Anselm of Canterbury is an important and early source of two key
themes in Western thought and religion that are hard to reconcile.
In his arguments based only on reason, Anselm develops a model of
pure and neutral rationality. In his intensely personal and passionate
prayers, meditations, and letters of spiritual direction, Anselm is the
forerunner of later experiential and emotional spirituality. Scholars
have been largely content to compartmentalize these different elements
in Anselm, but his most famous works, the Monologion and Proslogion,
are both prayerful meditations and argumentative assays of "reason
alone." Any account of Anselm as a thinker or of his place in Western
intellectual and religious history must make sense of this enigma.
In Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word, Eileen C. Sweeney
addresses these tensions, offering a new cumulative and comparative
interpretation of Anselm's writings. She finds common concerns
and patterns across his prayers, logical analysis, and Christological
and Trinitarian speculation. Sweeney argues that seeing the common
structure and goal in the many topics and genres in the Anselmian
corpus yields a new way of considering much-discussed questions in
Anselm scholarship -- the relationship of faith and reason, the search
for "necessary reasons," the concurrence of freedom and grace. It also
sheds further light on Anselm's engagement with non-Christian objectors
and on the emotional content of Anselm's prayers and letters.
Sweeney's study offers a comprehensive picture of Anselm's thought
and its development, from the early, intimate, monastically based meditations
to the later, public, proto-scholastic disputations. She reveals
Anselm as a thinker as relentless in his exposure of ambiguity, paradox,
and separation as in his pursuit of certainty, necessity, and unity.
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