Anselm of Canterbury Quotes on Knowledge
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the Italian Benedictine who succeeded Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury, gave eleventh-century theology its most influential motto for the relation between faith and reason: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. The Monologion and the Proslogion present the corresponding programme of rational reconstruction in which the believer, having first received the deposit of revelation, undertakes to display by argument the necessary connections among its doctrines. The Proslogion's ontological argument — that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and so cannot be conceived not to exist — has remained one of the most discussed pieces of philosophical theology in the entire subsequent tradition.
Quotes
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“Faith seeks understanding.”
Fides quaerens intellectum -
Attributed to Anselm of Canterbury:
“I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order that I may understand.”
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“Fides quaerens intellectum”
Faith seeking understanding | Original title of the Proslogion (1078) -
“Original title of the Proslogion (1078)”
Fides quaerens intellectum -
“Proslogion , chapter 5 by Anselm of Canterbury, translated by Clement C. J. Webb (1903).”
But since it is better to have perception or to have omnipotence, to be pitiful or to be without passions, than not to have these attributes; how hast Thou perception, if Thou art not a body? or omnipotence, if Thou canst not do everything? or how art Thou at one and the same time pitiful and without passions? For if only bodily things have perception, since the senses with which we perceive belon -
“Ergo domine...credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.”
Therefore, lord...we believe that you are something than which nothing greater can be thought. | Proslogion , ch. 2; Gregory Schufreider Confessions of a Rational Mystic: Anselm's Early Writings (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994) pp. 324-5. -
“Proslogion , ch. 2; Gregory Schufreider Confessions of a Rational Mystic: Anselm's Early Writings (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994) pp. 324-5.”
Ergo domine...credimus te esse aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.