ST ANSELM OF CANTERBURY
English people of my generation used to enjoy reading a hilarious spoof history of England called « 1066 and All That ». The point about the book is that it presents the history of England, not as it really happened, but as it was remembered by people from their school history lessons.
After much diligent research, the authors came to the conclusion that there is only date that English people infallibly remember from their school history, and that is 1066, the year when William the Conqueror came over from Normandy, defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and became King of England.
William then set out to “Normanise” the State and the Church (the two very much went together in those days), so as to establish his rule and to displace the backward and probably disloyal Anglo-Saxons. So when, in 1070 the Archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant, King William looked across the water to Normandy and brought Lanfranc, Abbot of Le Bec, over to be the new Archbishop, a key political as well as ecclesiastical post.
When Lanfranc died, William’s successor, William II, kept the archbishopric vacant for four years, hanging on to the substantial revenues for himself, but when he was finally persuaded to make a new appointment, he went back to the Abbey of Le Bec, which was acknowledged as one of the foremost seats of learning in Europe at the time, and brought another abbot over to England, a man called Anselm.
Anselm served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Now Anselm, or Saint Anselm as I should call him, was the greatest theologian ever to occupy the See of Canterbury.
So why am I telling you all this? Well, partly because I was staying at the Abbey of Le Bec this week for the annual meeting of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for France (a body which is referred to for short as French ARC); and partly because, last Tuesday, 21 April 2009, was not only St Anselm’s Day but in fact the 900th anniversary of his death in 1109.
This was, as you can imagine, the occasion for a great celebration. There was a Mass celebrated by the Bishop of Evreux, there was a vin d’honneur and a festive lunch, and there were several visitors from the Church of England, including some of the canons of Canterbury Cathedral. (Then, on Thursday, the Abbot of Le Bec and others went over to Canterbury for a return fixture presided over by St Anselm’s successor, Rowan Williams).
Anselm was first and foremost a scholar. He took a lot of persuading to accept the offer of the archbishopric of Canterbury: I have no desire to get immersed in affairs of state, he said.
But as it turned out, he was no push-over and he got into bitter disputes with both King William II and his successor Henry I. On two occasions, Anselm was forced into exile.
The big argument was about what was called “investiture”. In other words, who had the right to appoint bishops: the king or the Pope? In the end there was a compromise: the appointment was made by the Pope (though of course the kings continued to have great influence in the choice) but the new bishop had to pay homage to the king as his feudal lord for worldly affairs (which Church of England bishops still do, by the way).
This great wrangle dragged for decades in other parts of Europe too (particularly between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor), and although it seems immensely distant from our concerns today, it’s true to say that it marked a significant first stage in what we would call the separation of Church and State. Or to put it another way, Anselm saw himself as fighting to reclaim the independence of the Church from control by the State.
But why was Saint Anselm such an important theologian? He is described as “the greatest theologian between Augustine and Aquinas” – which is saying something! And does his theology still have things to teach us?
Well; I’ll touch on three aspects of his theology. First, he originated a famous argument for the existence of God. This is known as the “ontological proof” and is based on defining God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”.
Now I have to confess that I find Anselm’s kind of abstract logical argument simply mind-boggling, and not particularly helpful. But for philosophers, Anselm remains important and, down the centuries, arguments have continued to rage as to the validity of his “proof”. People like Aquinas and Kant criticised his argument, but it remains nonetheless a milestone in the history of philosophy.
Second, Anselm put forward one of the classical ways of understanding the meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross and how it achieved our salvation. Using the feudal concept of “honour”, he said that our sin outrages God’s “honour” and that only the death of Jesus, both God and Man, is able to “satisfy” God’s honour.
To us this all sounds very remote, though it’s worth noticing that the Prayer of Consecration in the Prayer Book communion service harks back to Anselm. Do you remember that splendid sentence of verbal overkill, where it says that Christ’s death on the Cross made “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”.
The problem is that to us, who have forgotten how medieval society worked, this talk of “honour” and “satisfaction” no longer makes a lot of sense. But what Anselm was doing was to use an analogy from secular society to try and explain the paradox which we still have to grapple with: namely, that through the Cross of Christ, God forgives us and wipes out our guilt, while maintaining his absolute justice. Or to put it another way, how does the righteous God accept us, sinners that we are, without outraging his righteousness?
But, frankly, what I find more interesting is Anselm’s theological method, which he summed up in the Latin phrase credo ut intelligam: I believe in order that I may understand. In other words, Anselm said that faith comes first: only if I first have a basis of belief will I have a chance of understanding the ways of God.
Now this is the opposite of our modern, rationalistic ways of thinking. We tend to think: only if I understand, only if I can first get my mind to make sense of it, will I be prepared to believe.
It’s also the opposite of how theology has to justify its presence in a modern university. The modern academic world thinks that we can only find truth by being neutral and “objective”, and so it is suspicious of people, like believing Christians for example, who cannot claim to be neutral and objective because they start from a pre-existing commitment of faith.
I hope I am not giving the impression that Anselm was anti-rational, that he wanted some kind of blind, unthinking faith. No, quite the reverse: what he was trying to do was to build a rational justification for faith, to show that faith makes sense to the mind.
And I think that Anselm’s approach – I believe in order that I may understand – is actually very much how Christians experience the relationship between faith and reason today.
This is what we do: first we take a step of faith (not just blindly, of course, but on the basis of evidence of one kind or another), but this is only the start of a whole lifetime of seeking, in which we seek to understand more fully (but never anything like completely) the ways of God; and through this process, of searching with our minds, then, by the grace of God, we may find ourselves led, little by little, more deeply into faith.
Now, finally, what, if anything, has all this got to do with Anglican-Catholic relations, which, you may remember, is why we found ourselves in Le Bec in the first place?
Well, the remarkable rapprochement that has taken place between Anglicans and Catholics at an international level during recent decades has come about to a considerable extent by a process of joint exploration into the heritage of faith of the two churches. We have been trying to re-express what we believe in ways that make sense in the modern world, and we have discovered that, not completely of course but to a very large extent, we can do this together, because the things we want to say are on the whole very much the same.
It seems to me that this is very much a process of what Anselm called “faith seeking understanding”: starting from a basis of shared faith, we find ourselves entering, together, into a new understanding our common theological heritage.
French ARC seeks to work out the practical implications of this rediscovered shared faith for the relations between our two churches in France today. And you might be interested to know that the agreement we have just reached with the Dominicans about our continued use of their church, despite our differences in such matters as the ordination of women, was seen at this meeting in Le Bec as a model of good practice for Anglican-Catholic relations in France.
Next year’s meeting of Franch ARC will take place in Strasbourg, and we shall be looking for ways of associating it with the life of our two churches in Alsace. So, meanwhile, let us pray that the process of growing theological understanding between our two churches may continue, and that our shared faith may lead us into a deeper and deeper understanding of the ways of God.
Let us pray:
Eternal God,
who gave great gifts to your servant Anselm
as a pastor and teacher:
grant that we, like him, may desire you with our whole heart
and, so desiring, may seek you
and, seeking, may find you:
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church
26 April 2009 (Easter 3, Year B)
