Anselm of Canterbury

Italian Benedictine monk, theologian and philosopher (1033–1109), born in Aosta and trained at the Norman monastery of Bec under the mastership of Lanfranc, whom he succeeded as prior and later as abbot, positions from which he turned Bec into one of the most important intellectual centres of late eleventh-century Europe. In 1093 he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, an office he held amid constant conflict with the English crown — first with William II and then with Henry I — over the investiture controversy, which led him into two long periods of continental exile in defence of the Church's independence from secular power. Regarded as the father of scholasticism and often called the second founder of natural theology after Augustine, Anselm formulated in the Proslogion (1078) the so-called ontological argument, one of the most debated proofs of God's existence in the entire history of philosophy: defining God as 'that than which nothing greater can be thought', Anselm argues that such a being must necessarily exist in reality and not merely in the understanding, since existing in reality is greater than existing merely as an idea; the argument, criticised already in his lifetime by Gaunilo and later by Kant, has continued to generate uninterrupted philosophical debate to this day. In Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), Anselm develops a theory of atonement according to which human sin constitutes an infinite offence against divine honour that could only be repaired through the voluntary sacrifice of a being at once human and divine, a model that exerted lasting influence on Western theology of redemption. His methodological motto, fides quaerens intellectum ('faith seeking understanding'), sums up his project of placing reason at the service of Christian faith without fully subordinating it thereto.

9 works

• De casu diaboli
• De Conceptu Virginali et de Originali Peccato
• De grammatico
• De libertate arbitrii
• De Processione Spiritus Sancti
• De veritate (Dialogus de veritate)
• Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi
• Proslogion
• Proslogion (ed. 2)