_{St. Anselm and His Work}

(c. 1033 – 21 April 1109)

By

A. C. Welch

 

Professor Jasper Hopkins: Anselm of Canterbury containing English translations of nearly every major work by St. Anselm

I. The Val d'Aosta: 1033 or 1034-1057

II. Sainte Marie du Bec: 1034

CHAPTER III. Monk, Prior, and Abbot:1059-1092

CHAPTER IV. The Monologium and Proslogium

CHAPTER V. The Church in England: 1062-1087

CHAPTER VI. Election as Archbishop: 1092-1093

CHAPTER VII. Rockingham : 1093-1095

CHAPTEK VIII. The Rupture at Winchester; 1095-1097

CHAPTER IX. The First Exile and 'Cur Deus Homo': 1097-1098

CHAPTER X. Councils of Bari and Rome:1098-1100

CHAPTER XI. The Investiture Question. Anselm and Beauclerk: 100-1103

CHAPTER XII. The Concordat:1103-1107

CHAPTER XIII. Conclusion: 1107-1109

 

INTRODUCTION. Revival of Religion in the 10th and 11th Centuries

 

Europe in the early half of that eleventh century into which Anselm was born was renewing itself under the influence of a quickened religious spirit. Christianity in the Western world had two great outward struggles with paganism, the first with a paganism which was already in possession and was rich in the accumulated treasures of an older civilization, the second with a paganism which sought to repossess itself of Europe and to overwhelm in barbarism the new order almost before it had struck root. The early incursions which broke down the Roman Empire had hardly been survived, and their influence had not been assimilated, before an equally heavy storm burst upon the West. The Avars from Asia, ever fertile of men, thrust themselves into the centre of Europe, and wasting everything on their way penetrated through Austria. The Saracens already possessed North Africa, and had with difficulty been restricted within the limits of Spain; they had captured Sicily and were not unknown before the walls of Rome. The Danes had seized on England: the last of England’s missionaries to the Continent were fugitives from wrecked monasteries. From heathen Scandinavia the Normans had carved a cantle out of France, and were in no way content with the rich lands which they had won.

During several generations Christendom had seen one province after another of her territory torn away by aliens to her civilization, her law, and her faith. The circle within which the light of a better order shone was small. And the light itself within the circle inevitably burned more dimly. Men needed all their strength for war. They were compelled to fight for standing-ground on behalf of the truths and institutions which they had already made their own. They had neither time nor energy left to rethink those truths or to reshape those institutions. To protect themselves against the enemy from without was their prime concern, and all their effort in thought as well as in deed was turned in that direction. Society had come to be constituted on a basis of war. Its recognition was given to those who could fight, its rewards to those who had fought well. Even the institutions which owed their inception to a different purpose were influenced by the same spirit.

The Church was secularized. The bishops often became ministers of State, partly because there were no others who had the capacity to fulfill that necessary function, still more because it was the most obvious Christian duty to support the civil power in its struggle with heathenism. Sometimes the Church dignitaries became warriors, because the State had as much need of their swords as of their prayers. Nor is it necessary to conclude that the motive which drove them to buckle on their armor was base.

When the Avars were at the gate a priest might be pardoned for leaving his oratory and joining battle. But the inevitable result followed in a deeper secularization. Men were chosen to ecclesiastical office, not for their religious but for their secular prowess. That they had the capacity for affairs, or were strong men of their hands, became a reason why they were chosen to fulfill religious duties. And the men who were so chosen were compelled by circumstances to think most about that side of their work for their generation. What was an additional advantage in a Churchman became his chief qualification. Necessary it might be, inevitable in the circumstances of the time it certainly was. But, had it continued, the result would have been that the Church would have lost sight of its spiritual functions and that society, thinking only of the necessities of the hour and engrossed in present needs, would have failed to receive the stimulus and vivifying breath which only the Church of Christ, conscious of higher ends than those of the present hour, can give.

With the indomitable power of recovery and of returning for fresh inspiration to its Founder, which is one of the best proofs of the eternal power in Christianity, the tenth and eleventh centuries saw a revival of religion break across Europe. So soon as Christendom had won a clear space in which to pray and think, the Church returned to its specific task. There was abundance of work calling for attention. It had to recast its own thoughts about God and man. The brutalized manners which a long-continued state of war had brought on Christian Europe must be tempered by the spirit of the Crucified. The new strong-blooded nations which had found a lodgment within the Christian pale needed to be disciplined. Some of them were outwardly subdued. But, though Norman dukes and Danish earls accepted Christianity for themselves and forced its forms on their reluctant subjects, the conversion was only skin-deep. Even the princes did not greatly understand and could not heartily obey the faith they compelled their subjects to profess.

Pagans, not merely in inward inclination but in outward practice, were found among the peasantry of Normandy for a century or two after Anselm had written his argument for the being of God in one of its convents. Because there was so much and so varied work to do, the revival of those centuries took several forms. It was as multiform as the life of which it taught its generation a new valuation. Three of the directions in which the deepened religious sense flowed need to be mentioned here, not because they were the most important, but because Anselm represented and helped to guide them. As Churchmen grew conscious of having their own specific message, they realized how different in its aims the Church must be from any of the kingdoms of the earth, and how the qualifications which made men citizens of the nations were ill-fitted to make "fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God".

The contrast between society as it is and society as Christ meant it to be can never cease to trouble the Church, if it is to be the salt of the earth. Every revival of religion makes that more troublesome. And the corruption of morals which had followed on long war, the deeper corruption which saps a society that has organized itself as a camp when the peril from without has ceased to threaten, drove the conviction of the contrast more sharply home to the conscience of the Church.

A Puritanic movement with its cry of "Come out, and be ye separate" spread through Western Christendom. It took an old form common to both East and West, but new needs brought into it a new spirit. The form was that of monasticism. The monks were the Puritans of the early mediaeval age. New monasteries sprang into being: Cluny, Clairvaux, Citeaux begin to be, and to be one of the most potent forces in Church and State alike. But though the form was old and in many respects familiar, the spirit was different. That most of the European monasteries accepted the rule of St. Benedict or framed new rules not unlike his great creation is in itself an indication of how new was the spirit which informed these foundations. The impelling motive was as before that men might save their souls alive, but they construed the method differently. They were not so entirely governed by the Manichean conception of the flesh being itself evil, which in Eastern monkery lamed so much wholesome activity and, e.g., thrust into morbid prominence celibacy as the only form of chastity. Its presence cannot be denied. But it was no longer the controlling impulse in this revived monasticism. Rather was the fundamental impulse social.

Men found themselves in a society which was based on war. So long as the war was waged against the infidel to keep Europe clear of paganism, the evil had been concealed. But when the threat of heathenism was withdrawn, the result it had produced oh society remained. After heathen Norman and Dane had become outwardly Christian, the princes and dukes turned against each other the weapons the use of which they had learned to love and the passions they had not learned to control. Each wasted and ravaged the other’s lands, slew or led into captivity the other’s vassals. With a dreary monotony they passed from sacking a neighbour’s tower to repelling an assault on their own. And the essential irreligion of it all became more manifest when it was Christian men who thus fought with each other. What had the Church to say to this state of affairs? The Church might and did enter to check excessive cruelty and to bid men show mercy after the battle was over. But had the Church nothing to say as to the constitution of society, which made such things possible, and which made them seem to many natural and inevitable? Many men in the disgust and weariness which a society so constituted must bring had looked back and seen the ideal of a society which was based on love toward all men and on a consequent peace. And, longing for it yet unable as matters then stood to realize it, they went out of society altogether, and strove to build up a society for themselves on a new basis, the new and ever old basis of the obedience to Christ. What drove them first was the need to save their own souls and the recognition that while they remained where they were they could not save their souls alive. They became monks and more particularly Benedictines, men who vowed themselves to service rather than to destruction, to love rather than to strife.

But this clearer vision on the part of the Church as to its own specific purpose in the world had a further result. So long as the distinction between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of Christ was not present to men’s minds, there could be little conflict between the two institutions which represented these, and such conflict as did arise between Church and State could be determined by easy compromises which did not touch principles. But so soon as the Church grew conscious of how far its ideals were its own and came not from an earthly but a heavenly Master, it was sure to raise the question of ecclesiastical method. Every revival of religion must bring to the front the relations between Church and State. A Church which is conscious of its peculiar dignity and of its special ends will never be content to have its officials appointed and its policy dictated by men who must construe its purpose from a different stand­point. The conflict was certain; that it was so bitter was due to its novelty. While the efforts of the civil power were largely directed to keep Christendom from being submerged, the Empire maintained in men's imagination the sacrosanct character it had long borne. Its aims not unworthily represented the kingdom of God on earth.

The Church, facing the immediate task and content to accept the State-ideal largely as its own, could well submit to have its methods of government controlled for such ends. While the bishops were State functionaries, and much of their energy was exhausted in fulfilling duties of a civil character, they might readily be appointed to office and even elected by the head whose work they aided. But when this temporary condition passed, and when Church officials realized anew their spiritual functions, they began to chafe, and the best among them to chafe most, against what now became an outside interference. The period saw the long strife over investiture. The merit of Hildebrand as an ecclesiastic is that he saw the issue so clearly and clung steadily to one principle. He struck at the centre of things when he claimed that religious men—the college of cardinals, and neither emperor nor king—must appoint the chief dignitary of the Church. He wrought from the centre out when he demanded that no archbishop should be consecrated until he had received the pallium, the symbol of his spiritual authority, from a pope so elected. He developed the system of legates who kept the several national communions in close touch with the revived centre of authority. He strove to break the custom which had grown up of making Church dignities hereditary property and the appanages of great families by his canons against simony and in favor of clerical celibacy.

Certainly the old idea of the superior sanctity of celibacy came to his aid, and he used it unhesitatingly. High Churchmen have often been heedless what heresy they helped to promote, if only they could compass their immediate end. But to him celibacy was not merely an end in itself; it was the means through which he overthrew the great ecclesiastical families and brought Church dignities under the control of the Church itself. It is not difficult to see the evil results of much of this policy and to recognize that it contained germs of evil which were later to blossom rankly. The idea of clerical celibacy brought a gross conception of the religious life, which needed to be flung off in the exaggerated protest of the Renaissance. The legates continually interfering with the government of local churches drew all initiative into the centre, until, overloaded with problems it was incompetent to answer and questions it could not understand, it simply ceased to act. The system which, at a time when the centre at Rome was full of fresh spiritual and moral life, sent life through every limb of the great body ecclesiastic made the corruption more swift and potent when the popes were Borgias. A means which religious men have used to promote a religious end often becomes a strangling cord round the neck of their less religious successors, who count themselves the inheritors of their fathers' purpose when they have only taken over their fathers' methods. But in its beginning the movement was the outcome of a new spiritual life within the Church itself. The more devout spirits welcomed it most heartily. The monks were Hildebrand's best supporters; the outcome of the religious revival, they recognized and furthered a movement which had its roots in the same soil.

And finally the deepened sense of religion produced a new interest in theology. Men had been fighting for several generations, they now began to think of the matters in defence of which they had unconsciously fought. Schools were founded. The monasteries began to copy the older literature and to write their own thoughts. The thirst for knowledge spread and drew men together. Hundreds of students flocked to Abelard's lectures. Men travelled across half Europe to have the opportunity of learning from Lanfranc. In these centuries the scholastic theology and philosophy had their birth.

And St. Anselm, as monk at Le Bec, as archbishop of Canterbury, as author of the Monologium and Cur Deus Homo, bore his part in this threefold movement. He entered into it all, because he was a man of genius who was also a profoundly religious man.

And in no one man of the time is it possible to study its movement more purely than in him. The man dwelt with God. His work is the expression of that. It is not always possible to be sure about the cleanness of Hildebrand’s hands. Not all the temptations of power nor all the greatness of the issues involved can excuse the inhumanity which Canossa proved to lurk in the pope, or expel the suspicion of an overweening pride. We confess to finding it difficult always to respect Bernard of Clairvaux, and his reiterated speech about humility makes the pride of the ascetic more open. One cannot entirely like Thomas a Becket. He leaves the impression of posing and of striving to live up to his part. Anselm leaves on one student of his lifework the impression of entire sincerity. He is one of the monks to whom the austerities and restraints of the convent have become a second nature. They have ceased to limit him, and consequently have become his support. The monk’s cowl is part of himself. He stands up before William Rufus and Henry Beauclerk to fight the battle of the liberty of the Church in England. He fights it uncompromisingly, but through all his battle gives the impression of one who fought not for the interests of his order, but for what he believed to be the interests of the kingdom of heaven. He writes on the most abstruse questions with an extraordinary boldness, which the fact of his agreement with the opinions received by his Church should never conceal. Boldness in thought is too often claimed as the monopoly of the heterodox. In and through all his work the man stands as a wholesome man, answering with what power he can, in the light of the strong religious convictions he holds, the questions with which his time brings him face to face. And so he has his reward. For, whether men agree or disagree with the answers he gave, they cannot fail to honor the spirit in which he did his work, and must end by loving the clean-souled, high-minded monk who, while seeking only to serve his generation according to the will of God, has made more clear to all after generations how that time presented itself to the eyes and to the efforts of men like himself.