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The Christian Humanism of Anselm of Canterbury

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The Christian Humanism of Anselm of Canterbury 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). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�3538_005 <UN> The Christian Humanism Of Anselm Of Canterbury 63 strong supporter of education, develops his own pedagogy and encourages education and critical thinking whenever he can. In his theological works he delves into themes from the nature of justice and its relation to mercy, freedom, law and punishment, love, authority, metaphysics, and epistemology. Though he never writes a specifically anthro- pological treatise, his theology is informed by and constantly attentive to human nature and the integrity of human causality. He follows the classic principle of Irenaeus that “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Philosophically, he is profoundly concerned with the two most distinctive powers of the human person: knowing and willing. He wrote the first ever treatise on the nature of truth, an insightful, broad, nuanced and multifac- eted work that includes even justice as a type of truthfulness. He writes extensively on freedom both philosophically and theologically, such that it arises as a significant aspect of well over half of his works, and he develops an understanding of freedom which is so nuanced and thoughtful that it has been used to support voluntarism and libertarianism as well as views more akin to compatibilism. Finally, he developed an utterly unique argument for God’s existence based upon the power of human reason to understand some- thing of the essence of God, an argument which, regardless of one’s view of its soundness, is undeniably ambitious. If one is looking for humanism in the medieval period, one should certainly expect to find it in Anselm. But, of course, this raises the disputed question: what is humanism? In this essay I will first briefly discuss the nature of human- ism, then I will look at the main lines of Anselm’s thought in order both to show that he is indeed a humanist thinker and also to map the contours of his particular version of humanism. 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. <UN>.
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