Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/102

92 With great difficulty he obtained a reluctant permission to leave, and in  he set out for. William immediately seized on the s of the, and retained them to his death. Anselm was received with high honour by, and at a great held at , he was put forward to defend the  doctrine of the  against the objections of the. But was too politic to embroil himself with the king of, and Anselm found that he could obtain no substantial result. He withdrew from, and spent some time at the little of. Here he finished his treatise on the, Cur Deus homo, and then retired to. In  was killed, and, his successor, at once recalled Anselm. But demanded that he should again receive from him in person  in his office of, thus making the dignity entirely dependent on the royal. Now, the in the matter was plain; all  and   were strictly prohibited. Anselm represented this to the king; but would not relinquish a  possessed by his predecessors, and proposed that the matter should be laid before the. The answer of reaffirmed the law as to. A second was sent, with a similar result. , however, remained firm, and at last, in, Anselm and an from the king set out for. The, , reaffirmed strongly the rule of , and passed sentence of against all who had infringed the law, except. Practically this left matters as they were, and Anselm, who had received a message forbidding him to return to unless on the king’s terms, withdrew to, where he waited to see if  would not take stronger measures. At last, in, he resolved himself to. His intention was made known to the king through his sister, and it seriously alarmed him, for it was a critical period in his affairs. A meeting was arranged, and a reconciliation between them effected. In Anselm crossed to, with power from the  to remove the sentence of  from the illegally  churchmen. In the long dispute as to  was finally ended by the king resigning his formal s. The remaining two years of Anselm’s life were spent in the duties of his ric. He died 21st. His appears to have taken place in. Anselm may, with some justice, be considered the first and. His only great predecessor,, had more of the speculative and element than is consistent with a ; but in Anselm are found that recognition of the relation of  to, and that attempt to elaborate a rational system of , which form the special characteristics of. His constant endeavour is to render the contents of the  clear to, and to develop the intelligible s interwoven with the. The necessary preliminary for this is the possession of the. &ldquo;He who does not believe will not experience; and he who has not experienced will not understand.&rdquo; That must precede  is reiterated by him. &ldquo;Neque enim quæro intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo, quia, nisi credidere, non intelligam.&rdquo; &ldquo;Christianus per fidem debet ad intellectum proficere, non per intellectum ad fidem accedere.&rdquo; &ldquo;Rectus ordo exigit, ut profunda Christianæ fidei credamus, priusquam ea præsumamus ratione discutere&rdquo; But after the is held fast, the attempt must be made to demonstrate by  the  of what we believe. It is wrong not to do so. &ldquo;Negligentiæ mihi esse videtur, si, postquam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus quod credimus, intelligere.&rdquo; To such an extent does he carry this demand for rational explanation that, at times, it seems as if he claimed for unassisted the power of penetrating even to the  of the. On the whole, however, the qualified statement is his real view; merely rational proofs are always, he affirms, to be tested by. (Cur Deus homo, i. 2 and 38; De Fide Trin. 2.) The groundwork of his theory of is contained in the tract De Veritate, in which, from the consideration of  as in, in ing, and in things, he rises to the affirmation of an absolute truth, in which all other truth participates. This absolute truth is himself, who is therefore the ultimate ground or principle both of things and of thought. The notion of comes thus into the foreground of the system; before all things it is necessary that it should be made clear to, that it should be demonstrated to have real existence. This demonstration is the substance of the Monologion and Proslogion. In the first of these the rests on the ordinary grounds of, and coincides to some extent with the earlier theory of , though it is carried out with singular boldness and fulness. Things, he says, are called good in a variety of ways and degrees; this would be impossible if there were not some, some good in itself, in which all relative goods participate. Similarly with such s as great, just; they involve a certain greatness and justice. The very existence of things is impossible without some one Being, by whom they are. This absolute Being, this goodness, justice, greatness, is. Anselm was not thoroughly satisfied with this reasoning; it started from undefined grounds, and contained several converging lines of. He desired to have some one short demonstration. Such a demonstration he presented in the Proslogion; it is his celebrated. is that being than whom none greater can be conceived. Now, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived existed only in the, it would not be the absolutely greatest, for we could add to it existence in reality. It follows, then, that the being than whom nothing greater can be conceived, i.e., necessarily has real existence. This reasoning, in which Anselm partially anticipated the, has rarely seemed satisfactory. It was opposed at the time by the Gaunilo, in his Liber pro Insipiente, on the ground that we cannot pass from  to. The same criticism is made by several of the later, among others by , and is in substance what advances against all. Anselm replied to the objections of Gaunilo in his Liber Apologeticus. The existence of being thus held proved, he proceeds to state the rational grounds of the  doctrines of creation and of the. With reference to this last, he says we cannot know from himself, but only after the analogy of his creatures; and the special analogy used is the self-consciousness of, its peculiar double nature, with the necessary elements,  and , representing the relation of the  to the. The mutual of these two, proceeding from the relation they hold to one another, symbolizes the. The further doctrines of, , , are developed, partly in the Monologion, partly in other mixed treatises. Finally, in his greatest work, Cur Deus homo, he undertakes to make plain, even to s, the rational necessity of the  of the. The theory rests on three positions: that satisfaction is necessary on account of ’s honour and ; that such satisfaction can be given only by the peculiar personality of the God-man; that such satisfaction is really given by the voluntary death of this infinitely valuable person. The demonstration is, in brief, this. All the actions of men are due to the furtherance of 's glory ; if, then, there be