Anselm of Canterbury

Who Was Anselm of Canterbury?

Anselm of Canterbury was the most significant theologian of the eleventh century and one of the foundational figures of scholastic philosophy. Born in Aosta, he entered the Benedictine monastery of Bec in Normandy, eventually becoming prior, then abbot. In 1093 he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, a position that placed him at the center of the investiture controversy — the struggle between church and crown over the right to appoint bishops.

Anselm’s intellectual achievement is inseparable from his method, captured in the phrase fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding. He did not approach theology as a skeptic testing claims from the outside but as a believer pressing from the inside, asking what reason could reveal about what faith already affirmed. This method produced two of the most enduring arguments in the history of philosophy: the ontological argument for the existence of God, developed in the Proslogion, and the satisfaction theory of the atonement, developed in Cur Deus Homo.

He was canonized in 1494 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1720. His influence on subsequent theology — on Aquinas, on Descartes, on Barth — is difficult to overstate. He represents, at its most disciplined, the conviction that faith and reason are not enemies but partners.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Monologion — 1076 — a meditation on the divine nature
• Proslogion — 1078 — the ontological argument
• Cur Deus Homo — c. 1098 — the satisfaction theory of atonement
• De Veritate — On Truth
• De Libertate Arbitrii — On Free Will