Medieval Europe · 1033–1109
Anselm of Canterbury
Benedictine monk and Archbishop of Canterbury
Faith seeks understanding. God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, and such a being must exist in reality, not only in the mind: the ontological argument.
Life and thought
Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, in the Alps, and crossed into Normandy to study at the abbey of Bec under the scholar Lanfranc. He became prior and then abbot there, and in 1093 succeeded Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury, where quarrels with English kings over the Church’s rights sent him twice into exile. He died in 1109.
His motto was “faith seeking understanding”: he did not reason his way to belief, but tried to understand by argument what he already believed. In the Proslogion he defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. Even a fool who denies God understands this phrase, so such a being exists at least in the mind. But a being that existed in reality as well would be greater; so if it existed only in the mind, it would not be the greatest conceivable. Therefore it exists in reality. A monk, Gaunilo, replied at once with a perfect island; Aquinas and Kant rejected the argument; Descartes and Leibniz revived it.