towards him, as a heretic, induced him to a recantation. Thus, driven by the power of his opponents from his native land, he sought in England a place of refuge and field of labor. But he found himself deceived in his expectations; for, on the one hand, he encountered in the archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the English church, the most zealous champion of realism and opponent of nominalism: while on the other hand, by maintaining a position in no way connected with his peculiar bent, but simply relating to an interest of the church, he incurred the violent displeasure of an important party. He set up the principle anew which had been held at an earlier period by zealots of the school of Hildebrand, and controverted by others, that sons begotten in priestly marriage which, by the sticklers of the law of celibacy in the priests, was considered, however, a concubinage should not be admitted to any ecclesiastical office. Now, since it was the case that, until the Hildebrandian principles had worked their way into the whole church, the number of married clergy was still very great, he must necessarily, by maintaining such a principle, excite against himself the hatred of multitudes, partly of sons from such marriages who already stood in some ecclesiastical office, partly of clergymen who lived in the bonds of wedlock, and who were desirous of handing down their office in their families. The anger of these men against him would be so much the greater, because, in such a contest, he could reckon on the support of a party at whose head stood the popes; for which reason the severe censors of morals among the clergy were ever feared and hated. Thus, driven by the wrath of his enemies from England, he returned back to France, where he was destined to engage in new controversies, till at length, wearied with disputing, he withdrew from the public stage, to a life of silent and quiet seclusion. Roscelin's opponent, Anselm, is the man who exerted the most important influence on the theological and philosophical turn of the twelfth century. He was the Augustin of his age. What gives him his great importance, is that unity of spirit in which everything is of one piece, -the harmony between life and knowledge, which, in his case, nothing disturbed. Love was the inspiring soul of his thought as of his actions. He was born at Aosta, in Piedmont, in 1033. The good seed sown in his tender mind, by his pious mother Ermenberga, seems to have had a singular influence on the development of his powers. Even in childhood he occupied himself in meditation on divine things. Brought up among the mountains, he fancied that heaven was above their peaks, and that there God sat enthroned, surrounded by his court of state. A deep impression was left on his mind by a dream, in which he imagined that he ascended above the mountains to God, and was there refreshed by God's own hands with the bread of heaven. When a young man he was induced, by the morose temper of his father towards him, to leave the paternal roof and travel to France. After having wandered about in that country for the space of nearly three years, attracted by the fame of Lanfranc, he repaired to the monastery of Bec in Normandy, over which that teacher presided,, 362 ANSELM'S DEVELOPMENT AND LIFE. and the dialectical bent which his mind here received, determined from that time and forever the course of his inquiries, and of his mode of thinking. In 1060, he became himself a monk in the monastery of Bec; and in 1063, prior of this monastery, as the immediate successor of his teacher, Lanfranc. His time was divided between the common exercises of devotion, the imparting of spiritual counsel, superintending the education of the youth in the monastery, guiding the souls of the monks at large, correcting the ancient manuscripts which had become disfigured with errors through the ignorance of the preceding centuries, and study and meditation on the subject-matter of the Christian faith. Great part of the night was spent by him in these occupations; only a few hours were allowed for sleep. With the station he held in the monastery, were connected a multitude of little duties, unprofitable to the mind; 2 but the self-denial of love enabled him to accomplish all this business with conscientious fidelity; so that the time which he was desirous of devoting to his labors as an author, to study, contemplation, or prayer, had often to be spent in such employments.3 The man of profound speculative intellect must let himself down no easy task for him to the business of teaching boys to decline. He was an enemy to the dark, rigid discipline of the monks. He endeavored to make love the inspiring principle of education. An abbot who enjoyed a high reputation for piety having once complained to him that, with all the strict severity employed in the education of boys, still nothing was brought to pass; that, after all the stripes inflicted on them, they remained incorrigible, utterly stupid, and brutish, Anselm replied to him: "A beautiful result of your training, to convert men into brutes. But tell me, if you were to plant a tree in your garden, and shut it up on all sides so that its branches could not extend in any direction, what sort of a tree would it become, in case you should, a year afterward, give it freedom again? Certainly, a good-for-nothing tree, with crooked, snarly branches. And would not the whole fault be your own, who forced the tree into such unnatural confinement."5 This comparison he applied to education after the following manner: "So would it turn out with boys treated with the same severity, irrespective of their several different peculiarities. The evil propensities, restrained by mere force, would only thrive the more in secret; and thus they would grow hardened against everything done for their improvement. Because they experience no love, no act of kindness or friendship, from you, they give you credit for nothing good, but imagine that all you do proceeds from hatred and malevolence. And because they have been educated 1 Libros, qui ante id temporis nimis corrupti ubique terrarum erant, corrigebat, says Eadmer, in his life of Anselm. As he himself expresses it (lib. i, ep. 42) Viles et steriles, quas tamen negligere non audeam, occupationes. 3 Lib. i, ep. 42: Non solum dictandi, sed et legendi et meditandi sive orandi opportunitatem video remotam. 4 As he writes to a young monk (1. c. ep. 55): Tu scis, quam molestum mihi semper fuerit pueris declinare. Itaque indiscrete oppressi, pravas et spinarum more perplexas inter se cogitationes congerunt, fovent, nutriunt, tantaque eas nutriendo vi suffulciunt, ut omnia, quae illorum correctioni possent adminiculari, obstinata mente subterfugiant. ANSELM'S DEVELOPMENT AND LIFE. 363 by no one in true love, they can accost no one otherwise than with a cast-down countenance, and stolen glances. And I would fain have you tell me," added he, with some feeling: "Why treat them with such hostility? Are they not human beings: have they not the same nature with yourselves?" He then proceeded to explain how love and severity should be united in the educating of youth. He made the abbot conscious of the evil results which must necessarily follow from his mode of training. What great effects might be brought about by love, Anselm showed by his own example. He found in the monastery a boy by the name of Osbern, who was greatly prejudiced against him, and who possessed a most obstinate temper. But by little acts of kindness, by entering wholly into his peculiar ways, by overlooking many faults, when it could be done without disturbing the order of the monastery, he found. means of overcoming, by the force of love, the resistance of an untoward disposition. He enchained the lad to himself, and then first began gradually to pursue with him a more earnest and strict course of discipline. As the boy grew up, a hearty friendship was formed between him and his teacher. Anselm promised himself great things, to be accomplished by his pupil, when a man, in the service of the church. But Osbern fell into a severe fit of sickness. Then Anselm sat continually at the bedside of the beloved youth, nursing him day and night, and furnishing him with every means of spiritual and bodily support. After his death, he took care that, for a year, daily masses should be offered for his soul, and from all to whom he wrote he requested prayers in behalf of his beloved Osbern. On the education of young men generally, he bestowed the greatest care; being convinced that this period of life was best suited to the reception of divine things; that the higher impressions could then be the most easily and durably fixed. As wax, which, when neither too soft nor too hard, most perfectly and clearly gives back the impression of the seal, such was the relation of this age to boyhood on the one hand and more advanced age on the other.2 He took great pains to excite in his young men an interest in the study of the ancient authors, only admonishing them to avoid everything in them which is obscene.3 But his love was shown no less to old age than to youth. He gave. a proof of this in the deep interest he took in nursing Herewald, an old man so enfeebled by old age and disease as to be unable to move 1 Cumque apud nullum fuerint in vera caritate nutriti, nullum nisi depressis superciliis, oculove obliquo valent intueri. 2 Videas hominem in vanitate hujus saeculi ab infantia usque ad profundam senectutem conversatum, sola terrena sapientem, et in his penitus obduratum, cum hoc age de spiritualibus, huic de subtilitate contemplationis divinae loquere, et perspicies eum nec quid velis quidem posse videre. Nec mirum, indurata cera est. E contrario consideres puerum, aetate ac scientia tenerum, nec bonum nec malum discernere valentem nec te quidem intelligere, de hu jusmodi disserentem, nimirum mollis cera est et quasi liquens nec imaginem sigilli quoquomodo recipiens. Medius horum adolescens et juvenis est, ex teneretudine atque duritia congrue temperatus, si hunc instruxeris, ad quae voles, informare valebis. 3 See his exhortation to a young monk, to read as much as possible, and particularly of those authors which he had not been able to read with him: et praecipue de Virgilio et aliis auctoribus, quos a me non legisti, exceptis his, in quibus aliqua turpitudo sonat. Lib. i, ep. 55. 364 ANSELM'S LIFE AND SPIRITUAL BENT. any member of his body except his tongue. He himself pressed the juice from grapes out of one hand into the other, and gave him to drink of it. After the death of the abbot Herluin, in 1078, Anselm was chosen as his successor; and in this new office also he made the spiritual interest his governing motive. He complained of many abbots, who neglected the spiritual, through an undue attention to the secular affairs of their convents, feeling it incumbent on them to see that nothing was lost of the property consecrated to God, intrusted to their hands, but allowing God's law to be obliterated from their hearts for they were so earnest in being too cunning to be cheated by others, as to become adroit adepts in overreaching others themselves; they were so fearful of any useless expenditure, and of letting anything go without a good reason, that they became covetous, and allowed what they hoarded to rot without being useful to anybody.1 A still wider field of action was opened to him, when, in 1093, he was called to England as archbishop of Canterbury. Inasmuch as he held it to be his duty, however, to maintain the independence of the church, according to the Hildebrandian principles, he became entangled by means of this high office in violent contests with the kings, William the Second, and Henry the First, which must have been extremely painful to a mind so amiable and so earnestly bent on the quiet of religious meditation. He took refuge with the pope. Urban the Second honored in him at once the dignity of knowledge, and of the office which he held in the church. Three years he spent travelling about without a settled place of abode, in France and Italy. When in the army of the Norman duke, Roger of Sicily, whom he visited at his own request during the siege of Capua, he met among others certain Saracens, who, attracted by the fame of his amiable character, came to visit him. These he entertained in a friendly manner, and won even from them the most unfeigned respect. Soon after his return, in the year 1109, he died, reconciled with all his enemies, and bestowing his blessing on all with his expiring breath. Thus we see in him a man, whose doctrine and life were in perfect harmony with each other. While love shone eminently forth as the soul of his life, it formed also the central point of his system of faith and morals, as appears evident in that remarkable saying of his, that "if he had presented before him the hatefulness of sin on the one side, and the torments of hell on the other, and were left to take his choice between the two, he would prefer to be pure from sin, and innocent in hell, rather than to be polluted with sin, and happy in heaven." Doubtless, in so saying, he was aware that he supposed what would be impossible. By this language, he simply contradicted the sensuous and fleshly externalized notions of hell and of heaven. By the manner in which he felt himself constrained to decide in the choice between His words: Sunt multi praelati nostri ordinis, qui quasi solliciti, ne destruantur res Dei in manibus eorum, agunt, ut dissipetur lex Dei in cordibus eorum, nam tantum conantur esse prudentes, ne decipian tur ab aliis, ut fiant astuti, ad decipiendum alios. Adeo sunt cauti, ne fiant prodigi et quae habent irrationabiliter perdant, ut avari fiant et quae servant, inutiliter putrescant. Lib. ii, ep. 71. ANSELM'S LIFE AND SPIRITUAL BENT. 365 two impossible suppositions, he simply marked the necessary inner connection between sin and hell, and between holiness and heaven; he simply pointed at that which forms the peculiar ground of Christian hope in its essential inner bond of union with Christian love. "To love others," said he, "is better than to receive proofs of love from others, for all gifts of love are of a perishable nature, but love itself is eternal, and in itself well pleasing to God."2 He ever represented the disposition of love as that which alone gave their true worth to all Christian doing and suffering; so that according to the measure of this, was to be estimated the value of all good works, and of all renunciations, as he distinctly remarks in one of his letters.3 "I have learned in the school of Christ, that whoever, from true love to God, and to his neighbor, gives to him that needs, were it but a cup of cold water, or an alms, shall not lose his reward. The greater the love to God, and to his neighbor, which prompts a monk to deny himself the food set before him, the greater is the alms which he gives, and the greater the reward which he reaps." On his own person, he practised the most rigid abstinence. He restricted, in every way, his sensual wants, so that his friends entertained fears for his health; and love set them on inventing many little expedients by which to compel him to relax the severity of his self-discipline. Even amid the splendor of the highest dignity in the English church, he preserved the rigid abstinence of the monk. We know this from a remarkable and characteristic incident, which at the same time evidences the force of love with which he bound others to his person. Queen Matilda of England, who clung to him with the deepest affection and reverence, as her ghostly father, was filled with great anxiety for him, when she had heard that, after long fasting, he was accustomed to take food, not from his own sense of hunger, but only by being reminded of it by his servant. She therefore wrote him a letter,5 in which she begged him, in the most touching manner, for the sake of his community, to be more indulgent to himself, lest by the severity of his abstinence he should lose the strength of his voice and thereby diminish his usefulness as a preacher, at least so far as not to be distinctly heard by those standing at a distance.6 She brought up the example of Christ, who, by attending banquets as .well as fasts, had sanctified eating. Anselm replied to her, that although he could fast without being pained by hunger, yet he could This idea lies at the ground of the language which he employed to explain his meaning, when the above-mentioned saying excited surprise. Cum constet, solos malos in inferno torqueri, et solos bonos in coelesti regno foveri, patet, nec bonos in inferno, si illuc intrarent, posse teneri debita poena malorum, nec malos in coelo, si forte accederent, frui valere felicitate bonorum. Eadmer's Account of his life, c. v, § 41. * Lib. i, ep. 41. Eadmer relates, that only when engaged, while he was eating, in the discussion of some theological subject, he would, without thinking of it, take more food than usual. and the one who sat next to him 7 |