In this volume on Anselm for the Great Medieval Thinkers series, Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams set out to provide ‘a fresh reassessment of Anselm's thought as presented in his own writings’ (p. v). It is intended primarily as exposition rather than evaluation, although understandably it is full of evaluation. My immediate reaction to a work such as this is, why not just read what Anselm wrote? After all, much of the bad exegesis to which Visser and Williams refer is based on a failure to read the texts adequately (if at all!). However, it does seem legitimate, given the controversial nature of the history of Anselmian interpretation, to provide an aide to understanding the texts. There seems little doubt that students reading Anselm (in particular, De Grammatico) need some assistance in getting their bearings, so this book is to be welcomed as an attempt to provide such assistance. By its nature and length, it can only skim over much of Anselm's thought, but in its fourteen chapters it provides many useful discussions and pointers.
The work is divided into three parts, ‘The Framework of Anselm's Thought’ (three chapters), ‘God’ (six chapters), and ‘The Economy of Redemption’ (five chapters). It takes a thematic approach. So, for example, discussion of Cur Deus Homo occurs in chapters 1, 10, 12 and 13, and of the Monologion in chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12. This approach allows the authors to show how integrated Anselm's thought is, how ideas from different works mutually support Anselm's ‘program’ (p. 254). However, the risk is that one cannot see the trees for the wood – Anselm's works were all written in a particular context with a particular aim as issues arose, and to that extent it might be doubted that Anselm had a ‘program’. This may also explain why, as the authors point out, Anselm does not express a developed theory of universals or why he does not appear interested in the metaphysical problems of Christology ‘for their own sake’ (p. 239).
The first chapter, ‘The Reason of Faith’, provides a clear and accurate account of Anselm's view of the relation of faith and reason. Anselm expects the believer to accept on faith, but the unbeliever has to be met with rational argument, as his letter to Bishop Fulk confirms (p. 19). There is some attempt to place Anselm within the context of 11th century dialectic with discussions of Lanfranc and Roscelin, but generally the dialectical tradition in which Anselm operates is little discussed. In explaining the argument of De Grammatico, the authors make no mention of the central role of the topics in this tradition (see Peter Boschung's From a topical point of view.) A discussion of the background to Anselm's dialectic might have suggested that there is more to the title, Proslogion, than ‘a bad rhetorical choice’ (p. 74). Surely, it is a ‘Greekification’ of the Latin term ‘proloquium’ (in some manuscripts that's the title given to the Proslogion), which itself is a translation of the Greek Stoic term ‘axioma’. Suddenly, the term becomes dialectically significant, rather than rhetorically bad.
Chapter 4, ‘The Monologion arguments for the existence of God’, contains a discussion of Anselm's view of the relation of ‘goodness’ and ‘greatness’. By ‘greatness’ Anselm is not referring to physical magnitude, but to ‘goodness’ or ‘worthiness’ (p. 61, cf. Monologion 2). The authors miss the clue that one finds here concerning the origins of Anselm's phrase ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’ in the Proslogion. In the Monologion, Anselm distances himself from Seneca's meaning in his Naturales Quaestiones: ‘magnitudo … qua nihil maius cogitari potest’ (I, Pref. 13). He is then able to take up this phrase in the Proslogion, freed from the Stoic conception of God and the world.
In the conclusion to chapter 5, ‘The Proslogion argument for the existence of God’, the authors put forward the essential structure of the argument in Proslogion 2 as:
To me this seems to have moved far beyond Anselm's text. As Desmond Henry pointed out there may be non-divine necessary beings, which is why I would suggest Anselm eschewed such language in the Proslogion. For Anselm, ‘necessary being’ is not to be equated with God, whilst ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’ is.
In chapter 6, ‘The Divine Attributes’, the authors ask whether Anselm is a ‘presentist’ or ‘eternalist’. He is, they suggest, ‘unequivocally a presentist’ (p. 101). Not only that, he is also an ‘endurantist’, since he states in Monologion 21: ‘A human being exists as a whole yesterday, today and tomorrow’ (p. 102). But if that is what Anselm says, then he is not a presentist. Herein lies one of the problems or benefits (depending on your point of view) of this kind of book. What Anselm actually says is ‘quemadmodum homo totus est heri et hodie et cras, proprie dicitur quia fuit et est et erit’. It is only by going back to the text that the student can realize that the confusion in the argument is due to the authors’ choice of quotation, rather than a confusion in Anselm.
This book attempts to cover the whole range of Anselm's written work and does so surprisingly effectively, given its length. (See for instance the discussion of modality in chapter 10 and the section on Anselm's soteriology in chapter 13.) This comes at the cost of spreading the argument too thinly at times. The success of Anselm should be measured on whether it will encourage students to pick up Anselm's writings and (re-)read them. That was certainly the effect on me. The frequent references to Anselm's works would be better captured in the text or in footnotes, rather than in endnotes.
