medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
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Subject: TMR 13.04.12 Sweeney, Anselm of Canterbury (Novikoff)
Sweeney, Eileen C. <i>Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the
Word</i>. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012.
Pp. xv, 403. $74.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-8132-1958-5.
Reviewed by Alex J. Novikoff
Rhodes College
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Few figures in the history of medieval philosophy can claim the
significance of Anselm of Canterbury. Even the most rudimentary survey
of western thought and society will almost inevitably accord him some
space, if only to ponder and play with that most arresting of
metaphysical concepts: the ontological proof of the existence of God.
For the modern scholar of Anselm and his oeuvre, this is both a
blessing and a curse. How to think anew about a canonical figure for
whom there exists over eight hundred years of reflection and debate?
How to contextualize and evaluate the mind of a medieval author who
comes closest to the definition of a philosopher in modern terms?
These are not the questions that Eileen Sweeney has explicitly set out
to address, but in providing one of the most thorough reevaluations of
Anselm's thought to date, they are among the conundrums for which her
enterprise yields fresh answers.
Sweeney's new book on Anselm rests on a basic, if slightly overstated,
paradox of his legacy. In his arguments based on reason alone, Anselm
appears to develop a model of pure and neutral rationality. From this
line of inquiry comes his famous dictum, "faith seeking
understanding," a sometimes misconstrued analytical precept that has
nevertheless influenced debates over reason and faith in the Christian
tradition for nearly a millennium. Yet in his intensely personal and
passionate prayers, meditations, and letters of spiritual direction,
Anselm is equally regarded as a forerunner of later experiential and
emotional spirituality, a topic of renewed interest in the current
study of devotional practices. [1] Seeking unity where others have
been contented with dichotomy, or at any rate diversity, Sweeney
addresses these tensions by offering a cumulative and comparative
interpretation of Anselm's writings over time and across modern
topical divides. "The thesis of this book," she writes, " is that
Anselm's corpus, from his earliest prayers to last treatise, is a
single project in which knowledge of self and God are inextricably
linked" (7). Sweeney specifically seeks to uncover the dialectics of
separation and union that run throughout his thought and that find
expression in the variety of literary genres that he took up over the
course of his career as monk, abbot, and archbishop. It is an
ambitious project, but in many ways Sweeney is the ideal person to
undertake it, having devoted many previous articles and books to
issues of medieval philosophy and theology, ranging from problems of
belief and action to discussions of representation and literary genre.
The resulting volume is the ripened fruit of many years of thinking
about Anselm and the motives for his writings.
The book wisely follows the progression of Anselm's thought and career
in rough chronological fashion, so far as chronology can be firmly
established. It may seem like a basic point, but this approach is
itself a departure from traditional treatments by philosophers and
theologians who generally privilege topical analysis over sequential
progression. [2] It is also crucial to what she frequently refers to
as the upward "arc" of his intellectual journey toward God, for in
identifying a persistent struggle between alienation and intimacy,
Sweeney adamantly resists the notion that Anselm's ideas show
significant change over time. Chapter 1 lays out the narrative pattern
of Anselm's prayers, since for Sweeney they establish in clearest
terms the issues and trajectory found in his other works. The prayers
sound the depths of human sin, but they also guide Anselm toward the
point where the sins that separate him from an infinitely unreachable
God are forgiven by a God whose very transcendence transforms him into
an intimate struggling to overcome his own ignorance. Chapter 2
continues this theme in his letters, where Anselm achieves union by
forgoing physical closeness for spiritual communion. By borrowing the
language of erotic love for higher purposes, what Sweeney subversively
but amusingly calls his "recruiting tool" (72), and joining it to the
language of mystical union, Anselm forms a model of monastic
friendship which he can then deploy to convince other monks to join
their wills to his and to will, with him, one thing: union with God.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Anselm's logical and grammatical writings
including, but not limited to, the <i>Monologion</i> and the
<i>Proslogion</i>. More than merely rehearsing Anselm's well-known
ontological argument, Sweeney places these works within a broader
rhetorical and pedagogical context of achieving union of words with
things. Just as the first movement in the prayers is the realization
of one's separation from God, so in the logical works learning how
words only imperfectly map onto things is the first step toward
creating the chain of terms that can carry the mind up toward God.
Philosophers may be disappointed to learn that no verdict is given on
the structural soundness of his arguments, but to my mind this, too,
is a refreshing feature of her approach.
Chapter 5 explores the relationship between Anselm's method of
linguistic analysis and the problems of truth and the will in <i>De
veritate</i>, <i>De libertate arbitrii</i>, and <i>De casu
diaboli</i>, a trilogy of dialogues that he deliberately intended to
be published in that order. Sidestepping the issue of their dating, a
thorny question for many, Sweeney instead focuses on their connection
to each other through their dialogical form, their topics, and their
relationship to Scripture. The subject of these works is not God per
se, but rather the world of finitude and becoming. Yet what is carried
forward from his earlier writings, while foreshadowing his later ones,
is the search for linguistic integrity in which clear formulations of
necessary truths come out in equally impenetrable paradoxes. Thus, for
example, Anselm argues there are evils that are something and evils
that are nothing. It is both possible and impossible for the world to
come to be. Some things both ought to be and ought not to be. Viewing
the Anselmian corpus holistically allows Sweeney to make some of her
most deft comparative observations. The topics of these dialogues are
not narrow or sectarian but universal and philosophical in the sense
that they are concerned with the most basic questions of human and
finite existence. They are just as theological as <i>Cur Deus homo</i>
and just as argumentative as the <i>Proslogion</i> because they are
fundamentally about assessing, questioning, and defending the
Christian narrative in the pedagogical company of his students. The
close attention to the literary form of the dialogue further allows
Sweeney to build the case that these early works foreshadow a proto-
scholastic approach to language and logic, a point she returns to in
the seventh chapter.
Chapter 6 takes up the culminating point in the Christian narrative,
the Incarnation, which Anselm treats following his earlier writings on
the creation and the fall. Once again, three texts form the basis for
this discussion: <i>Cur Deus homo</i>, <i>De incarnatione verbi</i>,
and <i>De conceptu virginali</i>. At nearly one hundred pages, this
chapter provides a detailed, if somewhat labored, examination of the
internal arguments of the works and, more significantly, of how they
relate to the upward "arc" of his philosophical journey. Sweeney
argues, as others have before, that they mark an important transition
from an intensely intimate setting and audience in the monastery to a
more public engagement with the language, debates, and polemics of the
outside world. Where she differs is in her contention that Anselm
takes those public debates and makes them intimate and internal, thus
reflecting continuity rather than rupture in the personal and
unremitting dialectics of union and separation.
Chapter 7, subtitled "From <i>Meditatio</i> to <i>Disputatio</i>,"
connects the intimate world of Anselm's meditative spirituality to the
more boldly argumentative methods of later scholastic authors,
independently arriving at conclusions very similar to ones reached by
this reviewer. [3] Here, however, the focus is on the final works of
Anselm's career. While the drama of the classical form of the dialogue
has all been suppressed in <i>De processione</i>, a more defensive
posture and in a certain sense more disputational tone emerges as he
publicly addresses the conflict with the Greek church and articulates
a decisive defense of the Latin view on the procession of the Holy
Spirit. <i>De concordia</i> returns to questions of free choice and
the fall that he had addressed in his earlier dialogues, but now he
has moved from being in dialogue with his students to being in
dialogue with Scripture, a dialogue in which Scripture is conceived
more as a series of propositions capable of contradicting each other,
"in the mode of a <i>sic et non</i>" (329). While other commentators
have ascribed the greater quantity of Scriptural passages in these
works to its increasing importance to Anselm over time, Sweeney
instead (and I believe rightly) stresses the <i>way</i> in which
Scripture is integrated into these works. "This is true in terms of
the questions they take up, the literary form in which their arguments
are placed, and the way in which they take up Scripture as party to
those debates" (367). Viewing the Anselmian corpus in one vast sweep
also allows Sweeney to come full circle in her argument concerning
continuity. As she persuasively shows, the scholastic method adopted
in Anselm's later works nevertheless still evinces features of his
earlier writings: extraordinary and relentless facility with language
and argument, with paradox and distinction, and with the construction
and analysis of analogies and metaphors.
There are some important limitations to this book. Historians will
regret that Anselm's relations with the world around him (his teacher
Lanfranc, his students, his correspondents) remain largely sidelined
from the discussion, orbiting rather than impacting his intellectual
development. Similarly, Sweeney's unshakable commitment to going no
farther than Anselm's corpus constrains the reach of some of her most
potent suggestions. For instance, discussion of Anselm's "public" and
of his proto-scholasticism are stated rather than demonstrated and
many of her statements about shifting attitudes toward learning are
assumed rather than explored. In this sense, Sweeney's fresh new look
at the mind of Anselm reveals both the advantages and the limitations
of this particular form of intellectual history.
--------
Notes:
1. See, for instance, Rachel Fulton Brown, "Three-in-One: Making God
in Twelfth-Century, Liturgy, Theology, and Devotion," in Thomas F. X.
Noble and John Van Engen, eds., <i>European Transformations: The Long
Twelfth Century</i> (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2012), pp. 468-98.
2. But see Anthony Kenny, <i>Medieval Philosophy</i> (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), who offers an exquisitely lucid combination
of both approaches.
3. Alex J. Novikoff, "Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic
Disputation," <i>Speculum</i> 86, 2 (2011): 387-418.
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