Early Scholasticism: Anselm and Abelard

Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), an Italian-born Benedictine monk who became abbot of Bec in Normandy and later archbishop of Canterbury, is often regarded as the father of Scholasticism for his rigorous method of fides quaerens intellectum, 'faith seeking understanding.' Like Augustine, whose formula he echoed, Anselm insisted that Christian believers should not remain content with bare assent to revealed truths but should strive, through reason alone and without appeal to scriptural authority, to understand why those truths are true and, where possible, to demonstrate them by necessary arguments. His first major work, the Monologion (1076), attempts just such a demonstration of God's existence and attributes purely from reflection on degrees of goodness and being in the world. Dissatisfied with the Monologion's reliance on multiple premises, Anselm sought, and reports finding in a moment of sudden insight, a single, self-sufficient argument that would establish God's existence and nature all at once, which he set out in his subsequent and most famous work, the Proslogion (1077-78).