Proslogion

A monk of Bec and a single argument

Anselm was born in 1033 at Aosta in northern Italy and around 1060 entered the Norman abbey of Bec, where he became prior in 1063 and abbot in 1078. Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093, he was twice exiled in disputes with English kings over the church's freedom, and died in 1109. His life and his Why God Became Man are told in Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology.

He wrote the Proslogion in 1077–1078, while prior. He had already written the Monologion, a chain of many arguments, and he began to ask "whether there might be found a single argument which would require no other for its proof than itself alone" Preface 1 to show that God truly exists. The answer kept slipping away; he tried to drive the thought off, until one day, worn out with resisting, "the proof of which I had despaired offered itself" Preface 2. His biographer Eadmer says it came to him during the night office.

He wrote "in the person of one who strives to lift his mind to the contemplation of God, and seeks to understand what he believes" Preface 3, and his first title was ‘Faith Seeking Understanding’, fides quaerens intellectum. Years later, urged above all by Hugh, archbishop of Lyons and papal legate, to put his name to the work, he renamed it "Proslogium, that is, A Discourse" Preface 3: an address. Unlike the Monologion, which reasons silently with itself, it speaks to God from first line to last.

Twenty-six chapters of prayer

The library holds the whole work in one part. Chapter 1 rouses the mind to seek God; chapters 2 to 4 argue that he truly exists; chapters 5 to 22 ask what God is, the soul grieving in 14 to 18 that it cannot feel the God it has found; chapter 23 confesses him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and 24 to 26 turn to the joy of those who will enjoy him. Gaunilo's reply on behalf of the fool and Anselm's answer, often copied with the work, are not included.

The book opens with a summons: "Up now, slight man! flee, for a little while, thy occupations" 1.1. He bids himself "Enter the inner chamber of thy mind" 1.1, as Jesus said, "go into your inner room, shut your door" (Matthew 6:6), and he prays with the psalmist:

My heart said, “Seek His face.” Your face, O LORD, I will seek.

Psalm 27:8

Seeking, he finds first how far away he is: "I strove toward God, and I stumbled on myself" 1.5. He cannot seek God unless God teaches him, for the image of God in him is so "obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing" 1.7 that God must create it anew. The chapter ends with the sentence that holds the book: "I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand" 1.7. The thought is Augustine's before it is Anselm's; see What is theology?

That than which nothing greater can be conceived

Chapter 2 names what faith believes: "we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" 2.1. The name is a confession, not a definition Anselm invented. Yet the psalm knows a man who denies it:

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt; their acts are vile. There is no one who does good.

Psalm 14:1

Even the fool understands these words when he hears them, so what they name is in his understanding, as a picture is in a painter's mind before he paints it 2.2. But if that than which nothing greater can be conceived were in the understanding alone, it could be conceived to exist in reality as well, "which is greater" 2.3; it would then be something than which a greater can be conceived, which is impossible. So "it exists both in the understanding and in reality" 2.4. Chapter 3 adds that it cannot even be conceived not to exist, "and this being thou art, O Lord, our God" 3.1. Chapter 4 explains the fool: he can say the words, as one can say that fire is water, but no one who understands what God is can think that God is not 4.3. The argument ends in thanks: what he believed by God's gift he now understands by God's light 4.4.

From here the name becomes a rule for thinking about God. He is "whatever it is better to be than not to be" 5.1. He is almighty, though he cannot lie, since to be capable of such things "is not power, but impotence" 7.1. Then chapter 15 turns the formula on itself: "thou art not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but thou art a being greater than can be conceived" 15.1. The name does not bring God within our grasp; it marks the place where thought must kneel.

In chapters 14 to 18 the soul that has found God grieves that it does not see him: its eye is "both darkened in itself, and dazzled by thee" 14.4. God dwells, as Paul says, "in unapproachable light" (1 Timothy 6:16), and Anselm prays, "Thou art within me, and about me, and I feel thee not" 16.2. See Why can't we see God?

Justice, mercy and joy

How can a God who is supremely just spare the wicked? Anselm finds the source of mercy hidden in the depth of God's goodness: "We see whence the river flows, but the spring whence it arises is not seen" 9.3. He prays, "Spare, in mercy; avenge not, in justice" 9.5. His answer is that one who is good to the wicked as well as the righteous is better than one who is good to the righteous alone (Deane's "to the wicked alone" 9.2 is a slip, as his own heading to the chapter shows), and God must be so good that none better can be conceived, so that "thy compassion is born of thy justice" 11.2. How mercy and justice meet at the cross he asked some twenty years later, in Why God Became Man.

Then he marks the edge of understanding: "by no consideration can we comprehend why, of those who are alike wicked, thou savest some rather than others" 11.3. Christians have received this Augustinian confession differently.

Reformed Christians hear in it the unconditional election they confess, its reason hidden in God's will. Lutherans confess election to salvation as grace alone, while teaching that the cause of anyone's ruin lies not in God but in sin and unbelief. Wesleyans hold to the God "who wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), and teach that prevenient grace reaches all, the difference lying in whether it is received or refused. The Catholic Church teaches that God predestines no one to be lost, and allows more than one school of explanation. All agree that no one is saved except by God's mercy. See Grace and election.

In chapter 23 the good he has sought is the Trinity: the Father, his Word the Son, and "the one love common to thee and to thy Son, that is, the Holy Spirit proceeding from both" 23.1. That last phrase is the Western confession of the filioque, which Anselm defended before the Greek bishops of southern Italy at the Council of Bari in 1098. The Orthodox, holding to the Spirit "who proceeds from the Father" (John 15:26), confess the Father as the Spirit's one source. See The Trinity.

The last chapters turn to joy: "Love the one good in which are all goods, and it sufficeth" 25.2. Where each loves the others as himself, every joy is multiplied 25.8, and "not all of that joy shall enter into those who rejoice; but they who rejoice shall wholly enter into that joy" 26.1. It is what "no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

How it has been read, and how to read it

In Anselm's lifetime Gaunilo, remembered as a monk of Marmoutier, answered on behalf of the fool that by this reasoning an island more excellent than all lands would exist merely by being imagined. Anselm replied that the argument fits only that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and, as the story is told, had both pieces copied with his book. Two centuries later Thomas Aquinas judged that God's existence is self-evident in itself but not to us, since we do not know God's essence; even granted the name, "it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally" Summa I.2.1. He argued instead from God's effects, by his five ways Summa I.2.3. Descartes revived the argument in 1641; Immanuel Kant, usually credited with naming it ontological, objected in 1781, chiefly against Descartes's form, that existence adds nothing to the concept of a thing (The Enlightenment and modern theology). In the twentieth century Karl Barth read the book as theology done within faith rather than a proof laid under it; philosophers still argue over it.

On how God may be known, the Catholic Church, following Thomas, taught at the First Vatican Council in 1870 that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason from created things First Vatican Council, Dei Filius; Paul says that God's eternal power and divine nature "have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship" (Romans 1:20). Reformed theology begins with Calvin's conviction that "a sense of Deity is indelibly engraven on the human heart" Institutes I.3.3, and many in that tradition treat such proofs as confirmations for those who know God from Scripture, not foundations for faith. See also Does God exist?

So read the Proslogion as a prayer first: even chapters 2 to 4 are spoken to God, and each step ends in thanks or longing. Do not skip chapter 1, and read slowly, even aloud. If chapter 2 feels like a trick, read it again, weighing the claim that to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the mind alone; that is where Gaunilo and Kant pressed.

In chapter 8 God is merciful to us, yet "not compassionate because thou art affected by no sympathy for wretchedness" 8.2: his love is not cold, but neither is it a feeling stirred in him from outside. The Westminster Confession likewise confesses God to be without body, parts or passions Westminster Confession 2.1, while some modern theologians, holding that God suffers with his creatures, question the teaching (What God is like). Christ is seldom named here; how God saves in Christ, Anselm asked in another book. Read it with the Psalms, whose words run all through it. The English is S. N. Deane's of 1903 (Monologium, Proslogium): a slight man is a little man, to conceive is to think, compassionate is merciful, sensible is able to perceive, and passionless is beyond suffering.

The book ends not with a proof but with a petition: "I pray, O God, to know thee, to love thee, that I may rejoice in thee" 26.3, until that joy is full, as the Son promised:

Until now you have not asked for anything in My name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.

John 16:24