Anselm of Canterbury Quotes on Knowledge
Anselm of Canterbury was an 11th and early 12th-century Italian-Norman Benedictine monk, philosopher, and theologian, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. This page collects quotes attributed to Anselm of Canterbury on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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. -
“Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 123.”
God often works more by the life of the illiterate seeking the things that are God's, than by the ability of the learned seeking the things that are their own.