Anselm's Argument: On the Unity of Thinking and Being

Abstract

In this article, I argue that at the root of the ‘ontological’ argument lies the notion that the idea of God is truth: in the idea of God, the meaning of the concept and the reality of the Being actually converge; the idea of God is God. After looking at a number of thinkers whose philosophical method is reminiscent of Anselm's I conclude that, while Anselm did not furnish a conclusive proof of the necessary existence of God, his argument shows how the question of the existence of God is one and the same with the question of the intelligibility and coherence of God and with the question of the intelligibility and coherence of reality.

The celebrated argument, particularly as put forth in Chapter II of the Proslogion has given rise to a greater volume of philosophical effort than perhaps any other single argument.¹ In this so-called ‘Ontological’ Argument,² the mediaeval philosopher maintains that the existence of the notion of God in thought would be impossible if God did not exist really. In this article, I shall argue that at the root of this argument lies the notion that the idea of God is truth: in the idea of God, the meaning of the concept and the reality of the Being actually converge; the idea of God is God.

In both his treatises (the Monologion and the Proslogion), Anselm maintains that the nature of God is ultimately unknowable to man. In the Proslogion, in particular, he reiterates the inaccessibility of God and the indirectness of any perception of his nature.³ He uses the analogy of the sun and the eye to describe the relationship between God and the mind. One cannot look upon the sun itself but only on other things reflecting the sun's rays of light.⁴ Anselm insists, with others, that we can know God only in the light of the truth, which is God.⁵ Thus the discussions of the divine attributes in both treatises, particularly in the Proslogion, are attempts to ‘grasp’ the divine nature as it shows itself in things dependent on it. Chapters II-IV of the Proslogion are to be taken separately from the rest of his work, for they deal with the being of God (that he exists) rather than the manner of his existence.⁶

Anselm is a Platonic thinker⁷ and his argument is only cogent within his Platonic framework. First in the Proslogion, and later in his reply to the objections of Gaunilon, Anselm argued from the idea of God to the existence of such a being. In a real sense his whole argument hinges on the definition Anselm uses for God: ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’,⁸ a definition partly inspired by Augustine who had characterized God as that “than which there is nothing higher”.⁹

The argument is meant to give voice to the ontological connection between God and man, that is the image of God in the interior of man, where the reality of God directly manifests itself. The idea of God is innate in man as the image of God; thinking can therefore be radically directed beyond itself.

Anselm holds that ideas are themselves things and for them to be is an indication of something concerning the nature of things. For him, thinking is a participation in being and an interpretation of being. The ‘ontological’ proof itself only holds in the case of God because God is that single being on which all thought, all action, and all being depend. Normally, the idea of no part of being would imply the existence of that part. Yet, if thought is itself being, the existence of thought would warrant the assertion of the existence of Being as a whole. As they approach their source, ideas and beings are identical, since the eternal ideas that may be experienced in thinking are the principles of Being.¹⁰

Karl Barth's re-reading of Anselm's argument, while typical of one who is averse to natural theology, is illuminating.¹¹ He holds that the Anselmian proof shows that, according to the testimony of his own revelation, God has the freedom to prove his existence within the reality that is distinct of him.¹² He sees the argument as nothing other than a repetition of the self-proof of God.¹³

Charles Hartshorne, whose publication in 1965 helped spark off a spate of works on the argument,¹⁴ sees Anselm's discovery as being the claim that both believers who lack understanding and unbelievers clearly do not know the meaning of belief in God.¹⁵ His formulation of Anselm's ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’ is ‘that than which no greater can be thought’. This entails that it is contradictory to assert that God does not exist. The question of the existence of God is a self-answering metaphysical one: although it involves a matter of fact and not merely of formal definition, its answer is seen as soon as the idea contained in it is correctly understood. One, therefore, does not need experience to confirm or deny God's existence.

Anselm proved the existence of God from the fact that God has proved himself and continues to do so by setting himself as the beginning beyond which thinking cannot go and with which all thinking must begin. Here, the Anselmian formula does not intend to say that we can first understand what the sentence means and then set about to determine whether there is anything corresponding to it; thinking along such a plane would be to imitate the insipiens. One can here refer to Anselm's own description, where he claims that it is one thing to think a reality (res) by thinking the vocable (vox) that signifies it; it is quite another thing to think a reality by understanding the very thing that the reality is.¹⁶

Anselm's position here is surely reminiscent (only of course, it is the other way round) of that of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was inspired by the famous poem penned by Parmenides, who found it impossible to deny that the world around us possesses some elements of truth, even if they are mingled with falsehood. Perhaps the most famous line in that poem is the one which is the most difficult to translate.¹⁷ Attempted translations have been: “is and cannot not be” and “is not and needs must not be”. The translation proferred by Heidegger is interesting and axiomatic to his philosophic system: ‘Being and the thinking of Being are the same’. His aim was to “work out the question of the meaning of Being; …. [his] provisional aim [was] the interpretation of time as the horizon within which any understanding whatever of Being is possible”.¹⁸

He denied that there are any ‘eternal truths’, holding that this contention belongs to the residues of Christian theology in philosophical thought,¹⁹ and attempted to establish the original meaning of the word. True to form, he appealed to the use of the etymology of the term to help him in this regard. He took up the Greek word a-letheia, a privative expression, meaning ‘uncoveredness’ or ‘unconcealment’ to argue that truth is the sense of coming to light: the truth of something is its having been brought out of a state of obscurity and forgetfulness into a state of notice and recall. A true statement is, therefore, one that is true in the sense of aletheuein: it clears and reveals; it lets something stand out.²⁰ Thus, we attain the truth when something is presented to us as it really is, without any concealment or distortion.

The centrality of the concept of Dasein in his philosophy is also indicative. The Dasein, in which the human mind participates, is like a clearing in which Being comes to light.²¹ It is a point at which the intellectus and the res converge. Recalling Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas,²² he defines the ‘I’ as the entity whose nature it is to come together with every entity²³ In Being and Time, Heidegger altered the metaphysical terminology so that the act that is directed toward Being is itself called ‘Being’ instead of ‘thinking’. ‘Thinking of’, thus becomes ‘Being toward’ (Sein zu) in Heideggerian terminology. Thus Dasein is nothing but the point of reflection where thinking and Being come together. It is the remoteness of Being manifested in the closeness of ‘here’.

At the other end of the self-to-other relation is the connectedness of meaning and reality in all things that is seen in the experience of truth. For Heidegger, the locus of truth is not the proposition, but the Dasein. Truth is an event in Dasein. This does not mean that truth is subjective, or that it can be made whatever we want it to be for “[Man] is the more mistaken, the more exclusively he takes himself to be the measure of all things”.²⁴ Heidegger maintains that truth is linked with the freedom of letting-be. Therefore, we perceive the truth of something when we let it be what it really is.

These two dimensions of Dasein and truth are brought together through a reflective act involving projection ²⁵ and disclosure.²⁶ The connection between projection and ascertainment (which derives from disclosure) is time. Heidegger argues that truth does not have “the structure of an agreement between cognition and object in the sense of an assimilation (Angleichung) of one entity (subject) to another (object)”.²⁷ For him, making an assertion is itself a relating of oneself in thought to the real thing itself;²⁸ the projection it contains is not that of a representation of the object but of the object itself. Verification takes place when the thing shows itself to be in itself the same as how it is projected, or disclosed, in the assertion. What is between the intellectus and the res is the temporality indicated by saying that the thing is in itself what it was in the assertion.

One might here well argue that the difficulty with this line of thought is precisely the link between Dasein and Sein. It seems hard to agree, with Heidegger, that thinking of being is the same as Being. For, while one would agree that ‘“A knows that p” implies p’ could be valid, it seems easy to disprove ‘“A thinks that p” implies p’. For one could easily picture impossible states of affairs.²⁹

As we have seen, Anselm too, argues that we cannot divorce the word from the reality it permits us to understand. His presupposition is that the name of God is not a mere word, as Gaunilon thought; it is a word of God that also reveals his existence. The fool's mistake is that he did not see that the name ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’³⁰ is not merely one vocative among others but is a revelatory word and the revealed and believed name of God.³¹ Anyone who hears and understands the name ‘God’ finds himself, not merely before a vocative, but before an actual possibility which in turn presents thinking with its real boundaries.

Hence, Anselm's argument is not as a prioristic and purely deductive as it seems. It is rather connected with Anselm's own doctrine of the image of God in the human person and is therefore close to the teaching of various Church Fathers on the idea of God as innate in the human person. However, as an argument, it certainly appears highly suspect to the philosophical tradition, especially that subsequent to Immanuel Kant. For, it is alleged that while it establishes that the concept of God involves the idea of God's existence, and indeed of the concept of God as necessary existence (as it is inconceivable that a being which exists without beginning or end and always as a whole ceases to exist); it cannot take the further step of establishing that this concept of an eternally existent Being is exemplified in reality. Therefore it does not follow from the argument that an eternal being in fact exists but only that if such a being exists, its existence is ontologically necessary.³²

Barth interprets the proof put forth by Anselm as involving, not the truth of the assertion ‘There is a God’, but the truth of the assertion ‘God is truth, that is, the unity of meaning and reality’. The unity of meaning and reality refers to what is given in the words ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’. What is shown in the proof is that “the object designated as God cannot be thought of as being only in the understanding”.³³ Anselm conducts this proof of the existence of God by presenting God as the only one whose existence can be proven. He attempts to show that it is impossible to even formulate the words ‘God may not exist’, because such an effort would violate the rule of non-contradiction. Thus, in the words of the name ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’, the referent of the name is present. Thinking the meaning of these words is to the knowledge of God's existence what perceiving a physical object through the senses is to the knowledge of mundane things.

Hence, the argument is concerned with the existence, not of just any idea, but of the supreme idea which is required for thinking and in which thinking transcends itself. The ontological argument is simply a logical unfolding of the ontological constitution of reason (ratio).

Indeed, Anselm interprets the sense of ‘God is’ through comparison of the relation between essence or esse and existence, to that between lux, lucere, and lucens. As ‘shining’ (lucere) is what light (lux) does by virtue of its being light, so ‘being’ (esse) is what God does by virtue of God's being God. Light cannot but lucere and God cannot but esse.

The Anselmian proof, thus, claims to show that, in the thought of ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’, we are presented with the unity of thinking and Being; it attempts to point out a place at which thinking cannot be separated from real Being.³⁴ Its sense is that of an idea that is not merely such, but that opens thought on to the real referent of thinking.

The highly original argument advanced by Anselm has not been without its critics of whom Gaunilon was the first. The argument was, however, dealt a virtual death-blow by Thomas Aquinas.

One argument the latter advances against Anselm is to be found in the Summa Contra Gentiles: “For it is not a difficulty that given anything either in reality or in the intellect something greater can be thought, save only for him who concedes that there exists something in reality than which a greater cannot be thought”.³⁵ This objection, which pinpoints the impossibility of conceiving God's greatness, is a serious one. However, ironically enough it is one with which Anselm would have been in complete agreement. In Proslogion XV he writes: “You are also something greater than can be thought”. Anselm ‘agrees’ with Aquinas that that entity, which both take to be the most real of all, is not knowable. In his definition ‘aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit’, he does not mean to say that God is a definite, specifiable entity within the grasp of one's conceptual capacity, but that God is what-ever is such that nothing greater can be conceived. Anselm's ontological argument seems to hold even if we do not have a clear and distinct idea of God. All we need to know is that God is something greater than which nothing can be conceived.³⁶

Through another argument, Thomas Aquinas dealt what, for many centuries, was considered to be the coup-de-grace, to the argument.³⁷ He recognized that Anselm was assuming that the being, to whose existence his formula led him, was to be identified with the Christian God. Aquinas is more conscious of the distinction between philosophy and theology. As a philosopher, he uses the term ‘God’ as a general term, and not as a proper name. While Aquinas certainly believed in God, he was perhaps more sensitive to the possible objections of the adversaries than was Anselm.

On the other hand, Anselm, while explicitly mentioning the Fool of the Psalm, who says in his heart “There is no God”,³⁸ nevertheless addresses himself to God in prayer, not to the Fool.³⁹ He makes God his primary audience: the reader feels that he is overhearing the prayer of a believer who is not prepared to discard his belief if he does not find rational proof for it. Anselm is evidently operating within the Augustinian tradition in an era where no careful distinction between philosophy and theology was made. His proof only confirmed that of which he was already convinced.

Aquinas also objects to Anselm's conclusion that the Fool cannot deny God's existence without contradiction. He distinguishes between something being self-evident in itself, and its being self-evident to us. Philosophically God is reached only through reasoning based on the existence of sensible things in themselves:

I maintain then that the proposition ‘God exists’ is self-evident in itself for, … its subject and predicate are identical, since God is his own existence. But, because what it is to be God is not evident to us, the proposition is not self-evident to us, and needs to be made evident. This is done by means of things which, though less evident in themselves, are nevertheless more evident to us, by means, namely, of God's effects … It is self-evident that there exists truth in general, but it is not self-evident to us that there exists a First Truth.⁴⁰

It is interesting to note that Anselm would probably agree with Thomas Aquinas's last point. He would have held that it is only with the help of the light of God, which enlightens the human mind, that one can understand that God's existence is necessary. Just as Augustine argued that “The hidden things and secrets of the Kingdom of God first seek out believing men that they may make them understand. For faith is understanding's ladder, and understanding is faith's reward”,⁴¹ Anselm speaks of the “ladder of faith”.⁴² For Anselm, God is inaccessible light and yet provides the very context and precondition of our seeing. He maintained, along Augustinian lines, that eternal truth illuminates human intellects, rendering them certain and infallible. Thomas does not agree. He holds that there is nothing eternal in the human intellect: “since the divine intellect alone is eternal, truth has eternity in it alone”.⁴³ Thus, the perception and the enunciation of truth by the human intellect is always necessarily historical, changeable, perfectible and fallible. This is even more the case when one considers the fundamental truths such as those regarding God and the soul.

The marked divergence between Anselm and Thomas derives from a divergence in feeling which lies in that the one is turned to the contemplation of the infinite intelligibility from which all truth proceeds, while the other concentrates on the question of a finite intellect working among the finite effects of a cause that exceeds its understanding.⁴⁴ This ancient debate between the two philosophers has been extended into contemporary times. For instance, Donald Davidson argues, on the one hand, that ‘truth’ enters the world with successful knowers or, as he puts it: “Nothing in the world, no object or event, would be true or false if there were not thinking creatures”.⁴⁵ On the other hand, we have proponents of the Augustinian-Anselmian tradition such as John Zizioulas who speaks of the truth in terms of ‘that which is’. The latter asks: “How can a Christian hold to the idea that truth operates in history and creation when the ultimate character of truth, and its uniqueness, seem irreconcilable with the change and decay to which history and creation are subject?”⁴⁶

Perhaps it would be instructive, at this point, to recall that, while it may not seem too evident that Karl Rahner's epistemological and metaphysical lines lie parallel to Anselm's – after all Rahner was in dialogue with Aquinas, not Anselm – there are a number of similar points that bear further elucidation.

The first concerns Rahner's postulation of the unity of being and knowing. His metaphysics and epistemology lead him to assert that, in the activity of human questioning, a questioning that inevitably raises the implicit and primordial question of Being, Being reveals itself as luminous self-presence. This does not exactly mean that Being is clearly self-evident:

… What being is, is not always obvious. We know of it (‘bekannt’) but we do not really know it (‘erkannt’). Although we know of being, our question is not a rhetorical one. We ask it, because we do not yet really know what we are inquiring about. Finally our question always makes a distinction between being and beings. It is precisely this which enables us to inquire about being. We know of beings, we know beings, we have continually to do with them, our knowledge refers to them. But we do not know what the being of these beings is. That is why we inquire.⁴⁷

He argues that: “Knowledge is the self-presence of Being and this self-presence is the being of any entity”.⁴⁸ Now, being is knowledge or truth only to the extent that being is or has Being. For, Rahner, in rejecting an idealist, panentheistic interpretation of the unity of Being and knowing (or what he calls the ‘self-luminosity’ of Being⁴⁹), maintains that ‘Being’ is an analogous concept. This, of course, is a quintessentially Thomistic perspective. However, his exact interpretation appears to locate knowledge or truth⁵⁰ in the degree of self-possession an existent enjoys. At any rate, there is very little scope for truth as the fruit of a relation between the intellect and the thing known or at least, this relationship is quite different from the Angelic Doctor's:

We must … start from this: that being is of and by itself knowing and being known, that being is self-presence … The complete ontic reality of the intellect is that which is actually known. Since this statement refers to the essence, it is also reversible: in order to be actually known, that which is knowable must basically be the ontic reality of the intellect itself … something is known to the extent that it becomes in its being identical with the knowing subject.⁵¹

Moreover, Rahner holds that intelligibility does not‘develop’ in being from without; it does not consist only in a relation that is extrinsic to the being itself or in some knowledge that happens to grasp the being in question. He believes that intelligibility belongs intrinsically to the very nature of the being in question: when one affirms being, being is always already expressing itself. Every being has, on account of its very being an “inner ordination to possible knowledge and so to a possible knower”.⁵² Intelligibility belongs to the essence of every being.

This principle is based on the original and fundamental concept of being from which all other objects of knowledge are but derivations: actual being or esse. This original unity of knowable and knowing implies that the intellect and the object have the same origin; in Thomist terms: the intellect and that which is intelligible in act are one.⁵³ Thus, being is, in itself, knowing and knowing is nothing else than the self-presence of being that is inseparable from its very make-up. Knowledge is self-possession or self-presence; being is self-luminosity.

Rahner also argues that one's interpretation of the Angelic Doctor's epistemology would be extremely shallow if one were to interpret the unity of the knowing and the knowable as if it simply meant that the known as such must be known to some knower; that the knower must know something and that it is in this sense that both must be one. For him, what Thomas really means is that, that which is knowable is basically the ontic reality of the intellect itself.⁵⁴

Thus, in Rahner's interpretation of Thomas, there is no distance or gap between the knower and the known. The intellect and that which is intelligible in act are one. Knowledge essentially takes place through the return of the knowing subject into him/her self. This possibility of ‘reditio in se ipsum,’ in turn, is the basic constituent in being.⁵⁵ It belongs to the basic constitution of the human person that s/he that not only can s/he inquire about being but that s/he must do so. The human person is not absolute consciousness; s/he is a finite spirit. It is only the pure act of being that is the absolute identity of Being and knowing; it is only that which possesses itself in pure luminosity. However, the more a human person knows and wills, the more s/he draws back into him/herself and the more s/he becomes present to him/herself and, concomitantly, the more s/he places him/her self in the presence of Absolute Being. The real and primordial object of knowledge is the knower him/her self:

The degree of self-presence, of luminosity for oneself, corresponds to the intensity of being, to the degree in which being belongs to some existent, to the degree in which, notwithstanding its non-being, a being shares in being. And the other way round: the degree of intensity of being shows in the degree in which the being in question is able to return into itself, in which it is capable, by reflecting upon itself, to be luminous for itself.⁵⁶

Also, Rahner maintains that the union of knower and known in the human person's act of knowledge demands their prior identity in Absolute Being as the condition of its possibility. In this regard, Rahner understands the relation between the intellect and the thing known in a very different manner from that envisaged by Aquinas;⁵⁷ in fact he may be said to give a somewhat Anselmian interpretation to Aquinas’ vision. For, his understanding of intelligibility and knowledge is an almost exclusively transcendental one which gets intelligibility into things and knowledge into intellects by deriving both rather hastily from the esse actu or summa veritas, which is God.

This epistemological and metaphysical idea is an extremely alluring one and it produces abundant fruit in Rahner's philosophico-theological system. For instance, in the ‘Vorgriff’ as the necessity that drives the human person to anticipate being as such, the existence of an absolute being (hence of God) is always co-affirmed, even though not categorially represented. The ‘Vorgriff’ affirms Absolute Being as real and, in this sense, one may say that the ‘Vorgriff’ aims at God. Rahner does maintain that this is not an a priori demonstration of God, like that of Augustine, Anselm or Leibniz for the ‘Vorgriff’ and that its range could only be known and be affirmed in the a posteriori knowledge of a real being and as the necessary condition of this knowledge.⁵⁸ However, whereas Thomas holds that the concept of God comes last in all our knowledge, Rahner's ‘Vorgriff’ implies that in every act of knowledge God is already implicitly known as the previous condition of that knowledge.⁵⁹

Like Anselm, Rahner is not careful enough in his distinction between philosophy and theology. Something being self-evident in itself is not necessarily self-evident to the human person. Like Anselm's, Rahner's demonstration (while derived from a posteriori experience) depends on inner individualist-mentalist experience. In rather the same Platonic-Augustinian line as Anselm, Rahner seems to present thinking as inconceivable except as a participation in being and as an interpretation of being. The ancient idea of the illumination of the soul by God appears to lurk behind Rahner's metaphysical epistemology as related to the idea that the image of God in the interior of the human person is the locus where God directly manifests Godself. In a similar way to Anselm's presentation of his celebrated argument, Rahner presents his idea of the ‘Vorgriff’ as the condition of the possibility of all knowledge of objects and all human action (Anselm might be said to have presented the concept of God as the supreme idea that is required for thinking and in which thinking transcends itself). Like Anselm's argument, Rahner's understanding of the ‘Vorgriff’ and of the ‘supernatural existential’ might well be dismissed by the modern thinker for much the same reasons as the ontological argument was rejected by Kant.⁶⁰

Rahner and Anselm both assume that the being, to whose existence their respective methods lead is to be identified with the Christian God: this leap, once again blurs the distinction between philosophy and theology for there is a difference between the usage of the term ‘God’ as a general term and its usage as a proper name. The non-conceptual, pre-thematic postulation of an ultimate, absolute or infinite⁶¹ or the experience of the dynamic movement of thought beyond itself makes no explicit reference to an object: there is no explicit answer to the implied ‘whence’ of the experience.⁶² Clearly, however, both Anselm and Rahner think that the experiences to which they appeal necessarily give rise to explicit beliefs. They would argue that the experiences and the beliefs are inseparable.

In conclusion, one must say that Anselm's philosophy is an attempt to circumvent the need for finite things in an attempt to arrive directly at the one, subsistent, eternal truth that is in God and that is God. It reflects the aspiration for perfect, eternal knowledge, the drive to rise above that which is merely human. It holds fast to the ideal of the knower being disengaged from human sensory and intellectual limitations, and social and historical contingency, and thus free to see reality objectively.⁶³

While he did not furnish a conclusive proof of the necessary existence of God, Anselm's argument shows how the question of the existence of God is one and the same with the question of the intelligibility and coherence of God and with the question of the intelligibility and coherence of reality; in discussing the possibility of such talk, one is discussing the possibility of the existence of God. This is, perhaps, Anselm's greatest achievement in his argument: he demonstrated, albeit inadvertently, how and why the question of the existence of the theist God is also a logical problem, a problem that lies at the heart of man's search for truth.