A monastic scholar

Daily Reading for April 21 • Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1109

In the year 1109, on the Wednesday in Holy Week, the Archbishop of Canterbury lay dying. His friends, knowing that they were at the death-bed of a saint, were ready to improve the occasion: ‘My lord and father,’ they said, ‘we cannot help knowing that you are going to leave the world to be at the Easter court of your king.’ But Anselm was not to be caught by pieties and sentimentalities. His reply is the key to his life and a way to begin to understand him: ‘And indeed,’ he replied, ‘if His will is set upon this I will gladly obey His will. However, if He would prefer me to stay among you, at least until I can settle a question about the origin of the soul which I am turning over in my mind, I should welcome this with gratitude, for I do not know whether anyone will solve it when I am dead.’

There is in this reply first the obedience of the monk—a joyful love of whatever might be God’s will for him. And secondly a true estimate of his own intellectual powers as a scholar, without false humility; a mind still employed to its utmost in understanding the things of God for the sake of the people of God. . . .

As a monk Anselm understood theology to be the dynamic reflection upon mysteries already accepted and believed, by which the whole person, engaging in an arduous and totally demanding task—an ascesis—would be transfigured, receiving more and more of the light which is God. Anselm was a man of profound learning and alert mind who made his intellectual genius an integral part of his commitment to God as a monk. . . . Fides quarens intellectum, or, as Hilary of Poitiers said: ‘Bestow upon us, O Lord, the meaning of words, the light of understanding, the nobility of diction, and grant that what we believe that we may also speak.’

From Anselm of Canterbury: A Monastic Scholar by Sister Benedicta Ward SLG (Fairacres Publication No. 62, 1973).

Past Posts
Categories