Anselm of Canterbury

Anselm of Canterbury was an Italian-born Benedictine monk, abbot of Bec in Normandy and archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. He is best known for the ontological argument, an attempt to prove God's existence from the very idea of God, and for his account of why God became human. His motto, faith seeking understanding, and his use of careful reasoning on questions of faith have led many to call him the founder of scholasticism.

Anselm was born in 1033 in or near Aosta, an Alpine town then in the kingdom of Burgundy and today in north-western Italy. His father, Gundulf, was a nobleman of Lombard origin, and his mother, Ermenberga, was related to the counts of Savoy. According to his biographer Eadmer, a monk who knew him well, he wanted to become a monk as a teenager but was refused because his father objected. After his mother's death he quarrelled with his father, and at about twenty-three he left home.

After some years of wandering through Burgundy and France he came in 1059 to Normandy, in today's France, drawn by the school of the abbey of Bec, where the prior was the famous teacher Lanfranc. In 1060 he became a monk there. When Lanfranc left in 1063 to become abbot of Caen, Anselm succeeded him as prior, and in 1078, on the death of the abbey's founder Herluin, he was elected abbot. Under him Bec became one of the leading centres of learning in Europe, and he wrote most of his philosophical works there, while advising rulers and nobles across Europe through a large correspondence.

After the Norman conquest led by William the Conqueror, Bec held lands in England, and Anselm visited the country several times. Lanfranc had become archbishop of Canterbury, head of the church in the Kingdom of England, and on his death in 1089 William's son, King William II, known as Rufus, left the post empty so that he could take its revenues. In 1093, when the king fell seriously ill and feared for his soul, Anselm was named archbishop, reportedly almost by force, with the pastoral staff pressed into his hand.

His time in office was stormy. He clashed with Rufus over church lands, over recognising Pope Urban II and over the king's control of the church. In 1097 he left for Rome without royal permission and was not allowed back. In exile he attended the Council of Bari in 1098, where he defended the Latin teaching on the Holy Spirit against Greek objections. After Rufus was killed in 1100, the new king, Henry I, recalled him, but they soon fell out over lay investiture, the practice of kings appointing bishops and handing them the symbols of their office, which the papacy had banned since the reforms of Pope Gregory VII. Anselm was in exile again from 1103 to 1107, until a compromise was reached in which the king gave up investing bishops with ring and staff but kept their homage for their lands. He died at Canterbury on 21 April 1109.

Anselm's method was to begin from faith and use reason to understand what faith believes. He did not think reason could replace belief, but he tried to show that Christian teachings could be supported by arguments that did not rely on quoting scripture or authorities. His first major work, the Monologion of 1075–1076, argued that the existence of goods of different degrees implies a highest good through which all others are good, and that this supreme being must be the God of Christian belief. In this he followed Augustine of Hippo, whose works he knew closely, and he drew on the logic transmitted by Boethius.

In the Proslogion of 1077–1078, Anselm looked for a single argument that would prove God's existence on its own. He defined God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even a fool who says there is no God understands this description, so such a being exists at least in the mind. But a being that exists in reality as well as in the mind is greater than one that exists only in the mind. So if the greatest conceivable being existed only in the mind, one could conceive of something greater, which is a contradiction. Therefore, Anselm concluded, it must exist in reality.

A monk named Gaunilo of Marmoutiers objected at once that the same reasoning could prove the existence of a perfect island. Anselm replied that the argument applies only to a being whose greatness cannot be surpassed, and had Gaunilo's objection and his reply copied together with the Proslogion. Later philosophers have argued over the proof ever since. Thomas Aquinas rejected it, René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz defended versions of it, and Immanuel Kant, who named it the ontological argument, objected that existence is not a property that adds to the concept of a thing. Modern logicians have built new versions in terms of necessity and possibility.

Anselm's other famous work, Cur Deus Homo, Why God Became Man, written in 1095–1098, explains the incarnation and death of Christ. Human sin, he argued, dishonours God, and justice requires satisfaction, a repayment greater than the offence. Only God could pay so great a debt, but only a human owed it, so the debt could be paid only by one who was both God and human. This satisfaction theory replaced the older idea that Christ's death paid a ransom to the devil, and it shaped Western Christian thinking on salvation for centuries. He also wrote dialogues on truth, on free will and on the fall of the devil, defining freedom as the ability to keep a right will for its own sake.

Anselm was canonised in 1494 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1720. His confidence in reason, his precise definitions and his habit of working through objections helped open the way to the schools and universities of the following centuries, and he stands at the start of the scholastic tradition of medieval Christian philosophy. In the United Kingdom he is remembered as one of the great archbishops of Canterbury, and his struggle with the crown over the independence of the church foreshadowed the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket later in the twelfth century.