Anselm (1033-1109)

Martin Jenkins recalls the being of the creator of the ontological argument.

To Italians, he is Anselm of Aosta; to the French, Anselm of Bec; to the English, Anselm of Canterbury. If you’re a Catholic, you can dodge the nationalism by calling him ‘Saint Anselm’. But whatever you call him, Anselm is probably the most important thinker of the eleventh century, and he was responsible for one of the big philosophical ideas about God which is still discussed today: the ontological argument for God’s existence.

Anselm was born about 1033 in Aosta in northern Italy. At some point he quarrelled with his Lombard noble father Gundulf, and began the life of a wandering scholar. In eleventh century Europe, abbeys and monasteries were the only institutions offering any sort of teaching; they were the nearest things to universities. So Anselm travelled through Burgundy and the Loire valley before reaching the Norman abbey of Avranches, in the north of France. Then in 1059 Anselm moved from Avranches to the abbey of Bec.

Bec was a peculiar abbey. It had been founded twenty-five years before by Herluin, who was still its abbot. Herluin, a former knight, was committed to a life of poverty. In 1041, Lanfranc, another Italian, moved to Bec from Avranches, where he had been a teacher. Herluin eventually convinced Lanfranc, who had reverted to being just a humble monk, to resume teaching – and so the abbey of Bec, founded on principles of poverty by a knight who was no intellectual, became a centre of learning, in which Lanfranc was its prior, in effect, the abbot’s deputy.

Anselm studied under Lanfranc, and in 1060 was invested as a monk. Lanfranc, meanwhile, having become a principal counsellor to Duke William of Normandy (later William the Conqueror), left in 1063 to become the abbot of the men’s monastery at Caen. This led to Anselm’s becoming the principal teacher at Bec. In 1078, he became its abbot, too.

Anselm the Teacher