What became clear to him? Almost all students of theology, and many students of philosophy, know that there is an argument for God’s existence called ‘the Ontological Argument’. Where is this argument to be found? The usual answer given is that it was first advanced by St Anselm (c. 1033—1109) in his Proslogion. Is the argument a good one? The usual answer is that it is not, and that Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) effectively showed why. In my opinion, however, these answers are wrong. In what follows I shall try to explain why this is so. The effort is worth while because it is important to know what Anselm did argue, and also because, as it seems to me, what he has to offer is much more cogent than what is normally attributed to him.

We can begin by noting the nature of the argument attributed to Anselm by those who see him as the father of the Ontological Argument. It runs like this:

If not from the beginning then from a very early time of his life, Mozart knew both that love in all its diverse manifestations is the rare wonder of our experience and that it is always under attack. At a London breakfast party in 1765, the nine-years old boy was asked by the distinguished lawyer, Daines Barrington, to extemporize a song for the castrato Manzuoli. The singer had befriended the little boy on this London visit and Mozart, with a grin, at once sat down at the harpsichord and began an air composed to the single word Affetto. ‘If this extempore composition was not amazingly capital’, Barrington reported to his fellows at the Royal Society, ‘yet it was really above mediocrity, and shewed most extraordinary readiness of invention’. He had asked for another song, one that might be ‘proper for the opera stage’. Immediately, the boy began a song of Perfido. ‘And in the middle of it, he had worked himself up to such a pitch that he beat his harpsichord like a person possessed’. That Love will ever be dogged by Treachery is the continuing theme of Mozart’s dramma in musica. The writing of operas became, as he told his father in February 1778, ‘an obsession with me’, and, taken together, these operas present as rare an assessment of the great matters of our experience as the philosophy of Aristotle, the sculpture of Michelangelo, or the novels of Henry James. ‘I cannot write a poem, for I am no poet; I cannot get the light and the dark into verse. Neither am I a painter.

Noche Oscura

Ever since Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 150 CE) there has been a tradition within the Christian Church of harmonizing the life of Jesus and blend together the four gospel accounts so as to compose a biography of the Lord. Perhaps nowhere is this tendency to harmonization more clearly demonstrated than in the sayings of Jesus from the cross. In fact, there are seven so-called ‘sayings from the cross’ recorded within our New Testament, but it sometimes comes as a surprise to discover just how these seven sayings are distributed. We note the following table:

1. The Sayings of Jesus from the Cross

• §1.) ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:33/Matthew 27:46)

• §2.) ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.’ (Luke 23:34)

• §3.) ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)

• §4.) ‘Father into your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46)

• §5.) ‘Woman behold your son ... Behold your mother. (John 19:26—27)

• §6.) ‘I am thirsty.’ (John 19:28)

• §7.) ‘It is finished!’(John 19:30)

2. Distinctives in Presentation within the Gospels

The first thing to notice about the distribution of the sayings is that the sole saying recorded in both Matthew and Mark is the same, probably due to Matthew’s reliance upon Mark for the passion narratives in his gospel. This means that if the only gospel we had was Mark, we would have quite a distinctive picture of the crucifixion. Here, the only statement of Jesus is one of extreme dereliction, of forsakeness and isolation.