 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode … A Canterbury Tale – Anselm's Life and Works You will presumably be familiar with Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book with almost as many jokes about philosophy in it as this series of podcasts, and his are funnier. Another novel by Adams, entitled Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, is less celebrated, but has a scene in it that I like very much. In this scene, the title character, Dirk Gently, refers to Sir Isaac Newton as the renowned inventor of the cat flap. When it's pointed out to him that, more to the point, Newton also discovered gravity, Dirk responds that gravity was just waiting around for someone to notice it, whereas the cat flap was a true stroke of genius. A door within a door, you see. It's put to him that this actually seems quite an obvious idea, at which point Dirk says, It is a rare mind indeed that can replace the hitherto non-existent with the blindingly obvious. Of course, being extraordinarily famous for one thing, when you deserve to be famous for other things too, is not that harsh a fate. Zepo Marx, the obscure fourth Marx brother, would presumably have leapt at such a chance. And it certainly wouldn't have bothered Anselm of Canterbury that he was in this respect the Isaac Newton of medieval philosophy. Fain was the last thing on his mind when he devised his so-called ontological argument, a proof intended to show that the existence of God is blindingly obvious, indeed entailed by our very conception of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Anselm owes his renown mostly to this argument, yet even without it he would deserve a prominent place in the history of medieval philosophy. He lived most of his life in the 11th century, dying in 1109, but helped to prepare the way for the flowering of scholasticism in the 12th century. He was also a significant, though reluctant, actor on the political stage, whose life story will give us a first glimpse of the clash between the authority of the church and of the state. Anselm was formed by, and for the most part remained within, the sort of monastic intellectual culture that has provided the main context for philosophy ever since the Carolingian Renaissance. Like Peter Damian, who featured in last week's episode, Anselm hailed from northern Italy, but he moved in his early 20s to France, where he became a monk at the Abbey of Bek in the year 1059. Here, he encountered Landfrank, whom we saw engaging in a dispute over the correct understanding of the Eucharist in a previous episode. Landfrank was well known as a teacher of the liberal arts, and must have had a significant role in shaping the intellectual outlook of Anselm, who succeeded him as the prior of Bek in 1063, later becoming Abbot. He did not enjoy the duties involved in these posts, but that was nothing compared to what awaited him. In 1093, he reluctantly agreed to be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. His biographer, Eyad Mir, claims that when Anselm was being invested as Archbishop, he actually physically resisted when William II, the King of England, personally bestowed the ring and staff upon him. The King's right to appoint bishops was at this time becoming a matter of intense debate. As we'll be discussing in a future episode, the investiture controversy had already erupted in the 1070s, as the Church resisted the claims of secular rulers to exercise authority over the clergy. But, in describing the scene, Eyad Mir may also have been writing with the benefit of hindsight, having a clearer understanding of the significance of this investiture ceremony, and also knowledge of the rocky relationship Anselm was to have with William. They clashed over the restoration of land to the Church and other financial matters. Eventually, Anselm had to go to Rome to petition the Pope for his support. He returned to England after William's death, only to go into exile again because of the investiture controversy which pitted him against William's successor, Henry I. Amidst these political battles, and despite his official duties, Anselm somehow managed to compose the works of philosophy and theology that stand as a landmark in the transition from early medieval thought to the intellectual renaissance of the 12th century. And yes, I know we just had a renaissance in the Carolingian period, but between the 8th and the 15th centuries, philosophy was reborn more often than a phoenix with a heavy smoking habit. In many respects, Anselm's writings would be at home in the earlier period we've been examining so far. He tells us that one of his better known works, the Monologion, was written at the request of his fellow monks, for the sake of meditating on the divine. Anselm was, he tells us, reluctant to set down his thoughts, but did so in humble compliance to their requests. The pastoral dimension of Anselm's career is also shown, for instance, by prayers and other spiritual writings which are rarely read by historians of philosophy but provide important context for his more philosophical writings. These texts are also deeply informed by Augustine, still the dominant intellectual force in monastic culture. On the other hand, those same writings point the way towards a major feature of philosophy in the 12th and 13th century, a reliance on reason rather than revelation and authority. In the preface of the Monologion, Anselm explains that what we are about to read will, supposedly at the request of Anselm's brethren, consist of nothing but rational argument. True to his word, in what follows Anselm refrains from quoting scripture. This approach displeased his teacher Lanfranc when Anselm sent him the Monologion to ask whether it met with his approval. Even though Lanfranc had criticized his opponent Berengar for trying to explicate the Eucharist using nothing but the tools of dialectic, Lanfranc was no opponent of the use of reason. So his disquiet at the lack of authoritative quotations in the Monologion powerfully demonstrates the novelty of Anselm's method. In the 12th century, figures like Abelard will have no hesitation in setting out pure argument such as to persuade even a fair-minded Jew or atheist. Anselm was a pioneer in this regard, and though he was humble enough to submit the Monologion to Lanfranc, he was also confident enough in his approach that he left the treatise as it was, despite Lanfranc's criticism. It was while he was at Beck in the 1070s and 80s that Anselm wrote the groundbreaking Monologion and its sequel, the Proslogion, which contains the famous ontological argument. Yet at this same time, he was dealing with somewhat more traditional topics. He penned a work on grammar, the first of the liberal arts, and he used his dialectical skills to sort out the problem of freedom's compatibility with divine predestination and the Augustinian position on grace, the issue that had led to such disputes in the time of Ariugina. Later, during his time at Canterbury, Anselm's rationalist project would take an even bolder form, as he tried to show why God not only did, but in fact had to, become incarnate as a human. Again, the preface to the work declares his method. Even if we knew nothing about Christ, we could work out for ourselves that God must become man in order to save humankind, and that otherwise the immortality for which humans are destined could never come to pass. Behind that argument lurks a fundamental presupposition of Anselm. Things in the created world can only be rightly understood in light of their purposes. To some extent this was old news. Ever since Aristotle, nature had usually been understood in a teleological way. If you want to understand a giraffe's long neck, you have to realize what purpose is being served by its length. But Anselm, following the lead of Augustine, tends to see even apparently abstract notions in teleological terms. Consider, for instance, his treatise entitled On Truth. We might assume that this is a pretty straightforward notion. A sentence is true if what it says matches the way that things are. Anselm would agree with that as far as it goes, but he would insist that affirmative sentences like this need to be understood as serving some purpose. They are, as it were, trying to do something. Their goal is to describe the world, or as Anselm puts it, to signify that what is, is. So, the truth of an assertion is an example of what Anselm calls rectitudo, meaning correctness, or if you prefer to stick closer to the Latin word, rectitude. In light of this understanding of truth, Anselm feels free to apply the concept of truth much more widely than we would today. If truth is the same thing as correctness, or rectitude, it can turn up wherever rectitude is at stake. And for Anselm, that's just about everywhere. For example, he says that a right action is a true action. God, being purely good and the source of all other goods, is the ultimate example of something that is as it ought to be, so Anselm concludes that God is nothing other than truth itself. Finally, we can apply this concept of truth or rectitude to the human will. Since we can will what we ought to as when we love God, or fail to do this as when we sin, the will can be true or false. In other words, it can have or lack rectitude. Anselm develops this idea in two further treatises which form a trilogy together with On Truth, called On Free Will and On the Fall of the Devil. Here, Anselm is trying to understand the sinful choices that led to the fall of humans and of Satan, a former angel who was punished for trying to usurp God's authority. Like On Truth, these treatises are written in dialogue form. As in Eriugina's Paraphysion, the dialogue unfolds between a teacher and a student, with the teacher coaxing a puzzled student into understanding the novel ideas being put forward. At the very outset, the student poses the question that had so vexed Eriugina and his contemporaries, if we need God's grace to avoid sin, how is it that we remain free? The teacher responds by saying that freedom is not the power to choose between sinning and not sinning. After all, God cannot sin, nor can the angels who have been confirmed in their commitment to God after they chose obedience to him rather than the defiance shown by Satan. With this point, Anselm is heading into the area we talked about last time, when we wondered whether there is anything that God cannot do. His answer is yes, God cannot will evil. He can only will one thing, namely the good. But this does not make him any less free. In fact, God's inability to choose anything but goodness makes him more free than a creature who can choose between good and evil. This may sound perplexing, but it is easier to understand in light of Anselm's earlier definition of the will. Remember that the will is not just a power to choose, but has a purpose. This purpose is, as Anselm puts it, to preserve rectitude for its own sake, and freedom is nothing more nor less than the ability to do this. In other words, the reason we have a will is so that we can persevere in willing goodness or justice, because they are good and just, rather than to win some reward or avoid some punishment. Someone is free so long as they are able to do this. Obviously, being unable to sin, like God and the good angels, does not amount to an inability to exercise will rightly. To the contrary, it is a guarantee that the will is always used in the way it was meant to be used, in other words, a guarantee that such a will is free. As humans, we face a different and more problematic situation. The first humans, like Satan before he fell, faced the choice of whether to use will correctly or incorrectly. Unfortunately, they picked wrong. We still bear the burden of this choice, being unable to will goodness consistently because we are born into original sin. To use Anselm's preferred language again, we are not in a position to preserve rectitude for its own sake. Doesn't that mean then that we do lack freedom after all? Anselm argues that it does not, and his argument is a clever one. Someone could have a power to do something without being in a position to use that power. His example is eyesight. Suppose that I sit you down in a theater where a Marx Brothers movie is playing and that your eyes are in good working order. Clearly, you have the power to see the movie. Now imagine that I blindfold you. Would you now lack the power to see the movie? No, that would be the case of someone who actually lacks eyesight, that is, someone who is blind. Rather, you do have the power but are unable to use that power until the blindfold is removed. It could have been worse, at least it isn't a silent movie. In the same way, even in their fallen state, humans have the power to preserve rectitude for its own sake. In other words, they do have free wills. It's just that they can't use this power in the way it was meant to be used, at least not without God's help. But that isn't to say that humans can't use their free wills at all. We are willing freely with every choice we make, including our sinful choices. Why though does sinning count as a use of free will if the purpose of the will is to preserve rectitude? Well, because you can use a power without using it rightly. The purpose of my power to write philosophy podcasts is to entertain and inform my audience. If I used this power to put out a dull and misleading episode, you never know, it might happen, then I would not be using the power as I should, but I would still be using it. Likewise, the choices of Adam, Eve, and Satan before they fell and the sinful choices we make now are incorrect uses of the will, yet they are still free uses of the will. Now, you might object to this that sinning doesn't seem to have anything to do with freedom at all. If freedom is the power to preserve the will's rectitude, how is it involved in violating that very rectitude? To understand Anselm's answer, we need to factor in another condition that he lays down for freedom of the will. No one is free to will something if they are compelled or coerced into willing it. Even the threat of guaranteed punishment can count as coercion. This is why Anselm insists that Satan could not have known the awful fate that would befall him if he defied God. If he had known, he would not only have chosen differently, but would have had no alternative but to choose differently, so he would not have been free. The same goes for humans. If God acts justly in punishing us, it is because humankind sins, as Anselm puts it, through a judgment that is so free that it cannot be coerced to sin by anything else. This is what the will to sin has in common with the will to preserve rectitude. Neither are coerced by any outside force. Whether the choice is good or bad, the choice is only free if it is determined by the person who is exercising their will to choose. A remarkable feature of Anselm's analysis is that, according to him, someone can even be coerced by their own motivations. When he is describing the fall of the devil, he says that Satan must have had two opposing motivations. One was a motivation to be just, the other a motivation to have whatever would make him happy. Justice would imply obedience to God, while Satan supposed that he would become happy by defying God. The other angels had the same pair of motivations but chose justice over happiness, and good thing too, since Satan's choice made him far from happy in the end. Anselm reasons that if God had given the angels only one of these two motivations, they would have been unfree in their choices. If he bestowed only the desire for justice upon the angels, he would effectively be forcing them to be obedient, which would render their choice both unfree and morally worthless. As it is, all the angels did have a choice of which motivation to follow, which is why Satan could rightly be punished and the good angels rightly rewarded. The fact that the good angels can no longer sin is no hindrance to their continued moral goodness and freedom, since this is a reward for their original free choice to be obedient to God. And what about God himself? He doesn't seem to have two motivations, one for justice and one for happiness, rather he has a simple, single will. But that's no problem, because no one else is responsible for giving God this single motivation, as he would have been responsible for giving such a motivation to the angels. Since God's goodness comes entirely from within, so that there is no hint of coercion in his choice, he remains fully self-determined and free. With all due respect to Arijuna, I have to say that this is an unprecedentedly sophisticated and clear-minded attempt to make sense of Augustine's position on freedom. With a deft series of distinctions and definitions, Anselm has secured everything an Augustinian might want. There is the needed asymmetry between acting rightly and wrongly, in that we are unable to be good without grace, but able to be evil through our own power. Yet, we also remain free with respect to these choices. We can also see exactly how God remains perfectly free even without being able to do certain things that even his creatures can do, like sin, for example. These victories do not come without costs, though. In particular, we might balk at defining an apparently basic idea like freedom with the rather complicated formula, power to preserve rectitude for its own sake. But Anselm was a master at deriving powerful conclusions from such verbal formulas. Take this example, that in which nothing greater can be conceived. It should be blindingly obvious what can be proved on the basis of that phrase, but if it isn't, I suggest you join me next time, as we turn to Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.