Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Canterbury
April 21 · d. 1109
also known as Anselm of Aosta, Anselm of Bec
Anselm was born at Aosta about 1033, entered the abbey of Bec in Normandy in 1060, and served as its prior and then abbot before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury on 4 December 1093. He wrote the Monologion, the Proslogion and Cur Deus Homo, and twice went into exile rather than concede the church's liberties to a king. He died at Canterbury on 21 April 1109. Clement XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1720.
Anselm was a boy of Aosta, a Burgundian town on the edge of Lombardy, and before he was fifteen he went to an abbot and asked to be made a monk. The abbot said no, because the boy had not his father's consent. His father Gundulf was a hard man of violent temper; his mother Ermenberga was the gentler of the two, and when she died the house became unbearable. Anselm left. He wandered Burgundy and France for about three years, a young man with nothing settled about him except a hunger to learn.
What he was walking toward, though he did not know it, was Bec, and at Bec was Lanfranc, the most famous teacher in Normandy. Anselm reached the abbey in 1060 and entered it as a novice at about twenty-seven. In three years the pupil was prior. In fifteen more he was abbot. And in those quiet years, between the accounts and the offices and the correspondence, he wrote the things that outlasted every kingdom he ever argued with. He began the Proslogion not as a lecture but as a prayer, addressing God directly: "Teach me to seek thee, and reveal thyself to me, when I seek thee, for I cannot seek thee, except thou teach me, nor find thee, except thou reveal thyself." Then, a few lines on, the sentence that became the motto of a whole age of Christian thought: "For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand." The translation is Sidney Norton Deane's.
The names Monologion and Proslogion came later. In the Preface Anselm records what the two books were called before that: "I accordingly gave each a title, that the first might be known as, An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith, and its sequel as, Faith Seeking Understanding." Faith seeking understanding is what the second chapter of the Proslogion sets out to do. Still speaking to God rather than to a reader, he lays down the description that the next nine centuries would argue over: "we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived." Then the turn. If such a being were in the understanding only, then a greater could be conceived, namely the same being existing in fact as well; so the thing than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot be a thought and nothing more. Philosophers call this the ontological argument and have been taking it apart and putting it back together ever since. Anselm left it where he wrote it, in the middle of a prayer.
Then England took him. Lanfranc had gone on to Canterbury and died, and King William Rufus left the see empty for four years and pocketed its income. Falling ill and frightened, the king named Anselm archbishop; recovering, he wanted the bargain back. Anselm was consecrated on 4 December 1093, and almost at once the two men were at odds. Anselm offered the king five hundred marks; the king refused the sum as too small, and Anselm would not raise it, because a larger payment would have looked like buying his office. When the pallium came from Rome in June 1095, the king expected to hand it over himself, as though the archbishop held his church from the crown. Anselm would not take it from his hand. The papal legate laid it on the altar, and Anselm took it up from there. It is the whole quarrel in a single gesture, and it cost him: in October 1097 he left England altogether.
Exile was not idleness. In Italy he finished Cur Deus Homo, the book that asks why God became man, written as a conversation with a monk named Boso who keeps pressing the obvious objections. When Boso guesses that one small sin, one glance against God's will, might be washed out by a single pang of regret, Anselm answers him: "You have not as yet estimated the great burden of sin." That is the hinge of the whole argument, and James Gardiner Vose's translation gives it plainly. In October 1098 Pope Urban II set him in a place of honour at the Council of Bari to argue the procession of the Holy Spirit before the Greek bishops.
Rufus died, and Henry I recalled him, and within three years the same quarrel had opened again and Anselm went into exile a second time, in 1103. What ended it was a sickbed and a sister. Anselm heard that Henry's sister Adela was ill, turned aside to visit her, and told her when she recovered that he was going to England to excommunicate her brother. She set at once to arranging a meeting, and in July 1105 the archbishop and the king met and began to make peace. He came home in 1106, and at the Council of London in 1107 the thing was settled: the king gave up investing bishops with ring and crosier, and bishops did homage to the king for their lands. Two exiles, twelve years, and in the end a formula both sides could live with.
He had two ordinary years left. He died at Canterbury on 21 April 1109, and they buried him beside Lanfranc, at his teacher's head. His body was moved after the cathedral burned in the 1170s and no one now knows where it lies, which is a strange ending for so careful a man. But he had written to his sister Richeza years before to place her death daily before her eyes, and to consider what she would find waiting that had been sent on ahead. He had already sent everything on ahead. What he asked for in the Meditations was one thing only: "Grant, I pray Thee, that my sole love and sole desire may be Thyself."
You have probably been told, at some point, to work out what you believe before you commit to it, and Anselm turned that instruction inside out: he believed first, and then set his whole mind to understanding what he had believed, and he did it on his knees, addressing God rather than an audience. The same man who could not be bribed or flattered out of his office wrote that he could not so much as seek God unless God taught him how. That is not a small thing to hold together. Where in your own life have you been waiting to understand something before you will trust it, when the order might run the other way?
The life of Anselm is unusually well documented for the eleventh century, and almost all of the intimate part of it comes through one man. Eadmer of Canterbury met him in 1078 or 1079, became his chaplain from 1093, and by his own account was scarcely separated from him thereafter. Eadmer wrote the Vita Anselmi, compiled about 1124 from notes taken during Anselm's lifetime, and the Historia Novorum in Anglia, covering the years 1066 to 1122. Everything personal descends from him: the childhood at Aosta, the refusal by the abbot, Anselm's own retelling of his youth. He is a devoted partisan, writing to establish Anselm's sanctity and Canterbury's independence of the crown, and modern scholarship (chiefly R. W. Southern, whose Saint Anselm and His Biographer appeared in 1963) has examined how far that shapes the portrait. The stories should be read as one close man's testimony, which is a great deal more than most saints of the period leave behind.
Anselm's own writings are the other body of evidence, and they are large: the Monologion, the Proslogion, Cur Deus Homo, De Veritate, De Libertate Arbitrii, De Casu Diaboli, De Concordia, De Processione Spiritus Sancti, the Meditations, and roughly 475 letters. The manuscript situation is uneven. MS Bodley 271, from Christ Church Canterbury, is the earliest collected edition of his works; it has sometimes been suggested that Anselm oversaw its compilation, but Southern dated the manuscript to the decade after 1120, which is after Anselm's death. The letters survive through what the editors call an immensely complicated tradition: no original sent or received letter survives, and no manuscript can be confidently identified as one Anselm himself authorized. The critical edition of the treatises is F. S. Schmitt's, completed in six volumes between 1946 and 1961; the current critical edition of the letters is Samu Niskanen's for Oxford Medieval Texts, whose first volume, on the Bec letters, appeared in 2019 and drew on nearly thirty manuscripts.
Dates. His birth is given as about 1033 by the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica; the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907 gives no year at all, and modern reference works hedge to a window between April 1033 and April 1034, back-calculated from Eadmer's report that he was about twenty-seven when he entered Bec in 1060. Entry to Bec in 1060, the priorate in 1063 and the abbacy in 1078 are agreed. So are the consecration on 4 December 1093, the pallium on 10 June 1095, the departure into exile in October 1097, Bari in October 1098, the second exile from 1103, the return in 1106, the settlement of 1107, and the death on 21 April 1109, which is the one date no source disputes. The council at Rockingham is given as March 1095 by one source family and as February by another, so it is best cited as February or March 1095.
The canonization is the contested part, and the contest is over process rather than fact. Local veneration began at Canterbury within a generation. On his election in 1162 Thomas Becket petitioned Pope Alexander III to canonize his predecessor, and made the request at the Council of Tours in 1163; John of Salisbury wrote a Vita Sancti Anselmi that same year expressly as the supporting dossier. Alexander directed Becket to convene a council of English prelates to decide it, and that council appears never to have met: Becket's own quarrel with Henry II broke out and he fled into exile. A formal papal act is dated 1494 under Alexander VI, at the request of Archbishop Morton, though some sources give 1497, and whether the act is best described as a canonization or as papal sanction of a devotion already long established is a fair question. Clement XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1720, and that, unlike the canonization, is firmly documented.
Anselm is kept on 21 April across the traditions that keep him: as an optional memorial in the Roman Catholic Church, as a lesser festival in the Church of England and across the wider Anglican Communion, and in parts of the Lutheran tradition. In art he carries the ordinary marks of an archbishop, mitre and pallium and crozier and book, and one attribute of his own: a ship, read as the spiritual independence of the church, which is a fair emblem for a man who twice crossed the sea rather than surrender it.
He has no shrine. He was buried at Canterbury at the head of Lanfranc, south of the Altar of the Holy Trinity, but the choir was rebuilt after the fire of the 1170s and where his remains were then placed is not known. In December 1752 the Sardinian ambassador asked Archbishop Herring for leave to carry the relics home to Aosta, which lay in his king's territory; the Canterbury prebendaries resisted, and nothing was moved. What stands in St Anselm's Chapel today is a memorial rather than a tomb: an altar carved by Stephen Cox from Aosta marble banded with white quartzite, a gift from the people of the Valle d'Aosta, consecrated on his feast day in 2006 with the Bishop of Aosta and the Abbot of Bec present. Aosta, Bec and Canterbury in one stone.
Anselm's principal works are available in English in the Open Court volume of 1903, reprinted 1926, hosted freely by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/basic_works.all.html. Readers should note a common misattribution: Sidney Norton Deane translated the Proslogion, the Monologion and the appendix containing Gaunilo's reply, but Cur Deus Homo in the same volume is James Gardiner Vose's translation, first published serially in Bibliotheca Sacra in 1854 and 1855.
The quotations above are located as follows. "Teach me to seek thee" and "For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand" are both from the Proslogion, chapter I, in Deane's translation: https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/basic_works.iii.ii.html#iii.ii-p8. "I accordingly gave each a title, that the first might be known as, An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith, and its sequel as, Faith Seeking Understanding" is from the Proslogion Preface, in the same translation: https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/basic_works/basic_works.iii.i.html. The words "we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" are from the Proslogion, chapter II, likewise Deane: https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/basic_works/basic_works.iii.iii.html. "You have not as yet estimated the great burden of sin" is from Cur Deus Homo, Book I, chapter XXI, "How great a burden sin is," in Vose's translation: https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/basic_works.vi.ii.xxi.html. "Grant, I pray Thee, that my sole love and sole desire may be Thyself" is from the Eighth Meditation, "The Penitent's Address to God His Father," section 36, in the 1872 translation signed only "M.R." (title page at https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/meditations.ii.html); the passage itself is at https://ccel.org/ccel/anselm/meditations.iv.viii.html. The counsel to Anselm's sister Richeza and her husband Burgundius is Letter 258 in Schmitt's numbering, translated by Walter Fröhlich in The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, Cistercian Studies 97; it is reproduced with Schmitt's Latin by Columbia University's Epistolae project at https://epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/letter/379.html, which reserves all rights.
The critical Latin edition of the treatises is F. S. Schmitt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, six volumes, Edinburgh, 1946 to 1961, superseding Dom Gerberon's editions of 1675 and 1721, reprinted at Venice in 1744 and by Migne in Patrologia Latina 158 and 159. The letters are being re-edited by Samu Niskanen for Oxford Medieval Texts, volume I, The Bec Letters, 2019. Eadmer's Vita Anselmi and Historia Novorum in Anglia are the contemporary lives; an English translation of the Vita, edited and translated by R. W. Southern (Nelson, 1962), is at https://archive.org/details/lifeofstanselm0000unse, through Internet Archive controlled lending rather than in the public domain. The standard modern biography is R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, 1990, with his earlier Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 1963.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Anselm special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52