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Anselm: Saint and Statesman*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
As the latest in a long line of St. Anselm's biographers, I am privileged here to address the comments of my most distinguished predecessor, Sir Richard Southern. Perhaps the greatest compliment one's work can receive is a rigorous and thorough examination of its premises, evidence, and argument; Southern has graciously rendered that favor to my Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan. I am grateful to both Sir Richard and to Albion for this opportunity to reply.
No one could dispute Southern's summation of the difficulty involved in assessing the richness and variety of Anselm's activities and achievements, nor indeed the fullness of the surviving materials and yet their tantalizing silences toward some of our most pressing questions. Indeed, fifteen years would hardly be enough time to work through them, were it not for the labors of many others, including Southern, upon which my arguments often depend. What seems remarkable to me, and apparently to Sir Richard as well, is that he and I can derive such different conclusions from virtually the same evidence. Southern views Anselm as “essentially a monastic contemplative man, with his eyes wholly directed towards God, and with his energies mainly absorbed in the task of calling others to the monastic life,” while I have argued for Anselm's political awareness, his conviction (at some point prior to his archiepiscopal consecration) that God had destined him for Canterbury, and his sense that as God's steward of the mother church of Britain, he must take effective action in the world of high politics to safeguard Canterbury's lands, privileges, and primatial rights. And I have argued that he did so skillfully and successfully. These two views seem almost mutually exclusive.
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- What Was Saint Anselm?
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1988
Footnotes
*
I wish to thank Professors C. Warren Hollister, Robert L. Palmer, Loyd Swenson, and John Ettling for helpful criticism of this reply in its early drafts, from which this final version has much benefitted. References in the text are to Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. M. Rule (London, 1884) as HN; Eadmer, Vita Anselmi in The Life of St. Anselm, ed. R. W. Southern (London, 1972) as VA; Vita Herluini, in J. Armitage Robinson, Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminister (Cambridge, 1911) as VH; and Vita Willelmi, in PL 150, cols. 713–24, as VW.
References
1 Cf. Epp. 78, 343; see my article, “The Monastic Sources of Anselm's Political Behavior: St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great and St. Benedict,” in Anselm Studies: Proceedings of the Fifth International Saint Anselm Conference: St. Anselm and St. Augustine—Episcopi ad Saecula, eds. Joseph C. Schnaubelt, et al., Kraus International Publications, forthcoming.
2 Anselm of Bec, pp. 120–21; cf. Epp. 148, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 163, 165, 166, 176.
3 VA, pp. 44–45, my italics; cf. Anselm of Bec, pp. 21–22, Epp. 78, 298, 343, and Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 5.
4 Anselm of Bec, pp. 135–38; Epp. 148, 150, 151, 155; cf. 159.
5 HN, pp. 1, 3, 22, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, for example, and 276–278; cf. my article, “Eadmer's Historia Novorum: A Reinterpretation,” in Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Caen Conference of 1987, forthcoming.
6 Ep. 222, a mirror image of the exchange between St. Augustine of Canterbury and St. Gregory, in Bede, I.27; Ep. 355, stating that by his actions Anselm established “customs for myself and my successors by my own example,” cf. Epp. 200, 231, 241, 290, 324, 328, 333, 339, 469.
7 Constable, Giles, The Letters of Peter the Venerable, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass, 1967), 2:5–10Google Scholar.
8 Ruud, Marylou, “Episcopal Reluctance: Lanfranc's Resignation Reconsidered,” Albion 19 (1987): 173–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 VA, pp. 32, 36, 40–41, 45–46; and Anselm of Bec, ch. 2, for Alselm's frequent, effective, and productive involvement in business and administration.
10 Ruud, , “Episcopal Reluctance,” pp. 163–75Google Scholar.
11 The day before our two articles were scheduled to go to the printer, I was told that Sir Richard Southern had submitted an addendum to his paper, consisting largely of an extended footnote on the point that William of Malmesbury did not use MS. L in his own autograph edition of Anselm's letters (M) and in his Gesta Pontificum, both written in the mid-1120s. Since I cannot reexamine M and the manuscripts on which it depends in the twenty-four hours that had been alloted me to respond, my comments must necessarily be tentative. They will depend largely on Walter Fröhlich's article (“The Genesis of the Collections of St. Anselm's Letters,” American Benedictine Review 35 [1984]: 249–66)Google Scholar, which constitutes the best published discussion of the MSS. of Anselm's letters. Fröhlich states that William of Malmesbury's M used three sources: N, the Historia Novorum, and F (BL, Regal. 5. IX), which Fröhlich describes as having been derived from L. Why Malmesbury should have used F instead of the superior L I have no idea, but the fact that he did so cannot be taken as decisive proof that L had not yet been written. Indeed, if Frohlich is correct in concluding that F depended on L and that William of Malmesbury used F, then L must have existed when Malmesbury wrote. Similarly, Malmesbury depended on N instead of the more complete and better arranged E for Anselm's letters as prior and abbot of Bec, although the first part of E (the section containing the pre-archiepiscopal letters) was evidently transcribed under Anselm's direction in 1092–93 (Fröhlich, , “St. Anselm's Letters,” pp. 253, 256–57Google Scholar) and was surely in existence in the mid-1120s when Malmesbury was preparing his edition. Such are some of the small mysteries that will doubtless remain unsolved. But the theory that the well-organized L post-dates the confused, ill-ordered M requires the further supposition that a Canterbury scribe preparing L sometime in the mid- or late-1120s, fifteen or twenty years after Anselm's death, could arrange his letters in a coherent, chronological order that had altogether eluded William of Malmesbury, the greatest historian of his age. The likelihood that the good order of L was the product of Anselm's direct supervision rather than of the genius of a Canterbury scribe of the 1120s is further strengthened by the rubric for a poem in praise of Anselm in La (which must postdate L): “Item versus de eodem Praesulis Anselmi quem nuper obisse dolemüs” (ibid., pp. 265-66, my emphasis). Surely, nuper is to be translated in this context as “recently,” and it cannot therefore be the product of a scribe of the 1120s referring back to Anselm's death, in 1109.
12 Ibid., p. 263.
13 Anselm of Bec, pp. 295–97; Epp. 364, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 387.
14 Gazeau, V., “Le domaine continental du Bec: aristocratie et monachisme au temps d'Anselme,” Les Mutations socio-culturelles au tournant des xie-xiie siècles: Ètudes Anselmiennes (IVe session), ed. Foreville, Raymonde (Paris, 1984), pp. 259–71Google Scholar; M. Chibnall, “The English Possessions of Bec in the Time of Anselm,” in ibid., pp. 273–82.