Interpreting Anselm of Canterbury as a Virtue Ethicist

To those who read and appreciate Anselm of Canterbury's works beyond the oft-excerpted Proslogion (mostly philosophers, concerned with proofs for God's existence), and Cur Deus Homo (mostly theologians, concerned with the atonement), it becomes clear that this great Benedictine thinker of the 11th and early 12th century makes a number of notable contributions to moral theory. One prime example is his definition of justice as "rectitude of will maintained for its own sake" developed in De Veritate.¹ He develops that conception of justice yet further though additional explanations, examples, and analyses in his subsequent works. One might also think of his further development of the notion of evil as privation, his helpful distinction between different modalities of the will, or his theory of the two main orientations of the will.

Anselm never authors a treatise articulating a fully developed moral theory in a systematic manner, and relatively little attention has been devoted by scholarship to what the moral theory undergirding, and emerging by glimpses from, his written works would be.² My intention here in this paper is not to exegetically reconstruct Anselm's moral theory in a systematic and comprehensive way. That requires a considerably longer study, at which I have been laboring slowly for a number years. What I would like to do instead is to focus on one central feature running throughout and providing some measure of greater unity and intelligibility to his moral teachings, an aspect that has been mostly overlooked and at times denied. Simply put, this is that Anselm's moral theory is best understood as being a type of what in contemporary moral philosophy we term "virtue ethics." That claim is, to say the least, one that should require a good bit of clarification, textual support, and argument.

This paper is divided into six parts. First, I consider whether Anselm's moral perspective might not be better classed among one of the other main approaches in moral theory typically distinguished and discussed in contemporary ethics. I argue that although there may be some initial plausibility to placing Anselm's perspective into several of these other approaches, when examined more closely, none of them really provides an adequate fit. Second, I suggest that virtue ethics could make a better fit, and clarify what construing Anselm as a virtue ethicist would involve and require.

The subsequent sections of the paper are devoted to exegesis of Anselm's writings, looking for passages and doctrines that would support classing his moral theory as a type of virtue ethics. In the third part, I focus on the treatises published during Anselm's lifetime, which taken on their own provide some, but not conclusive, support. The fourth part turns to other texts within the Anselmian corpus. Several of these not only conclusively show that Anselm is centrally concerned with virtues and vices in his moral theory, but also indicate the specific lines his thought takes on these matters. In the fifth and sixth parts, I turn to Anselm's letters, focusing first on general discussions, and then on discussions focused upon specific virtues and vices. The letters not only include the most references to virtue and vice (both in general and as specific states of character), but also provide additional developments of key lines of Anselm's thought on these matters.

1. Anselm's Thought and Main Approaches of Moral Theory

Over the last two centuries, several main approaches in moral theory have become dominant within literature on ethics. There is certainly some usefulness to this, since that development assures us a more or less common vocabulary for theorizing about, teaching, or applying ethics. When we get down to particulars and specifics, to be sure, differences do emerge over precisely how to understand these broad designations of approaches in ethics or moral theory, how they fundamentally differ from each other, where they overlap, and so on. But there is at least enough consensus at the level of broad generalities to justify employing these terms for approaches in moral theory without getting bogged down...