Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/109

Rh which in the early history of Christianity had been inspired only by the venom of enemies. Rejecting the error charged to the patripassians, Roscelin frankly accepted the reproach of tritheism. But we may learn from the extreme rigour with which he stated the alternatives, that with him there was not a religious principle but simply a speculative position at stake.

If it was almost an accident of time that connected Roscelin with a theological debate, it was certainly nothing more that involved saint Anselm in one of dialectics. A thinker of immensely larger capacity than Lanfranc, Anselm, like his predecessor in the see of Canterbury, belongs in spirit to the past. He is, it has been finely said, the last of the fathers. Unlike Lanfranc, he belongs also to the far future: as a philosopher, he is in at least one notable train of reasoning the parent of Descartes. His serene vision overlooks the chasm of scholasticism; he is not engulphed in it. Some of the questions on which he meditated are so alien from the temper of his time that one cannot but ask whence he derived the impulse. To this question, however, no answer has yet been given, and for the present we may still believe that the idea of constructing an argument for the existence of God originated in his solitary thought. At first indeed Plato, through the channel of saint Augustin, supplied him with the suggestion that the existence of relative good upon earth implies the existence of an absolute Good of which it is a reflexion. To this purpose he wrote the Monologion. But he was not content until he had perfected an argument the profoundness of which might, he felt, appeal to every reasonable man. Such he discovered in the