On Anselm and Bare Reason

At the beginning of the year I started reading through the works of Anselm of Canterbury. I have decided to post some of my miscellaneous thoughts on different aspects of his writing from time to time throughout the remainder of the year.

The preface of the Monologion lays out the goal of the book: for Anselm to write intelligibly and accessibly on the divine essence without making his argument from the authority of scripture. My initial skepticism in that approach flowed from the impossibility to separate the rational from the revealed. Dividing the discernment of God’s essence from nature, apart from scripture, is the beginning of jettisoning divine self-revelation in scripture in the pursuit of rationality. His approach to me smacked of pursuing of a neutral starting point (an impossibility), namely human reason. But there were two aspects of the Monologion that cooled this skepticism…