Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius and Dante

4. Meditative Movement in Anselm’s Proslogion

C H A P T E R 4 M E D I T A T I V E M O V E M E N T I N A N S E L M ’ S P R O S L O G I O N I N H I S P R E FAC E T O T H E Proslogion, Anselm describes the genesis of the work. After writing the Monologion, “a complex sequence of arguments,” Anselm sought to discover “a single argument ” sufficient to show “that God truly is .l.l. and the other things we believe concerning the divine substance” (S 93). This effort preoccupied him, and his failure to find this elusive “single argument” eventually made him so desperate that he tried to give it up. One day, however, “in the very conflict of my thoughts,” he discovered what he had been seeking and it gave him joy. Hoping to communicate something of this joy to others, he wrote the Proslogion “under the guise [sub persona] of someone striving to raise his mind to contemplate God and seeking to understand what he believes” (Preface, S 93–94). With these words, Anselm clearly distinguished himself, as author , from the literary persona he created, the praying voice in the Proslogion, whom I call Anselm the narrator. “Sub persona” is an image derived from the theater: “under the character,” even “under the mask.” Anselm the narrator is a dramatic character created by the historical Anselm, the author. Scholars have called both these figures “Anselm” because they examine the work to discover the historical Anselm’s views, and they assume he expressed these fully and directly . I distinguish Anselm the narrator from Anselm the author for two reasons. First, the work presents itself as a Christian-Platonist ascent, a raising of the mind “to contemplate God.” Anselm the narrator 159 proves to be a pilgrim figure on a journey, and we want to understand the dramatic structure of his journey. We cannot understand the work, with all that Anselm the author aimed to communicate to us, without understanding its genre and structure. Second, this dramatic structure has philosophical implications. Anselm the narrator ’s explicit conclusions may be ascribed to Anselm the author, as scholars have always done. Nevertheless, Anselm the author’s understandings in the work are not limited to his narrator’s utterances. The structure of the work as a Christian-Platonist ascent implies that the narrator’s earlier understandings are reconfigured by later insights . Anselm the narrator does not look back to work out the details , for he is intent on raising his mind to God. Anselm the author left this meditative labor to his readers. If we wish to understand the mind of Anselm the author in the Proslogion, we must look beyond his narrator’s utterances to the reconfigured understandings implied in the work as a whole. Let us review the presuppositions of the work’s genre. Anselm the narrator is a literary figure, praying in an ongoing literary present . Every time we read the Proslogion, he is speaking, and so I describe his activity with the present tense. By definition, his thoughts are explicit at every point in the work. In other words, the consciousness of Anselm the narrator is an inference from what the text is saying at any point. The narrator’s consciousness is inferred not only from what he is saying, its content, but also from how he says it, his tone or manner. Most of the time, for example, he poses questions and works out an analysis, but sometimes he asserts his views through rhetorical questions, as in chapters 5 and 24, and even rises to bold assertions, as in chapters 22 and 23. A different style of assertion indicates a different kind of assertion. He also laments his failure to experience God, especially in chapters 14–18. As the Proslogion unfolds, Anselm the narrator experiences a variety of feelings in his quest for God, from anguished longing to overflowing joy. These feelings are as much an index to his consciousness as his 160 Meditative Movement in Anselm’s Proslogion thoughts: his style and tone prove as crucial to his quest as his arguments . The work presents itself as spoken in an address—the Preface calls it an alloquium, a “speaking to” (S 94). Most often the narrator is speaking to God, though he occasionally addresses himself. Like Augusine...