FREE ESSAY ON ANSELM AND AQUINAS

ANSELM AND AQUINAS

Although born in Alpine Italy and educated in Normandy, Anselm became a Benedictine monk,
teacher, and abbot at Bec and continued his ecclesiastical career in England. Having been
appointed the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, Anselm secured the
Westminster Agreement of 1107, guaranteeing the (partial) independence of the church from
the civil state. 
In a series of short works such as De Libertate Arbitrii (On Free Will), De Casu Diaboli
(The Fall of the Devil), and Cur Deus Homo (Why God became Man), Anselm propounded a
satisfaction theory of the atonement and defended a theology like Augustines', that
emphasized the methodological priority of faith over reason, since truth is to be
achieved only through faith seeking understanding. Anselm's combination of Christianity,
neoplatonic metaphysics, and Aristotelean logic in the form of dialectical
question-and-answer was an important influence in the development of later scholasticism.

As a philosopher, Anselm is most often remembered for his attempts to prove the existence
of god: In De Veritate (Of Truth) he argued that all creatures owe their being and value
to god as the source of all truth, to whom a life lived well is the highest praise. In
the Monologion he described deity as the one good thing from which all real moral values
derive, whose existence is required by the reality of those values. 
Most famously, in the Proslogion (Addition), Anselm proposed the famous Ontological
Argument, according to which god is understood as that than which nothing greater can be
conceived. Such a being, he argued, must necessarily exist in reality as well as in
thought, since otherwise it would in fact be possible to conceive something
greater--something exactly similar except for its existence. Thus, at least for Anselmian
believers guided by a prior faith, god must truly exist as the simple, unified source of
all perfections, which excludes corruption, imperfection, and deception of eve.
Reflecting on the text of Psalm 14 (Fools say in their hearts, 'There is no god.') in his
Proslogion, Anselm proposed a proof of divine reality that has come to be known as the
Ontological Argument. The argument takes the Psalmist quite literally by supposing that
in virtue of the content of the concept of god there is a contradiction involved in the
denial of god's existence. 
Anselm supposes that in order to affirm or deny anything about god, we must first form in
our minds the appropriate concept, namely the concept of that than which nothing greater
can be conceived. Having done so, we have in mind the idea of god. But of course nothing
about reality usually follows from what we have in mind, since we often think about
things that do not (or even cannot) actually exist. In the case of this special concept,
however, Anselm argued that what we could think of must in fact exist independently of
our thinking of it. 
Suppose the alternative: if that than which nothing greater can be conceived existed only
in my mind and not in reality, then I could easily think of something else which would in
fact be greater than this (namely, the same thing existing in reality as well as in my
mind), so that what I originally contemplated turns out not in fact to be that than which
nothing greater can be conceived. Since this is a contradiction, only a fool would
believe it. So that than which nothing greater can be conceived (that is, god) must exist
in reality as well as in the mind. 
Born to an aristocratic family living near Naples, Italy, Thomas Aquinas joined the
Dominican order and studied philosophy and theology in Naples, Paris, and Koln, where he
was exposed to Aristotelean thought by Albert the Great and William of Moerbeke. During
the rest of his life, he taught at Paris and Rome, writing millions of words on
philosophical and theological issues and earning his reputation among the scholastics as
the angelic doctor. Aquinas developed in massive detail a synthesis of Christianity and
Aristotelian philosophy that became the official doctrine of Roman Catholic theology in
1879. De Ente et Essentia (On Being and Essence) includes a basic statement of Aquinas's
philosophical positions. His literary activity stopped abruptly as the result of a
religious experience a few months before his death. 
Although he wrote many commentaries on the works of Aristotle and a comprehensive Summa
de Veritate Catholicae Fidei contra Gentiles (Summa) Contra Gentiles) (1259-1264),
Aquinas's unfinished Summa Theologica (1265-1273) represents the most complete statement
of his philosophical system. The sections of greatest interest for survey courses include
his views on the nature of god, including the five ways to prove god's existence, and his
exposition of natural law. 
Although matters of such importance should be accepted on the basis of divine revelation
alone, Aquinas held, it is at least possible (and perhaps even desirable) in some
circumstances to achieve genuine knowledge of them by means of the strict application of
human reason. As embodied souls, human beings naturally rely on sensory information for
their knowledge of the world. 
Anselm's Ontological Argument is not acceptable, Aquinas argued, since we are in fact
ignorant of the divine essence from which it is presumed to begin. We cannot hope to
demonstrate the necessary existence of a being whose true nature we cannot even conceive
by direct or positive means. Instead, Aquinas held, we must begin with the sensory
experiences we do understand and reason upward from them to their origin in something
eternal. In this vein, Aquinas presented his own Five Ways to prove the existence of god.

The first three of these ways are all variations of the Cosmological Argument. The first
way is an argument from motion, derived fairly directly from Aristotle's Metaphysics:
1.There is something moving. 
2.Everything that moves is put into motion by something else. 
3.But this series of antecedent movers cannot reach back infinitely. 
4.Therefore, there must be a first mover (which is god).
The second way has the same structure, but begins from experience of an instance of
efficient cause, and the third way relies more heavily upon a distinction between
uncertain and necessary being. 
Aquinas's fourth way is a variety of Moral Argument. It begins with the factual claim
that we do make judgments about the relative perfection of ordinary things. But the
capacity to do so, Aquinas argued, presupposes an absolute standard of perfection to
which we compare everything else. This argument relies more heavily on Platonic and
Augustinian notions, and has the advantage of defending the existence of god as moral
exemplar rather than as abstract initiator of reality. 
The fifth way is the Teleological Argument: the order and arrangement of the natural
world (not merely its existence) bespeaks the deliberate design of an intelligent
creator. Although it is an argument by analogy, which can at best offer only probable
reason for believing the truth of its conclusion, this proof offers a concept of god that
most fully corresponds to the traditional elements of medieval Christian theology. Since
its experiential basis lies in our understanding of the operation of nature, this line of
reasoning tends to become more compelling the more thorough our scientific knowledge is
advanced.