Anselm of Canterbury

Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, a town set in an Alpine valley on the routes linking Italy with Burgundy and the lands beyond the mountains ^[1]. His father Gundulf was a Lombard nobleman, and his mother Ermenberga came from a propertied Burgundian family with connections in the region. The household was comfortable, and the boy received early schooling that revealed an unusually quick mind.

His biographer Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury who knew him personally in later life, recorded that Anselm was drawn to religion as a child and sought entry to a monastery around the age of fifteen, only to be refused because the abbot feared offending his father ^[2]. Relations with Gundulf deteriorated badly after the death of Ermenberga, and around 1056 the young man left home altogether.

For roughly three years Anselm wandered through Burgundy and France, apparently studying where he could. The journey ended in Normandy, where the reputation of a fellow northern Italian, the scholar Lanfranc of Pavia, drew him to the Benedictine abbey of Bec ^[1]. There, in 1060, at about twenty seven years of age, he took monastic vows. The decision fixed the course of his life.

Bec was a young house, founded only in 1034 by the knight turned monk Herluin, yet under Lanfranc's teaching it had become one of the most respected schools in Europe ^[3]. Anselm advanced with startling speed. When Lanfranc departed in 1063 to lead the new abbey of Saint Etienne in Caen, the monks of Bec chose Anselm as prior despite his brief tenure in the community. Some resented the promotion of so recent a recruit; his patience and evident ability won most of them over.

As prior he taught, administered the house, and began to write. His method was distinctive. Rather than stitching together quotations from earlier authorities, he tried to establish Christian doctrines by reasoned argument alone, an approach he described as faith seeking understanding ^[4]. The Monologion, completed around 1076, offered arguments for God's existence and nature built on reflection about degrees of goodness. Its companion, the Proslogion of about 1077 to 1078, distilled the case into a single famous chain of reasoning now called the ontological argument: God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and such a being must exist in reality and not merely in the mind ^[4].

When Herluin died in 1078, Anselm was elected abbot of Bec. The abbey held lands in England, conquered twelve years earlier by Duke William of Normandy, and Anselm's duties took him across the Channel, where he became a familiar and admired visitor at Canterbury. Lanfranc, his old master, had been Archbishop of Canterbury since 1070, and many in England came to see Anselm as his natural successor ^[2].

Lanfranc died in 1089, and King William II, known as Rufus, left the see of Canterbury vacant for nearly four years so that its revenues would flow to the crown ^[5]. Only in March 1093, when the king fell gravely ill and feared for his soul, did he nominate Anselm, who was then in England on abbey business. Eadmer describes the scene vividly: the reluctant abbot was physically dragged to the sick king's bedside and the pastoral staff pressed against his clenched hand ^[2]. Anselm protested that he was an old man unfit to be yoked to an untamed bull, but he was consecrated archbishop on December 4, 1093.

Conflict came quickly. Anselm insisted on recognizing Urban II as the lawful pope during a papal schism, while Rufus claimed the right to decide which pope England would acknowledge. The two also quarreled over money, over the discipline of the church, and over Anselm's wish to travel to Rome to receive the pallium, the woolen band symbolizing an archbishop's authority ^[5]. A council at Rockingham in 1095 failed to resolve matters, and in 1097 Anselm left England for Rome without royal permission. Rufus promptly seized the estates of Canterbury.

Exile proved productive. Anselm attended the Council of Bari in 1098, where at the pope's request he defended the Latin doctrine on the procession of the Holy Spirit before Greek churchmen, and he completed his most influential theological treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), in the hill town of Liri in 1098 ^[6]. The work argued that human sin dishonors God in a way only a being both divine and human could repair, a position known as the satisfaction theory of atonement that shaped Western teaching for centuries ^[6].

William Rufus died in a hunting accident in August 1100, and his brother Henry I invited Anselm back to England at once, eager for the legitimacy the archbishop could confer on his contested accession ^[5]. Cooperation soon collided with principle. At councils in Rome, Anselm had heard the papacy condemn lay investiture, the custom by which kings handed bishops the ring and staff of their office and received homage from them. He now refused either to accept investiture from Henry or to consecrate bishops who had.

The standoff dragged on for years. Anselm traveled to Rome again in 1103 and found himself in a second exile when Henry barred his return except on royal terms. Negotiation continued through intermediaries, among them the king's sister Adela of Blois, and the threat of Anselm excommunicating Henry concentrated minds ^[5]. In 1105 the two met at Laigle in Normandy and sketched a settlement, confirmed in London in 1107: the king gave up investing bishops with ring and staff, while bishops could still perform homage to the crown for their temporal lands ^[7].

The Concordat of London was a genuine compromise rather than a victory for either side, and historians have noted that it anticipated the better known Concordat of Worms, which resolved the parallel dispute in the Holy Roman Empire in 1122 ^[7]. For the English church, it drew a clearer line between spiritual office and feudal obligation than had existed before.

Anselm passed his final years at Canterbury in relative peace, reconciled with Henry I and occupied with the government of his province. He held a reforming council at Westminster in 1102 that legislated against clerical marriage and, notably, condemned the trade in slaves that still persisted in England ^[5]. He also pressed, with mixed success, the ancient claim of Canterbury to primacy over the archbishopric of York, a dispute that would outlive him by decades.

His pen never rested for long. Late works included De Concordia, an attempt to reconcile divine foreknowledge, predestination, and grace with human free choice, left in finished form shortly before his death ^[4]. Eadmer records that in his last days Anselm remarked that he would gladly accept death, though he wished he might first settle the question of the origin of the soul, since he doubted anyone would solve it after he was gone ^[2].

Anselm died at Canterbury on April 21, 1109, in Holy Week, at about seventy six years of age. He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, and the see he had led remained vacant for five years afterward while king and church again maneuvered over its future ^[5].

Few medieval thinkers cast a longer shadow. Anselm is often called the father of scholasticism because his confidence that reason could clarify revealed truth set the agenda for the universities of the following centuries ^[3]. The ontological argument of the Proslogion has had an extraordinary afterlife: criticized by his contemporary Gaunilo, rejected by Thomas Aquinas, reformulated by Descartes and Leibniz, dismantled by Kant, and revived in modal form by twentieth century philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga ^[4]. Whether or not the argument succeeds, it remains a fixture of every introductory philosophy course, which is a large part of why the question of who was Anselm of Canterbury still gets asked a millennium later.

His theology proved just as durable. Cur Deus Homo supplied the framework within which Catholic and later Protestant writers discussed the atonement, and his devotional prayers and meditations helped shape a more inward, affective style of medieval piety ^[6]. Veneration of Anselm as a saint grew steadily after his death; his cult was recognized in the medieval church, and in 1720 Pope Clement XI declared him a Doctor of the Church ^[8]. His feast is kept on April 21.

Any Anselm of Canterbury biography must also reckon with the man his contemporaries described: a teacher of unusual gentleness who opposed corporal punishment of boys in monastic schools, a friend whose letters reveal deep personal warmth, and an administrator who found high office a burden ^[2]. Among Anselm of Canterbury facts that surprise modern readers, his reluctance to hold power may be the most telling. The achievements of Anselm of Canterbury came not from ambition but from a mind that could not stop asking why the things he believed were true.