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WorkAnselm of Canterbury

Proslogion

A prayer with a proof inside it: the short argument that God cannot even be thought not to exist, attacked and rebuilt for nine centuries.

by Anselm of Canterbury47 passages held

  • Latin, the original language
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First published
(aged 45)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Eadmer, the Canterbury monk who became Anselm's biographer, tells a story about the first draft of this book. Anselm wrote his new argument on wax tablets and gave them to one of the monks to keep, and they went missing. He wrote it out again, and the second set turned up with the wax broken to pieces, which he fitted together before having the whole copied onto parchment. The argument he took such trouble over is the one now called the ontological argument. After the Monologion, which had needed a long chain of reasoning, Anselm wanted one argument that would need nothing but itself, and for a time the search gave him no rest; he tried to put it out of his mind, and then one day the argument came to him. Even the fool of the Psalms, who says in his heart that there is no God, understands what is meant by a being so great that nothing greater can be thought. Such a being exists at least in his mind. But a being that also existed in reality would be greater still, so the greatest conceivable being cannot exist in the mind alone. The rest of the book, written as a prayer, draws from the same idea that God must be just, merciful, beyond suffering and one. Anselm first called it Faith Seeking Understanding. Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier near Tours, soon answered it on behalf of the fool, and Anselm asked that Gaunilo's objection and his own reply be copied with the book. Thomas Aquinas rejected the argument in the thirteenth century; René Descartes built his own version in the seventeenth; Immanuel Kant classed it among the ontological proofs and rejected those too. In the twentieth century Norman Malcolm and Alvin Plantinga rebuilt it with the logic of what is possible and what is necessary.

Key concepts

What does “that than which nothing greater can be thought” mean?

It is Anselm’s description of God: something so great that nothing greater can even be thought. It does not say what God is made of or looks like, only where thinking runs out. That is its strength. Anyone, believer or not, can understand the phrase, and the whole argument works on what follows from understanding it, so the fool of the Psalm can be met on his own ground.

What is the difference between existing in the mind and in reality?

A thing can be in the mind without being in reality, as a picture is in a painter’s mind before he paints it, and after he paints it, it is in both. Anselm’s argument turns on this difference. If the greatest thinkable being were in the mind alone, a greater one could be thought, the same being existing in reality too. So it cannot be in the mind alone.

How can someone think “God does not exist” if God cannot be thought not to exist?

Anselm distinguishes two ways of thinking something. One can think the word that names a thing, or one can understand what the thing actually is. Thinking only the word, a person can say that fire is water, or that God does not exist. Understanding what God is, nobody can think that he does not exist. This is how Anselm explains the fool: he said the words in his heart without understanding them.

What is the “single argument” Anselm was looking for?

The single argument is what the Proslogion was written to find: one line of reasoning that needs no other to support it and shows both that God truly exists and that he is the highest good, needing nothing and needed by everything. Anselm had found the Monologion too long a chain of arguments. Here one idea does the work, and the later chapters draw God’s justice, mercy and eternity from it.

Themes of the book

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

What Even the Fool Understands

Can the mere meaning of a phrase show that God exists? Anselm stakes his most famous argument on a claim that the unbeliever already understands enough to be refuted.

Anselm wanted one argument that needed nothing but itself, and he set it inside a prayer. Whoever hears the words “something than which nothing greater can be thought” understands them, so the thing is at least in the mind, the way a painting is in a painter’s mind before he paints it. If it were only in the mind, something greater could be thought, namely the same thing existing in reality. It cannot even be thought not to exist. The fool says otherwise, Anselm explains, because he thinks the words without thinking the thing they mean.

  • ontological argument
  • divine existence
  • knowledge of god
  • faith and reason
  • analogy
  • divine nature

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Seeking a Face That Hides

Why does someone who already believes still feel that God is out of sight? The prayer around the proof is a search that the proof does not end.

The book opens not with a premise but with a plea: the reader is told to withdraw from business into the inner room of the mind, and the voice complains that it was made to see God and has never seen him. Anselm treats that absence as a fact about fallen human beings, not about God. Even after the argument succeeds, the seeker finds that God lives in light too bright to approach and is greater than anything that can be thought. The last chapters turn to the joy promised to the blessed, measured by how much they love and know.

  • prayer
  • longing
  • contemplation
  • joy
  • hope
  • beatitude
  • divine transcendence
  • fall

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Merciful Without Feeling Pity

If God is so great that nothing could make him greater, how can he be both just and merciful? Each answer tests what the argument has proved.

From the same idea of the greatest thinkable being Anselm draws God’s attributes: whatever it is better to be than not to be, God is. Then the attributes seem to collide. God is all-powerful, yet cannot lie; merciful, yet cannot be moved by pity; just, yet spares the wicked. Anselm answers each collision in turn. Lying is a weakness, not a power. Mercy is felt in us as its effect, not in God as a feeling. Sparing the wicked is just because it befits a goodness than which nothing greater can be thought.

  • divine mercy
  • divine justice
  • divine goodness
  • forgiveness
  • divine attributes
  • divine simplicity
  • power
  • sin
  • eternity

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
47
distinct concepts
85
by passages held, corpus-wide
#660

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: “divine justice” and “divine mercy”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 9 pairings. 42 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine justicedivine mercy5
divine goodnessdivine mercy4
divine attributesdivine simplicity3
divine goodnessdivine justice3
divine goodnessdivine simplicity2
divine simplicityeternity2
beatitudedivine goodness1
divine attributesdivine mercy1
divine attributeseternity1

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

    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
  2. 1078 Proslogion you are here 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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