Works of the saint Anselm

recueil de la prière de saint anselme

St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was an Italian Benedictine monk, abbot, and theologian. He was the archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109 and was declared a saint soon after his death. Later in 1720, he was pronounced a doctor of the church.

Anselm was born in 1033 near Aosta, in those days a Burgundian town on the frontier with Lombardy. Little is known of his early life. He left home at twenty-three, and after three years of apparently aimless traveling through Burgundy and France, he came to Normandy in 1059. Once he was in Normandy, Anselm's interest was captured by the Benedictine abbey at Bec, whose famous school was under the direction of Lanfranc, the abbey's prior. Lanfranc was a scholar and teacher of wide reputation, and under his leadership, the school at Bec had become an important center of learning, especially in dialectic.

In 1060 Anselm entered the abbey as a novice. His intellectual and spiritual gifts brought him rapid advancement, and when Lanfranc was appointed abbot of Caen in 1063, Anselm was elected to succeed him as prior.

With the exception of St. Augustine, and to a lesser extent Boethius, it is difficult to definitively ascribe the influence of other thinkers to the development of St. Anselm’s thought. To be sure, Anselm studied under Lanfranc, but Lanfranc does not appear to have been a significant influence on the actual content or expression of Anselm’s thought, and he largely ignored Lanfranc’s misgivings about the method of the Monologion.

Anselm cites Boethius but does not draw upon him extensively. Other figures have been proposed as influences on Anselm, for instance, John Scotus Eriugena and Pseudo-Dionysus, but any such proposals are set in the proper framework by these remarks from Koyre.