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369 1 Conclusion Reason, Desire, and Prayer There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of objections to Anselm’s project , one to its speculative expression—that it is too thoroughly rationalistic , and the other to its spiritual vision—that it is based on a distortedly negative view of the human person as sinful and of God as vengefully demanding payment. Though there are some signs of fraying over time in Anselm’s work, the argument of this book is that the rational and spiritual projects are elements of an integral whole: reason serving spirituality and spirituality giving value to reason. The final question for reflection , then, is whether attempting to see Anselm’s work whole makes it possible to respond to these objections. Reason and the Monastic Life Anselm’s commitment to reason is bold and uncompromising. He keeps a vow to unleash reason, giving it leeway to ask the hardest questions , to lead believers down the darkest paths. We might say that the results , judged by the standards of reason, the very reason Anselm sets in motion, are mixed. Anselm’s analysis of ordinary language leads to conclusions that require the embrace of contradictories and the multiplication of senses and distinctions. Gaunilo speaks for many when he objects that Anselm has not managed to present necessary, indubitable conclusions to convince unwilling or ignorant unbelievers. And even to the degree that Anselm succeeds, he does not do so without exposing deep difficulties for reason in the faith he wants to understand. As Bencivenga notes, “the practice of questioning the system in order to establish it is, after all, a practice of questioning the system.”1 Richard Southern comments 1. Ermanno Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense: The Case of Anselm and his God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 89. 370 Reason, Desire, and Prayer on the double-edged sword of Anselm’s thought: “Although [Anselm] was the most lucid and decisive of writers...he casts over every subject an iridescence filled with contradictory possibilities.”2 If, as seems clear, reason does not conclude its journey with clear and complete understanding, and Anselm is neither unaware of nor surprised by this outcome, the question is why Anselm has engaged in this project. As Bencivenga puts it so engagingly, “this stuff is too serious to be a game, it raises too many questions to be a way of enforcing power, it’s too much in earnest to be the devil’s work, however indirectly.”3 Anselm cannot, in other words, be simply playing with language and reason. He hopes for and wrings from them some real results. On the other hand, the results are too nuanced and complex to serve unambiguously to shore up the faithful and the institution of the Church (on this, De processione might be the exception), and it would be perverse to see Anselm as intentionally aiming to destroy by subversion the faith he sets out to understand . Bencivenga answers his question about why Anselm engages in this project of reason by noting the combination in Anselm of two contradictory impulses, “the one for novelty, surprise and change, and the one for stability and order.”4 While these impulses are separated in modernity, he argues, Anselm pursues both and holds them together with reason. Anselm is both more committed to the constructive powers of reason than his earlier medieval predecessors and more cognizant of the limits of reason, arguably, than many who were to follow him. It is important to note that Anselm’s embrace of reason is paired with a rejection of esotericism. Though they differ on much else, two of Anselm ’s important twentieth-century commentators, one a theologian, Karl Barth, the other a philosopher, Richard Campbell, agree on Anselm ’s stance against esotericism, noting that Anselm grounds his reflections in the shared language of available public discourse.5 “An2 . Richard W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 436. 3. Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense, 84. 4. Bencivenga, Logic and Other Nonsense, 108. 5. Richard Campbell, From Belief to Understanding: A Study of Anselm’s Proslogion Argument on the Existence of God (Canberra, Australia: The Australian National University, 1976), 196–97; Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, translated by Ian W. Robertson, (London: SCM Press, 1960), 69. Campbell with some justification takes this as his point of difference with Barth, arguing that nonetheless, Barth takes Anselm’s project to be internal to theology, to be in an important way only intelligible...

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