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Some may balk at his feudal presuppositions regarding substitution, but it's hard to ignore the larger point. Jun 03, Andre marked it as to-read Shelves: This book tackles why God and God alone had "pitch his tent among us" to save us. I have heard Sproul mention it before as great reading and was reminded of it thinking about Charles Finney and his views on the atonement moral government theory and some of the the other theories on the atonement. Mar 17, Joe Rigney rated it it was amazing. Anselm is not as well known as he should be.
Do things exist in any sense before God makes them or intends to make them? Are there things which God does not make? Not easy questions, and Anselm is great on them. Jan 27, April rated it liked it Shelves: I read part of this, I probably won't pick it back up for a very very long time. Jan 21, Daniel rated it it was amazing. Anselm beautifully models how philosophical theology should be done: Jan 01, W. Littlejohn rated it really liked it. Whatever your final assessment of them, Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and Proslogion are classics for a reason.
Jun 11, Steven Wedgeworth rated it really liked it. Not an easy read and not always spot-on, but a supreme mind. This is certainly the best single volume work to get for him. Sep 26, Jeremy Sienkiewicz rated it it was amazing. The way to understand Christ, God and the World. May 11, Kara Slade rated it really liked it. YES on the Incarnation, but not so much on the atonement theory Either way, though, it's a clear translation.
Oct 08, Trey Kennedy rated it it was amazing Shelves: Proslogion is an amazing work, especially in understanding God, as far as we can. Truly a marvelous work! Sep 03, Mark rated it liked it Shelves: I only read the proslogium. I read it in college. I'm neither catholic nor christian, but I felt like the proslogium, an ontological proof for god's existence, was the only piece of theology that was worth much to me that year.
Dec 27, Austin Hoffman rated it it was amazing. Read proslogion, monologion, fall of the devil, why God became man. Contents of the volume are listed at the end of my review. Most people probably read this book either for the Proslogion or Cur Deus Homo. I bought it for both, but with a bit more interest in the latter. I discovered, however, that I prefer the Monologion to the Proslogion. The ontological argument may be one of Anselm's most original contributions to philosophy, but I find it less convincing than the cosmological argument, and he has many very interesting arguments to make and things to say els Contents of the volume are listed at the end of my review.
The ontological argument may be one of Anselm's most original contributions to philosophy, but I find it less convincing than the cosmological argument, and he has many very interesting arguments to make and things to say elsewhere throughout this volume. This book is well worth any reader's time and attention. Different translators take different tacks, so Anselm's voice is not uniform throughout. One choice I found particularly repellent was the over-use of the adverbial just , especially in an author who so frequently uses the Latin adjective iustus.
The introductory material is very helpful, but every text is introduced individually in the general introduction at the beginning, so you may forget the introduction to a text by the time you reach. The treatises are arranged in chronological order, which I like, as an intellectual historian. You can thus see Anselm's thought over time.
Any of these treatises is a valuable experience in learning how to think. I found 'On Truth' particularly challenging as I worked through with the Student what the Teacher had to say on the subject.
If you want to learn how to think, this book is a good place to start if you actually take your time and work at it. Some may think, 'Why read a treatise about truth? Don't I know what truth is, anyway? As far as the theology goes, even if you not a Christian or a theist, or if you are a Christian who rejects, say, satisfaction theory in the atonement, these works are worth your time, not just because they are an exercise in the rigour of thought and the training of the mind but because Anselm is a major theological figure with a powerful legacy.
We cannot simply ignore him if we disagree with him. It not an easy read, but it is a worthwhile one. Aug 16, Philip rated it really liked it Recommended to Philip by: He uses a dialogue method, and heavily stresses the use of logic and rational thinking in dealing with such questions, which often results in theological speculation concerning things which Scripture may not be explicit about.
His command of logical reasoning is impressive. Yet he remains humble in his musings and emphasizes his intent not to stray from a scriptural foundation. While his heavy reliance on reason though perhaps not quite as exclusively as he originally set forth seemed to set the standard for his time, a Christian scholar today would likely feel that the judicious use of scripture to support his reasoning throughout his discourse could only enhance his arguments, particularly since the work was written primarily for believing Christians.
In these as well as in his focus on the use of reason in demonstrating the objects of faith and his attempts to see just how far this reason can take one down the road toward the contents of the Christian Faith, Anselm's works are remarkable early demonstrations of what would become the distinctive features of Western Christianity. In reading Anselm, one can, even if one disagrees with him, see clearly that he was a man of devoted piety blessed with a magnificent intellect.
While he is always well-intentioned and humble and his arguments are always well-reasoned, I found myself again and again wondering where the limit might be for him. Anselm had a penetrating mind that I believe sometimes relied too much on reason and not enough on accepting the mysteries of faith. Mar 30, Joseph rated it really liked it Shelves: His intuitions about value are shaped by the Platonic-Augustinian tradition of which he was a part. Augustine took from the Platonists the idea that the really real things, the greatest and best of beings, are stable, uniform, and unchanging.
He says in On Free Choice of the Will 2.
For Anselm, then, it is obvious that a being who is in no way passive, who cannot experience anything of which he is not himself the origin, is better and greater than any being who can be acted upon by something outside himself. So God, being that than which nothing greater can be thought, is wholly active; he is impassible. Notice that Augustine also found it obvious that the eternal is better than the temporal. It is a shifting and shadowy reflection of the really real.
As later Platonists, including Augustine, develop this idea, temporal beings have their existence piecemeal; they exist only in this tiny sliver of a now, which is constantly flowing away from them and passing into nothingness. An eternal being, by contrast, is to use my earlier description stable, uniform, and unchanging.
What it has, it always has; what it is, it always is; what it does, it always does. So it seems intuitively obvious to Anselm that if God is to be that than which nothing greater can be thought, he must be eternal. That is, he must be not merely everlasting, but outside time altogether. In addition to this strong intuitive consideration, Anselm at least hints at a further argument for the claim that it is better to be eternal than temporal.
His idea seems to be that if God were in time or in a place , he would be bound by certain constraints inherent in the nature of time or place. His discussion in Monologion 22 makes the problem clear:. So at least part of the reason for holding that God is timeless is that the nature of time would impose constraints upon God, and of course it is better to be subject to no external constraints.
The other part of the reason, though, is that if God were in place or time he would have parts. But what is so bad about having parts? This question brings us naturally to the doctrine of divine simplicity, which is simply the doctrine that God has no parts of any kind. Even for an Augustinian like Anselm, the claim that it is better to lack parts than to have them is less than intuitively compelling, so Anselm offers further arguments for that claim. The argument in the Monologion goes somewhat differently.
The argument in the Proslogion , then, seeks to relate simplicity to the intuitive considerations that identify what is greatest and best with what is stable, uniform, and unchanging; the argument in the Monologion , by contrast, seeks to show that simplicity is necessary if God is to be—as the theistic proofs have already established—the ultimate source of his own goodness and existence. Anselm's success in generating a whole host of divine attributes through the ontological argument does present him with a problem.
He must show that the attributes are consistent with each other—in other words, that it is possible for one and the same being to have all of them. For example, there seems at first glance to be a conflict between justice and omnipotence. If God is perfectly just, he cannot lie. But if God is omnipotent, how can there be something he cannot do? Anselm's solution is to explain that omnipotence does not mean the ability to do everything; instead, it means the possession of unlimited power.
Anselm of Canterbury also called Anselm of Aosta (Italian: et Alia Opuscula [ The Works of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury and Former Abbot of Bec, and the History of New Things and. Anselm produced other works beyond those summarized and by R. W. Southern and Dom Schmitt in Memorials of St. Anselm.
Being omnipotent, God has no weakness. So it turns out that omnipotence actually entails the inability to lie. Another apparent contradiction is between God's mercy and his justice. If God is just, he will surely punish the wicked as they deserve. But because he is merciful, he spares the wicked. Anselm tries to resolve this apparent contradiction by appeal to God's goodness. So God's supreme goodness requires that he be both just and merciful.
Do not waste your time with this book unless you are a very serious scholar. Anselm first sets out the problem in terms of participation in qualities. What I most disliked was Anselm's Trinitarian arguments, which came off as the most perfect example of what a "tautology" is. In the case of the first man or the fallen angel, the Devil: How can you be merciful and impassible at the same time? For one, there are many different ways in which grace is bestowed. Lists with This Book.
But Anselm is not content to resolve the apparent tension between justice and mercy by appealing to some other attribute, goodness, that entails both justice and mercy; he goes on to argue that justice itself requires mercy. Justice to sinners obviously requires that God punish them; but God's justice to himself requires that he exercise his supreme goodness in sparing the wicked. In spite of these arguments, Anselm acknowledges that there is a residue of mystery here:.
In other words, the philosopher can trace the conceptual relations among goodness, justice, and mercy, and show that God not only can but must have all three; but no human reasoning can hope to show why God displays his justice and mercy in precisely the ways in which he does. He explores the notion of rectitude of will most thoroughly in On Truth De veritate , so in order to understand the definition of freedom of choice, we must look first at Anselm's discussion of truth. Truth is a much broader notion for Anselm than for us; he speaks of truth not only in statements and opinions but also in the will, actions, the senses, and even the essences of things.
A statement therefore is correct has rectitude when, and only when, it signifies that what-is is. So Anselm holds a correspondence theory of truth, but it is a somewhat unusual correspondence theory. Statements are true when they correspond to reality, but only because corresponding to reality is what statements are for. That is, statements like anything else are true when they do what they were designed to do; and what they were designed to do, as it happens, is to correspond to reality. Truth in the will also turns out to be rectitude, again understood teleologically.
Rectitude of will means willing what one ought to will or in other words willing that for the sake of which one was given a will. So, just as the truth or rectitude of a statement is the statement's doing what statements were made to do, the truth or rectitude of a will is the will's doing what wills were made to do. In DV 12 Anselm connects rectitude of will to both justice and moral evaluation. Thus, an animal is just when it blindly follows its appetites, because that is what animals were meant to do.
Such rectitude requires that agents perceive the rectitude of their actions and will them for the sake of that rectitude. For an agent who is coerced into doing what is right is not willing rectitude for its own sake; and similarly, an agent who must be bribed to do what is right is willing rectitude for the sake of the bribe, not for the sake of rectitude. Now it is both necessary and sufficient for justice, and thus for praiseworthiness, that an agent wills what is right, knowing it to be right, because it is right.
That an agent wills what is right because it is right entails that he is neither compelled nor bribed to perform the act. Freedom, then, must be neither more nor less than the power to perform acts of that sort. Thus Anselm takes it to be obvious that freedom is a power for something: God and the good angels cannot sin, but they are still free, because they can and do preserve rectitude of will for its own sake. In fact, they are freer than those who can sin: It obviously follows, as Anselm points out, that freedom of choice neither is nor entails the power to sin; God and the good angels have freedom of choice, but they are incapable of sinning.
But if free choice is the power to hold on to what is fitting and expedient, and it is not the power to sin, does it make any sense to say that the first human beings and the rebel angels sinned through free choice? Anselm's reply to this question is both subtle and plausible. In order to be able to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake, an agent must be able to perform an action that has its ultimate origin in the agent him- or herself rather than in some external source.
The first human beings and the rebel angels sinned through an exercise of their power for self-initiated action, and so it is appropriate to say that they sinned through free choice. Nonetheless, free choice does not entail the power to sin. For free choice can be perfected by something else, as yet unspecified, that renders it incapable of sinning.
In On the Fall of the Devil De casu diaboli Anselm extends his account of freedom and sin by discussing the first sin of the angels. In order for the angels to have the power to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake, they had to have both a will for justice and a will for happiness.
If God had given them only a will for happiness, they would have been necessitated to will whatever they thought would make them happy. Their willing of happiness would have had its ultimate origin in God and not in the angels themselves. So they would not have had the power for self-initiated action, which means that they would not have had free choice.
The same thing would have been true, mutatis mutandis , if God had given them only the will for justice. Since God gave them both wills, however, they had the power for self-initiated action. Whether they chose to subject their wills for happiness to the demands of justice or to ignore the demands of justice in the interest of happiness, that choice had its ultimate origin in the angels; it was not received from God.
The rebel angels chose to abandon justice in an attempt to gain happiness for themselves, whereas the good angels chose to persevere in justice even if it meant less happiness. God punished the rebel angels by taking away their happiness; he rewarded the good angels by granting them all the happiness they could possibly want. For this reason, the good angels are no longer able to sin. Since there is no further happiness left for them to will, their will for happiness can no longer entice them to overstep the bounds of justice.
Thus Anselm finally explains what it is that perfects free choice so that it becomes unable to sin. Like the fallen angels, the first human beings willed happiness in preference to justice. By doing so they abandoned the will for justice and became unable to will justice for its own sake. Apart from divine grace, then, fallen human beings cannot help but sin.
Anselm claims that we are still free, because we continue to be such that if we had rectitude of will, we could preserve it for its own sake; but we cannot exercise our freedom, since we no longer have the rectitude of will to preserve.
Whether fallen human beings also retain the power for self-initiated action apart from divine grace is a tricky question, and one I do not propose to answer here. So the restoration of human beings to the justice they were intended to enjoy requires divine grace. But even more is needed than God's restoration of the will for justice. Anselm famously attempts to show on purely rational grounds that the debt incurred by human sin could be suitably discharged, and the affront to God's infinite dignity could be suitably rectified, only if one who was both fully divine and fully human took it upon himself to offer his own life on our behalf.
Augustine, Saint Duns Scotus, John free will medieval philosophy ontological arguments. For this too I believe since, unless I first believe, I shall not understand". Stylistically, Anselm's treatises take two basic forms, dialogues and sustained meditations.
While at Bec, Anselm composed: While archbishop of Canterbury, he composed: In the first chapter, Anselm begins with a statement that anyone should be able to convince themselves of the existence of God through reason alone "if he is even moderately intelligent". These must be understood as being judged relative to a single attribute of goodness. As such, it must be the highest good and, further, "that which is supremely good is also supremely great.
There is, therefore, some one thing that is supremely good and supremely great—in other words, supreme among all existing things. A letter survives of Anselm responding to Lanfranc's criticism of the work. The elder cleric took exception to its lack of appeals to scripture and authority. In it, Anselm reasoned that even atheists can imagine a greatest being, having such attributes that nothing greater could exist id quo nihil maius cogitari possit. Therefore, the truly greatest possible being must necessarily exist. Further, this necessarily-existing greatest being must be God, who therefore necessarily exists.
More probably, Anselm intended his "single argument" to include most of the rest of the work as well, [] wherein he establishes the attributes of God and their compatibility with one another. Continuing to construct a being greater than which nothing else can be conceived, Anselm proposes such a being must be "just, truthful, happy, and whatever it is better to be than not to be".
The argument presented in the Proslogion has rarely seemed satisfactory [] [m] and was swiftly opposed by Gaunilo , a monk from the abbey of Marmoutier in Tours. This is, however, absurd, since its shore might arbitrarily be increased and in any case varies with the tide. Anselm's reply Responsio or apology Liber Apologeticus [] does not address this argument directly, which has led Klima , [] Grzesik , [34] and others to construct replies for him and led Wolterstorff [] and others to conclude that Gaunilo's attack is definitive.
The Proslogion had already stated "anything else whatsoever other than [God] can be thought not to exist". That entity both must exist and must be God. All of Anselm's dialogues take the form of a lesson between a gifted and inquisitive student and a knowledgeable teacher. Except for in Cur Deus Homo , the student is not identified but the teacher is always recognizably Anselm himself. Anselm's De Grammatico "On the Grammarian" , of uncertain date, [o] deals with eliminating various paradoxes arising from the grammar of Latin nouns and adjectives [] by examining the syllogisms involved to ensure the terms in the premises agree in meaning and not merely expression.
He identifies this absolute truth with God, who therefore forms the fundamental principle both in the existence of things and the correctness of thought. He does not consider this a capacity to ' sin but a capacity to do good for its own sake as opposed to owing to coercion or for self-interest. All rational beings seek benefit and shun harm on their own account but independent choice permits them to abandon bounds imposed by justice.
The angels who upheld justice were rewarded with such happiness that they are now incapable of sin, there being no happiness left for them to seek in opposition to the bounds of justice. Cur Deus Homo "Why God was a Man" was written from to once Anselm was already archbishop of Canterbury [25] as a response for requests to discuss the Incarnation. Anselm argues that, owing to the Fall and mankind's fallen nature ever since, humanity has offended God. Divine justice demands restitution for sin but human beings are incapable of providing it, as all the actions of men are already obligated to the furtherance of God's glory.
Atonement for humanity, however, could only be made through the figure of Jesus , as a sinless being both fully divine and fully human. The first is that it was proper that Mary should be so pure that—apart from God—no purer being could be imagined. The second was his treatment of original sin. Earlier theologians had held that it was transmitted from generation to generation by the sinful nature of sex. As in his earlier works, Anselm instead held that Adam 's sin was borne by his descendants through the change in human nature which occurred during the Fall. Parents were unable to establish a just nature in their children which they had never had themselves.
The analogy that he used was the self-consciousness of man. The peculiar double-nature of consciousness, memory, and intelligence represent the relation of the Father to the Son. The mutual love of these two memory and intelligence , proceeding from the relation they hold to one another, symbolizes the Holy Spirit. If in a certain way the present time contains every place and all the things that are in any place, likewise, every time is encompassed in the eternal present, and everything that is in any time.
Anselm wrote nearly surviving letters Epistolae to clerics, monks, relatives, and others, [] the earliest being those written to the Norman monks who followed Lanfranc to England in Many of Anselm's letters contain passionate expressions of attachment and affection, often addressed "to the beloved lover" dilecto dilectori.
While there is wide agreement that Anselm was personally committed to the monastic ideal of celibacy , some academics such as McGuire [] and Boswell [] have characterized these writings as expressions of a homosexual inclination. Another was compiled about fifty years later by John of Salisbury at the behest of Thomas Becket. His works were copied and disseminated in his lifetime and exercised an influence on the Scholastics , including Bonaventure , Thomas Aquinas , Duns Scotus , and William of Ockham.
His work also anticipates much of the later controversies over free will and predestination.
Modern scholarship remains sharply divided over the nature of Anselm's episcopal leadership. Anselm's hagiography records that, when a child, he had a miraculous vision of God on the summit of the Becca di Nona near his home, with God asking his name, his home, and his quest before sharing bread with him. Anselm then slept, awoke returned to Aosta, and then retraced his steps before returning to speak to his mother.
His most common attribute is a ship, representing the spiritual independence of the church. In the United States, the Saint Anselm Abbey and its associated college are located in New Hampshire ; they held a celebration in commemorating the th anniversary of Anselm's death.
In , the Archbishop of Canterbury , Justin Welby , created the Community of Saint Anselm , an Anglican religious order that resides at Lambeth Palace and is devoted to " prayer and service to the poor". From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Saint Anselm redirects here. For other saints, see Saint Anselm disambiguation. Proslogion and Ontological argument.