St Anselm of Canterbury
St. Anselm of Canterbury

Early life

Anselm was born into a noble family in Aosta, Italy about the year 1033 His father was harsh and violent. However, Anselm received good religious instruction from his mother, who was regarded as prudent and virtuous .

At the age of fifteen, Anselm desired to enter a monastery but could not obtain his father's consent. In 1059, he left home, crossed the Alps and wandered through Burgundy and France. Attracted by the fame of his countryman Lanfranc (then Prior of the Benedictine Abbey of Bec), Anselm entered Normandy. The following year, he entered the abbey as a novice at the age of twenty-seven.

St Anselm

Years at Bec

In 1063, Anselm was elected Prior of the Abbey of Bec. He held this office for fifteen years until, in 1078, he was elected to Abbot. Under Anselm's jurisdiction, Bec became the first seat of learning in Europe. During these years he wrote his first works of philosophy, the Monologion and the Proslogion. These were followed by The Dialogues on Truth, Free Will and Fall of the Devil.

The monastery grew in wealth and reputation and, after the Norman Conquest, acquired large property in England. It was Anselm's duty, as Abbot, to visit this property on occasion. He became popular among the citizens of England for his mild temper and unswerving rectitude, and was considered by many the natural successor to Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Upon Lanfranc's death, however, King William II made no new appointment. Finally, in 1093 after a great struggle with King William II, Anselm was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury

Archbishop of Canterbury

While holding this office, Anselm continued to have trouble with King William II, then with King Henry I.

In October 1097, William reluctantly granted permission for Anselm to travel to Rome to seek the counsel of the pope, then immediately seized the revenues of the see and retained them until his death in 1100.

His successor, Henry I, invited Anselm to return to England but imposed conditions regarding investiture. The papal rule, however, stated that all homage and lay investiture were strictly prohibited. Henry refused to relinquish the privilege possessed by his predecessors, and proposed that the matter be laid before the pope. In 1103, Anselm himself and an envoy from the king set out for Rome. When he was forbidden to return to England unless on the king's terms, Anselm withdrew to Lyons after this ruling and awaited further action from Pope Paschal. In 1105, Paschal did act, excommunicating King Henry.

In 1106, Anselm was permitted to cross to England with authority from the pope to remove the sentence of excommunication from the illegally-invested churchmen. By 1107, the long dispute regarding investiture was finally settled with a compromise in the Concordat of London, whereby Henry relinquished his right to invest his bishops and abbots but reserved the custom of requiring them to do homage for the "temporalities" (the landed properties tied to the episcopate).

The remaining two years of Anselm's life were spent in the duties of his archbishopric. He died on 21 April 1109.

Writings

Anselm is the first scholarly philosopher of Christian theology. He sought to understand Christian consciousness through reason and develop intelligible truths interwoven with the Christian belief. He believed that the necessary preliminary for this was possession of the Christian consciousness. He wrote, "Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand." According to Anselm, after faith is found, the attempt must be made to demonstrate by reason the truth of what is believed.

The groundwork of Anselm's theory of knowledge is contained in the tract De Veritate, where he affirms the existence of an absolute truth in which all other truth participates. This absolute truth, he argues, is God, who is the ultimate ground or principle both of things and of thought. The notion of God becomes the foreground of Anselm's theory, so it is necessary first to make God clear to reason and be demonstrated to have real existence.

Recognition

Anselm was canonised by the Roman Catholic Church in the year 1494 by Pope Alexander VI. The anniversary of Anselm's death on 21 April is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church, much of the Anglican Communion and in the Lutheran Church as Saint Anselm's memorial day. He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1720 by Pope Clement XI. On 21 April 1909, 800 years after his death, St. Pius X issued an encyclical "Communion Rerum", praising Saint Anselm, his ecclesiastical career and his writings.

References

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_of_Canterbury

The Catholic Encyclopedia:  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01546a.htm