Quick Answer
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) formulated the ontological argument for God's existence in his Proslogion: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought," and a God who exists in reality is greater than one who exists only in the mind, therefore God necessarily exists. He also developed the satisfaction theory of atonement in Cur Deus Homo. His method was "faith seeking understanding": reason deepening what faith already grasps.
Key Takeaways
- The ontological argument is a meditation, not a proof: The Proslogion begins with prayer and maintains a contemplative tone throughout. Anselm was not trying to convert atheists but to deepen a believer's understanding of what God must be.
- Faith seeking understanding: Anselm's formula reverses the usual secular order. He does not argue from reason to faith; he begins with faith and uses reason to penetrate it more deeply.
- Two versions of the argument: The first version (Proslogion Ch. 2) argues God must exist in reality. The second (Ch. 3) argues God cannot be conceived not to exist, God necessarily exists.
- Cur Deus Homo: The satisfaction theory of atonement, humanity owes an infinite debt only God can pay, but only humanity owes it, so God becomes human to make infinite satisfaction on humanity's behalf.
- Rudolf Steiner's view: Steiner identified Anselm as the last major figure who could unify contemplative prayer and philosophical argument without experiencing the separation between faith and reason that became acute from the thirteenth century onward.
🕑 18 min read
Life at Bec: From Novice to Abbot
Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, a city in what is now the Italian Piedmont, near the Alpine passes between Italy and northern France. His family was Lombard nobility. His mother Ermenberga, whom Anselm later described as a deeply pious woman who first formed in him a love of wisdom, died when he was young. Relations with his father Gundulf were difficult, and after his mother's death, Anselm became restless at home.
He wandered for three years through Burgundy before, around 1059, arriving at the monastery of Bec in Normandy. Bec had been founded in 1034 by the knight Herluin and was, under its prior Lanfranc, becoming one of the most intellectually alive monasteries in Europe. Lanfranc was a gifted teacher of the liberal arts and theology, and Bec attracted students from across Europe. Anselm became a monk there in 1060.
When Lanfranc left Bec to become Abbot of Saint-Etienne at Caen in 1063, Anselm became prior. He held this position until 1078, when he succeeded Herluin as Abbot. Under his leadership, Bec continued to flourish as an intellectual and spiritual centre, and it was during this period that he wrote the Monologion, the Proslogion, and the three great philosophical dialogues: De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli.
The Monastic Context of Anselm's Philosophy
It is impossible to understand Anselm without understanding the Benedictine monastic context in which he worked. The monastery of Bec was not a university. It was a community of prayer, work, and contemplative life organised by the Rule of St Benedict. Anselm's philosophical works grew directly from this context: they were written at the request of his fellow monks, they were designed to deepen monastic contemplation rather than to address external critics, and they reflect a mode of intellectual life in which prayer, Scripture reading, and philosophical reflection were continuous activities, not separate domains. The tone of wonder, personal address, and contemplative attention that runs through even his most abstract works is not rhetorical decoration. It is the natural expression of the monastic intellectual life.
The Monologion: Reason Alone, Without Scripture
The Monologion (1076) was written at the request of Anselm's fellow monks, who asked him to set out the arguments for the existence and nature of God using reason alone, without appealing to Scripture or the authority of the Church Fathers. This was a specific methodological challenge, and Anselm accepted it.
The argument of the Monologion draws on the Neoplatonic tradition of degrees of perfection. If we observe that some things are better than others, and some better than those, there must be something through which all good things are good: a supreme goodness that is the source and standard of all partial goods. Similarly for greatness, for being itself: if some things have more being than others (are more fully real), there must be that through which all things have their being, which must itself be supreme being. These arguments, developed across 79 careful chapters, build toward a picture of the supreme nature as self-sufficient, eternal, perfectly good, perfectly great, and one, a picture that is recognisably the Christian God, derived without explicit recourse to Christian revelation.
Anselm himself was not entirely satisfied with the Monologion. It was thorough and careful, but each step of the argument relied on the previous steps, and the whole rested on the initial premises about degrees of goodness and greatness. He wanted something simpler: a single argument that could stand alone and prove everything that needed to be shown about God. The search for this argument led him to the Proslogion.
The Proslogion and the Ontological Argument
The Proslogion (1077-78) was originally titled Fides quaerens intellectum (Faith Seeking Understanding). Anselm describes in the preface how the argument came to him after much prayer and struggle: he had been trying for a long time to find the single argument he was looking for, and it came almost against his will, disturbing his sleep and disrupting his devotions until he finally wrote it down.
The argument appears in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion, embedded in what is essentially a prayer. The structural setting is important: Anselm is addressing God directly. He is not constructing a philosophical argument from a neutral standpoint. He is a believer attempting to understand more deeply what he already believes.
The argument runs as follows:
We believe that You are something than which nothing greater can be thought. Or can it be that there is no such nature, since "the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God" (Psalm 14:1)? But at any rate, even this same fool, when he hears what I am speaking about, namely, "something than which nothing greater can be thought," understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding, even if he does not understand it to exist. For it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another to understand that the object exists.
Thus even the fool is convinced that something than which nothing greater can be thought exists in the understanding, since when he hears this, he understands it. And surely that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist in the understanding alone. For if it exists in the understanding alone, it can be thought to exist also in reality, and this is greater. Therefore, if that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in the understanding alone, that very thing than which a greater cannot be thought is something than which a greater can be thought. But this is clearly impossible. Therefore, something than which a greater cannot be thought must exist both in the understanding and in reality.
Anselm, Proslogion Ch. 2, trans. Charlesworth
The argument has the following structure: the concept of God is the concept of "that than which nothing greater can be thought." Even an atheist who denies God's existence has this concept when they understand the definition. Now, something that exists in reality is, all else being equal, greater than something that exists only in the mind. Therefore, if God existed only in the mind, we could conceive of something greater (a God that also exists in reality). But then our original concept, of the greatest conceivable being, was not of the greatest conceivable being, which is a contradiction. Therefore, the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality.
The Second Version: Necessary Existence
Chapter 3 of the Proslogion contains a second version of the argument that many philosophers consider more interesting than the first. Anselm argues that it is greater to be a being that cannot be conceived not to exist than to be a being whose non-existence is conceivable. Contingent beings (beings that happen to exist but might not have existed) are, in this respect, lesser than necessary beings (beings whose non-existence is impossible).
If God is the greatest conceivable being, God must be a necessary being: a being whose non-existence is inconceivable. This means that God cannot be conceived not to exist. The fool who says "there is no God" is not merely mistaken about a matter of fact; the fool is attempting a thought that cannot coherently be completed. God's non-existence is not merely false but impossible.
This second version is structurally important because it shifts the argument from existence to the mode of existence. God does not simply exist; God necessarily exists. This anticipates the modal logic developments of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, particularly Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument (1974), which reformulates Anselm's second version using possible worlds semantics and argues that if there is any possible world in which a maximally great being exists, then that being exists in all possible worlds including ours.
Gaunilo and Kant: The Two Great Objections
The ontological argument has been the subject of more sustained philosophical debate than almost any other argument in the Western tradition. Two objections dominate the discussion.
Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, a contemporary Benedictine monk, wrote a response to the Proslogion titled On Behalf of the Fool. His central objection is the Perfect Island counter-example. If Anselm's reasoning is valid, it would prove the existence of any perfect thing: we can conceive of a perfect island, greater than any real island; by Anselm's reasoning, a perfect island that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind; therefore the perfect island must exist in reality. But clearly the existence of a perfect island cannot be proved by this reasoning. Therefore, something is wrong with Anselm's argument.
Anselm's reply was careful: the argument works only for a being whose very nature is to be the greatest conceivable. A perfect island can always be conceived as greater: add one more palm tree, improve the climate slightly. There is no natural stopping point for island-improvement. But "that than which nothing greater can be thought" is not a being that can be improved by adding properties. It is defined by the impossibility of anything greater. Only for a being with this specific character does the argument have force.
Kant's objection, developed in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), is different and deeper. Kant argues that "existence is not a predicate" (or, more carefully, not a real predicate, not a property that adds to a concept). When we list the properties of a lion, four-legged, maned, carnivorous, and then add "exists," we have not added another property to the list. We have claimed that the concept is instantiated in reality. This means that a real God and a merely-conceived God have exactly the same properties; they do not differ in properties, but only in whether the concept is instantiated.
If this is correct, then the move from "the greatest conceivable being would have existence as a property" to "therefore the greatest conceivable being exists" is invalid. We cannot include existence in the concept of God and then argue from the concept to the reality, because existence is not the kind of thing that can be included in a concept. Most philosophers regard Kant's objection as powerful, though not conclusive. Defenders of the ontological argument, from Descartes through Leibniz to Plantinga, have argued that necessary existence (unlike contingent existence) is a genuine property that can coherently be included in a concept.
Faith Seeking Understanding: The Anselmian Method
The formula fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is the key to understanding Anselm's entire philosophical approach. It is easy to misread this as a limitation: faith as a starting assumption that prevents genuine philosophical inquiry. Anselm himself understood it as exactly the opposite.
For Anselm, genuine understanding of divine realities requires a prior orientation toward them. This is not peculiar to theology. Even in mathematics, genuine understanding requires a kind of commitment: you must engage with the problem, hold it in attention, work with it seriously, before insight becomes possible. Anselm is making an analogous claim about theological understanding: without the prior commitment of faith, the attempt to understand God from a neutral external standpoint produces at best an abstract concept of the divine, not genuine insight into the divine nature.
The Contemplative Dimension of the Ontological Argument
In our study of the Proslogion in its full context, what strikes us most forcefully is how completely the argument is embedded in contemplative practice. The famous argument occupies less than two pages of a work that runs to twenty-six chapters, most of which are extended meditations on what God's nature must be: "You are truly, You are truly and supremely just, You are truly blessed, You are truly and supremely good." The argument is not the whole point. It is one move within a larger act of contemplative attention to the divine. Reading it as an isolated logical proof strips it of the spiritual context that gives it meaning. Anselm himself would not have recognised the argument as it is typically discussed in philosophy textbooks: a logical construction to be evaluated for validity, entirely detached from prayer and contemplation.
The famous statement of method: "I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, that unless I believed, I should not understand." This is a genuine epistemological claim, not a retreat from reason. It proposes that for certain objects of knowledge (specifically, the divine), the condition for understanding is not neutrality but orientation: you must already be turned toward the thing you are trying to understand. This anticipates the phenomenological tradition's insistence on the role of prior understanding and orientation (what Heidegger calls the "fore-structure" of understanding) in all genuine knowing.
Cur Deus Homo: Why God Became Man
Written between 1094 and 1098, while Anselm was already Archbishop of Canterbury and in the first of his exiles from England, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man) is Anselm's account of the necessity of the Incarnation and the Atonement. It is, after the Proslogion, his most influential work, and its impact on Western theology was enormous.
The argument has the following structure. Human beings have sinned, which means they have offended the honour of God. In Anselm's feudal-influenced framework, honour is a real moral quantity: an offence against a greater person requires a proportionally greater satisfaction. God's honour is infinite; the offence of sin against an infinite God is therefore infinitely serious. This means that the satisfaction required to restore right relationship is infinite in scale: nothing finite can adequately compensate for an infinite offence.
But who is required to make the satisfaction? The party that committed the offence: humanity. Only humanity owes the debt. God does not owe it; angels do not owe it. Yet humanity, being finite, cannot make an infinite satisfaction. The debt is infinite, but the debtor is finite. This is the dilemma that the Incarnation resolves: God becomes human, so that there exists a being who is both God (and therefore capable of infinite satisfaction) and human (and therefore the right party to make it). The God-man makes the infinite satisfaction that human beings owe but cannot pay.
The Satisfaction Theory and Its Critics
Anselm's satisfaction theory replaced the older "ransom theory" of atonement (in which Christ's death was a ransom paid to the devil to free humanity from his power) and remained the dominant account in Western theology through the Reformation. But it has significant critics. Peter Abelard, Anselm's contemporary, proposed a "moral influence theory": Christ's death demonstrates God's love so powerfully that it moves human hearts to repentance and transformation, which is itself the atonement. In more recent theology, the moral objection has been pressed: why should an innocent person's death satisfy the debt incurred by others? The satisfaction theory has been influential not because it is unproblematic but because it takes seriously both the severity of the human condition and the magnitude of what the Incarnation represents.
De Veritate and De Libertate Arbitrii
Three philosophical dialogues, written at Bec in the 1080s, constitute the most technically precise philosophical work Anselm produced. De veritate (On Truth) asks what truth is, not just in propositions but in actions, things, and the senses: truth in its most universal form is "that which is as it ought to be," a definition that connects truth to rectitude and ultimately to God as the source of all rectitude.
De libertate arbitrii (On Free Will) defines freedom as "the power to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake" rather than as mere indifference between alternatives. This definition has important consequences. It means that God is perfectly free despite being unable to sin, because God's inability to sin is not a limitation on freedom but the expression of perfect freedom: the settled, unimpeded capacity to choose rightly. Conversely, the "freedom" to sin that humans currently have is not genuine freedom but the result of the Fall: the will has lost its original rectitude and is now pulled in wrong directions that genuine freedom would not choose.
De casu diaboli (On the Fall of the Devil) applies these concepts to the problem of how a created being (the devil) could freely choose evil if it was originally created good. The answer: the devil's will was originally given rectitude, but the devil was also given a will for happiness (his own well-being and advancement). In choosing to pursue his own advancement beyond what justice permitted, grasping for what he was not given, the devil abandoned the rectitude of will and fell. This account of the Fall as the choice of self-will over the will for justice has significant resonances with later mystical accounts of sin and evil, including in Böhme and ultimately in Steiner's account of the Luciferic temptation.
Archbishop of Canterbury and the Investiture Controversy
In 1093, Anselm was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by King William II (Rufus) of England, an appointment that Anselm accepted with reluctance. The reluctance proved prophetic. For the last sixteen years of his life, Anselm was involved in two major conflicts over the investiture controversy: the question of whether kings or popes had the right to appoint (invest) bishops with the symbols of their office.
William II claimed the right to invest bishops and refused to recognise Pope Urban II (whose authority was disputed). Anselm refused to compromise on the principle that the Church's appointments were ultimately the pope's prerogative. After a period of increasing tension, Anselm went into exile in 1097, staying in Rome and Lyons, continuing to write (Cur Deus Homo was completed during this exile) and conducting ecclesiastical business from abroad.
Under Henry I, who succeeded William II in 1100, a temporary reconciliation was reached, but a second dispute arose over the same issue, leading to a second exile from 1103 to 1107. The final settlement in 1107 (the Concordat of London) distinguished between spiritual investiture (which was the pope's right) and feudal homage for temporal lands (which the king could require). This settlement was a precursor to the broader Concordat of Worms (1122) that temporarily resolved the investiture controversy throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
Rudolf Steiner and Anselm at the Threshold of Scholasticism
Rudolf Steiner discusses Anselm in GA 18 (Riddles of Philosophy) as one of the key figures in the transition from the early medieval synthesis of faith and reason to the more differentiated Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. For Steiner, Anselm represents a consciousness that has not yet experienced the full separation between faith as religious commitment and reason as independent philosophical inquiry.
In Anselm's world, prayer and philosophical argument are continuous activities. The Proslogion moves from prayer to argument to extended meditation without any sense of transition between different modes of consciousness. This is not naivety. It is the expression of a consciousness in which the division between the inner spiritual life and the outer intellectual life has not yet opened into the gulf it would become in the modern period.
The ontological argument itself is, for Steiner, a telling case. On its surface, it appears to be pure reason: a logical argument that makes no appeal to faith, Scripture, or religious experience. Yet it only makes sense within the orientation of faith. An atheist philosopher who encounters the argument typically responds to it as a clever but flawed logical puzzle. A believer who encounters it within the context of the Proslogion's meditation often finds it genuinely illuminating: not as a proof that creates belief where there was none, but as a clarification of what God must be if faith is to make sense at all. The argument belongs to the mode of understanding that Steiner calls "faith seeking understanding": it is not faith replacing reason, nor reason replacing faith, but faith and reason operating as a single activity.
The Ontological Argument and the Nature of Necessary Being
In our exploration of Anselm alongside Steiner's epistemology, one aspect of the ontological argument takes on particular significance: the distinction between contingent and necessary existence. Anselm's second version argues that God necessarily exists, that God's non-existence is not just false but inconceivable. This distinction between contingent beings (which happen to exist but might not) and necessary being (which cannot not exist) maps, in a suggestive way, onto the Anthroposophical distinction between the world of sensible appearances (which are contingent, arising and passing away in time) and the spiritual archetypes from which they derive their being (which have a different, more stable mode of existence). The divine that underlies the contingent world is not itself contingent: it does not happen to exist. It necessarily underlies all that is. This is what Anselm was trying to grasp in the Proslogion.
Steiner also recognised the significance of Anselm's coming after Eriugena and before Aquinas. Eriugena had preserved the rich Eastern Christian philosophical tradition in the West but wrote in a style accessible only to highly trained Neoplatonic thinkers. Anselm is more accessible but still integrated in his approach to faith and reason. Aquinas would make the separation more explicit: natural reason can prove some truths about God (the Five Ways), but supernatural revelation provides additional truths that reason cannot attain. Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum is the last major formulation before that separation, and in some ways the most honest: it acknowledges that the starting point for theological understanding is not neutral reason but the life of faith, without thereby denying the genuine insights that reason can achieve from within that orientation.
Frequently Asked Questions
St. Anselm's Book of Meditations and Prayers by Canterbury P.P., St. Anselm of
View on AmazonAffiliate link, your purchase supports Thalira at no extra cost.
What is Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument?
Anselm's ontological argument, in Proslogion Chapter 2: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought." Even an atheist understands this concept. But a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind. If God existed only in the mind, we could conceive something greater (a God that also exists in reality), which would mean our concept was not of the greatest conceivable being, a contradiction. Therefore God must exist in reality.
What does "faith seeking understanding" mean in Anselm?
Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum describes his philosophical method: he does not argue from reason to faith, but begins with faith and uses reason to deepen understanding of what faith grasps. His formula: "I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For unless I believed, I should not understand." This is a genuine epistemological claim: genuine understanding of divine realities requires prior orientation toward them, not a neutral external standpoint.
What is Gaunilo's objection to Anselm's ontological argument?
Gaunilo's "Perfect Island" objection: if Anselm's logic is valid, it would prove the existence of any perfect thing, a perfect island, for instance. But a perfect island's existence cannot be proved by thinking about it. Anselm replied that the argument only works for a being whose nature is to be absolutely greatest, with no natural stopping point for improvement. A perfect island can always be conceived greater. Only a being defined by the impossibility of anything greater has the character the argument requires.
What is Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?
Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man, 1094-1098) argues for the necessity of the Incarnation: human sin incurred an infinite debt against God's honour; only humanity owes the debt but only God can pay it (infinite satisfaction requires infinite capacity); therefore God became human to make the satisfaction humanity owes but cannot make. This satisfaction theory of atonement replaced the older ransom theory and remained dominant in Western theology through the Reformation.
What is Anselm's second version of the ontological argument?
Proslogion Chapter 3 argues that it is greater to be a being that cannot be conceived not to exist than one whose non-existence is conceivable. Since God is the greatest conceivable being, God must necessarily exist, God's non-existence is not just false but inconceivable. This second version, about the mode of existence (necessary vs contingent), was developed in the twentieth century into modal logic versions by Alvin Plantinga using possible worlds semantics.
Did Kant successfully refute the ontological argument?
Kant argued that "existence is not a predicate", not a real property that adds to a concept. When we say "God exists," we are not adding a property to the concept of God but claiming the concept is instantiated in reality. This makes the move from "the greatest conceivable being would have existence as a property" to "therefore God exists" invalid. Most philosophers consider Kant's objection powerful. Defenders of the argument, from Descartes to Plantinga, argue that necessary existence (unlike contingent existence) is a genuine property that can be included in a concept.
What is the Monologion by Anselm?
The Monologion (1076) argues for God's existence and nature using reason alone, without appealing to Scripture. It draws on Neoplatonic degrees of perfection: if some things are better than others, there must be the supremely good from which all good derives. In 79 chapters, Anselm derives the existence, unity, eternity, and goodness of God. His later Fourth Way in Aquinas's Five Ways draws on this Anselmian argument from degrees of perfection.
Was Anselm a mystic or a philosopher?
Anselm was both, and understanding this is essential to reading him correctly. The Proslogion is not a philosophical treatise but a meditation that begins with prayer and maintains a tone of personal address to God throughout. Anselm was a believing monk trying to understand more deeply what he already believed, not trying to prove God's existence to atheist sceptics. His philosophical arguments grow from and return to contemplative prayer, they are not separable from the monastic spiritual life in which they were embedded.
What is Anselm's view on free will?
De libertate arbitrii defines free will as "the power to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake," not mere indifference between options. God is perfectly free despite being unable to sin, because God's inability to sin expresses the perfect exercise of freedom. The human "freedom" to sin is not genuine freedom but the result of the Fall. Genuine freedom is the settled disposition to choose rightly, freely, for the sake of justice, not compelled and not pulled away by disordered desire.
What did Rudolf Steiner say about Anselm?
In GA 18 (Riddles of Philosophy), Steiner identifies Anselm as representing a consciousness that has not yet experienced the separation between faith and reason. In Anselm's world, prayer and philosophical argument are continuous activities. Steiner saw in Anselm the last major figure who could synthesise contemplative prayer and philosophical argument without experiencing the tension between them that would become acute from Aquinas onward, when the separation of natural reason from supernatural faith became explicit.
What does 'faith seeking understanding' mean in Anselm?
Anselm's formula fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) describes his entire philosophical method. He does not argue from reason to faith, as if faith were the conclusion of an argument. He begins with faith and uses reason to deepen understanding of what faith already grasps. His famous statement summarises this: 'I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe — that unless I believed, I should not understand.' This is not anti-rational. It reflects a specific view of the relationship between spiritual commitment and intellectual understanding: genuine understanding of divine realities requires a prior orientation toward them, not a neutral external standpoint.
The Argument That Begins in Prayer
Anselm sat in a monastery in eleventh-century Normandy, was troubled by an argument he could not quite grasp, and prayed for clarity until it came to him. The argument he found has been debated by philosophers ever since. Whether it succeeds as a logical proof is one question. Whether it succeeds as an act of contemplative attention to the divine is another. Anselm himself was clear which he thought he was doing: not demonstrating God's existence from outside faith, but exploring, from within the life of prayer, what it means to say that God is that than which nothing greater can be thought. That question, asked honestly, has not yet been exhausted.
Sources & References
- Anselm of Canterbury. (1077-78/1998). Proslogion. Trans. M.J. Charlesworth. University of Notre Dame Press.
- Anselm of Canterbury. (1094-98/1998). Cur Deus Homo. Trans. J. McIntyre. In Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. Oxford University Press.
- Southern, R.W. (1990). Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape. Cambridge University Press.
- Davies, B. and Leftow, B. (eds). (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Anselm. Cambridge University Press.
- Plantinga, A. (1974). The Nature of Necessity. Clarendon Press.
- Steiner, R. (1914/1973). Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18). Anthroposophic Press.
- Hopkins, J. (1972). A Companion to the Study of St Anselm. University of Minnesota Press.
- Evans, G.R. (1978). Anselm and Talking About God. Clarendon Press.