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ANSELM THE FOOL: MEDITATION AND THE JOY OF UNBELIEF IN THE PROSLOGION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2025

JAMES R. GINTHER
JAMES R. GINTHER*
Affiliation:
Regis St Michael’s Faculty of Theology, University of St Michael’s College. Toronto & Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
*
james.ginther@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

Most scholars tend to focus on the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Anselm of Aosta’s Proslogion and they often consider any meditative features to be of little importance. I will argue that reading the Proslogion as a meditative text can be justified based on the manuscript evidence and its textual history. A careful examination of the manuscript witnesses to this text reveals at least four versions, which enabled different readings of the text. I will argue that one version was a more meditative reading, namely, the first version of the Proslogion. That focus is also attested by the type of texts that travelled with this version from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Having established the validity of such a reading, I will bring to the surface the features of the Proslogion that make it a meditative text. Of the many possible outcomes focusing on the meditative features of the Proslogion, this essay will explore only one here: the fool of chapter two emerges not as some heretic, pagan, or proto-atheist, with whom Anselm has engaged in intellectual combat. Instead, in the mimetic tradition of meditative texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the fool is Anselm himself and, by extension, the reader.

Keywords

Anselm of Canterburymeditationunbeliefontological argumentmanuscript studies

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Research Article
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Traditio , Volume 80 , 2025 , pp. 125 - 149
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fordham University

Despite their commitment to interdisciplinarity and its concomitant of collaboration, there is always a bit of rivalry amongst medievalists, often aligned along disciplinary boundaries. For historical theologians who focus on the western Middle Ages, sometimes their nemesis is found among the philosophers. One major touchstone of that rivalry is the writings of Anselm of Aosta (1033–1109), the one-time prior and abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Bec and then archbishop of Canterbury. The one text that generates the most rivalry is his Proslogion, as it has often been read solely as a philosophical treatise. Worse still, it is not uncommon for undergraduate students in almost every introductory course to philosophy to be asked to read only chapters two through four of this text, as if these chapters were independent of the rest. To the non-philosophers, this focus on these chapters sometimes raises a question: is there more to this text than an unum argumentum that proves the existence of God? It is a difficult question to answer given that the unum argumentum has so overwhelmed the scholarship on the Proslogion. Footnote 1 It is nearly impossible to find more than a single article or monograph that does not end up focusing on the so-called ontological argument.Footnote 2

Is there a way to discover a different reading of the Proslogion, where the philosophical approach does not dominate? One possible way would be to employ a strategy that Anselm himself adopted in another famous work of his, Cur Deus homo. In order to discover the coherence of Christian soteriology and its grounding in the Incarnation, Anselm proposed that the discussion begin with the assumption that the Incarnation had never taken place, which he pithily described as remoto Christo. Having removed the Incarnation itself from the conversation, Anselm allows his readers to think afresh about human salvation.Footnote 3 Analogously, would it be possible for the Proslogion to be read remota philosophia? Is there any evidentiary basis for such a strategy?

In this article, I will argue that such an approach can be justified based on the manuscript evidence and the textual history of the Proslogion. A careful examination of the manuscript witnesses to this text reveals at least four versions. These versions enabled different readings of the text. I will argue that one version was a more meditative reading, namely, the first version of the Proslogion. That focus is also attested by the type of texts that travelled with this version from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. In this version, the philosophical issues are still present, but muted, and for this reason we may consider the Proslogion remota philosophia, if only momentarily. Having established the validity of such a reading, I will bring to the surface the features of the Proslogion that make it a meditative text. These are common features shared with the other meditations that Anselm composed. Of the many possible outcomes focusing on the meditative features of the Proslogion, I will explore only one here: the fool of chapter two emerges not as some heretic, pagan, or proto-atheist, with whom Anselm has engaged in intellectual combat; instead, in the mimetic tradition of meditative texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the fool is Anselm himself and by extension the reader.Footnote 4

In employing such an interpretive strategy, I am not arguing that a philosophical reading of Anselm’s text is invalid or deficient. The goal of this article is not to reanimate the reading of Anselm Stolz, osb (1900–1942), from nearly a century ago. Stolz was a brilliant young German theologian who had become skeptical of the neo-Scholastic project that had come to dominate the Catholic intellectual tradition.Footnote 5 For him, Anselm of Canterbury presented an ideal case study to explore the intersection of asceticism, mysticism, and speculative thought. Stolz emphasized in his own theological writings mystical elements over speculative reasoning.Footnote 6 Accordingly, Anselm’s Proslogion is not concerned at all with proving God’s existence, so Stolz argued, but rather with fostering a mystical experience of the Trinity.Footnote 7 Scholars have since rejected Stolz’s reading, and I would concur, although with some qualification.Footnote 8 Stolz felt the need to eliminate altogether the philosophical reading of the Proslogion; however, I am only seeking to set it aside momentarily in order to provide access to other facets of the text. In doing so, I am drawing upon the medieval notion of the multivalency of a text, namely, that it may contain or direct the reader to multiple meanings and even ones that can appear to be contradictory with one another. Given how this text was transmitted during Anselm’s lifetime and long after that, the Proslogion’s multivalency is evident. My purpose here is to focus on the meditative reading that has only gained scattered attention in the scholarship.Footnote 9

The Manuscript Evidence

The Critical Edition as a Resource and an Obstacle

While critical editions are part of the bedrock of medieval studies, sometimes a printed edition can become an obstacle to assessing the historical context or interpretation of a text or a corpus. A printed edition can easily calcify one modern reading, even if the evidence for alternative historical assessments or readings is supported by the data in its critical apparatus. It is often necessary to investigate the larger set of manuscript witnesses not only to determine the integrity of an editor’s methodology, but also to explore the possibility that the edition has either purposely or inadvertently masked important details about the text.

Such a critical approach to editions should not diminish the important contributions of a text. The Opera omnia of Anselm is a case in point. It is one thing for scholars to create teams of editors in order to publish the collected works of a medieval author; it is nearly herculean for one person to execute such a project on their own. And yet, this is exactly what Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, osb (1894–1972) did with the writings of Anselm. Schmitt first encountered Anselm in a seminar that focused on Cur Deus homo, taught by Bernhard Geyer (1880–1974) at Breslau in the early 1920s.Footnote 10 The experience resulted in two major changes to Schmitt’s academic interests. First, a lifelong fascination with Anselm’s writings began in that seminar. Second, not long after, he began producing editions of some of Anselm’s better-known works in the series Florilegium patristicum tam veteris quam medii aevi auctores complectens, published in Bonn, Germany, namely, Cur Deus homo (1929); the Monologion (1929); De incarnatione verbi (1931); and the Proslogion (1931). By 1938, those discrete editions were superseded by the first volume of a planned six-volume Opera omnia. The project was interrupted by the Second World War and nearly lost to the rubbish bin of history save for the intervention of the publisher Thomas Nelson and Sons of Edinburgh, who republished volume one and then published the subsequent five volumes between 1945 and 1961.

I have been unable to uncover any direct evidence concerning what kind of training Schmitt had received for editing medieval Latin texts. He was doubtlessly formed in the Lachmann-Maas method for critical editions, and it is not unreasonable to infer that Geyer played an important role in that formation.Footnote 11 Geyer had been editing medieval scholastic texts for over twenty years prior to being Schmitt’s teacher, and he would go on to spearhead the Opera omnia of Albert the Great. Both Geyer and Schmitt, along with Dom André Wilmart (1876–1941), were clearly dissatisfied with the 1675 edition of Anselm’s corpus, which had been reprinted in the Patrologia Latina series.Footnote 12 Initially Schmitt’s editorial work was highly praised by experts in medieval philosophy and intellectual history.Footnote 13 The only sour note was sounded by Dom David Knowles, osb, which concerned the lack of historical notes that could have more firmly established the dating of Anselm’s letters.Footnote 14 Another reviewer noted that Schmitt “excuses himself from writing an introduction. He and Dom Wilmart have written monographs on the principal Anselmian texts; and besides, he is saving himself up for an appendix to the completed work.”Footnote 15

Schmitt recognized that his apparatus criticus was hardly exhaustive (amplus non est), but that was because he elected to use only the “best and oldest manuscripts” (codices nisi optimos et antiquissimos non adhibuimus).Footnote 16 Such a rationale obviously raises many questions as to how one judges which manuscript witnesses were the “best” and how one avoids equating the oldest copy of a text to a better set of readings, which, as many text editors will report, is not always the case. When the six-volume Opera omnia was reprinted in two thick, octave-sized volumes in 1968 by Frommann Verlag of Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany, Schmitt finally produced the long awaited Prologemena sue ratio editionis. Instead of composing a new text, however, Schmitt, now in his mid-seventies, simply reprinted articles that he had already published between 1932 and 1955 on the writings of Anselm.Footnote 17

This was clearly an unsatisfactory response to the calls for Schmitt to explain his editorial methodology.Footnote 18 And yet, his edition has continually been used as the basis for numerous translations and as the source for an ever-expanding body of scholarly literature on the life and works of Anselm. Beginning in 1991, however, the chinks in Schmitt’s editorial armor began to appear in the literature. Constant Mews called attention to the incomplete account of the textual evolution of De incarnatione verbi. Footnote 19 Richard Sharpe pointed not only to the absence of any explicit editorial methodology but also to some of the flawed decisions that Schmitt had made.Footnote 20 Most recently, Samu Niskanen has exhaustively demonstrated the deficiency of Schmitt’s edition of Anselm’s letters, so much so that Niskanen has reedited them himself for a new facing-page English translation.Footnote 21

None of these critiques should be surprising. As editing methods have developed, allowing for new ways to analyze and edit medieval texts, the infelicities of past editions often become more apparent. For all the demonstrations of the deficiencies of Schmitt’s work, however, no one has yet come forward to re-edit any of Anselm’s major works (aside from Niskanen). The closest anyone has come to a new edition of the Proslogion is Ian Logan, who provided a transcription of a single manuscript copy along with a translation. He argued that one manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 271) was the best witness to the way that Anselm had wanted to publish the text, among his other major works.Footnote 22 It may be that Schmitt’s edition will not be superseded for at least another generation, if not longer. It should be used with caution, however, and with reference to the manuscript evidence that Schmitt may not have taken into consideration.

At the very least, it is clear that the Opera omnia hardly tells the whole story about the composition and reception of the Proslogion. There is an irony present in Schmitt’s work: the Lachmannian methodology seeks to recover the original content and structure of a text—to rescue it from the venial and error-prone pens of later scribes—but in Schmitt’s hands, this methodology did not produce the original Proslogion, but what would appear to have been its last two versions.Footnote 23 Schmitt refers to “prior versions” (recensiones priores), but never articulates the evidence for how many prior versions there were, other than recording individual variants from certain manuscripts.Footnote 24

More recently, Toivo J. Holopainen took up Schmitt’s reference to prior versions to argue that Anselm was responsible for two versions of the Proslogion. Footnote 25 These versions, Holopainen argues, were evidence that Anselm was struggling to defend his rational approach to theological discourse that he had explored in in the Monologion. With criticism mounting on his first major treatise, Anselm revised the Proslogion to include a new preface and the exchange between Gaunilo and himself about the nature of the fool’s statement in chapter two of the Proslogion. While Holopainen’s thesis is certainly coherent and compelling, he is the first to admit that his textual analysis concerning the Proslogion’s versions is based almost entirely on Richard Sharpe’s 2009 article.Footnote 26 However, a careful accounting of those manuscripts provides a different picture than the one Holopainen paints in both his article and his later monograph. There are, in fact, four versions extant among the manuscript witnesses.

While the content remained relatively unchanged from version to version, how the text is presented to its readers differs. Each presentation, each framing of how one might read the Proslogion, appealed to different types of readers. Versions of a text are often understood to belong to its reception history rather than its composition or development. Schmitt considered reception history to be of little importance in his editorial task: “It was not my intent to write about the history of the text that was passed down through the ages, since I judged this matter to be of little interest to anyone.”Footnote 27 Indeed, it may have been of little interest to scholars like Schmitt, but understanding the reception history of the Proslogion not only has historical value, but also hermeneutical implications.

The Four Versions of the Proslogion

Scholars agree that Anselm composed the Proslogion sometime around 1077 or 1078, not long after he had completed the Monologion. Eadmer, Anselm’s biographer, tells what is now a well-known tale of the vexing and agonizing process that Anselm endured as he tried to develop “a single argument” for God’s existence in contrast to the many arguments drawn together in the Monologion. Footnote 28 A moment of illumination came in the middle of the Matins office and Anselm quickly wrote down on wax tablets what “he had been given by God.” He then asked a fellow monk to hold the tablets for safekeeping. A few days later Anselm came to collect the tablets, but they had disappeared. So, he wrote his piece a second time and gave them again to the same monk (why this monk was still trusted, Eadmer does not say) who chose a more secure place to store the tablets. The following day, however, the tablets were discovered in pieces strewn on the floor. At this point, Anselm pieced all the shards of wax together and sent them off to the scriptorium with a command that the text be copied onto parchment. This is the first version.

Some six or seven years later, in 1083, Anselm “published” the Proslogion, to use Richard Sharpe’s designation. The abbot of Bec writes that he was commanded by Archbishop Hugh of Lyons to attach his name to the work, something that the first version did not have. Given that Hugh was also the apostolic legate for France (Gallia), Anselm took this as a papal mandate and it appears that he felt that he had little choice.Footnote 29 This second version had more than just his name on it, for he also added a prologue that explained the circumstances of the text’s composition (which differs somewhat from Eadmer’s account) as well as a list of the twenty-six chapter titles.

Nine years later, and fifteen years after the first version had begun to circulate, a certain Gaunilo sent Anselm a short piece entitled Pro insipiente. This monk from the Benedictine monastery at Marmoutier criticized the coherence of the unum argumentum. This delighted Anselm so much that he wrote a response and both pieces were attached to the Proslogion to create its third version. It was at this point that someone—perhaps Anselm himself—commissioned an excerpt to be copied out, which the earliest witnesses entitled sumptum ex libello Anselmi, which contained only chapters two to four. This was the fourth version.Footnote 30 These four versions circulated independently of one another, but there are more instances of the Sumptum included with the Gaunilo-Anselm exchange than on its own. And this is the version that Schmitt recreated in his edition: the Proslogion with the prologue and chapter titles, the Sumptum, and the Gaunilo-Anselm exchange.Footnote 31

The Textual Character of the First Version

One of the assumptions in the scholarship on the Proslogion is that the first version was eclipsed by the later ones, namely, that the second and third versions were most familiar to later readers. It is certainly what one might infer from Schmitt’s edition, and it is true that there were many copies made for those two latter versions. Based on a cursory examination of catalogues of European repositories, I have counted around thirty extant copies of the second version (prologue, chapter titles, and text) and at least twenty-one copies of the third version, which includes the Gaunilo-Anselm debate. These witnesses range from the early twelfth to the late fifteenth century and they demonstrate continued interest in the Proslogion, if not in Anselm’s corpus in general.Footnote 32 Fifty copies of the “published” version would seem of greater importance than five or so copies of the first version, but that same examination revealed twenty-two extant copies of the first version, also ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.Footnote 33 It would be reasonable to suggest that each version generated almost the same amount of interest and readership.

We can ascertain how the readers of the first version differed from those of the other versions. To do so we need to address two pertinent questions. First, did readers of the first version realize that they were reading Anselm? While Anselm was charged with addressing the anonymity of his little work in its second version, few copies of the first version hid his authorship: thirteen explicitly refer to Anselm in either the accompanying rubric or colophon. While one witness does not assert Anselm’s authorship, this copy of the Proslogion is accompanied by other known works of Anselm. Only two of the twenty-two copies ascribe the text to someone other than Anselm (namely, Augustine).Footnote 34 Fourteen of these manuscripts give the work the title of Proslogion, and only four use the title Anselm first assigned to the work: fides querens intellectum. Footnote 35 Finally, one manuscript provides no title, and another simply describes the work as Soliloquim sancti Anselmi. Footnote 36

Second, what textual characteristics differentiate the first version from the others? The answer to this question is based on both what is missing and what is present. As already noted, the first version lacks the prologue, and its absence has an effect on the disposition of a reader. Prefatory material was not simply about announcing the subject matter of a text or asserting authorship; it also concerned framing the text for a reader. In classical rhetoric, this was called the exordium, and this component of a text was meant to prepare the reader to become teachable (docilem), well-disposed (benevolum), and attentive (adtentum), that is, open to accepting a certain set of propositions or a larger argument or thesis.Footnote 37 In one sense, a prologue’s aim is to guide the reader so that she understands the text’s purpose and where the argument begins and ends. The preface that Anselm attached to the second version oriented the reader to consider that the Proslogion was about discovering and articulating the unum argumentum for God’s existence and that the process begins where Anselm had left off with his previous work, the Monologion. The absence of a prologue in the first version means that the first chapter became the de facto preface to the text. The reader therefore begins not by focusing on a single argument, but instead by confronting a problem: where is God and why can the author not find him? This directs the Proslogion towards a meditative disposition.

The second thing missing is the Monologion. Given how the prologue linked the Proslogion to the Monologion from the second version onwards, it is not surprising that the Monologion rarely traveled with the first version. Of its twenty-two witnesses, only four include copies of Anselm’s first treatise. Two of these outliers can easily be explained. One witness contains nearly all the works of Anselm, and oddly enough, copies of the first and third versions of the Proslogion in sequence.Footnote 38 The second is a manuscript owned at one time by Robert de Sorbonne (1201–1274), which he bequeathed to the college of his own name on his death. This latter witness primarily contains resources for a theologian in the university (including, for example, along with the main writings of Anselm, those of John Damascene and Augustine).Footnote 39 The other two manuscripts with the first version and the Monologion both contain incomplete copies of the latter text, and, given the other contents of these manuscripts, it is not entirely clear why these excerpts or incomplete copies are there.Footnote 40 For the rest of these manuscripts, it would seem that the Monologion was not of primary interest for their readers.

Perhaps more significant is what is present in these witnesses. How texts cluster in manuscripts can sometimes suggest an implied readership, and the more often this occurs in the copies of a single text, the more compelling the argument becomes that this text was perceived in a specific way. This is not to suggest, however, that a text can be read only in the light of an implied reader, for medieval writers and readers embraced the multivalency of a text. Nevertheless, how a text travels can provide some evidence for the different ways that it was read. Of the twenty-two copies of the Proslogion’s first version, fourteen of them also contain texts that scholars often categorize as devotional or monastic works that undergirded the contemplative life.Footnote 41 These include John Cassian (V), John de Scala (O), the devotional writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (A, M, Ms, Mu, W), Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis ad Deum (M), Richard of St-Victor (Ms and Ma), Ludolf of Saxony and Henry of Suso (Ms), Peter Damian (Ma), and various pieces attributed to Augustine (Ma, Mc), to name but a few examples.

A further five witnesses, while lacking any devotional texts, contain liturgical works for both Mass and Office.Footnote 42 Of the fourteen manuscripts with devotional texts, four of them also have liturgical texts.Footnote 43 Now, lest we differentiate too strongly between liturgical and devotional texts, it is instructive to recall the liturgical context of Anselm’s “discovery” of the unum argumentum. In Eadmer’s account, Anselm entered the night office vexed and distracted, but it was there that he made his profound discovery. It is significant to note that, in the monastic use of the ferial Psalms, one of the Psalms chanted during Matins on the third day of the week was Psalm 52, which begins: The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Footnote 44 Even though much is legitimately made of the distinction between the prayer of the liturgy and the more personal and affective prayer of devotional literature, both sources were intimately connected in monastic practice in particular.

This leaves three outliers that have neither devotional nor liturgical texts in their collections: MS Va is a small booklet that contains only Bernard’s In laudibus virginis matris, the Proslogion, and an excerpt from an anonymous sentence commentary on book 3, distinction 17. Ms B is a booklet that contains nine writings of Anselm—but not the Monologion—as well as some of his letters and so appears to be an Anselmian miscellany of sorts (and it is one of two witnesses that contains both the first and second version of the Proslogion). Finally, MS W is a fifteenth-century copy of Augustine’s Confessions, after which the scribe copied out the first version of the Proslogion. The scribe thought that the latter text was part of the former, and a later marginal note informs future readers: “The Book of the Confessions of blessed Augustine ends here; what follows does not belong to the Book of the Confessions.”Footnote 45 It is clear that those who commissioned the production of these manuscripts considered the Proslogion to be of interest and use to those who wanted to read Cassian, Bernard, Richard of St-Victor, and so on. Medieval readers clearly felt that Anselm wrote within the Benedictine tradition. Modern scholarship may consider him to be the “father of scholasticism,” but that was not an identification that medieval readers appeared to have shared.

Anselm’s Account of Meditative Texts

The manuscript evidence indicates that some readers of the Proslogion considered this small work to be a devotional or meditative text. What does that mean as a form of reading? Anselm himself provides a partial answer in a letter he wrote to a certain Adeliza, who was probably the daughter of William the Conqueror. It is difficult to date this letter with any certainty, but it was probably written sometime between 1075 and 1078, around the same time that Anselm composed the Proslogion. Footnote 46 The letter was sent along with a piece that Anselm calls the Flores psalmorum as well as seven prayers he composed. He does not name all seven prayers, but he does name two, one to Saint Stephen and another to Mary Magdalene. The first prayer, he notes, is more like a meditation than a prayer, since in a meditation “the soul of a sinner briefly examines himself, by examining he despises himself, by despising he abases himself, by abasing he is stricken with the terror of the last judgment, and having been struck [with that terror] he erupts into groaning and tears.”Footnote 47 This is perhaps more explicit than what one of his prayers was meant to do, whose purpose, as he says in the collection’s general preface, “is to stir up the mind of the reader to the love or fear of God, or to self-examination.”Footnote 48 These actions which the reader ought to experience in meditating are not necessarily meant to be realized in sequence or so the syntactical structure of the first statement indicates. The medieval penchant to use the gerund in the ablative as equivalent to a present participle suggests that Anselm saw all these actions (examining, despising, abasing, and so on) as occurring almost simultaneously or at least not in any sequential order. One cannot therefore identify a section on self-examination and then the next on the despising of oneself, and so forth. Anselm’s description also suggests that his meditations were meant to be read from start to finish. This contrasted with his prayers, where he acknowledged that the reader did not need to read a whole prayer, nor even to start reading at its beginning.Footnote 49

A careful reading of the two meditations from this period of Anselm’s writing suggests three additional features that Anselm did not articulate in his letter to Adeliza. The first is that the anguish and shame are told in the first person. It is the author’s own life that terrifies him in Meditation 1, for “after I have diligently examined [myself], it appears to me that my entire life is either sin or sterility.” In the lament for lost virginity in Meditation 2, Anselm writes “I was a virgin who had been washed in a celestial bath, given a dowry by the Holy Spirit, pledged in Christian profession, and betrothed to Christ. Oh, now what have I remembered! Oh, whom I have named! Certainly not my kind bridegroom, but the terrible judge of my lust.”Footnote 50 Such personal statements reflect a shift in spiritual writing that began in the eleventh century from being grounded in liturgy and communal prayer, to the inner mind where the soul engages in a form of self-examination that could be far more severe than any accusations hurled at fellow brothers at a monastic chapter meeting. And, indeed, Anselm played a pivotal role in realizing that shift.Footnote 51 Are these cries of shame and anguish from Anselm’s own life? It is difficult to draw a definitive conclusion on this matter.Footnote 52 Eadmer, for example, makes no reference to an incident where Anselm engaged in sexual relations after taking his monastic vows, and there are no specific biographical matters found in the first meditation. The emotional tone and the deeply personal statements, however, find resonance with the letters Anselm composed to friends, and so it is not stretching the evidence too much to hypothesize that Anselm is writing from his own personal experience.Footnote 53 At the very least, by writing in the first person, Anselm establishes a mimetic relationship between author and reader.Footnote 54

The second feature is closely related to the first, namely that even though the use of the first person in these meditations separated them from the spiritual exercises of earlier centuries, Anselm often oscillates between the affective admissions in a first-person voice and the accusations and questions of what we might call the third person as the omniscient author. This is most explicit in Meditation 1, where the text unfolds almost as a form of antiphonal chant. One example will demonstrate the textual structure at work here. As Anselm considers the many reasons his life terrifies him, the meditation unfolds in this way:

How much more tolerable to human beings is a putrid dog that stinks than the sinful soul to God. How much more unhappy is that to God than that dog to human beings. Alas, not human but the disgrace of humanity, more worthless than cattle, worse than a corpse. My soul is weary of my life,

I am embarrassed to live; I am scared to die.

What therefore is there left for you to do, oh sinner, except that for your whole life to lament about your life, for your whole life to lament about itself all the time?

But in this also my soul is miserably astonished and astonishingly miserable because my soul does not suffer insomuch as it examines itself but is numb to feel safe as if my soul does not know what it is enduring.Footnote 55

This voice exchange is not solely an internal dialogue that ignites the self-examination. While Anselm accuses and berates his sinful soul for all its misdeeds and terrible thoughts, he often shifts the person speaking to provide a larger context for the issues at hand. In these instances, he refers to himself, and by extension the reader, in the third person. This observation was made by a reader of one of the earliest copies of the first version of the Proslogion, MS V. Near the beginning of the first chapter, Anselm notes that he does not know how to see God:

I have never seen you, Lord God, I do not know your face … What is your servant to do, anxious for your love and cast a long way from your face?

In the margins, a cursive hand (perhaps from the thirteenth century) wrote: “he changes into the third person.”Footnote 56 The author, who admits to never having seen God, is the very same “servant” in the following sentence. While reading these two meditations, it is important to remember that however the author speaks, either in the first person or in the third person, he is speaking about himself.

The third feature of these meditations is that failure is not the end of the story. It would be very easy to conclude that Anselm has a very pessimistic view of human nature, or at least a pessimistic view of himself and his fellow monks, and he sees a benefit in focusing on his failures. Words like “sin,” “sterile,” “putrid,” “unfruitful,” “useless,” “turpitude,” “foul-smelling,” to name but a few modifiers of human nature and behavior, all lend to a view that Anselm loathed human nature in its sinful state and was insistent on reminding his readers just how horrible humanity really is. This pejorative account of human nature, however, is also the source of hope and resolution to joy and happiness. For Anselm, humanity’s failure (and his own failure) is cataclysmic and terrifyingly real, but in each meditation failure becomes the point of departure for resolution and salvation. The examination, despising, abasement, and terror indeed end in tears and anguish, but the trajectory of the reader hardly ends there. The understanding of the failure allows the reader to see that any healing, any rescue, belongs to the mercy and power of God. This is evident in the conclusion of the second meditation, where Anselm’s extensive and thoroughly depressing expression of his failure to remain chaste finally leads him to discover that as God’s creation, it is not just condemnation that awaits him, but also conversion and salvation.

If I have done something that makes me guilty,

Is there anything I could have done that would no longer make me your creation?

If I have taken away my chastity,

Is there any way I could deprive you of your mercy?

Lord, Lord, if I have admitted to that which you can condemn me,

Then have you let it go by which you are accustomed to saving?

Do not, Lord, do not just focus on the fact that I am evil so that you forget that you are good. Where is it, O truthful God, where is it said: I live and I do not wish for the death of the sinner but so that the sinner may be converted and live. Lord, Lord, who does not lie, what does it mean “I do not wish for the death of the sinner” if you bury the sinner, who cries out to you, in hell? Which meaning of “I do not wish for the death of the sinner” is it: to thrust the sinner into hell? Or is it “I wish that the sinner be converted and live”?

I am a sinner, Lord, I am a sinner. If therefore you do not wish for the death of the sinner, what compels you [to do] what you do not want that you would hand me over to death? What prevents you [from doing] what you want, that you would convert me and I would live? Does the enormity of my sin compel you [to do] what you do not want, and prevent you <from doing> what you want, even though you are an omnipotent God? God forbid, my God, God forbid, my Lord, that the wickedness of the sinner who confesses and grieves would prevail over the judgment of the Almighty.Footnote 57

Not all is lost. In some ways, these meditations are extended footnotes to the pithy phrase from the liturgy of the Easter vigil: “O felix culpa.”Footnote 58

Reading the Proslogion as a Meditative Text

The Failure to Find God and Anselm’s Solution

If these elements are the general features of Anselm’s composition of meditations, can we read the Proslogion as a meditation? I do not think that any Anselm scholar would dispute that the text opens with a call to self-examination and a focus on the inner self. But if each meditation is grounded in a fulsome analysis of a human failing, what is the failure of the author and, by extension, the reader of the Proslogion? One option is that the failure is the fallen nature of humanity, as it would be for Anselm’s Meditation on Human Redemption, which he would write over twenty years after composing the first two meditations. This is a possibility, as Anselm outlines in the first chapter of the Proslogion what humanity has lost thanks to the fallen actions of both Adam and Eve in a set of contrasting lines:

<Adam> belched with indulgence, we sigh with hunger;

He had in abundance, we go begging;

He happily possessed and miserably departed, we unhappily go wanting and miserably desire;

And, how we remain so empty.Footnote 59

But there is another failure for which Anselm wants to account, one that is certainly grounded in the fallen nature: why, if God exists, is he absent? In accepting the biblical command to seek God, Anselm raises a series of questions:

Lord, if you are not here, where do I seek you who are absent?

If you are everywhere, why can I not see you as present?

But certainly, you inhabit an inaccessible light.

And where is this inaccessible light?

How do I come into this inaccessible light?

Or who will lead and bring me into it, so that I may see you in it?Footnote 60

A few lines later, after shifting from the first to the third person, Anselm states further:

<Your servant> desires to come to you, and your dwelling place is inaccessible;

He wants to find you and he does not know your location;

He aspires to seek you and he knows nothing of your face.Footnote 61

What is at work here in Anselm’s words is a frustration resulting from the desire to seek out God that was implanted in humanity without the guideposts to do so, and indeed with a complete lack of understanding of what he should seek. And indeed, it would appear that Anselm fails to find him.

The solution to this failure at first appears to be singular and straightforward, as Anselm ends this first chapter with three important theological statements. First, he acknowledges and gives thanks for the fact that he was indeed created in the image of God, a reality that should provide him with the ability to remember, know, and love God. Second, that image, however, has been effaced and diminished by vice and sin, and so that image cannot guarantee that God can be found, unless, third, God renews and reforms that image. And this leads to the formulation that has made Anselm famous in the modern period:

I do not attempt, O Lord, to penetrate your heights because in no way do I match my understanding with it; but I desire in some way to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. Nor do I seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand…Footnote 62

The Fool’s Claim

With the beginning of the second chapter, where most scholars see Anselm changing the focus and to some degree, the subject matter, I see instead a further exploration of Anselm’s solution to the failure of finding God. After all, the chapter begins with the conjunctive adverb, ergo. And so Anslem begins by providing the content of what one believes in order to understand. On this point, he is very clear. It is not the act of believing or any general disposition of faith that Anselm is advocating; rather, there is a specific content of belief required for understanding. In other words, it is not the assertion of fides qua creditur, but rather of fides quae creditur, to draw from a distinction by Augustine.Footnote 63 That object of believing is two-fold: “…that you [Lord] exist just as we believe and that you are this which we believe. And indeed, we believe that you are something than that which nothing greater can be thought.”Footnote 64 It is at this point that Anselm introduces the fool:

Is it therefore that there is no such nature, because the fool has said in his heart there is no God? But certainly, that very same fool, when he hears the very thing that I say: ‘something which nothing greater can be thought,’ he understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his mind, even if he does not understand that this thing exists. For there is a difference between a thing that exists in the mind, and to understand that this thing exists.Footnote 65

Anselm then applies the coup de grace of his argument: if God is something which nothing greater can be thought, then such a thing must by its very nature exist not just in the mind, but in reality as well.Footnote 66

Who is this fool? Reading chapters two to four in isolation, outside of the context of Anselm’s meditative texts, it would appear that Anselm is pointing to another character, the fool, who stands in opposition to the believing Anselm. The fool is therefore an unbeliever and perhaps even worse, an atheist. If, however, we read these chapters as integral to the whole text, that there is connective tissue between the lament of the first chapter and chapters two through four and that what follows from chapter five onwards as the implications of finding God in the manner that Anselm proposes, then it seems more likely that the fool is someone who inhabits the world of the Christian faith, such as a Benedictine monk, and even Anselm himself. There are three reasons why we can say that Anselm is the fool: the first is rhetorical; the second historiographical; and the third exegetical. Above all, Anselm says as much at the end of the fourth chapter.

First, the rhetorical reason, namely, Anselm’s penchant to shift from the first person to the third person in his meditative texts is well on display in the Proslogion. The fact that he speaks of the fool in the third person does not necessarily mean that he is speaking about another character. We have already seen how Anselm makes such shifts in mid-thought, and often for the purpose of pronouncing judgment about an evil thought or a sinful behavior. There is no empathy for the fool here, for he is both stupid and foolish for saying such a thing in his heart. The historiographical reason is this: we need to dispense with the modern notion that unbelief—to say with the fool that there is no God—was not an option ever undertaken by a medieval Christian.Footnote 67 John Arnold’s excellent study of belief and unbelief in the Middle Ages has demonstrated the need for medievalists to have a more nuanced approach to the nature of Christian practice in the Middle Ages and how one infers dispositions of belief, unbelief, and even disbelief from such actions.Footnote 68 It is often at this point that the philosophical questions overwhelm any reading of these chapters. To some degree this should not be surprising since Anselm is raising a very important question: if I believe in order to understand, and that belief is in God’s existence, can someone nullify the subsequent understanding by unbelief? Clearly Anselm wants to answer in the negative, and that raises a number of epistemological and even metaphysical questions, all of which have been spun out for centuries.Footnote 69

But there is also a related pastoral dimension at work here. If the end of the first chapter provides a resolution to the failure of finding God by believing that God is that which nothing greater than which can be thought, the subsequent three chapters address the question: what if a Christian, like the fool, chooses not to believe, even one as learned as Anselm? This may sound repugnant to some, but as Anselm’s other meditations show and even his prayers, he had no hesitation in admitting to failure as a monk.Footnote 70 Could it be that the real reason for the mental and spiritual angst, described by both Eadmer and Anselm, that led to the composition of the Proslogion was not that one single argument eluded him (that is, a pressing need to solve an intellectual puzzle), but that this abbot of Bec, who had just composed a complex account of God’s existence and nature in the Monologion, was still struggling to believe? Could it be that he was seeking a single, powerful argument that could effectively respond to his own unbelief where the complex arguments of the Monologion had failed to do so?

The exegetical reason for placing the fool within the Christian tradition has to do with the invocation of the biblical lemma about the fool himself. Anselm’s deployment of the fool from the Psalms represents a significant shift in the exegesis of this biblical lemma, be it from Psalm 13 or Psalm 52. The nearly universal medieval exegesis of both lemmata initially derived from the second book of Augustine’s De libero arbitrio. When Augustine asks his interlocutor, Evodius, how he would respond to the fool who says there is no God, Evodius simply states that he would point this fool to the authors of the sacred texts who speak of God’s Son, both of his teachings and miracles, all of which point to the existence of God.Footnote 71 Later commentators and glossators concluded that the fool of Psalms 13 and 52 were those who denied the divinity of Christ, and they were primarily the Jews. This is hardly surprising given how pervasive antisemitism was in this period. Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), a contemporary of Anselm of Bec and the “father” of a major tool for medieval exegesis, the Glossa ordinaria, asserted that the prophet David was rebuking the foolishness and obstinacy of the Jews in Psalm 13: “They had expected [Christ] for a long time,” he writes, “but when he appeared the fool said in his heart, here is a man, he is not God.”Footnote 72 In other words, the statement non est Deus had a Christological context and was not understood to be any type of denial of the existence of God. Anselm brings no Christological account to his reference to the fool, as that interpretation of the Psalm lemma had placed the fool outside of the Christian tradition. By shifting to a different reading of the Psalm, Anselm situated the fool within the Christian tradition, for how does one reconcile the meaning of the fool’s statement with what Christians are called to believe, namely, that God is greater than that which can be thought?

Having parsed out what the fool has said and what he understands, Anselm closes chapter four with this statement in the first person:

Thank you, Good Lord, thank you, because I first believed with you giving [to me], I then understand with you illuminating [me], that if I did not want to believe that you existed, I am unable not to understand.

What Anselm has done here is to make both believing that God is greater than that which can be thought and the failure to believe—both are the same solution to finding God. The fool’s denial becomes the means by which he may rise from the misery of God’s absence to what Anselm will eventually call the fullness of joy. To deny that there is no God is to encounter him in those very words. As a form of meditative rhetoric, it is a brilliant solution to the failure of unbelief, and it then opens a path of how coming to understand who God is leads to the joy of the heart, soul, and mind. Anselm’s angst over unbelief and doubt, and indeed what other readers might also struggle with, becomes settled with the fool’s statement. This then opens a path to exploring God’s nature, what a believer may know, and the ultimate trajectory of that seeking, that is, the remaining twenty-two chapters of the Proslogion.

It should be clear from the preceding that by teasing out the meditative features of the Proslogion, most prominent in its first version, it is possible to read this text remota philosophia. At the same time, it is also clear that such a reading still leaves room for philosophical analysis. Indeed, one thing that all scholars must admit, even a historical theologian, is that even if the Proslogion was primarily a meditation, it was also more didactic than Anselm’s other meditations or prayers. There is certainly an affectivity at play, but there is also opportunity for instruction and corrective instruction at that. I have noted the multivalency of medieval texts above, and surely the same can be said about authors like Anselm. He was deeply committed to the Benedictine way of life but was acutely aware of how one could fail in that way of life—failure that needed to be ruthlessly and bluntly exposed in order to be addressed. But he was not interested in condemnation alone, but in bringing his readers from the pit of failure to the apex of joy in knowing God. His solutions were those of a teacher who thought carefully about both theology and philosophy and who, either rhetorically or based on his own experience, made failure and its resolution deeply personal. In bringing together all these elements, one can see why Anselm was such an effective teacher who gained long-lasting loyalty from his students.Footnote 73

This combination of meditation and instruction became stronger with each subsequent version. The reader of the second version with its prologue was alerted to the fact that the Monologion could be an important resource in this meditation on divine nature. With Gaunilo’s intervention added to the third version fifteen years after Anselm had composed the Proslogion, readers were less likely to think about meditative context and focused more on the doctrinal facets. And with the fourth version, the reader could proceed without thinking about how the unum argumentum was conceived as a solution to any crisis of belief. It is important to remember, however, that this not a progression, for these four versions survived in tandem until the end of the Middle Ages. Anselm may have been a self-confessed failure and a fool, but from his failure he gained wisdom to become an eloquent and compelling Christian leader and thinker.

Appendix: A Handlist of the Manuscripts containing the First Version

* = identified by Schmitt as a recensio prior

† = referenced on occasion in Schmitt’s apparatus

Twelfth Century (2)

Thirteenth Century (8)

Fourteenth Century (7)

Fifteenth Century (5)

Footnotes

The idea of reading the Proslogion in this manner first originated during a series of doctoral seminars in medieval historical theology at Saint Louis University in the early 2000s. I am grateful for the opportunity to have explored this idea in multiple instances with different doctoral students. Subsequently, this paper was presented at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds in July 2023. As I prepared for publication, I have benefited from the insights and advice of John Magee (University of Toronto), Peter King (University of Toronto), Robert Sweetman (Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto), and Greti Dinkova-Bruun (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies).

References

1 Ian Logan, “‘Whoever Understands This…’: On Translating the Proslogion,” New Blackfriars 89 (2008): 560–74, makes similar observations and one of the six rules he recommends for future study of the Proslogion is: “Read the (whole of the) Proslogion, before you decide that you understand what Anselm is saying there…” (573).

2 The International Medieval Bibliography contains 172 bibliographical records that relate to the study of the Proslogion (accessed 16 February 2024). Only three of these engage the Proslogion principally as a meditative text, a point that plays a significant role in the following analysis. The remaining studies engage the unum argumentum as either a philosophical or historical problem. The most recent monographic studies are John Bayer, The Unity of the Proslogion: Reason and Desire in the Monastic Theology of Anselm of Canterbury (Leiden, 2021); Richard Campbell, A Cosmological Reformulation of Anselm’s Proof That God Exists (Leiden, 2021); idem, Rethinking Anselm’s Arguments: A Vindication of His Proof of the Existence of God (Leiden, 2018); Toivo J. Holopainen, A Historical Study of Anselm’s Proslogion: Argument, Devotion and Rhetoric (Leiden, 2020); Gavin Ortlund, Anselm’s Pursuit of Joy: A Commentary on the Proslogion (Washington, D.C., 2020); and Arthur D. Smith, Anselm’s Other Argument (Cambridge, MA, 2014).

3 Cur Deus homo, praefatio, in S. Anselmi opera omnia, ed. Franciscus S. Schmitt, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1946–1961), 2:42 (cited hereafter as SAO).

4 Martin Benson, “Prayer and Proof, Affect and Argument: The Role of Joy in St. Anselm’s Proslogion,” Downside Review 135 (2017): 154–62, rejects the notion of the fool as an outsider to the Christian tradition but does not align him with Anselm. I have been influenced by Benson’s focus on the importance of joy in the Proslogion.

5 For a general history of the emergence of Neo-Scholasticism in the nineteenth century, see Ralph Del Colle, “Neo-Scholasticism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson (Oxford, 2010), 375–94. The authoritative study remains Gerald McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New York, 1989).

6 Anselm Stolz, Theologie der Mystik (Regensburg, 1936). For an account of the context of Stolz’s study of Anselm, see Elmar Salmann, “Die Anselm-Interpretation bei A. Stolz,” in La Teologica Mistico-Sapienziale di Anselm Stolz, ed. Elmar Salmann (Rome, 1988), 101–24; and Benjamin Dahlke, Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal and Vatican II (London, 2012), 53–60.

7 Anselm Stolz, “Zur Theologie Anselms im Proslogion,” Catholica 2 (1933): 1–24. This article was translated into English as “Anselm’s Theology in the Proslogion” and included in a collection of essays first published in 1968: The Many-Faced Argument: Recent Studies on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, ed. John Hick and Arthur Chute McGill (London, 1968), 183–206. Stolz is often lumped together with Karl Barth (1886–1968) to form a school of “fideistic” interpretation of the Proslogion: Logan, “‘Whoever Understands This…’,” 563–65; and Holopainen, A Historical Study of Anselm’s Proslogion, 168–69. Stolz’s approach to Anselm differed significantly from Barth, however, even if the Swiss theologian, as Stolz himself acknowledged, had alerted the young Benedictine to a “new” reading of the text. Ultimately, where they aligned (and indeed where they shared a common value with many of their contemporaries) was that neither was necessarily interested in a precise historical account of the Proslogion. Rather, they both engaged the text as a mirror to their own respective theological method. This was especially the case for Barth: even though he claimed that his encounter with Anselm transformed his theological work, he in fact brought to his study of Anselm the full weight of his opposition to natural theology and the conviction that the revelation of the “Word” was the primary point of departure for theology. For Barth’s study, see Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum: Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms (Munich, 1931); English translation: Karl Barth, Anselm, Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme, trans. Ian W. Robertson (Richmond, 1960). See also Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford, 1997), 421–41.

8 Ortlund, Anselm’s Pursuit of Joy, 57–58; and Ian Logan, Reading Anselm’s Proslogion: The History of Anselm’s Argument and Its Significance Today (London, 2016), 172.

9 I should note that by examining the meditative features of the Proslogion, I am indebted to Stolz’s lexical analysis of the text: Anselm Stolz, “Das Proslogion des Hl. Anselm,” Revue bénédictine 47 (1935): 331–47. I should also note that while I am also indebted to the work of Eileen Sweeney on this topic, I have drawn different conclusions based on evidence that she did not consider in her essay: Eileen Sweeney, “The Rhetoric of Prayer and Argument in Anselm,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 38 (2005): 355–78.

10 H. Kohlenberger, “Erfülltes Leben im Dienste von Wissenschaft und Kirche (Commemorazione del P. F. S. SCHMITT),” Sophia 41 (1973): 136–38, at 136.

11 Geyer was one of the two editors of volumes 17–42 of the Florilegium patristicum series, where Schmitt had published his initial editions of Anselm’s works.

12 PL 158, cols. 141–1208.

13 See the reviews of the first three volumes by H. D. Simonin, op, in Angelicum 16 (1939): 393–94; Frederick Copletson in Philosophy 24 (1949): 171–73; Austin Farrer in Mind 58 (1949): 541–42; and M. David Knowles in English Historical Review 64 (1949): 363–64.

14 See the review of the fourth volume by M. David Knowles in English Historical Review 67 (1952): 110–11.

15 See the review by Farrer in Mind 58 (1949): 541–42, at 541.

16 SAO, 1:vii.

17 S. Anselmi Cantuauriensis Archiepiscopi opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 2 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964), 1:7*–239*.

18 Coloman Étienne Viola, “Une réimpression des oeuvres complètes de saint Anselme,” Gregorianum 52 (1971): 555–61, at 556.

19 Constant J. Mews, “St. Anselm and Roscelin: Some New Texts and Their Implications, I. The ‘De Incarnatione Uerbi’ and the ‘Disputatio inter Christianum et Gentilem,’” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 58 (1991): 55–98, esp. 57–59.

20 Richard Sharpe, “Anselm as Author: Publishing in the Late Eleventh Century,” Journal of Medieval Latin 19 (2009): 1–87, esp. 7–11, 13 n. 30, and 24–27.

21 Samu Niskanen, The Letter Collections of Anselm of Canterbury (Turnhout, 2011), 30–33; and Letters of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, Volume 1: The Bec Letters, ed. and trans. Samu Niskanen (Oxford, 2019).

22 Logan, Reading Anselm’s Proslogion, 3–5 and 25–58. See also Ian Logan, “Ms. Bodley 271: Establishing the Anselmian Canon?” The Saint Anselm Journal 2 (2004): 67–80.

23 I have only completed some sample collation to determine that there are no major additions or redactions extant in the four versions I will describe below. The inventory of manuscripts of the Proslogion that I have begun comprises 80 witnesses at present, and I have not examined all of them either by digital facsimile or in situ.

24 Initially, Schmitt identified five witnesses that fall under the rubric of recensiones priores, and so they warranted a separate apparatus. He intermixes, however, the readings of these “prior versions” with readings from other witnesses, and indeed, those of the prior versions also appear in the main apparatus as well.

25 Toivo J. Holopainen, “On the Two Versions of the Proslogion,” Śląskie Studia Historyczno- Teologiczne 1 (2014): 10–30.

26 Holopainen, “On the Two Versions of the Proslogion,” 16, where the author confesses that he “does not work with manuscripts.”

27 SAO, 1:vii: “Historiam enim textus qui per secula traditus est scribere in animo nobis non erat, cum hanc rem parum cuique cordi esse arbitremur.”

28 For what follows, see Eadmer, Vita Anselmi 1.19, ed. R. W. Southern, in The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1962), 29–31. See also Giles E. M. Gasper, “Envy, Jealousy, and the Boundaries of Orthodoxy: Anselm of Canterbury and the Genesis of the Proslogion,” Viator 41 (2010): 45–68, who argues that this event speaks to resistance at Bec to Anselm’s new rational methodologies. More recently, Niskanen has argued that this episode exemplifies a larger current of anti-intellectualism during Anselm’s lifetime: Samu Niskanen, “Anselm’s Predicament: The Proslogion and Anti-Intellectual Rhetoric in the Aftermath of the Berengarian Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 82 (2021): 547–68.

29 Proslogion, SAO, 1:94: “Sed cum iam a pluribus cum his titulis utrumque transcriptum esset, coegerunt me plures, et maxime reverendus archiepiscopus Lugdunensis, Hugo nomine, fungens in Gallia legatione Apostolica qui mihi hoc ex Apostolica praecepit auctoritate, ut nomen meum illis praescriberem.”

30 There are two other excerpts of the text extant in a few codices. One version contains chapters 1–3 as found in two fifteenth-century manuscripts: Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 537, fols. 110ra–111va; and Gießen, Universitätsbibliothek, Hs 751, fols. 224va–226va. A second excerpt is more intriguing in that it comprises chapters 1, 16–17, and 24–26: Mainz, Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek, Hs I 195, fols. 318rb–319va (sec. xiiiex); and München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 18414, fols.19rb–20vb. I have examined three of these four manuscripts by digital facsimile (Clm 18414 is the exception). Given the late date of these witnesses, it is unlikely that these excerpts originated with Anselm or from an exemplar contemporary with Anselm.

31 SAO, 1:93–139.

32 Logan, Reading Anselm’s Proslogion, 129–49, surveys the medieval reception of the Proslogion. One thing Logan does not capture is that in the late fifteenth century, excerpts from the Proslogion were added as part of an appendix of sorts to the Ps-Augustinian text, De spiritu et anima. This version of the text was then included in the five earliest editions of the Opera omnia of Augustine (from 1489 to 1685), and then finally in PL 40, cols. 779–832. Chapter 63 of De spiritu et anima is a pithy summary of the Proslogion’s chapters 5–14, and the De spiritu et anima’s chapter 64 is a verbatim copy of chapters 24–26. See Leo Norpoth, Der pseudo-augustinische Traktat De spiritu et anima: Philosophische Dissertation München 1924 (Cologne, 1971), 231–32.

33 See the appendix below for a list of these manuscripts along with their sigla.

34 MSS Vc, fols. 47v–56v; and Mu, fols. 126va–132vb.

35 The fourteen witnesses with the title of Proslogion are: MSS H, fols. 40r–47v; V, fols. 219v–226v; Pa, fols. 110r, 109v, and 111r–112v; Pb, fols. 175v–181r; M, fols. 95r–104v; Vb, fols. 93v–96v (ends imperfectly); Pc, fols. 54vb–57ra; J, fols. 41r–49r; Ms, fols. 10ra–16rb; Ma, fols. 88ra–92va; D, fols. 162v–168v; Mb, fols. 110r–114v (ends imperfectly); Mc, fols. 113r–120r; and M, fols. 17ra–18va. The four witnesses with the title of Fides querens intellectum are: MSS Va, fols. 13r–18v; O, fols. 203r–206v; A, fols. 221ra–223rb; and B, fols. 81r–86v.

36 MS P, fols. 141ra–144vb.

37 Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.4.6–7, ed. and trans. H. Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 10–14.

38 MS Vb, fols. 93vb–96vb (Proslogion without the prologue and ends imperfectly as it appears that a quire may be missing), 97ra–100rb (Proslogion with prologue), 100rb–113vb (Monologion), and 145rb–148rb (Pro insipiente and Anselm’s responsio). In between the Proslogion and the Monologion is Anselm’s Letter 103 and in between the Monologion and the Gaunilo-Anselm exchange are Letter 29 and Anselm’s De similitudinibus.

39 MS Pc, fols. 54vb–57va (Proslogion) and 57va–68rb (Monologion). Why Robert chose to produce a copy of the first version instead of the third, which was more popular for university theologians, is a question I am unable to address at this point in time. Another related question is why Anselm’s writings appear, more often than not, in theological miscellanies alongside John Damascene’s De fide orthodoxa.

40 MS A, fols. 239va–249vb; and MS Pb, fols. 184r–190r.

41 MSS V, O, A, M, J, Ms, Ma, D, Mu, Mb, Mc, and Mz.

42 MSS H, P, Pa Pb, and Vc.

43 MSS A, M, J and Ms.

44 John Harper, The Forms and Orders of the Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1991), 245.

45 MS W, fol. 122v: “Explicit liber confessionum beati Augustini. Quod sequitur non pertinet ad librum confessionum.”

46 Epistola 10, SAO, 3:113–14, but numbered as 141 in Niskanen’s edition: Letters of Anselm, 403–405. I have used the latter in my citations. See also Benjamin Pohl, “Finding the Female Voice in Anselm’s Orationes Sive Meditationes: New Manuscript Evidence,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 76 (2025): 264–97, at 264–68.

47 Epistola 10, ed. Niskanen, Letters of Anselm, 403: “Quarum prima non tantum Oratio quantum Meditatio dicenda est, qua se peccatoris anima breuiter discutiat, discutiendo despiciat, despiciendo humiliet, humiliando terrore ultimi iudicii concutiat, concussa in gemitus et lacrymas erumpat.” Niskanen suggests that this might be Meditatio 1.

48 Orationes, prol., SAO, 3:3: “Orationes sive meditationes quae subscriptae sunt, quoniam ad excitandam legentis mentem ad dei amorem vel timorem seu ad suimet discussionem…” Further on Anselm’s prayers, see Benedicta Ward. The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm: With the Proslogion (Harmondsworth, 1973), esp. 27–86; Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 81 (2006): 700–33; and Lauren Mancia, “Praying with an Eleventh-Century Manuscript: A Case Study of Paris, BnF, MS Lat. 13593,” in Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, ed. Thomas W. Barton, Sara McDougall, and Susan McDonough (Turnhout, 2017), 153–77.

49 Orationes, prol., SAO, 3:3: “Nec debet intendere lector ut quamlibet earum totam perlegat, sed quantum sentit sibi deo adiuvante valere ad accendendum affectum orandi, vel quantum illum delectat. Nec necesse habet aliquam semper a principio incipere, sed ubi magis illi placuerit. Ad hoc enim ipsum paragraphis sunt distinctae per partes, ut ubi elegerit incipiat aut desinat, ne prolixitas aut frequens eiusdem loci repetitio generet fastidium, sed potius aliquem inde colligat lector propter quod factae sunt pietatis affectum.”

50 Meditatio 2, SAO, 3:80: “… quondam candidata caelesti lavacro, dotata spiritu sancto, in Christiana professione iurata, virgo fuisti, Christo desponsata. O unde memini! O quem nominavi! Utique non iam benignum sponsum virginitatis meae, sed terribilem iudicem immunditiae meae.”

51 Brian Patrick McGuire, “John of Fécamp and Anselm of Bec: A New Language of Prayer,” in Prayer and Thought in Monastic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Benedicta Ward S.L.G (London, 2014), 226–44.

52 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, 2010), 58–85, argues that the attention given to the appearance of the “impassioned I” in the late eleventh century has been more of a result of a subjective reading by modern scholars than actual literary or historical analysis. She makes a strong case that the first person in affective texts is not necessarily an indication that the text contains the inner thoughts of the author but simply a rhetorical figure. McNamer may well be correct, but she declines to test her argument with the writings of Anselm himself (as she focuses on exploring such texts in relation to the spirituality and religious practice of women in the Middle Ages). See also Pohl, “Finding the Female Voice,” 280–87. Even if we conclude that the “I” of Anselm’s meditations is not Anselm himself, it is clear that this innovation in the composition of meditative texts—the use of the first person—situates the reader within the text alongside the author.

53 See Brian Patrick McGuire, “Love, Friendship, and Sex in the Eleventh Century: The Experience of Anselm,” Studia Theologica: Scandinavian Journal of Theology 28 (1974): 111–52; and Thomas R. Barrows, “St Anselm and Gundulf of Rochester: Brothers of Bec, One in Heart and Soul,” in Anselm of Canterbury: Communities, Contemporaries, and Criticism, ed. Margaret Healy-Varley, Giles Gasper, and George Younge (Leiden, 2021), 103–21. The more recent work of Lauren Mancia also provides a good account of the general context: Lauren Mancia, Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling towards God (Leeds, 2023), 1–13; and eadem, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester, 2019).

54 Not long after the composition of Meditation 1, Durand, abbot of La Chaise-Dieu, wrote to Anselm to thank him for sharing this text with his community as it clearly struck a chord with its readers. See Letters of Anselm, ed. Niskanen, 180 n. 61.

55 Meditatio 1, SAO, 3:76–77: “Quam tolerabilius canis putris foetet hominibus quam anima peccatrix deo! Quam infelicius ista deo quam ille hominibus! Heu non hominem, sed opprobrium hominum, vilius pecore, peius cadavere! Taedet animam meam vitae meae. Vivere erubesco, mori pertimesco. Quid ergo restat tibi, o peccator, nisi ut in tota vita tua plores totam vitam tuam, ut ipsa tota se ploret totam? Sed est in hoc quoque anima mea miserabiliter mirabilis et mirabiliter miserabilis, quia non tantum dolet quantum se noscit, sed sic secura torpet, velut quid patiatur ignoret.”

56 MS V, fol. 219v: “Numquam te vidi, Domine Deus meus, non novi faciem tuam … Quid faciet servus tuus, anxius amore tui et longe proiectus a facie tua?” This copy omits two sentences between faciem tuam and Quid faciet, which are found in Schmitt’s edition (SAO, 1:98). The marginal note is in the left margin: “Transit in terciam personarum.”

57 Meditatio 2, SAO, 3:82–83: “Si feci ut essem reus tuus: numquid potui facere ut non essem creatus tuus? Si mihi castitatem meam ademi: numquid tibi misericordiam tuam peremi? Domine, domine, si ego admisi unde me damnare potes: tunc amisisti unde salvare soles? Noli, domine, noli sic attendere malum meum, ut obliviscaris bonum tuum. Ubi est, o verax deus, ubi est [Ez. 33.11]: Vivo ego, nolo mortem peccatoris, sed ut convertatur et vivat? Domine, qui non mentiris, domine, quid est nolo mortem peccatoris, si tu sepelis in infernum ad te clamantem peccatorem? An detrudere peccatorem in gehennam est nolo mortem peccatoris? An hoc est volo ut convertatur peccator et vivat? Peccator sum ego, domine, peccator sum ego. Si ergo non vis peccatoris mortem: quid te cogit quod non vis, ut me tradas ad mortem? Si vis ut convertatur peccator et vivat: quid te prohibet facere quod vis, ut me convertas et vivam? An immanitas peccati mei cogit te quod non vis et prohibet quod vis, cum sis omnipotens deus? Absit, deus meus, absit, domine meus, ne praevaleat nequitia peccatoris confitentis et dolentis sententiae omnipotentis.”

58 See Jean Deshusses, Le sacramentaire grégorien: Ses principales formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, 3 vols. (Fribourg, 1971), 1:361.

59 Proslogion 1, SAO, 1:98: “Ille ructabat saturitate, nos suspiramus esurie. llle abundabat, nos mendicamus. Ille feliciter tenebat et misere deseruit, nos infeliciter egemus et miserabiliter desideramus, et heu, vacui remanemus.”

60 Proslogion 1, SAO, 1:98: “Domine, si hic non es, ubi te queeram absentem? Si autem ubique es, cur non video praesentem? Sed certe habitas ‘lucem inaccessibilem.’ Et ubi est lux inaccessibilis? Aut quomodo accedam ad lucem inaccessibilem? Aut quis me ducet et inducet in illam, ut videam te in illa?”

61 Proslogion 1, SAO, 1:98: “Anhelat videre te, et nimis abest illi facies tua. Accedere ad te desiderat, et inaccessibilis est habitatio tua. Invenire te cupit, et nescit locum tuum. Quaerere te affectat, et ignorat vultum tuum.”

62 Proslogion 1, SAO, 1:98: “Non tento, domine, penetrare altitudinem tuam, quia nullatenus comparo illi intellectum meum; sed desidero aliquatenus intelligere veritatem tuam, quam credit et amat cor meum. Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam.”

63 Augustine, De trinitate, 13.2.5: “Ex una sane doctrina impressam fidem credentium cordibus singulorum qui hoc idem credunt uerissime dicimus, sed aliud sunt ea quae creduntur, aliud fides qua creduntur.” ed. W. J. Mountain, CCSL 50–50A, 2 vols. (Turnhout, 1969), 2:386.

64 Proslogion 2, SAO, 1:101: “… es sicut credimus, et hoc es quod credimus. Et quidem credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.”

65 Proslogion 2, SAO, 1:101: “An ergo non est aliqua talis natura, quia dixit insipiens in corde suo: non est deus? Sed certe ipse idem insipiens, cum audit hoc ipsum quod dico: aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, intelligit quod audit; et quod intelligit in intellectu eius est, etiam si non intelligat illud esse. Aliud enim est rem esse in intellectu, aliud intelligere rem esse.”

66 Proslogion 2, SAO, 1:101–102: “Convincitur ergo etiam insipiens esse vel in intellectu aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari potest, quia hoc cum audit intelligit, et quidquid intelligitur in intellectu est. Et certe id quo maius cogitari nequit, non potest esse in solo intellectu. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re, quod maius est. Si ergo id quo maius cogitari non potest, est in solo intellectu: id ipsum quo maius cogitari non potest, est quo maius cogitari potest. Sed certe hoc esse non potest. Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid quo maius cogitari non valet, et in intellectu et in re.”

67 Peter Dendle, “‘The Age of Faith’: Everyone in the Middle Ages Believed in God,” in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon Lee Grigsby (New York, 2008), 49–53.

68 John Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005). I do not want to get sidetracked here by making any distinction between unbelief and doubt. There are certainly differences between these two epistemic states, but my focus is what Anselm takes at face value when he as the fool says, “there is no God.” For a creative exploration of the various states of unbelief, see John Marenbon, “Thought Experiments with Unbelief in the Long Middle Ages,” in Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, ed. Philip Knox, Jonathan Morton, and Daniel Reeve (Turnhout, 2018), 21–40.

69 See, for example, Bernd Goebel, “Nachdenken über den ontologischen Gottesbeweis: Eine Diskussion philosophischer Einwände gegen seine beiden Grundformen mit einem Blick auf die zeitgenössische Theologie,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 31 (2009): 105–44, esp. 109–14.

70 Oratio ad sanctum Benedictum, SAO, 3:63: “Ecce beate Benedicte, quam strenue pugnat hic miles Christi sub tuo ducatu! Ecce quam efficaciter proficit hic tuus discipulus in tua schola. Ecce bonum monachum, qui sic mortificatis vitiis et voluptatibus carnis, sic fervet et vivit solis virtutibus. Immo ecce falsum monachum, cui sic extinctis virtutibus, sic turba dominatur vitiorum, premit moles peccatorum.” For a general discussion of failure and meditation, see Mancia, Meditation and Prayer, 35–52.

71 Augustine, De libero arbitrio 2.2: “Tum ego demonstrarem, quod cuiuis facillimum puto, quanto esset aequius, cum sibi de occultis animi sui quae ipse nosset uellet alterum credere qui non nosset, ut etiam ipse tantorum uirorum libris, qui se cum filio dei uixisse testatum litteris reliquerunt, esse deum crederet, quia et ea se uidisse scripserunt quae nullo modo fieri possent si non esset deus et nimium stultus esset si me reprehenderet quod illis crediderim qui sibi uellet ut crederem,” ed. M. W. Green, CCSL 29 (Turnhout, 1970), 238.

72 Anselm of Laon, Psalterium glosatum 13.1, in Troyes, Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, MS 511, fol. 12ra: “Increpat insipientiam et duritiam iudeorum qui Christo presenti quem optauit non credunt. Quasi: priores expectauerunt sed cum appareret dixit insipiens in corde suo hic homo; non est Deus.” See also the gloss on Ps. 52.1, on fol. 67vb: “Vel iudeus dixit de Christo: non est Deus. Idem, hodie mali. Vel cui supradictum est [Ps. 49.21]: existimasti inique quod ero tui similis: ille dicit non est Deus.”

73 Eadmer, Vita Anselmi 25, ed. Southern, 42; cited by Mary Agnes Edsall, “Learning from the Exemplar: Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations and the Charismatic Text,” Mediaeval Studies 72 (2010): 161–96, at 179 n. 71. See also Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge, 1990), 367–80.