he been born and bred in England, he might have managed better with the Red King. He never got an English point of view, but remained a Churchman with Italian-Hildebrandine convictions. Of course, two policies were clashing then in England, where it happened that there was on one side an able and rapacious tyrant, while the other was represented by a man with the countenance and temperament of an angel. But we may leave Anselm now in Italy, where he is beyond the Red King's molestation, and turn to his writings.
Their choice and treatment of subject was partly guided by the needs of his pupils and friends at Bec and elsewhere in Normandy or Francia or England. For he wrote much at their solicitation; and the theological problems of which solutions were requested, suggest the intellectual temper of those regions, rather than of Italy. In a way Anselm's works, treating of separate and selected Christian questions, are a proper continuation of those composed by northern theologians in the ninth century on Predestination and the Eucharist.[1] Only Anselm's were not evoked by the exigency of actual controversy as much as by the insistency of the eleventh-century mind, and the need it felt of some adjustment regarding certain problems. Anselm's theological and philosophic consciousness is clear and confident. His faculties are formative and creative, quite different from the compiling instincts of Alcuin or Rabanus. The matter of his argument has become his own; it has been remade in his thinking, and is presented as from himself—and God. He no longer conceives himself as one searching through the "pantries" of the Fathers or culling the choice flowers of their "meadows." He will set forth the matter as God has deigned to disclose it to him. In the Cur Deus homo he begins by saying that he has been urged by many, verbally and by letter, to consider the reasons why God became man and suffered, and then, assenting, says: "Although, from the holy Fathers on, what should suffice has been said, yet concerning this question I will endeavour to set forth for my inquirers what God shall deign to disclose to me."[2]
Certain works of Anselm, the Monologion, for instance,
- ↑ Ante, Chapter X.
- ↑ Cur Deus homo, i. I (Migne, Pat. Lat. 158, col. 361).
