Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/298

276 present the dry and the formal method of reasoning which was to make its chief home in France; others, like the Proslogion, seem to be Italian in a certain beautiful emotionalism. The feeling is very lofty, even lifted out of the human, very skyey, even. The Proslogion, the Meditationes do not throb with the red blood of Augustine's Confessions, the writing which influenced them most. The quality of their feeling suggests rather Dante's Paradiso; and sometimes with Anselm a sense of formal beauty and perfection seems to disclose the mind of Italy. Moreover, Anselm's Latin style appears Italian. It is elastic, even apparently idiomatic, and varies with the temper and character of his different works. Throughout, it shows in Latin the fluency and simple word-order natural to an author whose vulgaris eloquentia was even closer to Latin in the time of Anselm than when Dante wrote.

So Anselm's writings were intimately part of their author, and very part of his life-long meditation upon God. Led by the solicitations of others, as well as impelled by the needs of his own faculties and nature, he takes up one Christian problem after another, and sets forth his understanding of it with his conclusion. He is devout, an absolute believer; and he is wonderfully metaphysical. He is a beautiful, a sublimated, and idealizing reasoner, convinced that a divine reality must exist in correspondence with his thought, which projects itself aloft to evoke from the blue an answering reality. The inspiration, the radiating point of Anselm's intellectual interest, is clearly given—to understand that which he first believes. It is a spontaneous intellectual interest, not altogether springing from a desire to know how to be saved. It does not seek to understand in order to believe; but seeks the happiness of knowing and understanding that which it believes and loves. Listen to some sentences from the opening of the Proslogion:

"'Come now, mannikin, flee thy occupations for a little, and hide from the confusion of thy cares. Be vacant a little while for God, and for a little rest in Him.… Now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and how to seek thee, where and how to find thee. Lord, Lord, illuminate us; show us thyself. Pity us labouring toward thee, impotent without thee.… Teach me to seek thee,"