Saint Anselm

Saint Anselm is a short biographical study of Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033–1109) by Richard William Church, the Tractarian scholar who was shortly afterward made Dean of St Paul's. Church had first written on Anselm in a long review essay in the Christian Remembrancer in 1843; the 1870 book reworked that material into a continuous narrative for a general readership. It belongs to the mid-Victorian recovery of the medieval Church by Anglicans shaped by the Oxford Movement, who wanted to show English readers that their own history contained saints of the first rank, not merely the bishops and martyrs of the Reformation. Church draws chiefly on the two works of Anselm's companion and secretary Eadmer, the Vita Anselmi and the Historia Novorum, and on Anselm's own letters.

The book follows Anselm from his boyhood in Aosta through his decades at the Norman abbey of Bec under Lanfranc, his years as prior and abbot, and his reluctant elevation to Canterbury in 1093, then into the long collision with William Rufus and Henry I over the rights of the Church, the two exiles, and his death in 1109. Church's central move is to hold two Anselms together: the contemplative monk who wrote the Monologion, the Proslogion, and Cur Deus Homo, and the public man forced to resist a king whom Church portrays as brutal and faithless. He argues that the second Anselm is not a departure from the first but its consequence. The same simplicity of conscience that made Anselm pray and reason with such transparency made him incapable of the compromises Rufus demanded, and his resistance was not ambition for clerical power but the refusal of a gentle man to call wrong right. Church gives sympathetic but not uncritical attention to the theology, treating the argument of the Proslogion and the satisfaction theory of Cur Deus Homo as expressions of a mind that reasoned because it loved. The prose is restrained, the judgments measured, and the book is as much an essay on the moral weight of holiness in public life as a chronicle.

Saint Anselm has lasted because it was the first English life of Anselm to set his sanctity, his thought, and his political ordeal in a single frame, and because Church wrote with a moral seriousness that still reads cleanly. Later scholarship has corrected details and deepened the picture of the investiture conflict, but the portrait of a man whose inner life and outer courage were one thing has not been superseded so much as confirmed.

Who should read this: readers who want an introduction to Anselm as a person before approaching his treatises, and anyone interested in how faithfulness holds up under hostile power. It is not for those seeking a technical account of the ontological argument or the investiture controversy; Church assumes a reader content to be told a life well.