Saint Anselm of Canterbury / Sidney Norton Deane
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), monk of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Doctor of the Church, sought God not by setting reason against faith, but by letting faith seek understanding: fides quaerens intellectum. 'I do not seek to understand that I may believe,' he wrote, 'but I believe that I may understand.'This volume gathers his three principal works. In the Monologium he reasons his way, argument by argument, to the being and nature of the supreme Good. In the Proslogium he compresses the whole into a single famous argument: that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which drew the reply of the monk Gaunilo, and Anselm’s answer, printed here after it. In Cur Deus Homo, Why God Became Man, he asks by what reason and necessity God took our nature and our death, and gives the doctrine of the Atonement its most enduring statement.A compilation of four related works, presented complete and unabridged, in the public-domain translations of Sidney Norton Deane and James Gardiner Vose (Open Court, 1903).
