Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, in the Alps of what is now northern Italy. In 1059, after several years in the schools of Burgundy and France, he came to the Norman abbey of Bec to study under Lanfranc, one of the most prominent teachers in Europe. The following year, he became a monk, and in 1063, when Lanfranc moved to Caen, Anselm succeeded him as prior and teacher.
Over the next fifteen years, Anselm composed several works of lasting importance. His prayers and meditations significantly shaped medieval piety. In the Monologion he set forth proofs for the existence and attributes of God derived from reason alone. In the Proslogion he sought to distill these proofs into one—the slippery proof Kant would later term “the ontological argument.” The Proslogion’s original title, Fides quaerens intellectum (Faith Seeking Understanding), describes Anselm’s aim in both works: to reach through reason the truths he already held by faith, believing these truths to be eminently rational.
Despite his intense distaste for administration, Anselm was elected abbot of Bec in 1078. While Anselm was visiting England in 1093, King William II—gravely ill and believing himself to be dying—determined to fill the archbishopric of Canterbury, which had been vacant since 1089 while the king pocketed its revenues. Anselm came highly recommended, and in spite of his best efforts he was promoted yet again, this time quite literally by force.
One of Anselm’s first acts as archbishop was to send Pope Urban II On the Incarnation of the Word in answer to the nominalist Roscelin of Compiègne, who had spoken of the three persons of the Trinity as “three things” (tres res), a formulation that struck many as tritheism. Anselm argued that the persons are distinguished by their eternal relations of origin, and maintained that it was fitting that the Son, rather than the Father or the Holy Spirit, become incarnate.
The king, meanwhile, having recovered and forgotten his deathbed repentance, began once again to plunder church lands. In 1097, Anselm departed for Rome to consult the pope, marking the beginning of his first exile. Less than a year into this exile, he completed his most celebrated work, Cur Deus Homo (Why Did God Become Man?). The incarnation, he argued, was both fitting and necessary: only one who was true God and true man could satisfy the infinite debt of honor created by human sin. Its companion piece, On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin, defined original sin as the absence of the justice every person owes to God, inherited through ordinary generation.
William II’s death in 1100 ended Anselm’s first exile. Soon, however, Anselm was at odds with William’s successor, Henry I, over lay investiture and clerical homage, practices Rome condemned. This resulted in a second exile from 1103 to 1106. Shortly before this second exile, Anselm had finished On the Procession of the Holy Spirit, defending the necessity of the filioque, the Western addition to the Nicene Creed confessing that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Anselm died less than three years after his return from exile, in the spring of 1109.
Anselm’s philosophical speculations have fascinated scholars for centuries; the piety of his prayers, meditations, and academic treatises alike has inspired countless Christians; and the spirit of his theological program presaged that of the great medieval scholastics. Reformed theology, too, owes a profound debt to Anselm. It was his doctrine of the atonement, with its account of sin as an infinite debt of honor owed to a holy God—a debt only the God-man could satisfy—that Reformed theology would adopt and adapt. Q&As 12–18 of the Heidelberg Catechism, in fact, retrace a crucial part of the argument of Cur Deus Homo nearly step by step. In his commentary on the catechism, Zacharias Ursinus, its chief author, also quoted with approval the definition of original sin commonly attributed to Anselm—a definition that is closely echoed in Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 18. Furthermore, the Reformed tradition finds in Anselm an ally in holding the line on the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, which comes under renewed attack in each generation.
Anselm’s theological posture, as evident in two major throughlines of his career, is worthy of emulation. The first is faith seeking understanding. Reformed theologians rightly tempered Anselm on this point, emphasizing that reason holds only a ministerial role. But the substance—humbly seeking ever greater understanding of the things we believe by faith—remains important, and serves as one of the great warrants for rigorous theological training. The second is the prominence Anselm attached to the idea of fittingness. For him, the incarnation was not only necessary but fitting, and it was fitting besides that it should be the Son to assume our flesh. Scripture itself reasons in terms of fittingness about the person and work of the mediator: “it was fitting” (Heb 2:10; 7:26). Surely God, than whom nothing greater can be conceived, is and does only what is perfectly fitting.
“For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand.”
—Proslogion 1, trans. Sidney Norton Deane
“And, indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. … Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.”
—Proslogion 2, trans. Sidney Norton Deane
“If it be necessary, therefore, as it appears, that the heavenly kingdom be made up of men, and this cannot be effected unless the aforesaid satisfaction be made, which none but God can make and none but man ought to make, it is necessary for the God-man to make it.”
—Cur Deus Homo 2.6, trans. Sidney Norton Deane
“Of a truth, O Lord, because Thou hast made me, I owe my whole self to Thy love; because Thou hast redeemed me, I owe my whole self; because Thou dost promise so much, I owe my whole self. … Draw me, or rather this whole self of mine, O Lord, into Thy love. All that I am is Thine by creation; make it all Thine by love.”
—”Eleventh Meditation: Of the Redemption of Mankind” (the Meditation on Human Redemption), in St. Anselm’s Book of Meditations and Prayers, trans. M. R. (1872), 150–51
“It is, therefore, most obvious that the rational creature was created for this purpose, that it might love the supreme Being above all other goods, as this Being is itself the supreme good; nay, that it might love nothing except it, unless because of it; since that Being is good through itself, and nothing else is good except through it.”
—Monologion 68, trans. Sidney Norton Deane
Monologion (1076) Proslogion (c. 1077–1078) Prayers and Meditations (c. 1070–1080) On the Incarnation of the Word (1094) Cur Deus Homo (1098) On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (1099) On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (1102)
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