an Italian monk meditating by the Seine some centuries ago.
It was not only in the church which was one day to be his own, or among men of his own order only, that Anselm made friends in England. He made a kind of progress through the land, being welcomed everywhere, as well in the courts of nobles as in the houses of monks, nuns, and canons. Everywhere he scattered the good seed of his teaching, speaking to all according to their several callings, to men and women, married and unmarried, monks, clerks, laymen, making himself, as far as was lawful, all things to all men. Scholar and theologian as Anselm was, his teaching was specially popular; he did not affect the grand style, but dealt largely in parables and instances which were easy to be understood. The laity therefore flocked eagerly to hear him, and every man rejoiced who could win the privilege of personal speech with the new apostle.
Writers with nothing else in common have been equally attracted by Anselm. To the student of ecclesiastical biography he is one of the most perfect examples of the piety of the cloister—a piety which retains a charm even for those who have rejected all the ideas that gave it birth. Hegel and Cousin found in Anselm a mediæval Descartes who spoke the first word of modern philosophy amid the litanies of the Middle Ages. The student of the constitutional history of England finds Anselm’s career to be of the first importance; for during the reign of William Rufus, and during part of that of Henry Beauclerc, Anselm, like Laud in the reign of Charles I., is in reality, as well as in name, the second personage in the realm. To those who care for the honour of the Church of England the name of Anselm is, or ought to be, precious, for in him they have an archbishop who was never timorous either in thought or in action. With his name, if with no other, they can answer the taunt, “Episcopi Anglicani semper pavidi.”
It was not till several centuries after his death, that his remarkable originality of genius was fully appreciated. He anticipated Descartes in his argument to prove the existence of God. He is generally regarded as the profoundest intellect among the early schoolmen, and the most original that appeared in the Church after Saint Augustine. He was not a popular preacher like Saint Bernard, but he taught theology with marvelous lucidity to the monks who sought the genial quiet of his convent…. He was a true scholar of the Platonic and Augustinian school; not a dialectician like Albertus Magnus and Abélard, but a man who went beyond words to things, and seized on realities rather than forms; not given to disputations and the sports of logical tournaments, but to solid inquiries after truth. The universities had not then arisen, but a hundred years later he would have been their ornament, like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura.
If his philosophical treatises exhibit the profundity, the daring originality, and masterly grasp of his intellect, his meditations and prayers reveal the spiritual side of his nature, the deep humility of his faith, and the fervour of his love towards God, while his letters show him in his more human aspect—his tender sympathy and affection, his courtesy and respectfulness, combined with firmness in maintaining what he believed to be right, and in reproving what he believed to be wrong. Thus his writings completely verify the statement of William of Malmesbury that he was thoroughly spiritual and industriously learned—“penitus sanctus, anxie doctus.”
In him the two elements—the speculative and logical tendency on the one hand, and the devout and contemplative on the other—are so evenly balanced and so thoroughly commingled that he fulfils the ideal of the scholastic theologian.
Though Anselm was thus early invested with the aureole of the saint, the process preliminary to his canonisation, committed to the care of Becket by Alexander III. in 1163, was abandoned in consequence of the subsequent troubles; nor was it revived until 1494, and then, in the irony of fate, by Alexander VI. of evil memory. Whether it resulted in a decree does not appear; but Anselm belongs to the number of those Blessed Doctors whom the ancient and universal consent of the Church has canonised. His feast, 21 April, was raised from a semi-double to a double by Clement XI. in 1720.
