Essential Thinkers #11: St. Anselm, the Father of the Scholastic Tradition

Born at Aosta in Burgundy, Anselm (1033-1109) was a pious child and sought admission to the monastic life at the early age of 15. The local Abbot, however, refused him of his father’s insistence (Abbot mean ‘a man who is the head of an abbey of monks’). After his mother’s death, Anselm went for travelling. Eventually he arrived at the Abbey of Bec and began studying under the renowned Prior Lanfranc. He eventually took his monastic orders in 1060. Only three years later, when Lanfranc was appointed Abbot of Caen, the young Anselm succeeded him as Prior much to the chagrin of older and more established candidates. During the next 30 years he wrote his philosophical and theological works and was appointed Abbot of Bec.

Now remembered as the father of the Scholastic tradition and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 until his death, Anselm is of philosophical interest mainly for his logical arguments in two major works, the Monologion (meaning ‘Soliloquy’) and the Proslogion (Discourse) both of which gave various arguments intended to prove the existence of God. By the 12^th century the works of Plato and Aristotle had been rediscovered and reinterpreted by the scholastics who attempted to synthesise early Greek ideas with medieval theology. Following the Greek tradition, it is said that Anselm’s students had been concerned to hear a rational justification for the existence of God that did not rely merely in the acceptance of Scripture or doctrinal teaching. Anselm’s most famous response to this challenge was to become famously known as “the ontological argument for the existence of God” which has been called by some one of the most hotly debated issues in the history of philosophy.

Consider, invites Anselm, that by the term ‘God’ we mean something than which nothing greater can be thought of. Given that even the non-believer or, as Anselm calls him, the Fool, accepts that this is what the concept of God entails, the existence of God would seem to follow necessarily from the definition. For it would be a contradiction to suppose that God is on the one hand something than which nothing greater can be thought of and on the other hand does not exist. For a God thought of that does not really exist is not so great as one thought of that does exist, and since one can clearly think of God and suppose he exists, then something which nothing greater can be thought of must be something that exists (read the last two passages again).

Anselm’s ontological argument is ingenious in its simplicity. While most people agree that there is something rather fishy about it, opinion has been divided as to exactly what is the matter with the argument. The earliest critic of Anselm was a contemporary Benedictine monk called Gaunilo of Marmoutiers. Gaunilo argued that if Anselm’s reasoning were correct, then one could conceive of a lost island that was the most perfect island there could ever be. Since by definition the island is the most perfect it must exist, for by Anselm’s reasoning it would be less than perfect if it did not. Thus, complained Gaunilo, Anselm’s reasoning licences the existence of all sorts of imaginary objects and must therefore be faulty. In response, Anselm claimed that the quality of perfection is an attribute that only applies to God, and therefore his ontological argument cannot be used to prove the existence of imaginary islands or anything else.

Versions of Anselm’s ontological argument were later used by both St. Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes and were, much later still, heavily criticised by Immanuel Kant. Kant’s principle complaint was that the concept of God as a perfect being does not entail that God exists since ‘existence’ is not a perfection. The concept of a perfect being that exists is no more or less great than the concept of a perfect being that does not exist. Philosophers agree that the problem with Anselm’s argument revolves around the fact that we surely cannot ascertain whether something exists or not merely by analysing the meaning of a word or concept. However, exactly what logical error is being committed by attempting to do so has remained a cause of much dispute amongst philosophers and logicians.

The argument was taken up again in more recent times, in the 1960’s, when the philosopher Norman Malcolm revived a lesser known variant of Anselm’s argument which sidesteps the objections made by Kant and others. According to Malcolm, Anselm argues in the Proslogion that if it is possible that a necessary being could exist, then it must exist, for it would be a contradiction to say a necessary being does not exist. God could only fail to exist of the concept of God was self-contradictory or nonsensical. This remains to be shown by opponents of the ontological argument.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012. Also watch YouTube’s ‘Anselm and the Argument for God’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmTsS5xFA6k]

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