4. Proslogion, Preface (pt. 3), But Why?
When we last left Anselm, he'd just discovered, seemingly in a flash of insight, the unum argumentum which proved itself and demonstrated "whatever we believe about the Divine Being." But why write up this insight in a book? It's not like there are any roving Sam Harrises in 11th-century Normandy arguing that God doesn't exist or that if He does exist, He's not omniscient, wise, and so on.1 Nor is Anselm engaging apologetically with the rival world-pictures of the time. There's little in the Proslogion that a Muslim or Jew would disagree with, as opposed to something like Cur Deus Homo.2 He's also not writing a textbook like Thomas's Summa where demonstrations of God's existence and for His attributes have an obvious place.
Instead:
Judging, then, that what had given me such joy to discover [i.e. the IQM] would afford pleasure, if it were written down, to anyone who might read it, I have written the following short tract dealing with this question as well as several others, from the point of view of one trying to raise his mind to contemplate God and seeking to understand what he believes.
A few lines later he tells us that the work was originally distributed under the title Fides Quaerens Intellectum, Faith Seeking Understanding.3 Thus, it's the last of the reasons Anselm gives that seems key here.
A brief aside to justify this claim: Honorius Augustodunensis may or may not have been Anselm's student. He certainly was Anselm's contemporary, likely lived and worked in the same community (at least for a little while), and admired his work.4 In fact, Honorius is one of the primary ways that Anselm's ideas spread throughout Europe, particularly in Germany. Anyway, the point is that we can safely take Honorius as an authority on the general outlook of Anselm's time.
Honorius's works tended to be oriented toward beginners and provided a lot of guidance on how texts out to be interpreted. One of his big pieces of advice is to pay attention to titles because a title serves "as a sort of key. Just as a gate is opened by a key, so our understanding of a work is opened by its title."5 Let's assume, then, that the title should guide how we read Anselm's little tract.
So, what does it mean to understand?
We come to know things through seeing them. We see a tree in our front yard and say, "there's a tree in our front yard." We can, through our senses, distinguish the maple tree in our yard from the oak tree across the street and, through comparison with a mental image, from the pine tree in our parents' yard. Using reason, we can discursively sift through the concepts and images stored within our memory to search for causes, examine the consequences of our concepts, affirm or deny dubitable propositions, and through all this, we can be said to know things.
But understanding is different, somehow participating in both modes of knowing. The things we understand are apparent to us. We do not arrive at them through a discursive process but as something given, in the same way, that the presence of the above-mentioned tree is given to the senses through a sort of inner seeing. Yet, the objects of the understanding aren't objects of sensory apprehension. They're of a higher order.
I'll again turn to Honorius, who distinguishes three types of vision each with their own sorts of object. Our physical eyes see physical things, sense impressions from objects in the world around us. The eyes of the spirit see those same objects as they are rendered as phantasms in the memory, shades of the object without now present within. Finally, there is the third sight, for which we utilize the “eyes of the mind” or “eyes of the heart.” Its object is, to quote Josef Pieper, the "simple vision of truth as it offers itself to the mind."
offers itself6
The object of this vision does not lie outside or within us, but beyond and over us. It is a grasping of the truth of things, at a deep and intuitive level. Honorius compares it to being able to distinguish grammatical forms or to recognize the truth of mathematics, and an example that I recently encountered was of recognizing the presence of life. We simply know.
And that's the purpose of the Proslogion, to elevate the reader to this sort of contemplation, to enable them to see what they believe.
Since he's not just talking about belief in general but belief regarding the Divine Being the truth of which simply is the Divine Being,7 this means the purpose of the Proslogion is to help the reader see God, and seeing God is salvation. To behold God in contemplation is to receive a foretaste of Heaven. It's no accident that the tract ends with a description of the joys of heaven because, by the end, that's precisely where you're supposed to be (or at least on the way).
Pretty neat.
One final note on the preface. Anselm tells us that after copies of the book had begun to circulate under the title Faith Seeking Understanding, he decided to rename the book Proslogion, "that is, an allocution." To use a more common English word, an exhortation.
Titles are important. Who's being exhorted and to what?
There's a pretty compelling argument to be made that atheism was simply not a "live option" as world-picture during the Middle Ages.
interesting to note that while Anselm does suggest the argument of Cur Deus could be used apologetically, his primary motivation seems to have been the same as the Proslogion, contemplation.
Note, this is not because faith for Anselm means something along the lines of “belief without reason.” If it did, then Anselm's writings, not just the Proslogion but the Monologion and Cur Deus Homo as well, would destroy faith, certainly not something he's interested in doing.
I tend to roll with Johannes Trithemius, the fifteenth century author who first recorded a connection between the two men and claimed that Honorius was Anselm's singularis amicus, singular friend.
also, "just as the rising sun illuminates the world, so a title illuminates the work that follows."
Note, this is exactly how Anselm discovered the IQM, it offered itself to him, even as he tried to resist.
this is actually true of all truths, but super-duper true about God's attributes