Saint Anselm of Canterbury

Saint Anselm of Canterbury, also called Anselm of Aosta, was a Benedictine, abbot of the monastery of Bec in Normandy, archbishop of Canterbury, and a Doctor of the Church. He joined prayer with the search to understand the truths of faith, and as a bishop he defended the freedom of the Church and twice paid for it with exile. The Church commemorates him on April 21, the day of his death.

He was born in Aosta, into a noble family, in 1033 or at the beginning of 1034. He owed his first religious upbringing to his mother. His biographer, the monk Eadmer, recorded that as a child Anselm imagined that God lived on the snow-covered peaks of the Alps, and dreamed that God welcomed him there with the whitest bread. At fifteen he wanted to enter a monastery, but his father opposed it. After his mother’s death he left home and for three years wandered through France.

In Normandy he came to the abbey of Bec, drawn by the fame of its prior, Lanfranc of Pavia. In 1060, at the age of twenty-seven, he became a monk there and was later ordained a priest. In 1063 he was entrusted with the office of prior and with the monastic school, and after the death of Herluin, the founder of the abbey, the monks unanimously elected him abbot. He formed others by persuasion, not by force: he compared the young to plants that grow better when they have a healthy freedom.

At Bec he wrote the Monologion and the Proslogion. To the second of these works he first gave the title “Faith Seeking Understanding,” and these words describe his path: he did not want to understand in order to believe, but believed in order to understand. In it he called God the One than whom nothing greater can be thought. He is regarded as the father of scholastic theology, and tradition has given him the title of Magnificent Doctor.

After the death of Lanfranc, who had become archbishop of Canterbury, King William Rufus for four years would not allow the see to be filled. In 1093 Anselm became archbishop, though he resisted this dignity. From then on he had to strive for the independence of the Church from royal power. In 1097 he left for Rome, and the king did not allow him to return. In exile he completed the work “Cur Deus homo,” on why God became man, and in 1098, at the Council of Bari, convened by Pope Urban II, he set out for the Greeks the teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit.

He returned to England in 1100, summoned by the new king, Henry I. Soon he came into conflict with him too over investiture, that is, over whether a ruler may confer offices in the Church, and in 1103 he was again in exile. He returned in 1106, when the king renounced that right. He devoted his last years to the formation of the clergy and to theological work. He died on April 21, 1109, and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral.

He was venerated as a saint already in the Middle Ages. In 1720 Pope Clement XI declared him a Doctor of the Church. In 2009, on the nine hundredth anniversary of the saint’s death, Benedict XVI recalled that prayer, study, and governance were joined in his life.