Anselm Of Canterbury Research Articles

Ohlasy satisfakční teorie ve spise Richarda ze Sv. Viktora Ad me clamat ex Seir

In his celebrated writing Cur Deus homo, Anselm of Canterbury († 1109) proposed the first systematical treatise on Christian soteriology in history. The greatest influence of Cur Deus homo lies in the concept of Christ's redemption which is interpreted as satisfaction, with this being the specific idea which continues to attract the attention of theologians. One of the first promoters of Anselm's idea was Richard of Saint-Victor († 1173), who, in his work Ad me clamat ex Seir, focused on the idea of satisfaction in connection with the additional soteriological questions. In comparison with Anselm's, however, Richard's concept of satisfaction is extremely different. This article deals with the relationship between Anselm's and Richard's thinking in general, but also focuses on the acceptance of Anselm's thinking in Ad me clamat ex Seir and analyses the acceptance of the term satisfaction as a soteriological category in Richard's writing. It also mentions those aspects of Richard's work which are original and the solutions to the aforesaid questions which he proposes.

World

This paper is the second of a two-part essay that aims to examine anthropologically the category “world.” The first part argued in favor of a single-world approach and for the unavoidable centrality of personhood in the human condition. In this second part of the essay, I address the metaphysical implications of the category “world” and relate them to the process of “worlding,” thus defending the continued heuristic value of the old anthropological category of worldview. I suggest that a consideration of the Ontological Proof of God’s existence, developed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the late eleventh century, helps us develop a comparative theory of personhood by showing how the experience of transcendence is inherent in personal ontogenesis.

Anselm of Canterbury and Dionysius the Areopagite's Reflections on the Incomprehensibility of God

Anselm of Canterbury and Dionysius the Areopagite's Reflections on the Incomprehensibility of God

A Logical Analysis of the Main Argument in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion by Anselm of Canterbury

The primary aim is the reconstruction of the main argument of the second chapter of Anselm’s Proslogion. To be proved is the statement that God, or something than which nothing greater can be thought, exists in reality. I proceed by a piecemeal analysis of every sentence of the Latin original and its subsequent translation into a formal second-order language with choice operator. Reconstructing Anselm’s reasoning demands interpretative input and additions. For example, the formula ‘quod maius est’ has to be suitably interpreted and expanded. Furthermore, I try to explicate Anselm’s maius predicate in terms of a perfection predicate and to develop a general proof for Anselm’s theorem, i.e. the statement that something/that than which something greater cannot be thought has all greater-making attributes.

The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury, by Samu Niskanen

The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury, by Samu Niskanen

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word. By Eileen C.Sweeney. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 403. Cloth, $74.95.

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word. By Eileen C.Sweeney. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 403. Cloth, $74.95.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury and Charismatic Authority

The early career of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109) provides an opportunity to explore the operation of charismatic authority in a monastic setting. It is argued that the choice of Anselm for the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury in 1093 was the result of his growing reputation cultivated during his years as prior and abbot of the influential Norman monastery of Bec. The article explores various aspects of Anselm’s charismatic authority including his performance of charisma, the charisma derived from his fame as a scholar, and his reputation as a miracle-working holy man.

“To Know Christ in the Father, Christ in the Flesh, and Christ in the Eucharist”: The Comprehensive Scope of Classical Christology in the Twelfth Century

219 The Thomist 78 (2014): 219-45 “TO KNOW CHRIST IN THE FATHER, CHRIST IN THE FLESH, AND CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST”:1 THE COMPREHENSIVE SCOPE OF CLASSICAL CHRISTOLOGY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY BOYD TAYLOR COOLMAN Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts CHOLARLY INTEREST in the theology of the “long twelfth century” shows no signs of abating.2 On the contrary , the ongoing conversation has reached the point where revisionist approaches now question earlier commonplaces .3 At the same time, despite agreement about the existence of this distinct era in the High Middle Ages, little consensus exists about how best to characterize its chief concerns, characteristics, and accomplishments. Indeed, a remarkable variety of “theological styles” coexists in a century that includes figures as diverse as Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, Hildegard of Bingen, Peter Lombard, and Peter Comestor—to name only the more well-known. In the mid-twentieth century, one historian characterized this period as “the most uncompromisingly christocentric period of 1 Baldwin of Ford, De sacramento altaris, ed. and French trans. J Morson, E de Solms, and J Leclercq, Sources chrétiennes 93-94 (Paris,1963). 2 “Long” reflects a consensus that a unity encompasses the forms of theological discourse that flourished in the period between (roughly) the Eucharistic debates in the 1050s and the Gregorian reforms of the 1070s, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the formal incorporation of the universities (especially at Paris), the fuller assimilation of Aristotle, and the appearance of the Mendicant Orders in the first three decades of the 1200s. 3 Rachel Fulton Brown, “Three-in-One: Making God in Twelfth-Century Liturgy, Theology, and Devotion,” in European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 468-97. S 220 BOYD TAYLOR COOLMAN Western civilization.” 4 Since then, a cottage industry has focused on the twelfth-century “discovery” of and devotion to the humanity of Jesus.5 Yet, recently the Dominican scholar Gilles Emery has argued that “the Trinitarian question constitutes the great theme of twelfth-century theology,”6 which inaugurated the “golden age of Trinitarian reflection in the West.”7 Yet again, if one considers the Eucharistic debates between Lanfranc and Berengar in the 1050s and the pronouncements of Lateran IV in 1215, and then observes in between the avalanche of treatises with the words “body and blood” in their titles, one could also claim the twelfth as the century of the Eucharist. So—Christ, Trinity, Eucharist—which is it? Or is this a false question, created by problematic assumptions of modern historians? Recently, Rachael Fulton Brown, a leading religious historian of the twelfth century, has 4 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University, 1957), 61. More precisely, Kantorowicz intends “roughly, the monastic period from 900 to A.D. 1100” (ibid.). That the scope of his observation deserves to be extended somewhat will be borne out below. 5 The literature on this theme is vast. In the middle of the twentieth century, R. W. Southern observed: “This power of St. Anselm and St. Bernard to give varied and coherent expression to the perceptions and aspirations which they shared with their contemporaries is most clearly seen in their treatment of the central theme of Christian thought: the life of Christ and the meaning of the Crucifixion. The theme of tenderness and compassion for the sufferings and helplessness of the Saviour of the world was one which had a new birth in the monasteries of the eleventh century, and every century since then has paid tribute to the monastic inspiration of this century by some new development of this theme” (R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages [New Haven: Yale University, 1953] 231). See also Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University, 2002). For later developments, see Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University, 1997); and Paul Gondreau, The Passions of Christ's Soul in the...

Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy. Edited by Giles E.M.Gasper and IanLogan. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2012. Pp. xii + 461. $95.00.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy. Edited by Giles E.M.Gasper and IanLogan. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2012. Pp. xii + 461. $95.00.

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word by Eileen C. Sweeney, Catholic University of America Press, Washington DC, 2012, pp. xv + 403, $74.95, hbk

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word by Eileen C. Sweeney, Catholic University of America Press, Washington DC, 2012, pp. xv + 403, $74.95, hbk

The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550)

The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550)

Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy (Durham Medieval and Renaissance Monographs and Essays, vol. 2). Edited by Giles E. M.Gasper and IanLogan. Pp. xii, 461, Durham University, Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012, $95.00.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy (Durham Medieval and Renaissance Monographs and Essays, vol. 2). Edited by Giles E. M.Gasper and IanLogan. Pp. xii, 461, Durham University, Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012, $95.00.

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word by Eileen C. Sweeney (review)

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word by Eileen C. Sweeney (review)

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word. By Eileen Sweeney

Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word. By Eileen Sweeney

Anselm of Canterbury on Affectio(Section 3,Research Reports,THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION)

Anselm of Canterbury on Affectio(Section 3,Research Reports,THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION)

Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1330 by Ian P. Wei (review)

Reviewed by: Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1330 by Ian P. Wei Gillian Adler Ian P. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012) 462 pp. The notion of universitas did not originally imply the academic institution. Rather, the Latin term in its ancient etymology meant “the whole” or “the total.” Only later did it come to describe a corporate body organized by law, and eventually it was used to refer exclusively to communities of higher education. The abstraction of universitas transformed into literal centers of learned authority, established in major European locales like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford during the Middle Ages, and becoming the modern schools of advanced learning of today’s world. While little evidence of the birth of the university survives, Ian P. Wei’s new book Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1330 explores its foundations and development in Paris and the greater region of northern France during the Middle Ages. This study offers a comprehensive examination of the intellectual, social, and religious currents that formed the background to academic life, and gives new insight into the history of a broad range of concepts that became the basis of not only the modern university, but also the fields of philosophy, religion, law, and history. Wei draws connections between the spirited scholarly pursuits within the university and the broader movements of medieval Europe, and focuses especially on these interactions’ effects upon the urban center of Paris. Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris treats diverse intellectual approaches of the most influential minds of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, giving evidence that scholarly life during the medieval period was contentious, vibrant, competitive, and inventive. Chapter 1 focuses on the achievements of the twelfth-century schools of northern France, institutions that placed new emphasis on texts and on contexts of learning, shaped particularly by “the lure of logic,” that departed from those of the monastic and cathedral schools of prior centuries (17). Tracing the intellectual developments of Abelard, John of Salisbury, Adelard of Bath, and Bernard Silvestris, among others, Wei offers strong evidence and thorough explanations of emerging philosophies, but also connects new ways of thinking to the growth of key debates and conflicts concerning the interpretation of texts, which laid the foundation for a highly selective and competitive university life. At the same time as a diversity of opinions marked the conversations of major thinkers, consensus on the use of dialectic and syllogistic reasoning, on the terms of basic education, and on the textbooks that should be required for students, showed a kind of standardization and systematization that benefitted centers of learning and the status of Paris as a pre-eminent seat of theology and philosophy. The next chapter examines the influence of monastic change and the new religious orders of the twelfth century upon the secular and scholarly world of Paris. Supplying extended textual evidence which allows students to engage with historical sources critically, Wei proposes detailed accounts of the [End Page 360] philosophies of figures like Anselm of Bec and Canterbury, whose Proslogion established his ontological proof of God’s existence, and Bernard of Clairvaux, who drew on the same written traditions of Anselm but whose scholarship on the Bible, and specifically the Song of Songs, emphasized the intimacy of one’s experience with God. The contest between the approach to God through contemplation, mysticism, and personal experience, and, on the other hand, through reason and logic, leads Wei to explain the relationship between monks and schoolmen during this period and to show how “conflicts were exacerbated by the personalities of men like Bernard and Abelard” (77). Demonstrating the sheer variety of intellectual methods in this culture, Wei ultimately envisions Hugh of Saint Victor as a culmination of such debates, developing “a synthesis of the approaches characteristic of schools and monasteries,” examining the schools like a monk and reacting to religious experience as a scholar (78). The relationship between schoolmen and preachers in the twelfth century becomes even more dynamic during the thirteenth century, when institutional changes at the University of Paris, including the Statutes of 1214...

‘Bycause the redyng shold not turne hem to enoye’: Reading, Selectivity, and Pietatis Affectum in Late Medieval England

Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes sive meditationes, written in the late eleventh century, influenced generations of later authors of devotional and mystical literature, and the prologue to the Orationes, in particular, was repeatedly translated and reworked by vernacular authors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England. This essay examines the textual and codicological contexts in which this prologue occurs in four late medieval manuscripts, and situates Anselm’s prologue within broader theoretical conversations regarding the respective values of indexical and affective modes of reading. Although selective modes of reading are at times perceived as being less sophisticated than those that engage with written works more comprehensively, the late medieval interest in translations of Anselm’s prologue indicates that reading selectively could be seen as a sophisticated method for engaging the reader’s emotions so as to propel him or her towards a more devout and pious lifestyle.

Anselm of Canterbury and the desire for the Word

Anselm of Canterbury and the desire for the Word

Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish (review)

Reviewed by: Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish David Luscombe Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish. Edited by Cary J. Nederman, Nancy Van Deusen, and E. Ann Matter. [Disputatio, Vol. 21.] (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers. 2009. Pp. ix, 308. €60,00. ISBN 978-2-503-52756-7.) Marcia Colish has published widely and influentially on the history of medieval thought. This Festschrift celebrates her valuable achievements with thirteen essays written in her honor, some boasting witty titles, eight of them on twelfth-century topics, five on later ones up to Machiavelli. Great figures are present: St. Anselm of Canterbury, Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, Gratian of Bologna, and Nicholas of Cusa, among others. Important themes, too, are here: theories of language, the devil, Christology, the sources of law, wonders, programs of study, music, princely virtues, and saints’ cults. And the contributors are well-established scholars. An excellent evaluation of notions of schools of thought—Porretans, nominalists, and so forth—in the study of twelfth-century history is made by William Courtenay (“Schools and Schools of Thought”). Gary Macy (“Fake Fathers”) finds that canon law discussions of the role of women in the Church were most often based on spurious authorities. Arjo Vanderjagt (“Constant Exercise”) brings to life links between modern devotion and humanism in northwestern Europe in the late-fifteenth [End Page 531] century with a study of a letter of Rudolfus Agricola offering pedagogical advice. Grover Zinn (“Minding Matter”) unpicks the discussion by Hugh of St. Victor of a (now lost) symbolical drawing of Noah’s ark that denotes the Church as the body of Christ. One of Colish’s books was on The Mirror of Language (New Haven, 1968), and, appropriately, her interests in language are reflected in an amusing essay by Mary Sirridge on the content and functions of vocative and substantive phrases such as “I am called” and “I am.” Priscian’s “rambling” and “notoriously cryptic and episodic” discussion of these, she writes (p. 97), “in no way discouraged medieval commentators from trying to extract a consistent theory from his remarks.” Willemien Otten (“Broken Mirrors”) also writes on theory of language and Abelard’s teaching on the Incarnation, but he loses the reader when he writes that Abelard sees “incarnational teaching resulting in an intersubjective human process of universal learning by which Redemption can ultimately be the result of one teacher’s unusual talent” (p. 86). M. B. Pranger shows how St. Augustine’s exclusion of evil from being shaped the thought of Pope Gregory the Great, Anselm of Canterbury, and Heinrich von Kleist about the devil. In an interesting way Jason Taliadoros challenges Colish’s assessment of the controversy in Anglo-Norman circles over Lombard’s Christology, but his attempt to bring John of Salisbury into these debates (pp. 139–40) is not successful. Edward M. Peters’s essay on Gervase of Tilbury (“The Lady Vanishes”) usefully adds to knowledge and understanding of twelfth-century stories about edifying and memorable wonders. Nancy Van Deusen provides a most helpful study of the Timaeus in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa. E. Ann Matter shows how Alberto Alfieri in the early-fifteenth century happily turned Macrobius’s swirling realm of the heavenly spheres into a Christian vision of the afterlife. Cary Nederman suggests that Poggio Bracciolini and Machiavelli were not so startling in their views on greed since Nicolas Oresme and Christine de Pizan in the fourteenth century were already heading in a similar direction. Joel Seltzer vividly shows how Hussite radicals in fifteenth-century Bohemia dismantled the practices that accompanied the cult of saints, yet by the early-sixteenth century the Utraquists in Prague “celebrated St Jan Hus Day with all the hoopla of a national holiday” (p. 297). Occasional misprints notwithstanding, these “Mind Matters” are well worth reading. They are opened and brought together with an appreciation by the volume’s editors of Colish’s published work. David Luscombe University of Sheffield Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

The Fruits of Exile. Anselm of Canterbury and Lyons

Modern historians have given considerable interest and scrutiny to the political and papal circumstances surrounding Anselm of Canterbury’s exiles, casting a particular eye on the influences and events by which it was realised. Significantly less attention, however, has been given to what Sir Richard Southern has dubbed ‘the fruits of exile’, a concept expanded here to include the effective governance of the church of Canterbury from across the English Channel. Anselm’s dedication to ecclesiastical affairs in absentia, evidenced through his residence at Lyons (in Burgundy) from May 1099 to August 1100 and again from December 1103 to March 1105, is intriguing, unprecedented, and deserving further investigation. This paper examines Anselm’s governance of Canterbury from afar, his intimate relationship with the archbishop of Lyons, and the extent of his clerical activity in Burgundy -factors which help realise the true nature of exile and friendship in the High Middle Ages.