Anselm’s Proof

    In our last class, we briefly discussed what the ‘point’ of the ontological proof really is (‘Saint Anselm wasn’t writing to convince Richard Dawkins’); I would like to expand a bit on that here, although I am not sure whether this way of talking about the proof will make sense for anyone else.
    Anselm wrote at the beginning and end of the first chapter of the Proslogion that “the believer does not seek to understand, that he may believe, but he believes that he may understand”. That is, knowledge of God cannot be rational or empirical; the act of belief is epistemologically prior to any other species of knowledge.
    However, the term ‘act of belief’ is misleading because Anselm did not conceptualize ‘belief’ as an ‘act’ in the sense of ‘making a conscious decision’: “man cannot seek God, unless God himself teaches him; nor find him, unless he reveals himself”. Clearly the act of approaching God in ‘the inner chamber of your mind’ is not a rational exercise, for Anselm. It is rather the decision to participate in an internal religious phenomenon that is already unfolding. It is to accept the grace that God offers.
    Likewise, Anselm wrote that “I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that”. That is, the exercises of the Proslogion were contained within the mind (the ‘inner chamber’) of the devotee. They did not flit outside of the mind into the external world, let alone into the realm of God. Rather, God would approach the devotee on the terms of the latter’s intellectual capacities. There were no acts of coercion involved in the contemplation of God on either party’s behalf: certainly the believer did not intrude upon God in his quarters; neither did God intrude on the believer in his. Thus, “it is not intended that the reader should feel impelled to read the whole, but only as much as will stir up the affections to prayer”.
    The ground of any understanding of God, for Anselm, was therefore the ‘act of belief’, which involved the participation of the believer and the sponsorship, so to speak, of God. Anselm’s notion of the ‘understanding of God’ does not seem to have connoted a positive meaning, at least in the opening chapters of the Proslogion. Our understanding is limited to what God reveals to us, namely the core idea of the ontological proof, which is that the essence of God itself consists in existing.
    This is quite relevant for the ontological proof insofar as virtually every opponent of the proof, from Thomas Aquinas to actual atheists, have taken the position that the concept of a being ‘than which nothing greater can be conceived’ is incoherent. Naturally, this critique is generally uninterested in the fact that the Proslogion did not introduce the concept as its own invention; it was a concept that God revealed to the devotee in his ‘inner chamber’. It was a concept that ‘came to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment’ (Heidegger, QCT).
    It seems to me that this is the proof that Descartes wanted to write: “mais quand bien même je dormirais, tout ce qui se présente à mon esprit avec évidence, est absolument véritable”. History, though, attests that his philosophy hastened the spread of a novel epistemological system, which is embodied in the position of Locke that all truth can be demonstrated through experience or reason. This position completely reoriented the plane of western thought. By the 1740s, Voltaire could believe that he had reaffirmed the orthodoxies of Lockean empiricism by affirming Newton’s conviction that cœli enarrant gloriam Dei simply because he took that position on account of reason rather than belief: when Voltaire read ‘heavens’ in Newton, he thought that he meant ‘matter’ (Voltaire, Éléments).
    In any case, Anselm believed that God was already in the ‘inner chamber’, and that we would be able to ‘see’ him if only he revealed himself to us as we approached him. Conversely, Locke believed that the human mind could penetrate the realm of God and observe his substance directly, and that anything unobservable – either literally or figuratively (observable by reason) – was, in the end, unworthy of belief: that is, reason became the condition for belief, rather than belief being the condition for understanding, as Anselm said. The ontological proof was not, in its original context, meant to create knowledge, it was meant to reveal it.
    This brings us back to the ‘point’ of the ontological proof: in its original formulation, it was an act of devotional meditation. It represented the progress of truth from concealment into unconcealment on the terms allowed by the human mind, which for Anselm was so important because ‘man was created to see God’. It was also, perhaps more importantly, an act of purification, in that the Proslogion was meant to provide a sanctuary for the reader from bad thoughts, much as the psalms that Anselm often paraphrased were meant to provide a sanctuary from bad language through repetition; so his thinking was quite monastic.
    Now, if we want to do history right in striving to understand the spirit of Anselm’s society and the mindset that created the ontological proof, then this is the direction in which to move. Clearly, the notion of the philosophical proof as a fundamentally ‘rational’ tool has completely driven the proof’s original (devotional) context from our historical memory, and we now measure the strength of the proof by its ability to succeed on this level, namely with respect to its contested terminological coherence. It may perhaps be edifying to remember that Pascal’s demonstration that it is ‘rational’ to believe in God for probabilistic reasons was only meant to demonstrate that atheism, like belief, comes from the heart, not the mind; it was not meant to convince the atheist to believe in God on account of a probability. Likewise, Anselm’s proof was not meant to convince anyone of anything. It was only meant to help the believer “flee, for a little while, your occupations; hide yourself, for a time, from your disturbing thoughts. Cast aside, now, your burdensome cares, and put away your toilsome business. Yield room for some little time to God; and rest for a little time in him.” And, we should add, to see the ‘face’ of God.

-Henry Stratakis-Allen