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WorkAnselm of Canterbury

Monologion

Asked by his monks to argue without appeal to Scripture, Anselm reasons his way from the good things of this world to God and the Trinity.

by Anselm of Canterbury144 passages held

  • Latin, the original language
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First published
(aged 43)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Lanfranc, Anselm's old teacher and by then Archbishop of Canterbury, was sent a copy of this book for his approval, and he objected that it argued without appealing to the authorities. The objection touched the book's whole design. The monks of Bec, the Norman abbey where Anselm was prior, had asked him to write down what he had been telling them about God, and they had set the conditions themselves: nothing was to be proved by the authority of Scripture, the style was to be plain and the arguments ordinary, and even the objections of simple people were to be answered. Anselm refused for a long time before giving in. What he produced is a meditation in which one mind, reasoning silently with itself, works out what God must be. It starts from the many things we call good and argues that they are all good through one thing that is good through itself. From there it climbs to a single highest nature on which everything else depends for its existence, and then, still by reason alone, to an account of that nature as Father, Word and the love between them. He had not expected it to travel beyond the monks, but others began copying it, and he defended it in a preface asking any reader who found it new or false to read Augustine's On the Trinity first and judge it by that. He kept the method Lanfranc disliked. Within a few years he was dissatisfied with the book for a different reason: it needed a long chain of arguments, and his search for a single argument produced the Proslogion. He gave the book its present name only when Hugh, Archbishop of Lyon and the pope's legate in France, ordered him to put his own name on it.

Key concepts

What is the “supreme nature” in the Monologion?

The supreme nature is the one thing that exists through itself, while everything else exists through it. Anselm reaches it by elimination: whatever is caused, made from some material or helped into being by an instrument exists through something else, and so comes after that thing and is less than it. The highest nature can come after nothing and depend on nothing. It is not made from nothing either, because it is not made at all.

What are the three ways of speaking in the Monologion?

Anselm notes that we can speak of one thing in three ways: aloud, with signs others can hear; silently, by saying the same words to ourselves; or with no words at all, by holding the thing itself before the mind. The third is the same in every language. The thought of a man, rather than the word “man”, is speech of this kind, and Anselm uses it to describe how the world first existed in its maker’s mind.

Why does Anselm call God “simple”?

Saying that God is simple means he has no parts and no qualities added to him, so whatever is truly said of him is what he is. A just man has justice; the highest nature does not have justice but is justice itself, and the same holds for its wisdom, life and goodness. All these words therefore name one and the same thing. Anselm concludes that it cannot change and cannot be divided.

What is a rational creature for, according to the Monologion?

A rational creature exists to love the highest being. Anselm argues that the power to remember, understand and love was impressed on the mind by nature, and that the creature’s task is to express that likeness by its own will, by actually loving what it was made able to love. A love that will not end calls for a life that will not end, which is why he concludes that the soul lives forever.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One Good Behind All Goods

Can a mind with no Scripture in hand reason its way from ordinary good things to God? The first chapters try, and stake the whole book on reason alone.

Anselm starts where anyone can: a strong, fast horse is good because it is useful, a strong, fast robber bad because he does harm, and we rank natures, so that wood is lower than a horse and a horse lower than a man. Things good to different degrees must be good through something, and he argues it is one thing, good through itself. The same reasoning leads to one nature that exists through itself and gives existence to everything else. Before the world was made, he adds, it already existed in its maker's thought, as a craftsman first says over to himself what he is about to make.

  • goodness
  • highest good
  • existence
  • causation
  • dependence
  • creation
  • nothingness
  • metaphysics
  • essence
  • substance

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Everywhere and Always, Yet Nowhere

How can anything be present everywhere without being spread out, or last forever without growing older? The answer decides what words can say about God at all.

Whatever is said of the highest nature, Anselm argues, is not a quality it has but what it is: it does not have justice, it is justice. It has no parts, so it cannot be partly here and partly there, partly earlier and partly later. It must therefore be whole in every place and every time, and in another sense in no place and no time, because no place contains it and no time measures it. Our words about it, he concedes, fit it only from a great distance, the way a likeness fits what it portrays.

  • eternity
  • space and time
  • time
  • divine simplicity
  • immutability
  • divine attributes
  • predication
  • analogy
  • divine unity
  • divine nature

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A Mind That Speaks Itself

Can reason alone arrive at a God who is one and also three? Anselm tries, starting from the way a mind remembers, understands and loves itself.

A mind that understands itself forms an inner word of itself, and Anselm argues that the highest spirit does so perfectly: its word is not a copy outside it but equal to it, born of it as a son from a father. The spirit remembers itself, understands itself and loves itself, and the love proceeds from both. A human mind, which can remember, understand and love that highest being, is its mirror and image. Made for that love, Anselm concludes, the rational soul was made to live forever. Even so, he admits, three of what he cannot say.

  • trinity
  • divine word
  • divine love
  • divine generation
  • procession
  • language
  • divine knowledge
  • divine essence
  • beatitude
  • immortality

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
144
distinct concepts
161
by passages held, corpus-wide
#427

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “creation” and “divine word”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
creationdivine word12
divine naturemetaphysics10
divine wordtrinity10
creationmetaphysics8
divine attributesmetaphysics8
divine lovetrinity8
creationdivine nature7
creationdivine simplicity7
divine simplicitymetaphysics7
divine attributestrinity5
divine simplicitydivine word5
divine attributesdivine simplicity4
divine simplicitytrinity4
divine wordmetaphysics3
creationtrinity2
creationdivine attributes1
creationdivine love1
divine attributesdivine love1
divine naturedivine simplicity1
divine naturedivine word1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1076 Monologion you are here LA
  2. 1078 Proslogion

    The book by which Anselm is known: twenty-six short chapters composed at Bec in 1077 and 1078, a year or two after the Monologion.

     LA
  3. 1078 Reply to Gaunilo (Liber apologeticus contra Gaunilonem)

    A treatise Anselm did not choose to write: his answer to a critic of the Proslogion, in which he restates its argument point by point.

     LA
  4. 1080 De Grammatico (De grammatico)

    The odd one out on Anselm's shelf: a short exercise in logic for beginners, of disputed date, which he refused to count among his dialogues on Scripture.

     LA
  5. 1080 On Truth (De veritate)

    The first of three dialogues Anselm wrote at Bec in the 1080s and later arranged as a set, with On Freedom of Choice and On the Fall of the Devil.

     LA
  6. 1085 On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)

    Builds on the definition of justice reached in On Truth, and supplies the account of the will that On the Fall of the Devil then tests on the first sin of all.

     LA
  7. 1085 On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)

    The longest of the three dialogues from Bec and Anselm's fullest account of evil, worked out on the case of the angels who fell.

     LA
  8. 1094 On the Incarnation of the Word (Epistola de incarnatione Verbi)

    A letter turned treatise, begun by the abbot of Bec around 1092 and finished by the Archbishop of Canterbury two years later, addressed to the pope.

     LA
  9. 1098 Why God Became Man (Cur Deus homo)

    The founding text of the satisfaction theory of the atonement, in two books, completed during Anselm's first exile from England.

     LA
  10. 1099 On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato)

    A sequel to Why God Became Man, written a year later for Boso, the questioner of that dialogue, to give a second answer to a question it had raised.

     LA
  11. 1102 On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (De processione Spiritus Sancti)

    Given first as a speech at a council and written up four years later: the treatise in which Anselm argues not with a pupil or a critic but with another church.

     LA
  12. 1107 De Concordia (The Compatibility of God's Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Human Freedom) (De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio)

    Anselm's last completed treatise, written in 1107 and 1108 after his second exile, and his answer to a question the student had raised in On Freedom of Choice more than twenty years before.

     LA
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