SAINT ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

• Italian Benedictine Monk, Abbot, Philosopher, Theologian,
Archbishop of Canterbury (1039-1109) and Doctor of the
Church (1720).
• Known as the Father of Scholasticism, a philosophical
school of thought that dominated the Middle Ages.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• Born: c. 1033, Aosta, Kingdom of Burgundy
• At the age of fifteen, Anselm desired to enter a monastery but, failing
to obtain his father's consent, he was refused by the abbot. The illness
he then suffered has been considered a pyschomatic effect of his
disappointment, but upon his recovery he gave up his studies and for
a time lived a carefree life.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• He was recognized in modern times as the originator of the
ontological argument for the existence of God (based on the idea of an
absolutely perfect being, the fact of the idea being in itself a
demonstration of existence) and the satisfaction theory of atonement
or redemption (based on the feudal theory of making satisfaction or
recompense according to the status of a person against whom an offense
has been committed, the infinite God being the offended party and
humanity the offender).
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• His mother, Ermenberga, belonged to a noble Burgundian family and
possessed considerable property. His father, Gondolfo, was a
Lombard nobleman who intended that Anselm would make a career
of politics and did not approve of his early decision to enter monastic
life.
•  He received an excellent classical education and was considered one
of the better Latinists of his day. His early education impressed on
him the need to be precise in his use of words, and his writings
became known for their clarity.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• In 1057 Anselm left Aosta to enter the Benedictine monastery at Bec
(located between Rouen and Lisieux in Normandy, France), because he
wanted to study under the monastery’s renowned prior, Lanfranc. 
• While on his way to Bec, he learned that Lanfranc was in Rome, so he
spent some time at Lyon, Cluny, and Avranches before entering the
monastery in 1060. In 1060 or 1061 he took his monastic vows. Because of
Anselm’s reputation for great intellectual ability and sincere piety, he was
elected prior of the monastery after Lanfranc became abbot of Caen in
1063.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• In the year 1077, he had written the Monologion (“Monologue”) at the
request of some of his fellow monks. A theological treatise,
the Monologion was both apologetic and religious in intent. It
attempted to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God by an
appeal to reason alone rather than by the customary appeal to
authorities favored by earlier medieval thinkers.
• In 1078 he became Abbot of Bec.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• Under Anselm, Bec became a centre of monastic learning and
some theological questioning. Lanfranc had been a renowned
theologian, but Anselm surpassed him. He continued his efforts to
satisfactorily answer questions concerning the nature and existence of
God.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
Appointment as archbishop of Canterbury
• William the Conqueror, who had established Norman overlordship of England
in 1066, was a benefactor of the monastery at Bec, and lands in both England
and Normandy were granted to Bec. Anselm made three visits to England to
view these lands. During one of those visits, while Anselm was founding a priory
at Chester, William II Rufus, the son and successor of William the Conqueror,
named him Archbishop of Canterbury (March 1093). The see had been kept
vacant since the death of Lanfranc in 1089, during which period the king had
confiscated its revenues and pillaged its lands.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• Anselm accepted the position somewhat reluctantly but with an
intention of reforming the English church. He refused to be
consecrated as archbishop until William restored the lands to
Canterbury and acknowledged Urban II as the rightful pope against
the antipope Clement III. In fear of death from an illness, William
agreed to the conditions, and Anselm was consecrated on December 4,
1093.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• When William recovered, however, he demanded from the new archbishop a sum
of money, which Anselm refused to pay lest it look like simony  (payment for an
ecclesiastical position). In response to Anselm’s refusal, William refused to allow
Anselm to go to Rome to receive the pallium—a mantle, the symbol of papal
approval of his archiepiscopal appointment—from Urban II, lest this be taken as
an implied royal recognition of Urban. In claiming that the king had no right to
interfere in what was essentially an ecclesiastical matter, Anselm became a major
figure in the Investiture Controversy—a conflict over the question of whether a
secular ruler (e.g., emperor or king) or the pope had the primary right to invest
an ecclesiastical authority, such as a bishop, with the symbols of his office.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• The controversy continued for two years. On March 11, 1095, the
English bishops, at the Synod of Rockingham, sided with the king
against Anselm. When the papal legate brought the pallium from
Rome, Anselm refused to accept it from William, since it would then
appear that he owed his spiritual and ecclesiastical authority to the
king. William permitted Anselm to leave for Rome, but on his
departure he seized the lands of Canterbury.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• Anselm attended the Council of Bari (Italy) in 1098 and presented his
grievances against the king to Urban II. He took an active part in the
sessions, defending the doctrine of the Filioque (“and from the Son”)
clause in the Nicene Creed against the Greek church, which had been in
schism with the Western church since 1054. The Filioque clause, added
to the Western version of the Nicene Creed, indicated that the Holy
Spirit proceeded from the Father and Son. The Greek church rejected
the Filioque clause as a later addition. The council also reapproved
earlier decrees against investiture of ecclesiastics by lay officials.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• When Anselm left England, he had taken with him an incomplete
manuscript of his work Cur Deus homo? (“Why Did God Become
Man?”). After the Council of Bari, he withdrew to the village of
Liberi, near Capua, and completed the manuscript in 1099. This work
became the classic treatment of the satisfaction theory of redemption. 
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
•  According to this theory, which is based upon the feudal structure of
society, finite humanity has committed a crime (sin) against infinite
God. In feudal society, an offender was required to make recompense,
or satisfaction, to the one offended according to that person’s status.
Thus, a crime against a king would require more satisfaction than a
crime against a baron or a serf. According to this way of thinking,
finite humanity, which could never make satisfaction to the infinite
God, could expect only eternal death.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• The instrument for bringing humans back into a right relationship
with God, therefore, could be rendered only by someone who was both
God—because God could overcome sin by sinlessness—and human—
because humans were those who were guilty of sin. Anselm held that
the death of the God-human (Christ) on the cross was the only
rationally intelligible way in which sinful humankind could have been
reconciled with God.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• Atonement is made possible through Christ, by whose infinite merits
humanity is purified in an act of cooperative re-creation. Anselm
rejected the view that humanity, through its sin, owes a debt to the
Devil and placed the essence of redemption in individual union with
Christ in the Eucharist (Lord’s Supper), to which the sacrament
of baptism (by which a person is incorporated into the church) opens
the way.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• Anselm’s theory was significant for presenting
a comprehensive system that focused on the interrelationship between
God, Jesus, and humankind. With some relatively minor alterations,
Anselm’s doctrine of the Atonement eventually passed over into the
theology of the Latin church, forming the basis of both Roman
Catholic and orthodox Protestant ideas of the work of Christ.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• After completing Cur Deus homo? Anselm attended a council at the Lateran
(papal palace) in Rome at Easter 1099. One year later, William Rufus died in a
hunting accident under suspicious circumstances, and his brother Henry
I seized the English throne. In order to gain ecclesiastical support, he sought
for and secured the backing of Anselm, who returned to England. Anselm
soon broke with the king, however, when Henry insisted on his right to invest
ecclesiastics with the spiritual symbols of their office. Three times the king
sought an exemption, and each time the pope refused. During this
controversy, Anselm was in exile, from April 1103 to August 1106.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
• At the Synod of Westminster (1107), the dispute was settled. The king
renounced investiture of bishops and abbots with the ring and crosier
(staff), the symbols of their office. He demanded, however, that they
do homage to him prior to consecration. The Westminster Agreement
was a model for the Concordat of Worms (1122), settling for a time
the lay-investiture controversy in the Holy Roman Empire.
• Anselm spent the last two years of his life in peace.
 ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

• Died: April 21, 1109, Canterbury, England

• Canonized: 1163 by Pope Alexander III.
• Declared Doctor (Teacher) of the Church: 1720
by Pope Clement XI.
• Feast Day: 21st of April
 ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
• St. Anselm first set forth the Ontological Argument in the eleventh
century.
•  This argument is the primary locus for such philosophical problems
as whether existence is a property and whether or not the notion of
necessary existence is intelligible. 
• An a priori argument based on innate knowledge, logic that attempts
to prove the existence of God from the meaning of the word “God”
and depends on a particular understanding of God.
 PROSLOGION
Chapters 2 & 3
• His Proslogion  (“Address” or “Allocution”), originally titled Fides
quaerens intellectum (“Faith Seeking Understanding”), established the
ontological argument for the existence of God. In it he claimed that
even a fool has an idea of a being greater than which no other being
can be conceived to exist. Such a being, he argued, must really exist,
for the very idea of such a being implies its existence.
 ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
• It is also the only one of the traditional arguments that clearly leads to
the necessary properties / classical concept of God:
• 1. OMNIPOTENT – All powerful, can do anything
• 2. OMNISCIENT – Knows all things, past, present & future
• 3. OMNIPRESENT – Present at every place at same time.
 ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
• St Anselm formulated the idea of God as that of “something than with
nothing greater can be conceived”. He then argued that something
that exists in reality must be greater than something that exists in the
mind only; so God must exist outside as well as in the mind, for if he
existed in the mind only and not in reality he would not be “something
than which nothing greater can be conceived”
 ST. ANSELM’S FIRST ARGUMENT
• St. Anselm defined GOD as
• “than that which nothing greater can be conceived”
• Everyone must have a definition of God (even the atheist).
• Therefore, God exists in the mind and therefore, GOD must exist in
reality because He is “than that which nothing greater can be
conceived”
 GAUNILO’S OBJECTION
• Anselm’s ontological argument was challenged by a contemporary
monk, Gaunilo of Marmoutier, in the Liber pro insipiente , or “Book in
Behalf of the Fool Who Says in His Heart There Is No God.” Gaunilo
denied that an idea of a being includes existence in the objective order and
that a direct intuition of God necessarily includes God’s existence.
• If I were to describe the most perfect island then state that it must exist
because of its perfection. You would be a fool to believe me not comparing
like with like Anselm talks of “than that which nothing greater can be
conceived”. A greater island can always be conceived.
• Anselm wrote in reply his Liber apologeticus contra
Gaunilonem (“Book [of] Defense Against Gaunilo”), which was a
repetition of the ontological argument of the Proslogion. The
ontological argument was accepted in different forms by René
Descartes and Benedict de Spinoza, though it was rejected
by Immanuel Kant.
ST. ANSELM’S SECOND ARGUMENT
• Must be more to God than fact that He exists that would make Him
similar to us. Therefore, God must be “necessary” that is there is no
possibility of Him not existing.
• It can be conceived that something exists that cannot be thought to
exist. God must be such a thing if He is “than that which nothing
greater can be conceived”. This is because something that can be
thought not to exist would be inferior to that which cannot.
• 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant imposed another
kind of objection against the ontological argument. Notice that when
explaining a perfect being, the things that make it perfect are all
predicates, or words that reflectively describe the being. For example, I
might say, “God is completely good.” “Completely good” describes God.
 KANT’S OBJECTION
• However, Kant argued that existence does not operate as a predicate because it
does nothing to explain or describe what God essentially is.
• (Existence cannot be an essential property of anything (that it was an
inherently accidental property), and therefore cannot be an essential property of
God).
• Saying God exists in reality or only in our mind does not add to or detract
from our concept of a perfect being. Thus, existence cannot be used as a
predicate to make a being than which nothing is greater more or less great
since existence does not change its concept.