St. Anselm’s Proslogion

Saint Anselm, M. J. Charlesworth

Description

In the Proslogion, St. Anselm presents a philosophical argument for the existence of God. Anselm's proof, known since the time of Kant as the ontological argument for the existence of God, has played an important role in the history of philosophy and has been incorporated in various forms into the systems of Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and others.

Included in this edition of the Proslogion are Gaunilo's "A Reply on Behalf of the Fool" and St. Anselm's "The Author's Reply to Gaunilo." All three works are in the original Latin with English translation on facing pages. Professor Charlesworth's introduction provides a helpful discussion of the context of the Proslogion in the theological tradition and in Anselm's own thought and writing.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Christian Theology
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Descartes
• Colegio Mayor Universitario Santo Tomás de Aquino
• Leibniz
• Thomas Aquinas
• Gottfried Leibniz
• Christianity
• History
• Karl Barth
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• René Descartes

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 1979
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268077037
• Langue: English

Extrait

ST. ANSELM’S PROSLOGION
WITH A Reply on Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilo AND The Author’s Reply to Gaunilo
TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY BY
M. J. CHARLESWORTH
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME
University of Notre Dame Press edition published in 1979
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu First edition published by Oxford University Press in 1965 Manufactured in the United States of America Reprinted in 1982, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2003, 2004 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anselm, Saint, Abp. of Canterbury, 1033–1109. St. Anselm’s Proslogion. Reprint of the ed. published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford. --> English and Latin. Includes bibliographical references. --> 1. Good—Proof, Ontological. I. Charlesworth, Maxwell John. II. Gaunilo, 11th cent. Liber pro insipiente. English & Latin. 1978. III. Title. IV. Title: Proslogion. B765.A83P73 1978 212 78-63300 ISBN 0-268-01696-8 ISBN 0-268-01697-6 (pbk.) ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper . -->
E-ISBN 978-0-268-07703-7
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
PREFACE
I N this book a new translation of St. Anselm’s. Proslogion is offered, together with the texts of the subsequent debate between St. Anselm and Gaunilo. The introduction to these texts attempts to set the Proslogion within the context of St. Anselm’s life and thought; and the commentary expounds and assesses the arguments contained in them.
I have been at pains to clarify St. Anselm’s position in the Proslogion as he intended it, because in the past it has had all kinds of arbitrary interpretations foisted upon it. St. Anselm did not ask himself precisely the same questions about faith and reason as the philosophers of the thirteenth century, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, were to ask; nor, of course, did he consider the questions that theologians and philosophers are compelled to put to themselves at the present day. On the whole matter of faith and reason St. Anselm’s thinking has a fluid, uncrystallized, or (blessed word!) ambivalent character, and it is all too tempting, and all too easy, if one comes to the Proslogion with one’s own favoured theory about faith and reason, to make St. Anselm either into a precocious Aquinas or into a twelfth-century Karl Barth. What I have tried to do is to re-present St. Anselm’s ideas as he intended them.
I have not, however, confined myself to a neutral exposition or re-presentation of St. Anselm’s ideas in the Proslogion ; but I have gone on to discuss them in a critical way and to argue with them. Many medieval texts are of antiquarian interest only, but the Proslogion is still of real moment for the philosopher as well as for the historian, and we can do St. Anselm (and ourselves) the honour of arguing with him, philosopher to philosopher, much as we might argue with a contemporary.
The translation keeps as close as possible to the literal sense of the original texts consistent with making good sense in English. St. Anselm’s style, upon which he obviously prided himself, is characterized by elaborate antitheses and wordplays, oratorical flights and crescendos, and, in the Proslogion , by a mixture of intensely fervent prayer with fine and subtle philosophical analysis in which every word and nuance counts. Inevitably, unless the translator engages in a good deal of glossing, he must miss much of the rich flavour of St. Anselm’s writing. However, for the purposes of philosophical discussion, there are advantages in a fairly literal translation even though it exacts a certain stylistic price.
The Proslogion is translated together with Gaunilo’s reply and St. Anselm’s counter-reply. Eadmer, St. Anselm’s disciple and biographer, tells us that St. Anselm himself wished the three texts to be collected and considered together. ‘A friend,’ he writes, ‘sent this [Gaunilo’s reply] to Anselm who read it with pleasure, and after thanking his critic he wrote his own reply to this reply. He had this appended to the tract which had been sent to him, and returned it to the friend who had sent it, requesting any others who deigned to possess this tract to append to the end of it the criticism of his argument and his own reply to the criticism.’
The Latin text of the Proslogion and of the two annexed texts is reproduced from the magnificent edition of St. Anselm’s works, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia , by Dom. F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B. (Nelson & Sons, Edinburgh, 6 vols., 1946–61). References in Latin to other texts of St. Anselm are also to Dom. Schmitt’s edition, and I wish to make very grateful acknowledgement to Dom. Schmitt and to the publishers, Nelson & Sons, for their generous permission to make use of it.
M. J. C.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Proslogion Argument
St. Anselm: Life and Times
St. Anselm’s System
1. The Character of St. Anselm’s Thought
2. St. Anselm and St. Augustine
3. Faith and Reason in the Cur Deus Homo
4. Karl Barth’s St. Anselm
PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY
Proslogion
A Reply on Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilo
The Author’s Reply to Gaunilo
TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS
Proslogion
A Reply on Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilo
The Author’s Reply to Gaunilo index -->
INTRODUCTION
THE PROSLOGION ARGUMENT
I T is not too much to claim that St. Anselm’s argument for the existence of God in the Proslogion is one of the most enduring texts in the history of philosophy. The boldness and originality (or—according to one’s point of view—the outrageousness) of the argument compel one’s interest and force one to declare oneself either for or against it, and it has provoked lively controversy right from the time of St. Anselm’s contemporary and first adversary, Gaunilo of Marmoutier, to the present day.
To some extent we have to qualify what has just been said, for, curiously, there is little explicit reference to the Proslogion argument by St. Anselm’s own immediate disciples in the early twelfth century. So Rodulfus or Ralph, in his Libellus primus de nesciente et sciente , uses a primitive causal proof to establish the existence of a First Cause of life, without referring at all to the Proslogion argument of the master. 1 There is, however, a reminiscence of the Proslogion in the work of another of Anselm’s English disciples, Gilbert Crispin, abbot of Westminster between 1085 and 1117. In Gilbert’s interesting Disputatio Christiani cum Gentile de Fide Christi , ‘Christianus’ proves that there can be only one God by arguing that ‘God is that than which nothing greater or better exists’, from which it follows that there cannot be a number of Gods. 2 Apart from this, however, St. Anselm’s Proslogion might have fallen stillborn from the scriptorium for all the influence it had upon his own intellectual milieu.
This same neglect of the Proslogion argument continues through the latter part of the twelfth century, owing, no doubt, to the sudden and quite radical change in the philosophical climate that followed the introduction of new translations of the works of Aristotle soon after St. Anselm’s death. 3 In the early thirteenth century, however, St. Anselm’s argument began to enjoy a considerable vogue. William of Auxerre, in his Summa Aurea , written between 1215 and 1231, is the first known thirteenth-century thinker to refer to the Proslogion argument, 4 and he is followed by other contemporaries such as the Oxford Dominican, Richard Fishacre, and the Franciscan, Alexander of Hales. Richard Fishacre has an extremely ingenious variant of the Anselmian proof: thus he says, God may be defined as the ‘most simple being’ (‘ens simplicissimum’); but such a being cannot be distinguished from its existence, for then it would no longer be simple; therefore its essence must be identical with its existence, which is to say it must exist necessarily. 5
Some thirty years later the great St. Bonaventure takes up the Proslogion argument and gives it an important place in his natural theology. In his Quaestiones disputatae he concludes: ‘The truth “God exists” is a truth which is most certain in itself in that it is a primary and most immediate truth. For not only is the cause of the predicate contained in the subject, but the existence which is predicated of the subject is absolutely identical with the subject. That is why, just as the uniting of a subject and predicate which are removed to the greatest degree from each other is completely repugnant to the intellect, so also the dividing of what is one and indivisible is not less repugnant to the intellect. Thus, just as it is false in an absolutely evident way that the same thing can both exist and not exist, or that it should at the same time be the greatest existent and not exist in any way, so also it is most evidently true that the primary and greatest thing exists . . .’. 6
It was, so it seems, partly against St. Bonaventure’s version of the Anselmian argument that St. Thomas Aquinas argued. 7 Aquinas, it is well known, completely rejects the argument, or what he took to be Anselm’s argument, though, as we shall see later, it can be shown that his criticisms rest upon a misunderstanding. At all events, understood or misunderstood, the Proslogion argument continued to be discussed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries by such thinkers as Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, and William of Ware. 8 Duns Scotus, for one, took the argument seriously and revised or ‘coloured’ it so as to make it into a proof of the infinity of the ‘First Being’. 9 Again, in the De Primo Principio , Scotus exploits Anselm’s idea of a ‘pure perfection’ and argues that the idea of God as a synthesis of ‘pure perfections’ cannot contain any contradiction, since contradiction can only occur where something is posited and s