Archbishop of Canterbury, theologian
Anselm of Canterbury
AD 1033–1109
An Italian-born Benedictine monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm is remembered as "the father of scholasticism" for his rigorous rational arguments for God's existence and his theory of atonement.
Life and work
Born in Aosta in the Kingdom of Burgundy, Anselm became a monk at the Norman abbey of Bec, rising to abbot and gaining fame for his intellectual rigor and devotional writing, including the Proslogion, which contains his famous "ontological argument" for God's existence — reasoning that God, defined as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," must exist, since existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind alone.
Anselm was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093 and spent much of his tenure in conflict with English kings William II and Henry I over the Investiture Controversy — the broader European struggle over whether kings or the church had authority to appoint bishops — leading to two periods of exile.
His treatise Cur Deus Homo ("Why God Became Man") developed an influential "satisfaction" theory of atonement, arguing that human sin created an infinite debt to God's honor that only a God-man could satisfy, a framework that shaped Western atonement theology for centuries.
- Occupation
- Monk, archbishop, theologian
- Places
- Aosta, Bec (Normandy), Canterbury
- Dates
- AD 1033–1109
In their own words
"I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand." (Credo ut intelligam)Proslogion, Chapter 1
Further reading
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