Abstract
St. Anselm of Canterbury’s Monologion was a bombshell when he released it in 1075–76. It was a new type of work, a long argument written in the person of someone who, by reasoning things out for himself and without appealing to Scripture or to outside authors, arrives at the truths of the Catholic faith. Anselm describes this work as an outgrowth of his teaching the monks at Bec, and claimed that its unusual (for the time) method was in response to their requests that, rather than just teaching them what they should know according to Scripture and tradition, Anselm help them to understand what they professed. Anselm was criticized immediately for his innovative method, since Benedictine monks were supposed to write commentaries on Scripture and teach the Fathers, not engage in speculation. In response, Anselm defended his work as “consistent with” the Fathers, and challenged his critics to judge his work only after a “careful and thorough reading” of Augustine’s De Trinitate. The method was intentionally different, but only so as to help the reader grasp the rationale for the traditional doctrines and ideas.
John Slotemaker’s book attempts to introduce the reader to the entirety of St. Anselm’s thought through a close reading of the Monologion. His reason for doing so is somewhat artificial: the “Mapping the Tradition” series for which the book is written uses “a single primary source as the entry point into a given thinker” (xiv), and Slotemaker settled on the Monologion as his entry point because Anselm’s more famous Proslogion and Cur Deus Homo had already been studied extensively. That choice could have been felicitous—the Monologion is Anselm’s longest work; he kept returning to its themes, and yet it is criminally understudied. Unfortunately, Slotemaker seems relatively uninspired by the work’s own ideas and arguments, such that his summaries of each chapter of the Monologion frequently go off on tangents regarding authors other than Anselm or works other than the Monologion. I found it easier to read the Monologion directly rather than Slotemaker’s summaries, which were often mostly paraphrases, and occasionally introduced errors: for example, he claims (20) that Anselm “argues that because something in creation is X, it follows that the divine essence is necessarily X,” while in the section under discussion (chapter 10), Anselm uses the much more reasonable “possibly” (non immerito videri potest) rather than “necessarily.”
Slotemaker, associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, knows well both Augustine’s De Trinitate and the post-Augustinian tradition of trinitarian theology, and his reflections on Anselm’s trinitarian thought helpfully show where Anselm fits into that tradition. However, he is disappointingly unsympathetic to Anselm’s own reasons for holding his views, preferring to note that he’s different without trying to help the reader understand why. He criticizes Anselm as a reader of De Trinitate, often in superficial ways: for example, he complains that the Monologion breaks with Augustine’s theological method because it lacks a section on scriptural exegesis, when Anselm defends that decision on the book’s first page. Also on the first page, Anselm mentions that he would follow the Greeks in some of his terminology; yet, rather than asking why Anselm might have made that choice, Slotemaker simply criticizes this as another departure from Augustine.
The book’s second part moves on from the Monologion to a quick survey of how Anselm’s Proslogion and Cur Deus Homo have been received from the Middle Ages until today. Here Slotemaker seems much more comfortable, and he displays a real talent for summarizing others’ views. He gives several quick sketches of how Aquinas, Scotus, Robert Holcot, John Calvin, Johann Mohler, Karl Barth, Anselm Stoltz, and Etienne Gilson have received Anselm’s work. His presentations here are clear, and he is able to bring the authors into dialog with each other effectively.
Ultimately, Slotemaker’s lack of sympathy for the Monologion’s project, methodology, and arguments reduces the book’s usefulness as a study of Anselm’s distinctive contributions or as an entry point to the rest of his thought, and the extraordinary cost of the book makes it hard to recommend for purchase.