3 thoughts on “On a Celebrated Saint of Ours

  1. rick allen

    Impressions gleaned from the internet are always suspect, of course, but I’ve always been surprised by how little respect and affection there seems to be among Anglicans/Episcopalians for St. Anselm. One would think that Cur Deus Homo was some sort of medieval Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and the ontological argument a silly word game.

    Last year I happened to buy an Anselm anthology, edited by Thomas Williams; and I hadn’t really read Anselm since college. What struck we was what I would call his extreme rationalism, his conviction that the Christian creed represents an almost necessary scenario for divine/human concord. (I was amused to read in the introduction to this anthology that Anselm was chided by his predecessor at Canterbury, Lanfranc, that his Monologian made too little appeal on authority.)

  2. Derek the Ænglican

    Last year I happened to buy an Anselm anthology, edited by Thomas Williams

    Oh come now Rick, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in those intros. I mean, who even knows who this Williams guy is and if he knows what he’s talking about… :-D

    Actually, Thornton’s section on Anselm in his English Spirituality is nothing short of a hymn of praise to the man. The problem is, most Episcopalians only know him from a fifteen minute slice of a lecture on the atonement (and one that represents his arguments poorly at that…)

    Caelius,

    That’s what I originally had in the post but suspected I wasn’t spelling it right.

Comments are closed.