On Truth

Truth, Anselm argues, is a kind of rightness: a statement, a will or a thing is true when it is as it ought to be.

Latin, the original language

Original title: De veritate
First published: 1080(aged 47)
Original language: Latin

Overview

Thomas Aquinas, starting his Disputed Questions on Truth in Paris in the 1250s, set out in his very first article the definitions he meant to reconcile, and one of them was Anselm's: truth is a rightness that only the mind can perceive. The definition comes from this dialogue between a teacher and his student, composed at Bec in the 1080s, when Anselm was abbot there. It begins with statements. A statement is true when it says that what is so is so, and that is what statements were made to do; its truth is its doing what it ought. The dialogue then follows the same idea through thought, will, action, the senses and finally the being of things, and finds rightness at every stage: a will is true when it wills what it ought, and a thing is true when it is what the highest truth made it to be. That highest truth has no beginning and no end, and Anselm identifies it with God. All the other truths are one truth, present in many true things the way time is one in many things that happen in time, and Aquinas took up that comparison too, to qualify it. Along the way the dialogue defines justice as rightness of the will kept for its own sake, and the definition carries straight into On Freedom of Choice. Anselm grouped the two with On the Fall of the Devil as three treatises on the study of Scripture, written at different times but in the same question-and-answer form. Some readers in a hurry had copied them in another order before they were finished, and Anselm insisted that they stand in his. They have often travelled together since; Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson published them in English in 1967 as Truth, Freedom, and Evil.

Key concepts

What does Anselm mean by “rectitude”?

Rectitude is rightness: being or doing what something ought to be or do. Anselm’s word is the one used for a straight line, and he contrasts the two. A stick’s straightness can be seen with the eyes. The rightness he calls truth can be perceived by the mind alone, because seeing it means knowing what a thing is for. Hence his definition: truth is rightness perceptible only to the mind.

What are the two truths of a statement?

A statement has one truth always and another only sometimes. “It is day” was made to say that it is day, and it says so even at night; doing what it received the power to do is its natural truth. It also has the truth of saying what is actually so, which it has only in daylight. Most people only mean the second, and Anselm thinks the first is what makes the second possible.

What is the “highest truth” in On Truth?

The highest truth is the truth that makes everything else true and owes nothing to anything. Every other truth consists in being as the highest truth wants it to be, so a true statement or a true will is true by answering to it. Because it was never not true that something would come to be, Anselm argues, the highest truth can have no beginning or end, and he identifies it with God.

Can an action be true or false, according to On Truth?

Anselm argues that actions signify, just as words do. Since nobody should do anything except what they ought, whoever does something says, by doing it, that it ought to be done. A deed done rightly therefore says something true, and a deed done wrongly says something false, even if no word is spoken. Truth and falsehood reach far beyond what people say.

Themes of the book

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

Truth as a Kind of Rightness

What do a true sentence, a true friend and a true diamond have in common? The dialogue’s answer is that each is as it ought to be, and that only the mind can see this rightness.

The teacher starts with the most familiar case, a statement, and finds its truth in doing what statements were made for. Then he carries the same rightness through opinion, will, action, the senses and the very being of things. Fire that heats does the truth, because it does what it was given to do. The senses report correctly even when a straight stick looks broken in water; the fault lies with the judgment that reads them. At the top stands a highest truth with no beginning or end, and every true thing is true by one truth, as all simultaneous events share one time.

truth
rectitude
signification
propositions
semantics
language
perception
sensory knowledge
error
judgment
definition
universals
eternity
immutability
time

Enter a dialogue

Rightness Kept for Its Own Sake

When is doing the right thing really just? The dialogue answers that it depends on why the will holds to what is right, and on nothing else.

From truth the dialogue turns to justice and defines it as rightness of will kept for its own sake. A stone falling downward does what it should, but it does so by nature and not by willing, so it is not just. Only a rational nature can recognise rightness and want it. A person who does the right thing under compulsion or for an outside reward wills rightly, but keeps that rightness for something else. Only someone who keeps it because it is right is just. The definition becomes the foundation for the two dialogues that follow, on freedom and on the devil’s fall.

justice
will
moral responsibility
action
normativity
obligation
intention
agency
evil
divine providence

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 46
distinct concepts: 66
by passages held, corpus-wide: #662

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: “rectitude” and “truth”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 37 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
rectitude	truth	16
justice	will	8
language	truth	8
action	truth	7
language	rectitude	7
action	rectitude	6
justice	moral responsibility	5
moral responsibility	rectitude	5
rectitude	will	4
action	will	3
justice	rectitude	3
moral responsibility	truth	3
moral responsibility	will	3
truth	will	3
action	language	2
action	moral responsibility	2
language	moral responsibility	1
language	will	1

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.

1076 Monologion
The earliest of Anselm's books about God and the longest he wrote at Bec, composed in the mid-1070s while he was still prior there.
LA
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
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
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
1080 On Truth (De veritate) you are here LA
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

— or open another of their works