What About God?
The 11th-century wasn’t such a bad time, if you asked Anselmo de Candia Ginevra (1033-1109), more familiar to us as (Archbishop) Anselm of Canterbury.
Anselm, as prelate and philosopher, played a dominant role in helping lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the second phase of the Middle Ages. (See the Addendum for definitions of these terms.)
He is best known for his ontological [from Gk. ontos, being + logia, writing about, study of] argument for the existence of God.
Anselm’s starting point was the premise that God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Or, the idea of God’s existence is greater than the idea of God’s non-existence. He then built on his premise using logic: he reasoned his way to his “proof.”
His approach is laid out in Proslogion (Discourse on the Existence of God). Proslogion wasn’t written to convince the non-believer of God’s existence, but rather to bolster the faith of the believing Christian. The original title of the work was to have been Faith Seeking Understanding.
We all know that if you let go of an apple in your hand, it falls to the ground. We have faith [from L. fidere, to trust] that it will do just that. Newton, the great scientist-theologian, discovered why the apple falls. The law of gravity provides the understanding to justify our faith.
I have slipped into the God argument. Whether or not God exists is one issue. Whether we need God to sustain us in this life is another.
The celebrated English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, an evolutionary atheist, or someone we might consider a religious atheist, finds God in the natural laws that run the universe. So did Einstein. They speak for perhaps 0.0001 percent (600,000 people) — is that too high an estimate? — of the world’s population of 6 billion, while the bulk of humanity lives at another intellectual-spiritual level.
Anselm considered atheists to be fools, fondly quoting Scripture: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 53:1).
For Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), the fools are those who, in this scientific age of ours, seek to prove God ’s existence using primitive and outdated methodologies.
Anselm did the best he could within the confines of his time, and history has good reason to remember him. He was the force behind scholasticism, the teaching that aimed at uniting Greek philosophy with medieval Christian doctrine.
Scholasticism was a method of learning which emphasized dialectical reasoning to resolve contradictions. Anselm’s heirs — Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas — helped prepare Europe for the modern age.
Addendum: The Middle Ages are generally considered the period in European history between classical antiquity and the Italiam Renaissance, usually dated from 476 to 1453. In 476, the Western Roman Empire collapsed when Romulus Augustus was forced from his throne by the Germanic general Odoacer. The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire came to an end in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople to to the Ottoman Turks under Fatih Sultan Mehmet.
The Dark Ages refers to the earlier part of the Middle Ages, from 476 to about the end of the 10th century, a time characterized by widespread stagnation.
Roy Hanu Hart, M.D.