God in Proof. Nathan Schneider

      This simple idea did for Anselm exactly what he hoped it would. In a single stroke, it declared that the God of his faith and hope, the sum of all perfection, has to exist. Knowing what God is, then, becomes the same as knowing that God is. God’s nature and existence are the same. There could be no more fitting proof for the one, true God whose self-disclosure to Moses was in the words “I AM THAT I AM.”⁷

      Usually, when I describe this to people for the first time, they give me a sour look, like I’ve got to be kidding. There were those in Anselm’s time, too, who weren’t buying it. Soon after copies of the Proslogion began circulating, a fellow monk named Gaunilo composed an objection.

      Twice his age, and with a soberer cast of mind, Gaunilo believed in God no less than Anselm did; what he didn’t like was Anselm’s reasoning. Their exchange was a considerate one, between two monks with a common cause and a common faith. Gaunilo chose a playful title for his essay: “On Behalf of the Fool”—the same fool of Psalm 14.

      The essence of the critique is simple: just because something seems like it should exist doesn’t mean that it actually does, out there in the world. He gives an example to illustrate. Say we’re told of an island—another island!—out in the ocean, so far away that it can’t be reached. That’s a shame, because there’s no island more perfect than this one. It has bounty and wealth undisturbed by people. Gaunilo then claims that, according to Anselm’s logic, this island really exists. It must, right? If it didn’t, we could think of an island just as excellent that did exist, and it would be better. But nobody is going to claim that such an island, or what-have-you, is really out there. How, then, could the same kind of reasoning be a trustworthy proof for God’s existence? Thus Gaunilo builds a reductio ad absurdum—the whole thing collapses in absurdity.

      Nothing Gaunilo wrote could make Anselm back down or lose confidence in his first flash of insight at Matins. He was so confident, in fact, that he circulated the critique together with his own reply. The reply clarifies a subtler part of the proof in the Proslogion, which Gaunilo, and others since him, overlooked.⁸ See if this helps.

      God, Anselm explains, is not in the same class as an enchanted island. The single thing “than which nothing greater can be conceived” must be always and everywhere, with no possibility of not existing. Everything depends on it. As the height of perfection, it’s the measure against which we judge the good in all else. As things in the world come and go, it’s the steady ground beneath them. It’s not simply, as Gaunilo wrote, something “greater than all other beings,” much less other islands; an island may be paradise, but it is still only an island, and greater things than that can be conceived. God, on the other hand, is uniquely unsurpassable. No other thing could qualify. “You alone, then,” he prays, “of all things most truly exist and therefore of all things possess existence to the highest degree.”⁹ Gaunilo was out of his depth.

      Anselm didn’t know it, but he had precursors in this kind of thinking. Recall, for instance, that Ibn Sina wrote of that which exists necessarily, by virtue of itself. Abu Nasr al-Farabi, a tenth-century Turk, came especially close to Anselm’s phrasing when he described “a perfect being nothing more perfect than which can exist.” “It is not possible to conceive,” al-Farabi added elsewhere, “a being more complete than his being; a reality greater than his reality; or a unity greater than his unity.”¹⁰

      Anselm had no access to the writings of his Muslim counterparts. Their only common denominator was the Greek heritage, but even the Greeks were still largely missing from Anselm’s world. There may have been a copy of the Timaeus at Bec, though little else even of Plato. It was from Augustine, mainly, that Anselm got the Platonic themes that show up in his proof. Against the advice of Lanfranc and the convention of the time, however, he refused to pepper his treatises with quotations from earlier authors. Like so many others who work in the genre of proof, he felt the anxiety of influence. How can one claim to speak for pure reason while relying on the authority of those who came before?

      What’s striking about Anselm’s proof, even more than the motions of its logic, is how he describes it. Doing justice to what he had discovered by the grace of God meant inventing a literary device. The Proslogion mixes treatise and devotion, reason and emotion. It takes the form of a prayer—or a letter, as if to a friend. Thinking and feeling meet, the basic ingredients of assent.

      In Anselm’s world, letter writing bridged distances and soothed absences. An informal postal system of couriers carried letters, inscribed on rolls of parchment, between the monasteries.¹¹ When a new batch arrived, someone would read what was in it out loud to the whole community. Letters, whether bearing a greeting or a matter of contention, were public documents in private form. The more intimate one sounded, the better the show.

      Until he eventually succeeded Lanfranc as archbishop of Canterbury in Britain, monastic discipline kept Anselm at Bec. Letters were his contact with the outside world. Most of the early works we have from him are letters and prayers, written for the far-flung monks and noblewomen who asked for his advice or blessing.¹² Even while expounding on theological ideas, these are drenched with feeling and imagery, anticipating the worldly, romantic passions of the troubadour poets who were then coming on the scene. They were widely copied and circulated.

      Anselm thought, as Plato did, that friendship could be an ecstatic, salvific undertaking. His passion in letters to friends is so palpable, and so unusual for its time, that modern interpreters have wondered whether his relations with other monks were actually celibate.¹³ Take, for instance, this passage from a letter to another monk named Gundulf.

      When I sit down to write to you, oh soul most dear to my soul, when I sit down to write to you, I am uncertain how best to begin what I have to say. Everything I feel about you is sweet and pleasant to my heart; whatever I desire for you is the best that my mind can conceive.¹⁴

      There it is: a variant of the central formula of his proof—“the best that my mind can conceive”—appearing, years earlier, as a token of affection. In turn, the kind of language he uses in friendship turns up in prayers and treatises. Anselm felt his God, like his friends, more as absence than presence. Addressed to the silence of the mind, his proof answers much the same longing as the letters; it insists that all along, though unseen, God is with him. In the first chapter of the Proslogion he writes, “Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek You, where and how to find You. Lord, if You are not present here, where, since You are absent, shall I look for you?” And with the proof, he says in the book’s last chapter, “I have discovered a joy that is complete and more than complete”—from absence to presence, from longing to consummation.