Anselm

We live again in a time that is one of the most anti-intellectual periods in Western Christianity. That is, we are anti-mind, and it's become a virtue among Christians to embrace what is called a childlike faith. But a childlike faith doesn't mean having a shallow faith. Christians are called to think deeply about things that matter.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul continues his series, The Consequences of Ideas, and he'll help us think through the origin of the universe from both a secular and biblical point of view. For believers, this is important.

We need to be fully engaged because these are ideas that shape our culture. In our last session, we took a brief, in fact all too brief, glimpse at the prodigious work of St. Augustine. And I might mention here that from Augustine through the Middle Ages and up and into the Renaissance, the history of philosophical thought in the Western world was dominated by Christian thinkers. Obviously, there were non-Christian thinkers who had some significant contributions to make in the development of Western thought, but the dominant players in that period of time were Christian intellectuals.

And of course, that's not the case today, but it has been in previous time periods. Now, when we get to the beginning of the second millennium, that is to the 11th century, we meet a man who, following in the line of Augustine, made a significant contribution both to the realm of theology and to philosophy, and I'm referring, of course, to St. Anselm, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm, like Augustine, was both a theologian and a philosopher, and he's most famous for three important works that he wrote.

The first one that I'll mention is the little book, Cur Deus Homo. It's really a question mark, Cur Deus Homo, Why the God-Man? And from a somewhat speculative vantage point, Anselm was trying to give a rational argument for the need or the necessity of a person who participated both in deity and humanity to function and to serve adequately as a mediator for our redemption. And he also was asking the question in this book, Why an Atonement?

Was an atonement necessary for God to redeem His people? And this is significant in the history of theology because Anselm really developed in greater detail than anyone had before him the so-called satisfaction view of the atonement, namely that in the atonement Christ satisfied the demands of God's justice by serving as our substitute in our place. And so the whole idea of vicarious sacrifice was central to the thinking of Anselm, and he saw in this the necessity of God's having such satisfaction in order for God not to compromise or to negotiate His own justice. But again, our greater concern today is for the philosophical contributions of Anselm.

And his two other works that are important are the Monologium and the Proslogium. And the Monologium, he begins to develop some of his arguments for the existence of God. Now, Anselm followed in the footsteps of Augustine and adopted a concept that Augustine himself had used as part of his own personal creed, and that is the statement Credo ut Intelligam.

In that phrase, what is being confessed are these words, I believe in order that I might understand. Now, neither Augustine nor Anselm was ever satisfied with a blind faith, which they considered to be a form of credulity that was not in any way virtuous, but rather though both subscribe to the idea that in the final analysis God is incomprehensible, namely that we cannot contain in our finite minds or our finite intellect a total comprehensive understanding of God. Nevertheless, the God who is has revealed Himself to us with sufficient clarity, and particularly in the sacred Scriptures to such a degree that we can at least have an apprehensive knowledge of Him, and those who put their trust in God and their faith in God and the things of God should never be satisfied with a childish, immature understanding of God. Now, I mention that because we live again in a time that is one of the most anti-intellectual periods in Western Christianity. That is, we are anti-mind, and it's become a virtue among Christians to embrace what is called a childlike faith. Now, of course there is a point for a childlike faith insofar as a small child puts implicit trust in one who knows more than the child does, namely the parent, while they're very young at least, that doesn't last too long of course, that we as the children of God should have an implicit trust in our heavenly Father, just as a young child has that kind of implicit trust in their earthly parents. But this concept of a childlike faith has come to mean to many people today what I would call, what Anselm would call, what Augustine would call, a childish faith. Now, they say, I don't want to have to think about the content of my faith. That's a destructive thing that scholars get into. I'm just going to keep it as simple as I possibly can and not be engaged in any serious study of theology or the Word of God or anything else.

I'm just going to keep it simple. Now, at that point when we take that position, we sin. It's so far from being a virtue, it is a vice according to the New Testament because the New Testament commands us that we are to be babes in evil, childlike in our sin, but in understanding we are to be men, that is, we are to be adults. And as the author of Hebrews labors that it is a sin to be satisfied with the milk, and we are commanded as we seek maturity in Christ to the diet of the meatier things of the faith. Now, this is the kind of thing that both Augustine and Anselm were jealous to communicate, that the content that God has revealed in His Scripture is content that was designed to be understood by His people, and that we must seek to gain as much understanding as we possibly can of that which God has provided for us. Now, again, we know at the outset that we can't possibly have a comprehensive understanding of God, but we should not allow that to lure us into an ungodly kind of skepticism or negligence of His truth. It is the duty of the Christian not only to believe, but the purpose of belief is that in order that, it's a purpose clause here, we might understand.

And now that takes work, and it takes hard work. It means we have to study and think clearly and so on to gain a deeper understanding of God. Now, with this, Anselm believed that the Christian faith was rational. Now, because of that and because of his heavy use of reason in his philosophy, many have called him a rationalist. But when we talk about rationalism, where reason is placed above divine revelation, that would be a slanderous appellation to make to Anselm. Anselm believed that revelation was the ultimate source of truth, not naked, bare, rational speculation. But like Augustine before him, he believed that that which God reveals is not irrational.

It is to be understood in an intelligible manner. We are responsible to apply our minds to the deepest possible level of cogent thinking in trying to understand the God who reveals Himself. Now, when he begins to develop his arguments for the existence of God, before we get to his most famous one, he started with a simple argument in the monologium, and that is this, that if anything exists, or let's put it another way, whatever exists, either exists through something or by means of something, or it exists through nothing.

That's a very simple distinction. Either something, whatever exists in this world, exists because it has been made by something other than itself, or it has come from nothing. And the point that Anselm wants to establish at the very beginning is that for something to come from nothing is a manifest logical absurdity. Now, keep in mind here that we've already looked at Augustine's doctrine of creation where he says that God creates things ex nihilo, out of nothing. But what that means is that there wasn't some pre-existent matter that God then shaped and reshaped into the present world, something that eternally co-exists with Him. But Augustine did not mean, when he said that creation is ex nihilo, that things come out of nothing by themselves. That is, with nothing causing them to be, because God is not nothing.

God is something. And the whole reason why Augustine and Anselm and others are pointing to the necessity of a Creator is because of their conviction that it's manifestly impossible for something to come out of nothing by itself. Now, I can't think of any principle more rational than that, and I can't think of any pit of irrationality that has been more frequently jumped into by modern thinkers than that.

They use sometimes more sophisticated language, but as I pointed out in my book, Not a Chance, that it still remains impossible for something to create itself, because to create itself it would have to be before it was, which means it would have to be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. And so to argue that something comes into being out of nothing by its own power is to jump into a sea of pure absurdity. Alright, but then we get over into the Proslogium, which is the most controversial and perhaps interesting work that came to us from St. Anselm, because it's in the Proslogium that he developed the famous ontological argument for the existence of God. Usually when Christian thinkers look at the traditional arguments for the existence of God, they'll boil down to three or four. The three most popular and most famous are called the cosmological argument for God's existence, where you reason from the cosmos or the world back to its first cause, or to a creator, or the teleological argument, which is the argument from design, where we look around and we see that things seem to operate for certain purposes or for certain reasons, and you can't have design without a designer.

You can't have purpose without somebody intelligently planning the desired end. And those are two very famous arguments that people work over again and again. But the ontological argument, as it was spelled out by Anselm, is one that is exceedingly vexing.

It's the kind of argument that easily gives you an Excedrin headache, number one. And for the most part, it's been dismissed and then revisited and then dismissed again through Western philosophical history. And even in our own day, there's been a revival of interest in Anselm's ancient ontological argument. Now, it's called the ontological argument because it's an argument from being.

And ontology is the science of being, and while we looked at the pre-Socratics and Heraclitus and Parmenides and Plato and Aristotle, we know that the metaphysical aspect of philosophy is one that focuses attention on ontology, on being. Now, the ontological argument is called the ontological argument because it is an argument from being to the existence of God. Now, the way Anselm states the argument is extremely important because sometimes you can try to shorthand this argument and miss the whole point that Anselm was trying to communicate.

The way he did it was this. He says that God is that then which no greater can be conceived. God is that then which no greater can be conceived. Again, the shorthand version is often stated this way, that God is the greatest conceivable being. It's interesting that Anselm didn't state it that way.

His articulation of it is much more awkward, but there was a reason for that. God is that being then which no greater can be conceived. Now, that's the primary premise that he adds to that, that for God to be that which then no greater can be conceived, he must exist in reality as well as in the mind. That is, he must have real being and not just hypothetical being, because if you're thinking simply of the idea of God that exists in your mind, you are not thinking about the God of Anselm because Anselm is saying that the God he's defining is the greatest being conceivable, and if you're conceiving of the greatest being conceivable as not existing, then we can come up with a greater being than the one you're talking about, the one who actually is. Because existence is greater than non-being or nothingness in the language that he is using here. Now, his chief antagonist was a monk by the name of Gonolo who took up arguments against this somewhat strange ontological argument for the existence of God, where Gonolo argued and said, wait a minute. He said, just because we can conceive of the greatest island conceivable, an island of which no greater island can be conceived, does not mean that such an island exists, unless we have the power to conjure up reality just by conceiving it.

Well, Anselm said, you're right, Gonolo. Just because we can conceive of the greatest conceivable island doesn't mean that such a conceivable island exists in reality. But the greatest conceivable island is not the highest conceivable being. There's a difference between arguing for that being than which no greater can be conceived as being necessarily conceived as actually existing, than arguing that a perfect island or a perfect horse or a perfect man can be therefore thought to exist in reality.

Now what's going on behind the scenes here and what's being assumed tacitly in this way of thinking is what's left for modern and later philosophers to argue about. But one of the common views is that what Anselm is really saying here is that you cannot think of being without thinking of being as being. Non-existent being is unthinkable.

Non-existent islands are conceivable as a mental concept, but you cannot even have a mental concept of non-existing being, because being by definition, bees, being by definition is. It is a necessary logical connection to the very idea of being to conceive of it as being. For example, in his response to Gondola, he would say that it's impossible to have, if you're a rational person, it is impossible to have the idea of a possible necessary being. Because if a necessary being is simply possible, then it's not really necessary. So now we have to think in terms of this idea that becomes a central point of focus later on in philosophy, particularly in Thomas Aquinas, of the idea of necessary being. Necessary being in this case is that being which is both logically necessary to assume and ontologically necessary. Now that distinction between ontological necessity and logical necessity we'll look at in greater length when we look at St. Thomas Aquinas. But for now we mention it only in passing that what Anselm is driving at, I think, is again the logical necessity of a really existing being. Again, you cannot think of being as not being. That introduces the logical principle that is one of the most weighty, if not the weighty, logical proof for anything there is, and that is the impossibility of the contrary.

The impossibility of the contrary is the rule that says something cannot be its opposite, intellectually, logically, or rationally, so that the being greater than which no other can be conceived cannot even be conceived of as not being. Now, if you have your Excedrin headache, take two aspirins and call me in the morning. Well, these are certainly concepts that require some deep thinking, aren't they?

But Dr. R.C. Sproul is helping us make our way through them step by step. This week on Renewing Your Mind, we are pleased to feature Dr. Sproul's series, The Consequences of Ideas.

In 35 messages, he traces the development of philosophical thought in the Western world, and he helps us see why those ideas matter today. You're welcome to contact us and request this complete series. We'll send them to you in a nine-DVD set for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org, or if you prefer, you can call us at 800-435-4343. In addition to the full series, when you contact us this week, we'll include a bonus disc that contains the audio files of the series, plus a helpful study guide that provides you with an outline of each message, additional reading suggestions, and group discussion questions. So again, with your donation of any amount, request the 35-part series, The Consequences of Ideas.

Our number is 800-435-4343, and our web address is renewingyourmind.org. By the way, you can always visit our online archive of Past Renewing Your Mind programs. One easy way to do that is with our free Ligonier app. Download it today and begin exploring the resources available there. You'll find audio and video clips, articles, daily Bible studies, and many other helpful resources.

Just search for Ligonier in your app store. Can we discover knowledge of God through nature? There's a difference of opinion on that question, but tomorrow Dr. Sproul will introduce us to one theologian who answered with an emphatic yes. I hope you'll join us Wednesday for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.