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328 7 The Later Works From Meditatio to Disputatio In the last two works of Anselm’s corpus, De processione Spiritus Sancti and De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio , the basic themes of earlier works return: the metaphysics of God, the most specifically Christian (and most difficult) theological problems, and the “metaphysics of creaturehood.” In these works we get a chance to see how Anselm’s way of working with these issues developed by the end of his career. The most obvious change is that these last works are in more than one sense the most “scholastic” of his Anselm’s writings. Even though avant la lettre, the works move further toward the scholastic model of disputation than the works on the Incarnation considered in chapter 6. The elements of dialogue in the classical, literary sense—particular interlocutors whose characters, prejudices, fears, and concerns become part of the discussion, where there is (more or less specifically laid out) a dramatic setting and some kind of dramatic transformation of the participants, especially the objector—have all been suppressed in these works. De concordia uses the pronouns “us” (as those inquiring together), “you” (as the one posing objections), and “I” (as the one answering objections ), but the “dialogue” is in indirect discourse; the “you” quickly disappears , reabsorbed into the “we” of Anselm’s reply and silenced by the “I” who speaks without further interruption. Moreover, unlike De libertate and De casu, it takes as one of its main tasks the harmonization—not just of free choice with foreknowledge, predestination and free choice— but of scripture passages with Anselm’s views and with each other. Thus not just in its suppression of the elements of dialogue, but in treating scripture markedly different from Anselm’s dialogue trilogy, De concordia presages later scholastic methods. De processione has a defined rather than disembodied objector in the 329 From Meditatio to Disputatio Greek church to whom the work returns for further arguments and objections . There are in addition a number of attempts to argue on the basis of other views those in the Greek church profess to share, but there is no dialogue between the Greek and Roman views. The work is virtually unbroken and unanswered argument on the topic, as befits the occasion for its writing—Anselm’s presentation of the Latin view against the Greeks at the Council of Bari in 1098 at the request of Pope Urban II.1 Like De concordia, a significant portion of the text is used to interpret scripture passages. Unlike, for example, the way in which the three dialogues are related to scripture, a deep consideration of only a few passages as a way of getting to the central themes in Christianity they adumbrate, these texts use scripture passages in the mode of a sic et non, as expressing apparent contradictions in scripture itself and in relationship to Anselm’s positions.2 Gillian Evans argues that Anselm was pushed into this more disputational form in an attempt to write in the “new fashion” “acceptable to contemporary tastes.”3 The result is less distinctively Anselmian, less a work, she writes, that “only [Anselm] could have written.”4 It is clear that these works are different, yet they do develop out of themes and strategies we have seen in Anselm’s previous work and there are important ways in which they could only have been written by Anselm. The extraordinary and relentless facility with language and argument, paradox and distinction, as well the construction and analysis of analogies and metaphors that mark Anselm’s earlier work are present here as well. Moreover , we see in these works an important link between Anselm’s mode of thinking and the full-blown scholasticism that was developing around 1. See Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury/Vita Sancti Anselmi archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, edited and translated by Richard W. Southern (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962), book 2, xxxiv, 112–13. For an account of the council and who was present correlated with other contemporary chroniclers as well as thoughts about the relationship of the work to the terms of the actual debate, see Giles E. M. Gasper, Anselm of Canterbury and His Theological Inheritance (Burlington , Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 178–93. 2. Commentators have noted the greater quantity of scriptural passages in De concordia and De processione but have generally seen this as an increase in scripture’s importance to Anselm in the latter works, rather than, as I...

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