2. Anselm, Proslogion, Preface (pt. 1)
Just a warning, this one gets a bit technical, I do not intend this to be the norm going forward.
The problem with medieval authors is that no one bothers to read them. Anselm is particularly afflicted by this neglect because his arguments, even bowdlerized, retain a certain force which often translates to a kind of irritation on our part when we encounter them today. They're tightly argued, difficult to poke holes in, but they (or at least their conclusions) strike us as somehow wrong. People don't just discount Anselm, they get mad at him, even if what they're getting mad at isn't Anselm himself, but some badly sketched summary that they still find themselves unable to argue against.1 This is especially true of his so-called "ontological" argument.2
It's a shame because Anselm is a brilliant thinker whose works demand and reward serious study. He tends to be very concise, packing a lot of depth into short works. He's careful with his language, precise with his logic, and rarely repeats himself. This requires that the reader pay attention and read very closely.
It speaks to Anselm's brilliance that I believe his style is deliberate, serving a distinct pedagogical purpose.3 For Anselm, reasoning is a sort of rumination, a chewing over, and the act of reading his books forces you into this rumination, otherwise you miss the point.4
So, that's what we're going to try and do here, ruminate.
Specifically, I'm going to do a close read of Anselm's Proslogion, the book where we find the famous and troublesome argument mentioned above. I mention the argument but will endeavor not to dedicate too much time to it. For one thing, a lot of other people have already done that. For another, Anselm dedicates precisely two chapters out of 26 in the Proslogion to it. To reduce the whole of the book to its second and third chapters is absurd, an exercise in missing the point.
Let’s begin.
Something nice about medieval authors is that they tend to tell you right up front what they're hoping to accomplish in their books. Anselm is no different. Indeed, he was notable even among his peers for his efforts to control the dissemination and reception of his works.5
Therefore, we’ll start with the preface.
Anselm begins by telling us that, following the publication of his Monologion, which used a succession of arguments to examine the truths of faith independent of revelation, he wondered if it might be possible to find a single argument: "that for its proof required no other save itself, and that by itself would suffice to prove that God really exists, that He is the supreme good needing no other and is He whom all things have need of for their being and well-being, and also to prove whatever we believe about the Divine Being."
A couple of notes on what Anselm is doing here. The first is that it's obvious that he's trying to accomplish significantly more than finding an argument that proves that God exists. He'd already done that (more than once) in the Monologion. Instead, what he's seeking is a single argument that proves whatever we believe about the Divine Being, an argument in other words from which every one of God's attributes follows.6
He's not, therefore, talking about the ontological argument here, because that in and of itself certainly doesn't prove that God is all-knowing, omnipotent, beautiful, etc., etc. The argument of the second and third chapters is but one facet, one conclusion, which unfolds from the unum argumentum that he seeks.7
But this is weird, because it seems like the ontological argument is a distinct argument, and I just complained about people not taking the rest of the book, all his proofs that God is all-knowing, omnipotent, and so on, seriously. Isn’t the book, just like the Monologion a whole chain of different arguments then? What exactly does he mean by "single argument"?8
Of course, we've all read our Boethius on Cicero, so we know he means something like "a reason that produces belief regarding a thing in doubt."9
It's the doubt that's key.
Think about a question: Is Socrates mortal? We can rephrase this as two dubitable propositions: "Socrates is mortal or Socrates is immortal." We want an argument to know which one we ought to believe, but that argument cannot be contained in "Socrates" or "mortal"/"immortal" because, if it were, then the proposition wouldn't be in doubt in the first place, "the blue house is blue" is not a doubtable thing.10
In the Socrates example, then, what's the argument? It's the middle term, man. Because Socrates is a man, we have reason to believe that Socrates is mortal.
The unum argumentum that Anselm is seeking, therefore, is the common middle term that can link the subject, God, to all the different predicates that are traditionally ascribed to Him: all-knowing, omnipotent, good, etc. Rendered as a categorical syllogism, it would look something like this:
God is [insert unum argumentum here]
[unum argumentum] is omnipotent
Therefore, God is omnipotent
Also, as he mentioned in the passage quoted way back at the beginning of our rumination, it needs to prove itself, which isn't really supposed to be possible in Boethian logic.11
Understandably, Anselm has some difficulty with finding this argument, no matter how hard he strives until in desperation he decides to give up. However, no matter how far he tries to put the idea outside his mind, it presses in relentlessly, even more forcefully than before, until he's worn out by the effort to turn his thoughts away from the argument, to work on other projects, just then, "there came to me, in the very conflict of my thoughts, what I had despaired of finding," the argument: that than which nothing greater can be thought
And with that, we've almost finished with the first paragraph of the preface!
Pascal, with his famous wager, is another great example of this phenomenon.
I say so-called because Anselm didn't call it that, nor did anyone else for a few hundred years, for good reason.
contemporary accounts attest that he was a great teacher
Another element of this is that he forces the reader to consider the existential dimensions of their conclusions, "Here's what you must believe, here's what you must do if you truly hold the position you claim." This is less evident in the Proslogion proper but seems to be his primary method of replying to interlocutors, as we can see over and over again in his dialogues and in the Reply to Guanilo, a concrete instance of him responding to a critic, which was appended by Anselm's request to later editions of the Proslogion.
his extraordinary efforts seem to have largely failed in his lifetime, and given the whole "nobody reads, everyone misunderstands" thing, I guess he really failed in the long run
These attributes even, we shall see, includes God's unknowability, His transcendence of all human conception, the encounter with which will cast us into a sort of intellectual darkness at the height of our mind's elevation to the contemplation of the Divine.
And thus we dispense with one of the stupider objections to the ontological argument, that it doesn't prove that the God whose existence it demonstrates is the God of Christianity. See also, the same stupid objection against Thomas's famous Five Ways or any other pre-modern author's argument that God's existence can be demonstrated.
This is always a key question to ask when reading a pre-modern work and things stop making sense. The meaning of words, especially when used technically, shifts over time, and we're generally pretty sloppy in how we use them today compared to the past. Anselm simply expects his educated medieval readership to know what he's talking about, particularly since "argument" is a Logic 101 sort of word (and logic itself is one of the three core subjects any educated person would be expected to have mastered).
Another example of how terminological confusion can mix us up when reading Anselm is his discussion of the offense that sin does to God's "honor" in Cur Deus Homo. The nature of this offense is fundamental to his theology of atonement, and it's not uncommon for modern readers to be put off by the term. It seems like Anselm considers God to be some easily-offended nobleman, on the verge of challenging humanity to a duel for a sort of social faux pas. Yet, if we read carefully, we find that God's honor is, for Anselm, the order, beauty, and harmony of creation. Puts the whole thing in a very different light.
ratio rei dubiae faciens fidem (that fidem should make you think)
This is distinct from argumentation, which is the expression of the argument. In other words, a syllogism or an enthymeme (An enthymeme is a rhetorical syllogism. So: Syllogism - Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Enthymeme- Socrates is moral because he's a man.) is not an argument, it's argumentation. So, when we talk colloquially about an argument today, we're generally referring to what Boethius and, following him, Anselm would call argumentation.
yes, we're assuming "blue house" is not some house out there that's called "the Blue House" but is actually painted purple, don't be annoying
We’ll talk more about this later, this post is getting long.