Anselm’s Struggle with Wholeness and the Answer in the Trinity

Anselm writes his Proslogion with the intention to understand.  He wants to fulfill his faith, what he believes and holds to be true, with an understanding of it, or as he otherwise puts it, to give “meaning” (p. 239; line numbers from hereon) to what he knows.  As he spurs himself to this project, it becomes clear that the end of such understanding is sight, a vision of the face of God - “He loves to seek you, but he does not know your face” (41-2), he says of himself, and asks God that he might know “where and how to find you” (17).  Elsewhere, he calls this encounter “experience” (470); just as he wants to understand what he believes so that he may see, he expects understanding to lead to an experience of what he knows.  To frame it more broadly, for him this is about access, about entering into whatever God is.  He wants to understand (intellego, literally read into or between), so that he may encounter with his eyes the God which he calls at the beginning “inaccessible” (22) to sight, he wants to have experience (sentio, feel, perceive) of the knowledge. While knowing is on the outside, understanding leads to vision and experience.  Anselm wants to get inside, end the separation with God that he now endures on earth as a fallen man.  

However, as he works through the boundless nature of God in both logical and devotional spirit, he continues to lack the access he set out to obtain.  Perhaps he has the understanding of faith (in fact he says he does understand - 464), but it has not resulted in vision or experience (“Lord God, if my soul has found you, why has it no experience of you?” - 468-470).  As his exploration comes to a close, he realizes that what he has been seeking must remain in some way inaccessible, for God is, as he conveys in diverse ways near the end of his work, a unity entirely perfect and whole. “Light, entire and inaccessible!  Truth, whole and blessed!” (538-9) he calls Him.  It is because of this, this unfathomable completeness and absoluteness of being, that Anselm cannot enter inside.  For of this light he says, “Nothing can pierce through to see you there.  I cannot look directly into it… the eye of my soul cannot bear to turn towards it for too long.  It is dazzled by its glory, mastered by its fullness” (525-6, 534-536)  Seeking a source for this fullness that denies him access, he finds that it is in God’s manner of being.  Knowing that God is “goodness, blessedness, eternity, and all true good” (581), he wonders at first if these things are each a part of Him, but ultimately decides that, since something joined from parts is lesser than something fundamentally whole because it can be broken, God must truly be all these things.  “No parts therefore are in you, Lord, You are not many, you are so much one… you are unity that cannot be divided by the mind” (592-3, 596). Thus, God is the wisdom that He is, He is the light that he is, and ultimately “that being who exists truly and simply” (652).  He ismore truly than anything else; He is a perfect unity, and everything that is in Him can be truly predicated of Him.  “Overwhelmed”  and “dazzled” (501) by Him, marvelling at “how wide is that truth in which is everything that is true” (508-9), Anselm admits that he cannot behold this God in His fullness with his own “narrow thought” (582). It is something beyond his access.  

As his own meditations on his selfhood reveal, his inability to enter into this fullness is because he comes up to it, as all humans do, in a divided state.  While he is dazzled and overwhelmed by God, he is “clouded” (502) and “darkened” (500) by himself.  While God is what He is completely, “an undivided unity” that exists outside time, the human exists in parts.  In Anselm’s words, humanity is divided because it “does not now have what it was before, and does not yet have what it will be in the future” (648-9), and thus does not exist as the One who truly is. Split between the heavenly heritage which he once had and lost through the Fall and now hopes for, and what he is now, he does not so absolutely exist as the God he worships, who exists truly and simply.  As a created thing, he knows he was made to see God, but in his present state, “blocked by the ancient sickness of sin” (557), he cannot. Made by God he desires Him, but cannot reach a fulfillment of that desire, for he is not now what he was meant to be.

Having worked through all this, at the end he admits that this vision of God he has so desired, this experience of “the fullness of joy” (767) that is God, Who exists absolutely, cannot be had in this life.  He expects, when this life is done, to enter “wholly into that joy” (773) but knows that it is a joy that ‘neither has eye seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man” (779-80) -  one cannot enter into it fully on earth.  Still, on earth he expects it and desires it with his whole being, and thereby is invited into some sort of encounter with God, though perhaps not the complete vision he had initially pleaded for. And here the Triune God becomes crucial to his searching.  True, as he explains it (Chapter 23), it is another example of perfect unity of being that so bewildered and overwhelmed him - each person is fully predicated of God, the substance the same.  And yet, it is also so that, in this understanding of who God is, there are distinctions that are relating to each other.  There are relationships between persons - the Son begotten of the Father, the Spirit, the Love that is between them, proceeding from both.  It is an idea more intricate than the “inaccessible light” that Anselm was facing (or rather, unable to face) in its fullness, unsure how to penetrate.  In this Trinity, while there is perfect unity and perfect being, there are also distinct persons and relationships, a sense of an inside and a “between.”  It is by this relational Triune God that Anselm is able himself to relate, to gain access.  As he asks in his final prayer, “Lord, you have commanded, or rather advised us, to ask by your Son, and you have promised that we shall receive, ‘that our joy may be full.’  That which you counsel, through our ‘wonderful counselor,’ is what I am asking for Lord” (803-810).  It is through the Son, with the Son, that Anselm is able to begin the path toward the fullness he seeks, the vision he craves.  It is a process on earth that has its end point in heaven; while on earth, in cooperation with the Son, knowledge of the Father will increase(797), but in heaven it will “come to its fullness” (798).  Spurred by the Holy Ghost to wanting, now his heart longs for something it cannot yet see and is moving toward, but in the Son he seeks it and loves it, until, as he puts it, “I enter into the joy of my Lord, who is God one and triune, blessed forever” (824-5).  Thus, already on earth he has gained access, entered in, though not completely; he is in this life seeing what he had hoped to see “in a certain degree” (483), in that he is in the midst of a process that, when complete, will give him the whole vision, the fullness of joy.  

JM 

References

Saint Anselm of Canterbury. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion. Translated by.Benedicta Ward. London: Penguin Books, 1973.

Latin word references: The Latin Library, Anselmus Cantuariensis, Proslogion.  http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/anselmproslogion.html