Proslogion

Overview

The Proslogion is about sixty pages long and it is a prayer. Anselm wrote it around 1078 at the abbey of Bec in Normandy, where he was prior, and his first title for it was Fides Quaerens Intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Every chapter addresses God directly in the second person. The argument everyone knows occupies chapters 2 to 4 of a twenty-six chapter devotional work, and it arrives as an answer to prayer rather than as the opening move in a debate.

That shapes how you should read it. Anselm is not trying to convert an unbeliever. He is a monk who already believes and who wants to see, by reason alone, what he has been told. In the preface he explains that he had been hunting for a single argument, one that would need no other argument to prop it up and would prove by itself both that God exists and that God is what Christians say he is. The search exhausted him and he nearly abandoned it. The book is what he found when he stopped trying.

The argument

Chapter 1 is not argument at all. It is a lament about absence: the soul was made to see God and cannot, and Anselm asks to be taught where to look. It ends with the sentence that gave the book its first title. He does not want proof in order to believe. He believes, and wants to understand.

Chapter 2 sets the trap. Take the phrase “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Even the fool of Psalm 14, who says in his heart that there is no God, understands the phrase when he hears it, so the thing it names exists at least in his understanding. But existing in the understanding alone is less than existing both in the understanding and in reality. So if that than which nothing greater can be conceived existed only in the understanding, then the very thing than which nothing greater can be conceived would be something than which a greater can be conceived. That is a contradiction. Therefore it exists in reality as well.

Chapter 3 goes further and is the version modern philosophers take most seriously. A being that cannot be thought not to exist is greater than one that can. So God does not merely exist; he exists so truly that he cannot be conceived not to exist. The claim has moved from existence to necessary existence, which is why twentieth-century readers reconstruct this chapter in modal logic and mostly leave chapter 2 alone.

Chapter 4 handles the obvious objection: if the argument works, how could the fool say in his heart what cannot be thought? Anselm distinguishes thinking the words from thinking the thing they signify. The fool has the sound and not the object.

Chapters 5 to 23 do the second half of the job the preface promised. If God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, then God is whatever it is better to be than not to be: just, truthful, blessed, living, and so on. Anselm then works at the hard cases his own definition creates. How can God be compassionate and yet feel nothing? How can he be just and still spare the wicked? How is he in no place and no time and yet everywhere and always? Chapter 15 is the turn that readers who stop at chapter 4 always miss: God is not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, he is greater than can be conceived at all. The last chapters are about the joy of the blessed and end, like the rest, in praise.

Printed with the work you will find Gaunilo, a monk of Marmoutier, writing “On Behalf of the Fool,” and Anselm’s reply. Gaunilo’s counter-example is the lost island: conceive of an island more excellent than all other lands, and by Anselm’s reasoning it must exist somewhere. Anselm’s answer is that the argument works for one thing only, because everything except that than which nothing greater can be conceived can be thought not to exist. Whether that answer is enough is the standing seminar question.

How to read it

Read the preface and chapter 1 first, and do not skip them for the argument. They tell you what kind of book you are holding, and the argument reads completely differently once you know it is a prayer.

Then read chapters 2, 3 and 4 slowly, two or three times, in that order. They are four pages. Write the argument out as numbered steps in your own words; almost everyone who thinks it is obviously fallacious has misremembered a step.

Read Gaunilo and Anselm’s reply next. Both are short and the exchange is the first and still one of the best objections.

Watch the word “greater.” It never means larger. It means something closer to more perfect, better to be than not to be, and the whole proof depends on a scale of value that Anselm takes as given and a modern reader may not.

Two common misreadings. The first is that the argument is aimed at atheists; it is aimed at understanding, and the fool is a character from a psalm. The second is the textbook version, “existence is a perfection,” which is Descartes in the fifth Meditation rather than Anselm, and Kant’s famous objection that existence is not a real predicate lands on Descartes far more squarely than on Anselm’s chapter 3.

The Oxford Major Works volume is the convenient one because it prints the Monologion, the Proslogion, Gaunilo and the reply together. Deane’s 1903 translation is free online and is the wording most older commentaries quote.

Questions it raises

• Can a definition alone establish that something exists, or has Anselm smuggled in a premise about what reality contains?
• What is the difference between having a phrase in your understanding and having the thing it names? Does the fool understand enough to be caught?
• Gaunilo’s island is meant to reduce the argument to absurdity. Is Anselm’s reply, that only one being cannot be thought not to exist, a real distinction or a convenient one?
• If God is greater than can be conceived, as chapter 15 says, does that undermine an argument built on what we can conceive?
• Does it matter that the Proslogion is a prayer? Would the same words in a treatise mean the same thing?
• Anselm wants understanding of what he already believes. Is that inquiry, or is it a proof written to a known answer?