St. Anselm, the Praying Monk

Several years ago, I was texting another pastor while I was waiting for a somber meeting. I remarked that I at least had Anselm to keep me company. He shot a wonderfully nerdy reply: “That's the greatest way to pass your time that could be conceived.” For those who miss the joke, don’t worry; we’ll come back to it later.

Anselm has been my favorite figure from the Middle Ages ever since I read his famous Why the God Man in my seminary days. It is hard to overestimate his contributions to the church, especially considering the dark times in which he lived. He has been called the greatest theologian between Augustine and Aquinas, and I believe, if there had been no Anselm, Aquinas would not have accomplished what he did.

One of the things I would like to do here is walk you through Anselm’s works as a kind of chronology of his life. What is often done in his biographies, like that by William Shannon, is to treat the whole of his work as if it were written all at once. With Anselm in particular, this leads to a muddled view of who he was, but to view these works in sequence as a display of his evolving thought gives us a very different perspective. In a way, Anselm’s life was prophetic of the reformation, moving from isolated monastic life and veneration of saints to trust in Christ’s justification and assurance of salvation. As Shannon observed, Anselm embodied the words of Augustine: “Our hearts are restless, until they find their rest in you.”

Another reason Anselm appeals to me is the way in which he spans the breadth of the Christian life. He had the soul of a Christian saint, the heart of a poet, and the mind of a scholar. As Thomas Merton said, in Anselm there was no division between scholasticism and mysticism. He engages the heart and the mind, all the while pointing us toward heaven. He lived the life of a sojourner, a scholar, a pastor, and most importantly, a sinner saved by grace.

We have to acknowledge that Anselm was, in part, a product of his age. He was marked as a Hildebrandian reformer, emphasizing (like his mentor Lefranc) the strict, celibate, austere life of a monk. He wrote prayers to various saints and defended the Papacy. But while his earlier writings have a stronger Roman Catholic feel, they stand in tension with what he wrote later in his life.

“Your mercy outweighs all offenses”

Anselm was born around 1033 in Burgundy, now part of France, to a religious mother and a less-religious father. He expressed a desire to enter into monastic life when he was around 15, but his father opposed it. He later said this caused him to go the way of the world for a time, and then left home. He came to Bec Abby, and was persuaded by Lefranc to take the Benedictine vows and join the monastery. In many ways, the character of Anselm would be defined by these vows of St. Benedict. Shannon writes, “Anselm exemplified the picture of the abbot described in rule 64 of the Rule of St. Benedict: ‘Let him strive to be loved rather than feared.’” When Lefranc left to become the Archbishop of Canterbury in England, Anselm took over as the abbot. He was beloved by the monks there who loved him as a father. If we read the accounts and Anselm’s letters to these monks, we find the heart of a pastor. This pastoral concern would drive much of his work and life, even after he became Archbishop.

It was during his time as abbot of Bec that he first began to write. He was an incredibly humble man, but the monks there begged him to put his teachings into writings. A big part of this was a Benedictine practice of lectio divina. A monk would take a text of Scripture or a written prayer and read it repeatedly as a kind of meditation. This was also meant to spur prayer, a kind of priming the spiritual engines. It was to this end that Anselm wrote his prayers and meditations. His later work, the Proslogion would be written in this same form of meditative prayer.

He began with prayer to Christ. Much of this early writing is characterized by a heavy awareness of sin, often with a tone of despair. Anselm embodies the despondency of an age when assurance of salvation was considered presumptive sin and pride. From Christ he moves to prayers directed at individual saints—Paul, Peter, John the Baptist, and Mary. You can sense the conflict within him as he writes. He knows that he is unworthy in and of himself to come before God, but he also sees the sinfulness of the saints to whom he prays. In a startling section, Anslem mentions Peter’s denial of Christ in the midst of a prayer to Peter! Even his reference to Mary as “redemptrix” would appear mixed with doubt, judging from comments Anselm made to his fellow monk, friend, and biographer, Eadmer.

Despite his profound sense of unworthiness, Anselm continually returns in his prayers to Christ as the true way to God. In his second meditation, regarding the insufficiency of his own penitence, he writes, “Of course my conscience deserves damnation, and my penitence is not enough for satisfaction; but it is certain that your mercy outweighs all offenses.”

“I believe so that I may understand”

Anselm’s next work was the Monologion, a meditation on the character of God. He wrestles with the nature of God and the divine attributes. He ponders the immutability of God which would lead to later writings in the Proslogion about impassibility. He works from a then-common assumption that God does what he does because he is what he is, a kind of extrinsic necessity. Later in Why the God Man, Anselm will show a more mature concept of God doing what he does because he wills to do it. Here in the Monologion, we find his examination of God as fully self-realized, that pure independence that God alone has, and how man’s very existence is derived from and dependent upon God. His treatment of free-will and human culpability shows an early Augustinian influence. He speaks of the Christian’s will as gifted and transformed by God, without which he is utterly lost. In other words, he understood the need for regeneration before there could be saving faith.

Around the time of Monologion, Anselm also wrote the Proslogion. In this work, the monk returns to his literary technique of the meditative prayer. It is unfortunate that so many seem to skip straight to the second and third chapters on the ontological argument for God— the argument that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived (hence my friend’s joke)—and miss his poetic introductory prayer.

His phrase of “I believe so that I may understand” is essential to understanding the rest of what Anselm writes. Many have treated the ontological argument as exactly that, an argument for the existence of God, as if Anselm wrote it as an isolated apologetic. As a result, many have disdained it as insufficient. Others, like Descartes, would try to use it as a jumping off point and, while meaning well, cause much trouble in history. But the context indicates something else. Anselm is coming as a believer, a sinner saved by grace, and meditating on the transcendent glory of God. He believes and wants to understand. Shannon summarizes Anselm as follows,

“For believers, reason adds nothing to the certitude of their faith. What it does bring is greater clarity and greater joy. Nor do believers approach faith through reason; rather faith itself leads to understanding.”

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting things about Anselm’s writings throughout is his emphasis on human reason. At first blush, it appears as though he is arguing for the ascent to the beatific vision (what Luther called perceiving God in the nude) by human reason alone. Yet, to look more carefully at what Anselm writes, he is not using reason independent of Scripture or divine help. He is essentially speaking of interpreting Scripture according to the faculties of reason which God has gifted. As he said in his Proslogion,

“Teach me to seek you, and as I seek you, show yourself to me, for I cannot seek you unless you show me how, and I will never find you unless you show yourself to me.”

“…this is the joy and consolation of my life”

While Anselm was serving as the abbot in Bec, Lefranc was in England. When Lefranc died, William II, the king of England, refused to appoint someone else to the position, but instead pocketed the Archbishop’s salary. Providentially, Anselm was visiting England in 1093 when the king fell gravely ill. In a brief moment of conscience, he called for Anselm and named him the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm did not want the position, wanting to return to Bec and serve the monks there in humble obscurity. As the story goes, the other priests would not hear of it. They held back his right arm and pried open his thumb and index finger to force the bishop’s crozier between them. They then carried him, protesting all the while, to the cathedral for his ordination where he finally relented.

The king recovered from his illness, and demanded that he be the one to put the archbishop’s cloak on Anselm. This was an important moment of foreshadowing. There was a practice of what we call lay-investiture that the kings of that era were quite fond of. Symbols of the office would be given by the king or a noble to clergy as a way of saying that they had some degree of authority over the church. The pious Anselm was severely opposed to this. For the cloak, they reached a momentary compromise that the king would place it on the altar of the church, and Anselm would pick it up from there.

During his years as Archbishop, Anselm was characterized by his love of the monks he served. He preferred serving God’s people as a pastor to the prestige of his office. He wrote, “Just as an owl when she is in her hole with her chicks, so it is with me. For when I am with you, all is well with me, and this is the joy and consolation of my life.”

A few years later, this contention over who-appoints-who again came to a head. The king demanded what he thought was his right to appoint clergy, and Anselm demanded to take it up with the Pope. As a result, William II exiled Anselm for the remainder of William’s life. It is my personal opinion that Anselm’s arguments were not so much for the supremacy of the pope, but that the state had no rights over the church.

While Anselm was in Rome, he asked to be released from his position as Archbishop so that he could return to the monastery at Bec to which he had continued to write. The Pope refused, saying that it was clearly God’s will that Anselm one day return to England. However, when the Pope threatened to excommunicate William, Anselm protested that it not be done on his account. After William II died, his younger brother Henry took the throne and invited Anselm to return. Henry would later exile Anselm for another period of three years for the same controversy of lay-investiture.

Progress toward the Heavenly Homeland

During his exiles, Anselm wrote a great number of letters. Perhaps the most notable aspect of the letters of that period is the focus on the sojourning life of a Christian. Anselm was looking toward heaven, which he viewed primarily in terms of absolute perfection, more and more with less attachment to the things of this world. “Since in the exile of this life, I am enjoined never to cease encouraging all whom I can to progress toward the heavenly homeland, I surely ought not withhold this service from those to whom I know I am joined by the debt of love.” It was also during this time that he wrote Cur Deus Homo, Why the God Man.

Here Anselm reached new hights in his thought and devotion. He again writes at the request of others to answer questions, particularly the answer the title asks. In one of the prayers of his early writings, he said, “I was moving toward God, and I got in my own way.” At this stage, he seems to have finally gotten out of the way. He lays aside the saints and Mary and turns his gaze to Christ alone. This is a monumental mile-marker in the development of Christian thought. Anselm takes the soteriology of Augustine, and develops a uniquely forensic perspective of justification. A part of this is to denounce what we call ransom theory, that Christ’s death was to satisfy Satan’s requirements rather than God’s. We see his years of meditation on Scripture’s presentation of God’s sovereignty and justice. He uses another monk, Boso, as a dialogical sounding board for the doctrine of justification. He fleshes out how Christ’s incarnation was necessary for the fulfillment of the law on the behalf of the elect, and how his death satisfied the punishment necessary for God’s justice. All the years of meditation on God’s word culminate in this work wherein Anselm places the whole of his trust on Christ. God used this pious, humble monk to set the stage for another monk 400 years later to spark the Reformation.

As to Anselm himself, the rest of his life would be uncharacteristic of his age due to this grasp of salvation Sola Christo. At his deathbed, Anselm was not anxious over purgatory or penance. On Palm Sunday of 1109, the monks at Canterbury told him he would be in glory for Easter, and he responded that he was ready to go if that was God’s will. Then he said, “If God would prefer me to remain among you, at least until I can settle a question about the origin of the soul, which I have been turning over in my mind, I will welcome this with gratitude.” He never was able to write that book. Shannon records:

“One of the monks read to him the passion narrative that would be used in Mass that day. When he came to the words of Jesus, ‘You are they who have remained with me in my temptations. And I appoint to you a kingdom, as my Father has appointed to me a kingdom, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.’ Anselm began to breathe more slowly. The end had come.”

Conclusion

It is worth noting that most of what we know of Anselm and his life outside his writings are the product of Eadmer’s account. While Anselm was cooperative with Eadmer for most of his life, near the end, he said that his story was not worth recording. He did not want to be venerated by the biography, and demanded that Eadmer burn his manuscript. Eadmer was torn over this, so he did burn his manuscript, but only after making a copy, for which we can be grateful. God used Anselm mightily for the sake of his church, and because of that hope in Christ alone, we can unhesitatingly call Anselm our brother, numbered among the saints now in glory.

Chris Marley is the pastor of Miller Valley Baptist Church in Prescott, AZ. Chris has an M.Div. from Westminster Seminary California (from the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies). He is the author of Scarlet and White.

Related Links

"Abelard & Anselm; or How to Throw Yourself in Front of a Bus" by Bruce Baugus

"The greatness of the weight of Sin" by Mark Johnston

"Surveying the Wondrous Cross: The Atonement in Church History" by Jeff Waddington

Atonement, with J. I. Packer, R. C. Sproul, and Sinclair Ferguson

The Claims of Truth: John Owen's Trinitarian Theology by Carl Trueman