Anselm Of Canterbury Quotes

Lord, give me what you have made me want; I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired; perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for.

Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself for a little to God and rest for a little in Him.

For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that unless I believe, I shall not understand.

And what we say - that what He willeth is right and what He doth not not will is wrong, is not so to be understood, as if, should God will something inconsistent, it would be right because He willed it. For it does not follow that if God would lie it would be right to lie, but rather that he were not God.

God has made nothing more valuable than rational existence capable of enjoying him;

I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.

the angels are separated between those who adhering to justice enjoy all the goods they wish and those who having abandoned justice lack any good they desire

Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek, because I can neither seek You if You do not teach me how, nor find You unless You reveal Yourself.

Oh, mizeră soartă a omului care L-a pierdut pe Cel pentru care a fost făcut.

For we affirm that the Divine nature is beyond doubt impassible, and that God cannot at all be brought down from his exaltation, nor toil in anything which he wishes to effect. But we say that the Lord Jesus Christ is very God and very man, one person in two natures, and two natures in one person. When, therefore, we speak of God as enduring any humiliation or infirmity, we do not refer to the majesty of that nature, which cannot suffer; but to the feebleness of the human constitution which he assumed. And so there remains no ground of objection against our faith. For in this way we intend no debasement of the Divine nature, but we teach that one person is both Divine and human. In the incarnation of God there is no lowering of the Deity; but the nature of man we believe to be exalted.

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

Nous sommes certainement tous tombés dans celui dans lequel nous avons tous péché! Celui qui possédait si facilement tant de bonheur évanoui maintenant, l'a pour lui et pour nous malheureusement perdu. En lui nous en avons tous été privés, et désormais lorsque nous voulons chercher, nous ignorons la voie qu'il faut suivre ; lorsque nous cherchons, nous ne trouvons pas; et lorsque nous trouvons, ce n'est déjà plus ce que nous cherchions.

Certainement tu es la sagesse, la vérité ; tu es la bonté, le bonheur, l'éternité; tu es tout ce qui constitue le vrai bien. Toutes ces choses sont nombreuses, mon intelligence étroite et captive ne peut voir tant d'objets d'un seul coup, et jouir de tous à la fois. Comment donc, Seigneur, es-tu tous ces objets? Sont-ils tes diverses parties, ou chacun d'eux n'est-il pas tout entier ton essence? Car, tout ce qui est composé de parties n'est pas véritablement un. Il est, en quelque manière, plusieurs et différent de lui-même ; il peut être désuni et dans le fait et par la pensée, conditions étrangères à ta nature, au-dessus de laquelle on ne saurait rien concevoir. Il n'y a donc point de parties en toi, Seigneur ! Tu n'es pas multiple ; mais tu es tellement un et si complètement semblable à toi-même, que tu ne diffères en aucun point de ta propre nature. Bien plus, tu es l'unité véritable et absolue, indivisible même par la pensée. Ainsi donc, la vie, la sagesse, et toutes les autres vertus que nous avons énumérées, ne sont pas des parties de ton être, mais toutes ensemble ne font qu'un, et chacune est, tout entière, et ton essence et l'essence des autres.

But why, an impatient critic will immediately object, should our forgiveness depend on Christ’s death? Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross? ‘God will pardon me’, Heinrich Heine protested. ‘That’s his métier [his job, his speciality].’4 After all, the objector might continue, if we sin against each other, we are required to forgive each other. So why should God not practise what he preaches? Why should he not be as generous as he expects us to be? Two answers need to be given to these questions. The first was given at the end of the eleventh century by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote in his magnificent book Why God Became Man: ‘You have not yet considered the seriousness of sin.’5 The second answer might be: ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ To draw an analogy between our forgiveness of each other and God’s forgiveness of us is very superficial. We are not God but private individuals, while he is the maker of heaven and earth, Creator of the very laws we break. Our sins are not purely personal injuries but a wilful rebellion against him. It is when we begin to see the gravity of sin and the majesty of God that our questions change. No longer do we ask why God finds it difficult to forgive sins, but how he finds it possible. As one writer has put it, ‘forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems’.6 Why may forgiveness be described as a ‘problem’ to God? Because of who he is in his innermost being. Of course he is love (1 John 4:8, 16), but his love is not sentimental love; it is holy love. How then could God punish sin (as in justice he must) without contradicting his love? Or how could God pardon sin (as in love he yearned to do) without compromising his justice? How, confronted by human evil, could God be true to himself as holy love? How could he act simultaneously to express his holiness and his love? This is the divine dilemma that God resolved on the cross. For on the cross, when Jesus died, God himself in Christ bore the judgment we deserved, in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. The full penalty of sin was borne – not, however, by us, but by God in Christ. On the cross divine love and justice were reconciled.

Man’s exile is ignorance; his home is knowledge,” said the twelfth-century Bishop Honorius of Autun. And Saint Anselm of Canterbury: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand.

DISCIPULUS. Placet mihi quod dicis. Quippe utile puto hoc cognoscere. MAGISER. Recte putas.

If one of the other persons be incarnated, there will be two sons in the Trinity, viz., the Son of God, who is the Son before the incarnation, and he also who, by the incarnation, will be the son of the virgin; and among the persons which ought always to be equal there will be an inequality as respects the dignity of birth. For the one born of God will have a nobler birth than he who is born of the virgin. Likewise, if the Father become incarnate, there will be two grandsons in the Trinity; for the Father, by assuming humanity, will be the grandson of the parents of the virgin, and the Word, though having nothing to do with man, will yet be the grandson of the virgin, since he will be the son of her son. But all these things are incongruous and do not pertain to the incarnation of the Word.

I was striving unto God but collided with myself. I was seeking rest in my inner recesses but found tribulation and grief in my inmost being.

[God] cannot be corrupted, or lie, or cause what is true to be false (as for example, to cause what has been done to not have been done), or many other such things.

Id quo nihil maius cogitari potest

Thou art not capable of all things? or, if Thou canst not be corrupted and canst not lie..how art thou capable of all things? Ore else to be capable of these things is not power but impotence. For he who is capable of of those things is capable of what is not for his good, and of what he might not to do and the more capable of them he is, the more power have adversity and perversity against him, and the less has himself against these.

Thou art not capable of all things? or, if Thou canst not be corrupted and canst not lie..how art thou capable of all things? Or else to be capable of these things is not power but impotence. For he who is capable of of those things is capable of what is not for his good, and of what he might not to do and the more capable of them he is, the more power have adversity and perversity against him, and the less has himself against these.

Eu nu caut să înțeleg pentru a crede, ci eu cred pentru a înțelege.

Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point. Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.

2. The Ontological Argument Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of “God”). It is greater to exist than not to exist. If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2). To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3). It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4). God exists. This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033–1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say, “Unicorns don’t exist.” The claim of The Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this generalization. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it’s not so easy to figure out what it is. FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in The Ontological Argument—it is to treat “existence” as a property, like “being fat” or “having ten fingers.” The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that “existence” is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat “existence” as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as “a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists.” So, if you think about a trunicorn, you’re thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore, trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

Det förflutna, som är mitt och Johannes Lupigis och andras, börjar lagra upp sig framför mig såsom en framtid, vilken jag skall genomtränga. Det förflutna lagrar på det sättet upp sig framför oss alla. Vi står och trampar i detta och måste genomtränga det för att få kunskap. Vi har genomlevt - eller uppslukat - en del av det och nu måste vi genomtränga och svälja det igen för att bli fria genom kunskapen om hur det var. Så är antagligen kunskapslagen, vägen till erfarenhetens förvärv, har diakonen Anselmus sagt.

For by the just judgment of God it was decreed, and, as it were, confirmed by writing, that, since man had sinned, he should not henceforth of himself have the power to avoid sin or the punishment of sin; for the spirit is out-going and not returning (est enim spiritus vadens et non rediens); and he who sins ought not to escape with impunity, unless pity spare the sinner, and deliver and restore him. Wherefore we ought not to believe that, on account of this writing, there can be found any justice on the part of the devil in his tormenting man. In fine, as there is never any injustice in a good angel, so in an evil angel there can be no justice at all. There was no reason, therefore, as respects the devil, why God should not make use of his own power against him for the liberation of man.

MAIS si par ton éternité, tu as été, tu es et tu seras; et si avoir été n'est pas devoir être, si être n'est ni devoir être ni avoir été, comment ton éternité est-elle toujours tout entière? Serait-ce que rien d'elle n'a passé de manière à n'être plus, et que rien de ce qui doit s'en écouler un jour ne peut être regardé comme n'étant pas encore? Tu n'as donc point été hier, tu n'es point aujourd'hui, tu ne seras pas demain ; mais hier, aujourd'hui, demain, tu es; bien plus encore, tu n'es pas hier, aujourd'hui, demain, mais tu es simplement, et en dehors de toute condition de temps. Hier, aujourd'hui, demain n'existent que dans le temps, et toi, quoiqu'il n'y ait rien sans ton essence, tu n'es cependant ni dans le lieu ni dans le temps ; mais toutes choses sont en toi, rien ne te contient et tu contiens tout.

For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe that “Unless I believe, I shall not understand.” —ANSELM OF CANTERBURY1