Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, a town in the Alps in what is now northern Italy. His mother, Ermenberga, a pious and prudent woman, gave him his first instruction in the Christian faith. His father, Gundulf, a worldly wastrel, had little in common with his son. After Ermenberga’s death the relationship fractured beyond repair, and around 1056 Anselm left home. For some three years he drifted through Burgundy and France, where the schools of the day offered grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In 1059, Anselm came to the Norman abbey of Bec, hoping to study there under Lanfranc, one of the most prominent teachers in Europe. The following year, Anselm became a monk, giving himself to the vocation with unusual vigor. In 1063, Lanfranc moved to Caen, and Anselm was appointed to fill his roles as prior and teacher.
Over the next fifteen years, Anselm composed several works of lasting importance. By the early 1070s, he had begun penning the first of his prayers and meditations, devotions of an intensely personal, emotionally charged nature that significantly shaped medieval piety. In 1075–76, he wrote the Monologion, a series of deductive proofs for the existence and attributes of God, his creation and upholding of all things, and the Trinity itself—all derived from reason alone without appeal to Scripture, and all framed as a meditation. Over the next two years came the Proslogion, whose goal was to distill the proofs of the Monologion into one. In it, Anselm set forth the first of many iterations of the slippery proof that Kant would later term “the ontological argument”: God is “a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived” (Proslogion 2). To exist in reality is greater than to exist only in the mind. Therefore the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality. The original title of the Proslogion was Fides quaerens intellectum (Faith Seeking Understanding), and this was Anselm’s aim in both works: to arrive through reason where his faith already stood, believing the truths of his faith to be eminently rational.
When Herluin, Bec’s founder and first abbot, died in 1078, Anselm was elected to the position. Having developed an intense distaste for administration during his time as prior, Anselm was dismayed at the prospect of serving as abbot, but the monks would not relent. Anselm made his first visit to England within a year or two; he would return several times during his abbacy. His final trip to England as abbot of Bec took place in 1092. Three years earlier, Anselm’s former master, Lanfranc, had died, having served as archbishop of Canterbury since 1070. The king, William II, opted not to appoint a new archbishop, pocketing the revenues himself, and thus the see had been vacant since 1089. Toward the beginning of 1093, while Anselm was still in England, the king fell gravely ill, and believed himself to be dying. Bitterly regretting his misappropriation, he determined to reconcile himself to God and name a new archbishop, and Anselm came highly recommended. In spite of his best efforts, Anselm was promoted yet again, this time quite literally by force.
The new archbishop’s first major act as an author was to settle an old theological score. In 1094, Anselm sent Pope Urban II a letter entitled On the Incarnation of the Word. It was his definitive response to a trinitarian controversy stirred up a few years earlier by the nominalist Roscelin of Compiègne, who spoke of the three persons as “three things” (tres res), a formulation that struck many as tritheism. In the letter, Anselm declared nominalists incapable of doing theology, argued that the persons of the Trinity 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.
Anselm did not fight only theological battles in his early days as archbishop. Shortly after naming Anselm to the see, the king recovered, promptly forgetting his deathbed repentance, and returned to his old ways. He plundered church lands and blocked councils Anselm wanted to call. By 1097, the situation had become untenable, and Anselm felt that he needed to consult with the pope. He requested that the king grant him leave to travel to Rome, a petition that was rebuffed repeatedly. In late 1097, Anselm departed for Rome at last; the king straightaway confiscated the revenues of Canterbury, and offered no terms for his return. Anselm’s first exile had begun.
Less than a year into exile, Anselm completed his most celebrated theological work, Cur Deus Homo (Why did God become man?), begun about three years prior. In answer to the title’s question, Anselm argued that the incarnation 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 and make a way for God’s original purpose for humanity to be realized. The next year brought Anselm’s first exposure to the investiture controversy, at the center of which was the question of whether kings and emperors were permitted to hand a bishop the symbols of his office: staff and ring. Hearing a papal council in Rome condemn, on pain of excommunication, both lay investiture and the homage of clergy to laymen, Anselm, who had done both in 1093, was appalled. He set off from Rome for Lyons, where he wrote, as a companion piece to Cur Deus Homo, On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin. The latter defined original sin as the absence of the justice every person owes to God, inherited through ordinary generation.
Anselm’s first exile came to an end in 1100 when William II was killed and his successor, Henry I, recalled him. He soon found himself at cross-purposes with this new king as well. Having learned Rome’s position on lay investiture and clerical homage, Anselm would neither do homage to Henry nor consecrate bishops invested by him. During this brief stint back in his see, Anselm finished On the Procession of the Holy Spirit, in which he defended the necessity of the filioque—the Western addition to the Nicene Creed confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
In 1103, Anselm left for Rome to refer the investiture question to Pope Paschal II, who ruled in his favor. Thereupon, Henry made his return conditional on submission, and sequestered Canterbury’s revenues once again, leaving Anselm to wait out the second exile in Lyons. It ended only when Anselm moved to excommunicate the king, at which point the two met at the Norman castle of L’Aigle in 1105 and brokered a compromise. Under its terms, papally ratified in 1106, the king renounced the right of investiture, while Rome allowed bishops to do homage to the king for the lands of their churches. Anselm returned to England in late summer 1106. He died less than three years later, 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)
At Westminster Seminary California, study Anselm and other scholars who have shaped the church by laying a rich theological foundation that continues to equip pastors and church leaders for faithful ministry.
