Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy

2. The Adorative Intellect

2 The Adorative Intellect On Anselm’s Integration of Contemplation and Philosophy Amor ipse notitia est [Love itself is a sort of knowledge]. –—Gregory the Great In chapters 2 and 3 of his Proslogion, Anselm argues that the name of God—that than which nothing greater can be thought, id quo maius cogitari necquit—constrains us to think the necessity of God’s existence. “Surely,” he says, “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought cannot exist in the mind alone. For if it exists solely in the mind even, it can be thought to exist in reality also, which is greater.”1 By all accounts, Anselm and this most famous of his arguments occupy a crucial and contested place in the dispute between faith and reason. Alternatively lauded and bemoaned as the father of philosophical rationalism or the champion of fideist theological autonomy, how one relates to Anselm is a sort of litmus test for how one will conceive the very projects of philosophy and theology. But, when we talk about the relationship between theology and philosophy, and assign Anselm to one side or the other, are we so sure we know what these terms mean? Do we already know where grace begins and human rationality ends? Do we even know what a mind is capable of or how human thought is able to transcend its own proper boundaries? 1. Anselm, St. Anselm’s Proslogion, trans. M. J. Charlesworth (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), ch. 2. 75 In what follows, I will argue that Anselm’s Proslogion forces such questions upon us by initiating its readers into a contemplative practice of sacred rationality that alone yields the conclusions that have made the text famous. The Proslogion cannot be reduced to two of its twenty-six chapters, nor isolated from the monastic and spiritual milieu within which it was conceived. Indeed, it is precisely when considered in its integral fullness that the Proslogion arguments achieve their greatest probative success. The vitality and efficacy of the Proslogion is inseparable from a contemplative elevation of the reader’s mental capabilities, a noetic transformation that Anselm understood as thinking with the heart and that I will call the adorative intellect. First, I introduce the context and scope of this question by briefly considering a number of extant interpretations of Anselm. Although there have been rumors of war between Athens and Jerusalem for millennia, the most common interpretations of the Proslogion err inasmuch as they read the peculiarly strident division of faith from reason that constitutes modernity back into Anselm’s decisively pre-modern text. In this vein, I note especially the way that even the most postmodern and radical interpretations of Anselm fail to do justice to his alternative contemplative rationality and so end not by challenging modernity in any sense but by reinscribing modernity’s terms in a new, more impervious manner. Next, I expand this picture by showing the role the adorative intellect plays in the Proslogion and how it becomes the key to our holding together central but seemingly disparate features over which critics otherwise stumble. Finally, I contend that attention to the adorative intellect enables us to reevaluate and defend the central philosophical claims of Anselm’s meditative text. The Juxtaposition of Faith and Reason in Interpretations of Anselm In the Preface to the Proslogion, Anselm tells us that he originally left it and its predecessor, the Monologion, untitled and unsigned. On seeing that the tracts were of interest to those outside of the monastery walls at Bec, however, Anselm named the first An Example of Meditation on the Meaning of Faith, and the second Faith in Quest of Understanding. Later still, at the behest of certain magisterial figures, Anselm added his own signature to the works and gave them the names by which we know them today. The first title of the Proslogion—Fides quaerens intellectum—alerts us to the nature of the work as something equally at home in both the perspicacity of the intellect and the strivings of faith. This explicit attention to the role of faith and reason in the Proslogion is amplified by the historical context within which the work arose. 76 | Partakers of the Divine Hailing from the eleventh century, Anselm is something of a twilight figure. He stands in between times, appearing, for example, as the culmination of that great flowering of monastic theology in the...