Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, was born in Aosta in northwest Italy, though moved to the monastery of Bec in Normandy when he was in his early twenties. His career typifies the Catholic church during this era, where its leadership and many followers and personnel shifted across state, city and other boundaries, displaying a level of globalisation which would not look amiss, in spirit if not in form, in the 21st century. Anselm’s predecessors as head of the English arm of the church were similar. The founder, St Augustine, was an Italian monk originally. One of his greatest successors later in the 7th century was Theodore of Tarsus, holder of the position from 668 to 690, an utterly extraordinary person whose career spanned almost eight decades, and which had started in modern day Turkey, then moved to Constantinople, and from there to Rome. It was under him that Canterbury through St Augustine’s Abbey and Christchurch Cathedral became one of the major European centres of learning – a status is enjoyed into the middle Medieval period, and reinforced through the work of Anselm.
Anselm’s life veered between religion, politics and study. In his period at Bec he made the monastery a renowned centre of scholarship after becoming abbot in 1078, and reinforced links which were to bond this, and the See of Canterbury, close together for centuries. His appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093 was sanctioned by William the Second, successor to the Conqueror. But in accepting this position, he was to be pitched into the fight over relations between church and state, an argument that existed long before his time, and which was to shape the ensuing centuries long after his death.
For his support of Church autonomy and rights, Anselm was exiled from Britain not once but twice. In 1097, when William decided to attempt to remove him, he moved temporarily to Rome, writing `Cur Deus Homo.’ Under the new King, Henry the First, he returned to Britain, although soon experienced the same tensions, and was in exile again from 1103 to 1007. He died, and was buried in Canterbury, two years later, although the location of his grave is not known due to the destruction of most the cathedral he had constructed in a fire in 1174, four years after Thomas Becket’s death.
Anselm wrote a series of prayers and meditations throughout his life, some of them extremely beautiful:
`In what way, then, shall I praise you,
How shall I exalt you,
With what love shall I pray to you,
And with what joy shall I glory in you?’ (`The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm’ trans Sister Benedicta Ward, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, 103)
His most famous work however is philosophical and concerns the ontological argument. This is contained in `Proslogion’ in which he presents the argument that God, being all perfect, has to exist, because an all perfect entity which does not exist is therefore imperfect and logically contradictory.
`This is so truly, that it is not possible to think of it not existing. For it is possible to think of something thinking which it is not possible to think of as not existing, and that is greater than something which can be thought not to exist. If that than which nothing greater can be thought, can be thought of as not existing, then that than which nothing greater can be thought is not the same as that than which nothing greater can be thought.’ This being, Anselm declares, `is yourself, our Lord and God’ (Ibid 245).
Anselm’s argument was framed in the discourse of theology which dominated his time. But over eight centuries later it formed the heart of a passionate debate between figures from Bertrand Russel to G E Moore at Cambridge about whether existence could be attributed as a predicate or quality. What, in essence, does it mean to say of something that it exists? That in its turn contributed to the school of existentialism flowing through Heidegger, Sartre and on to the current day. As Frederick Copleston in his magisterial history of Western Philosophy makes clear, Anselm `belonged to the Augustinian tradition’ and had the Augustinian spirit. Quoting the Canterbury saint, Copleston states his fundamental creed: `I do not seek to understand, in order that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand’. (Frederick Copleston, `A History of Philosophy, Volume 2, Party One, Image Books, New York, 1962, 177)