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Anselm's Formula and the Logic of ‘God’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Paul M. van Buren
Paul M. van Buren
Affiliation:
Professor of Religion, Temple University
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Extract

Anselm built his meditation Proslogion on the formula ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’. The peculiarity of this phrase has been often remarked but not, I believe, fully appreciated. Properly understood, I shall argue, this formula, although unable to support the so-called ontological argument, throws important light on the logic of the religious use of the word ‘God’. My argument will turn on the difference between the two uses of the verb ‘conceive’ in Anselm's claim that we can conceive of that than which nothing greater can be conceived.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 1973 , pp. 279 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

page 279 note 1 Although the concern of this paper is philosophical, not historical, some awareness of the historical context of Anselm's Proslogion will aid in its proper interpretation, as we shall see.

page 279 note 2 I am following the reading of Stolz, A., Anselm von Canterbury (Muenchen: 1937), p. 54Google Scholar: ‘dass du Sein hast, so wie wir es glauben.’ Cf. pp. 15 ff. for his argument. This reading is sharpened by McGill, Arthu: ‘You are just as we believe,’ Hick, J. and McGill, A., eds., The Many-Faced Argument (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1967), p. 4.Google Scholar

page 280 note 1 I follow the translation of the sixteenth-century Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer, as being closest to the Vulgata which Anselm would have known, with some emendation to bring the citations closer to the Vulgate text.

page 280 note 2 Other biblical passages could also count as part of the background, but we can be reasonably sure of at least the Psalter as an ancester, due to its frequency of use in the daily Offices. I recall Prof. O. K. Bouswma reading a paper at a philosophy colloquium at the University of Texas some years ago in which he went on for over an hour picking out such words of praise from the Bible as a guide to the sort of expression which Anselm had ‘discovered.’

page 280 note 3 Fides quaerens intellectum (Muenchen: 1931), pp. 79 ff.Google Scholar

page 283 note 1 But for the richness of Anselm's logic in other distinctions, see Henry, D. P., The Logic of Saint Anselm (Oxford: 1967)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 5.

page 286 note 1 This judgment, I wish to emphasise, is descriptive, not normative. I am maintaining that it just is a fact of our use of the word ‘religion’ that we employ it when this feature is present and are in doubt about using it when this feature is not evident. For a fuller treatment of this linguistic behaviour in both religious and non-religious cases, see my The Edges of Language (N.Y.: Macmillan. 1972).Google Scholar

page 287 note 1 A theistic construction of the religious use of ‘God’ may be the most common but it is not the only one, and it leads into logical difficulties which do not plague the formula X and the construction developed in this paper. If my argument is sound, then it is correct to call theism a mis-construction of the religious use of ‘God’.