chapter 3 The Christian Humanism of Anselm of Canterbury
Benjamin Brown Lourdes University, oh
3.1 Introduction
Anselm of Canterbury is one of the towering intellectual figures of human his- tory and certainly of medieval Europe. And yet he is also probably one of the most ignored, misunderstood and even vilified thinkers in human history, often all three together. Few scholars have been so often over-simplified, sum- marized and dismissed without even having been read as has Anselm.1 Even during his own lifetime he had to insist that the entirety of a given work be copied, read and kept all together and in its fullness so that misrepresentations did not continue to occur.2 However, as I will argue here, the reality is that Anselm’s thought is robust, penetrating, powerfully analytic, beautifully syn- thetic and one of the most truly humanistic available.3 As the “Father of Scholasticism,” and therefore also to a degree the founder of the first universi- ties, Anselm relies extensively on logic and debate, takes an interest in all knowledge and all the disciplines of his day, manifests a very high regard for human reason, and encourages careful conversation and dialogue about a wide range of topics, including between people of different religions. He is a
1 John McIntyre in his defense of Anselm’s soteriology writes: “No major Christian thinker has suffered quite so much as St. Anselm from the hit-and-run tactics of historians of theism and soteriology” (St. Anselm and his Critics: A Re-interpretation of the Cur Deus Homo [Edinburgh: 1954], 2). Charles Hartshorne, referring particularly to Anselm’s “ontological argument” in the Proslogion, writes: “In Anselm’s own lifetime, a tradition…began to take shape that one scarcely reads Anselm: rather one refutes him essentially unread, so decisively that reading him would be needless toil” (Introduction to Saint Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S.N. Deane [La Salle, il: 1962], 3). 2 See Anselm’s prefaces to both De veritate in Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 2, (eds.) and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (Toronto: 1976), 74 and Cur Deus homo: Why God Became Man and The Virgin Conception and Original Sin, trans. Joseph M. Colleran (Albany, ny: 1969), 60. 3 Because of limits of space, I am not providing anything like a biography of Anselm, but focusing on his thought itself. To help put Anselm in his historical context, many good contemporary biographies might be consulted, including Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: 1990) and Gillian R. Evans, Anselm and a New Generation (Oxford: 1980).
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3.2 Competing Humanisms
Interest in and discussion of humanism has seen a resurgence in the last couple decades,4 but there is still much disagreement about anything beyond the most general understanding. The reason for this lack of consensus has to do with a more
4 For example, Don S. Browning, Reviving Christian Humanism: The New Conversation on Spirituality, Theology and Psychology (Minneapolis: 2010); David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Malden, ma: 2008); and John W. De Gruchy, Confessions of a Christian Humanist (Minneapolis: 2006). I think that some of these Christian humanisms sometimes give away too much that is distinctively Christian in order to appear humanist in a more secular sense, but that is the subject of another essay.