Orexis Dianoētikē: anselm of canterbury

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Mar 20, 2021

Next Thinkers for Sadler's Lectures Podcast Selected

Every once in a while, I do polls about which authors' works I should focus on next for the Sadler's Lectures podcast. I ran one earlier this week in three places - Twitter, YouTube, and Patreon - and I think at this point in time I can call the winner of the poll: Thomas Hobbes. I'll be producing podcast episodes from the recent core concept videos on his masterwork, Leviathan.

For those who don't already know, the stock of 800 or so core concept videos I have produced provide the raw material for the podcast episodes. Hence the title "Sadler's Lectures" - that's exactly what they are, lectures I gave originally in video form, and then converted to audio, boosting sound quality, taking out filler words, and exporting into mp3 format podcast episodes.

The four alternatives for the polls were:

Anselm of Canterbury - On Freedom of Choice
Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
Lev Shestov - All Things Are Possible
Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks

Each of these is a work on which, in the last several years, I produced a sequence of short lecture videos, and which I intended eventually to get to producing podcast episodes on. I'll be doing so for all of them in which remains of this month and throughout next month. The only question was where I should start.

I take the votes from the polls and add them all together. My Patreon supporters, however, get their votes much more heavily weighted than the general public - each of their votes counts as 20 votes. 17 Patreon supporters have voted. 80 or so people voted on Twitter, and over 700 on YouTube. Here's how the votes came out (Patreon + Twitter + YouTube)

Thomas Hobbes 80 + 14 + 260 = 354
Anselm of Canterbury 100 + 23 + 175 = 298
Frantz Fanon 80 + 31 + 175 = 286
Lev Shestov 80 + 15 + 91 = 186

So, there you go! I'll be starting with Thomas Hobbes, then moving on to Anselm, then to Frantz Fanon, and then Lev Shestov. I've got my work cut out for me. You'll see me posting the podcast episodes in my social media, but if you want to listen to them as soon as they come out, you might want to subscribe to the Sadler's Lectures podcast. You can do so at its home on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Player FM, iHeart Radio, and plenty of other places online.

Feb 23, 2020

Five Podcast Episodes On Anselm's Proslogion

One of the often underrated Medieval thinkers who I teach routinely in Introduction to Philosophy classes is Anselm of Canterbury. He also happens to be the thinker upon whom I've published the most in the course of my academic career - and I point that out mainly to stress that he's definitely a thinker whose works are worth studying. The work most students encounter him through is the Proslogion - or rather a short portion of it, chapter 2 (maybe supplemented by 3 and 4) - since Anselm provides a version of what later comes to be called the "ontological argument".

It's a shame that most of the time, people don't read further on in the work, since it is quite fantastic (and even more so in the original Latin). Even in his own time, there were critics - like the monk Gaunilo - who basically misunderstood what Anselm was up to in the work, and focused in solely on the argument about God's existence. The Proslogion uses the same line of argument to lead the reader into consideration of the divine attributes, resolution of some seeming paradoxes, discussion of our capacities to even understand God, and in the end even some conjectures about what heaven would be like.

I recently produced five podcast episodes on the Proslogion, drawing upon the core concept videos I'd created for my students on the work. They don't cover the entirety of the ideas contained in the work, but do hit on some of the most important points and passages. (I'll likely shoot more videos on the work and convert those to podcasts this summer.)

All told, the five episodes come to a little over an hour of lectures you can download and listen to wherever you like. Here they are:

Feb 9, 2020

Five Recent Guest Appearances and Interviews

It's been a while since I did a roundup of my recent appearances on radio shows, podcasts, and video channels, so it's time for another one!

I make these lists every so often, as the appearances accumulate. I also have a more comprehensive list of most of my appearances in the last seven or eight years over at my company website, if you'd like to check any of those out.

I get fairly regular requests to talk about a variety of topics because of my philosophy-focused YouTube channel, my podcast, my business ReasonIO, and my work as editor of Stoicism Today. If you'd like to invite me for a television, radio, video, or podcast appearance - or even for a live, in-person event, feel free to contact me.

Interview on Cooper Cherry podcast - two-hour conversation hosted by Cooper Cherry, discussing the nature of Hegelian dialectics, Marxism and post-structuralism, political perspectives of the present, and what's right and what's wrong with Hegel - you can listen here

Interview on Rendering Unconscious podcast - hosted by Vanessa Sinclair, discussing how philosophy gets put into practice, what philosophical counseling is and how it is connected with psychotherapy, and a range of other topics - you can listen here

Guest Show on Riverwest Radio - "Why It's Good To Give (Philosophical Perspectives)" - fundraising two-hour show with Dan Hayes, discussing philosophical insights about generosity, giving, and supporting community from Stoic and other perspectives - you can listen here.

Interview on Nathan Ormand channel - video interview hosted by Nathan Ormand, discussing Anselm of Canterbury's works and key ideas, what the "single argument is", Anselm's views on human freedom, how Anselm revolutionized prayer, and other topics - you can watch or listen here

Guest Appearance on the Post-Structuralist Tent Revival podcast: hosted by Eric Aldieri, Jacob Given, and Paula Landerreche Cardillo, discussing perspectives on anger in ancient philosophy and theology, and techniques for managing anger – you can listen here

There are several other podcast interviews I've done in the last month or so which aren't yet out. As they appear, I'll post about them in my social media and on my Patreon site.

Nov 13, 2019

Moving Video Premiere Date to November 30

One of the new series of videos I started this year provide viewers with my expert advice about how to engage in self-directed study in the field of Philosophy. Once I have produced a video in this series, I premiere it on YouTube. That allows anyone who is interested in the topic and the particular thinker to join in via live chat, while everyone watches it for the first time. I answer questions and address comments over the hour that the video airs.

This month, the plan is to produce, release, and premiere a video focused on how to productively study the range of writers that fall under the rubric of "early Christian philosophy". This includes a host of thinkers from the very early generations of that new religion, way of life, and indeed in some cases, philosophy all the way though what we might call the "era of Augustine" (though some are his contemporaries).

There were quite a few early Christian writers who explicitly framed Christianity as a "philosophy" and sometimes even called themselves "philosophers". These were almost invariably Christian writers who had a substantial background in a wide range of the philosophical schools, ideas, and controversies of ancient Mediterranean culture, and who engaged some of those movements and thinkers as interlocutors. Sometimes they willingly borrowed from pagan thinkers, when there was something of value to incorporate into the new synthesis and the new philosophy as a way of life, centered around the figure and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and the developing community of the Church.

In the case of some of the authors I'll be discussing - Justin Martyr, Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria, John Cassian, as examples - I've been reading and thinking about their works (and occasionally teaching them as well) for about two decades. So I've got a lot of advice to assemble and organize for the video. Given my extraordinarily heavy teaching load this semester (seven classes), I'm a bit behind on video production.

I was hoping to have this next video on self-directed study in philosophy ready to premiere this Saturday, but now think that unlikely. Accordingly, I'm moving the date for this release - and the Q&A session - out to Saturday, November 30. In the meantime, here's the other videos in the series:

Sep 14, 2019

Seven Videos on Anselm's On Freedom of Choice

One of the texts I've been teaching for a number of years in my classes is Anselm of Canterbury's On Freedom of Choice. It's a short dialogue between a teacher and a student, with the teacher clearly as a stand-in for Anselm. On Freedom of Choice is the second dialogue in a trilogy of works, intended originally to aid the monks under his charge with their study of Scripture.

The other two works in that trilogy are also dialogues, the first one being On Truth, and the third, the significantly longer On The Fall of the Devil. If you're interested, you can get all three in a single affordable volume, ably translated by Thomas Williams and published by Hackett.

Anselm summarizes what On Freedom Of Choice is about in the preface to the three dialogues:

[W]hat freedom of choice is, whether a person always has it, and how many distinctions of freedom there are with respect to having or not having uprightnessof-will. . . In this treatise I show only the natural strength of the will for keeping the uprightness which it has received; I do not show how in order to keep uprightness the will needs the accompaniment of grace.

This summer, knowing I'd be teaching the text again, I decided it was about time to create some core concept videos as aids for my students. Here are those seven videos:

Feb 14, 2019

Five Videos on Anselm's Proslogion

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I have been creating new core concept videos for students enrolled in my college classes this semester. So far I've released several new series, links to which are below.

One of the texts we are covering in its entirety in my Marquette classes, and just in part in my MATC class, is Anselm of Canterbury's short work, the Proslogion. I created five new core concept videos covering some of the main aspects and arguments in that work (which is, according to Anselm, one long single "argument"). I hope to get to some additional videos on this work later on down the line, covering some of the other issues examined in the text.

Anselm is relatively poorly know and not all that often read (if you like, you can read my IEP article on Anselm). When he does get addressed by philosophers, it is usually the Proslogion to which they turn, and typically just chapter 2 (and sometimes 3 and 4), where Anselm sets out what has come to be called the "ontological argument for God's existence". There's far more going on in that book, however, as you'll see if you read it, or even if you watch the videos below.

So here they are:

In the last few months, I have also created several other series of core concept videos, on other key philosophical texts. You might find these interesting or helpful:

I'm in process of shooting a lot more video content, and you'll see more posts like these in the coming months. We've got more Cicero coming up, as well as more Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Hannah Arendt, James Rachels, and Lawrence Kohlberg, to name a few.

If you'd like to support the work I do, creating these videos in my home studio, used by learners worldwide, consider becoming a Patreon supporter!

Jun 23, 2017

Aristotle Didn't Say That! - On The Topic Of Criticism

The internet is full of fake quotations attributed to famous authors. For some reason, Aristotle seems to attract more of these than most others, typically posted and then sometimes commented upon by people who know fairly little about him and his thought. Here's a gem that has been making its way around the web - particularly in leadership, self-help, and personal development contexts:

Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

This time around it happened to be cited by the Tiny Buddha site - using the quote as a springboard for what proved in parts an interesting article - starting, of course, by parroting an erroneous attribution that just a few moments' casual research would have revealed as such.

Where does this quote actually come from? Why couldn't it be from Aristotle? Why would people unthinkingly accept and repeat that attribution. Even if it is not from Aristotle, is there some value to the saying? Those are some interesting questions that I'll answer below - though not in quite that order.

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Jun 10, 2016

Free Video Resources on St. Anselm's Monologion

Off and on, from March to May, I created a new series of Core Concept videos devoted to a classic text of Medieval Christian philosophy, Saint Anselm's early work, the Monologion.

This book is in, in fact, Anselm's earliest treatise, written when he was prior of the monastery at Bec, after numerous requests by his fellow monks that he write down some of the arguments, reflections, and explanations about the divine substance that he was providing them with in his teaching and conversations.

I shot and uploaded this sequence of videos, covering most of the chapters and topics in the Monologion. For whoever would like to watch and use them, here they are - all 24 of them.

I'll be producing further videos on Anselm later on this Fall, starting with his next main work, the Proslogion. If you're interested in further study of Anselm's texts with me specifically, I will be teaching an online course on Anselm later on this Fall, and I'm always available for tutorial sessions.

Apr 7, 2015

Anselm on Divine Power and Greatness

Recently, the web-comic xkcd put out a one-panel one-liner that caught my immediate attention as a sometime scholar working on Anselm of Canterbury. He's often credited with originating the "ontological argument," in some important senses a misattribution, since that term comes into use much later, in the 18th century, and since Anselm's "unum argumentum" is actually nearly the whole of the Proslogion, not just the second chapter -- there's even more to be said, but those are topics for another day, and a different post.

What's particularly interesting to me about this is the question that's being asked in the panel -- not the part about a "flaw" in the ontological argument, but rather the much more intriguing question hinted at about divine power, or rather omnipotence, and its intersection with the "that than which nothing greater can be thought" reasoning driving Anselm's argumentation in the Proslogion. Here's why that issue is well worth thinking through in light of Anselm's actual texts and thought:

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Oct 16, 2014

Six Senses of Justice in Saint Anselm's Thought.

Last weekend, down in Washington D.C., I read a paper and got involved in some very interesting and provocative discussion on the borderlines between philosophy and theology. The American Catholic Philosophical Association -- one of my old haunts in an earlier academic life (I'd not been there since 2008) -- includes a great variety of what are called "satellite sessions." Many of these are in fact meetings of other scholarly organizations and institutions whose membership overlaps partly with the ACPA, and one of those, with which I have a longstanding and particularly close personal connection, is the Institute for Saint Anselm Studies.

This year, the Institute hosted a panel focused specifically on one of Anselm's greatest works, the Cur Deus Homo - or Why God Became Man. One of the issues about which I've been thinking for quite some time, and particularly in light of St. Anselm's thought and writings, is the relationship between divine mercy and justice. So, when the opportunity presented itself to become the third interlocutor on the panel, I gladly put myself forward, and the Institute accepted. The paper that I presented -- which is still in rather unpolished state (I'll post it once I've added the requisite footnotes and transitions) -- was titled "Is God's Justice Unmerciful in St. Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?" You can listen to the paper, my responses to questions and comments, and the general discussion (after all three papers had been read) in this podcast, if you like. What I'd like to do here is to take up a related topic that I inserted into a footnote of the paper and touched upon in the Q&A -- the differing senses of "justice" in Anselm's thought.

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Jul 31, 2013

Inserting Anselm into Alasdair MacIntyre's Narrative of Medieval Thought

I recently gave a talk -- partly reading, partly summarizing, and partly promising parts yet unwritten of a paper about Alasdair MacIntyre, Saint Anselm of Canterbury (or Bec, or Aosta, depending on where you're from) and medieval moral theory.

My contention -- a friendly one -- is that MacIntyre's account of what took place in that period we call "medieval" would be considerably improved by incorporation of a fuller picture of Anselm's formation and contributions to an ongoing tradition of moral enquiry. MacIntyre calls this "Augustinian", but it is really much broader -- and older -- than the properly augustinian tradition in philosophy or theology.

I think what I'm trying to fix in this paper is encapsulated in one remark: MacIntyre's account of Anselm is precisely what one might expect from a reading that focuses exclusively upon the Proslogion and upon Thomas Aquinas' references to Anselm's theory of truth. Accordingly, my aim is to show, mainly by way of exposition, that Anselm's contributions lay in moral theory as well -- and to set out his influences upon Aquinas as an interlocutor.

Jul 19, 2013

Talk Radio Interview: Saint Anselm's Argument

Last night, I appeared as a guest on an internet radio talk show -- Theology Matters with the Pellews. Devin Pellew turned out to be an engaging host, quite interested in the topic I had proposed to focus upon: the "single argument" Saint Anselm elaborates in his early work, the Proslogion.

The first hour or so of the show was simply Devin and I, doing some back-and-forth discussion, starting with the more general, and then zeroing in on several key themes having to do with Anselm -- I'll say what those were shortly. Then, we had the call-in segment, and I participated in some very enjoyable conversations with several different callers.

If you'd like to hear the show -- or to download the mp3 of it -- you can access it here. For me, it was an opportunity to explore, in a different medium, some themes I've been thinking about for a long time, and to communicate my own interest in these themes to a broader, less academic audience -- the sorts of people actually, that Anselm himself spent much of his time working with, counseling, and even teaching.

So, what did we range over? A number of topics that I think would make good starting points for future blog posts. To start with, Anselm's "argument" turns out not to be the "ontological argument" (a name he wouldn't recognize, since it appears only from the time of Kant onward), but rather a much broader, deeper, yet more interesting structure that runs through nearly the whole of the Proslogion. This shouldn't be surprising, really, if we look at what Anselm himself tells us the argument is suppose to attempt and attain -- or if we actually read the Monologion, for whose multiple arguments this "single argument" is supposed to substitute.

We also talked about Anselm's own purposes in providing this argument in a written form -- he's not doing Christian apologetics as we often conceive of it, not trying to produce arguments to convince the unbelievers primarily. Rather, he tells us that he felt joy in discovering and exploring the argument, and wanted to share that experience -- or at least its apparatus -- with others. Interestingly, this wasn't how he felt about it at the start or in the middle of his enquiry. Another key theme, which I'll doubtless blog about later this Fall, is how Anselm could think, for a while. . . that the argument might actually be a trick of the Devil.

May 4, 2013

Another Anselm Lecture

I'm finally getting around to posting this here in Orexis Dianoētikē -- I can plausibly plead as an excuse the pressures imposed by (attempting) solid work in my ongoing classes -- a recent lecture I've given on Saint Anselm of Canterbury.

This particular talk, with some very lively Q & A at the end, comes from the recent conference focused on the question "Must Morality Be Grounded Upon God," hosted by the Franciscan University of Steubenville (incidentally -- and this is entirely off topic -- incorporating the name of one of my long-time heroes, the Baron Von Steuben, drillmaster to the budding Continental Army during our American Revolution).

In this talk, I answer the question structuring the conference with some typically Anselmian, "let's make some distinctions. . . and then Yes. . . and No" -- but more Yes than No in Anselm's case.

I'm not entirely happy with the shape of the paper, some I'm loath to upload it into my usual channels like Academia.edu or GoogleDrive -- once I've reworked it, added all the references it need, and I'm satisfied with it, I'll definitely post a copy for public viewing.

There's a reason I rather tongue-in-cheek call this post "another Anselm lecture" -- I've given quite a few of them over the last five years. Here's a representative sampling:

All of these are supposed in one way or another to feed into the book project I started years back, specifically devoted to systematically reconstructing and setting out Anselm's moral theory. Although I've written several chapters, work on that particular project moves slower than I'd like. But, that -- as well as additional work on translating the De Similitudinibus and the Dicta Anselmi -- are matters to which I plan to give much attention this coming summer and fall.

Sep 4, 2011

Virtuous Humility . . . and Pride?

A month or so back, attending the ISME conference, I came across an interesting paper delivered by Kristen McPherson, a Marquette doctoral candidate with a promising project bearing on the topic of humility and pride. The natures and values -- positive or negative -- of these opposed affective states is a subject upon which many different, some mutually incompatible, viewpoints have been worked out down the centuries, and a pattern and (broadly speaking) point of progress is what I aim to write about here – a way of returning to the theme of my earlier Sunday posts prior to the blogging hiatus imposed by my summer travels: theological, specifically monastic treatments of humility as a virtue.

What particularly caught my attention in that ISME paper were three things: a goal, a claim, and an omission. One of the stated goals was to provide a naturalized account of pride and humility, one which would presumably draw upon the centuries of hard-earned insights and progressively developed intellectual resources of Christian thought on pride and humility but in such a way as to strip away the specifically Christian elements, arguments, appeals, concepts, so as to leave a residue or precipitate equally acceptable (even embracable, incorporable) to secularists of good faith as to committed Christians. The interesting, and to me startling claim was that we ought not only to think in terms of vicious pride, a vicious counterfeit to humility, and genuine and virtuous humility, but also in terms of virtuous pride as well.

The omission was that. . . . well as it turns out, what counted as stand-ins for the wide scope of Christian thought was . . . you guessed it: Augustine and the later, greater Thomas Aquinas. Now, I would be far from faulting diligent study of, and reliance upon, the thought of these two great Doctors, but when it comes to the matter of humility and the distinctively Christian understanding, it can only help one to read monastic as well as scholastic writers – Thomas, for one drew deeply on the wellsprings of wisdom afforded him by generations of monastic authors.

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Aug 21, 2011

Catching Up With Anselm the Christian Philosopher

I'm still in the midst of writing another Anselm-themed post which will appear later this week (or next week), dealing with justice, mercy, and our (often inadequate) images of the divine -- but I found myself, instead of reading through those texts most germane to such purposes and topics, following once again down the paths, seemingly so straightforward and sunlit, but occasionally and admittedly to me obscure, of the beginning five chapters of Anselm's first treatise, the Monologion. This text, in our times relatively little known and studied (except by Anselm scholars, philosophers of religion, or historians of medieval thought), is both programmatically and exemplarily emblematic of the Anselmian project of fides quaerens intellectum, "faith seeking understanding" -- although some better Anselm scholars than myself have argued that an equally important and characteristic contribution by Anselm is his well-worked-out conception of justice as rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata, "rectitude of will kept for its own sake".

Rereading and ruminating upon these chapters, mulling through them, actively dialoging with their assertions and arguments -- using them as they were designed, by Anselm's own lights -- got me thinking both about Anselm's moral theory (the broad and multifarious topic about which I'm currently -- with painful, though perhaps not painstaking, slowness -- researching and writing a book) and about the "problem" of Christian philosophy (as it is often put, concealing a tangled an wideranging number of problems, issues, historical phenomena, debates. . . ). I noticed a confluence of these two sets of concerns.

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Jun 5, 2011

Anselm's Mountain of Humility

So far, in the Sunday series I've been writing, addressing monastic authors' interpretations of the virtue of humility and its developmental levels, I have discussed -- and in some of the entries, translated (here and here) -- the thought of a later monastic author, St. Anselm. His own reflections and chosen metaphors bearing upon the capital vice of pride and its remedy, the virtue of humility, were no doubt formed through reading, and long meditation placing him in conversation not only with the authors of Scripture but also earlier Christian authors, particularly St. Benedict, St. Gregory, St. Augustine, and John Cassian.

One key thing we know about Anselm (in The Life of St. Anselm) noted by his biographer, Eadmer, a fellow Benedictine monk of Canterbury and a close friend of Anselm's, is that -- although he was certainly not lukewarm about this early on in his monastic profession -- at one point he decisively "gave himself up entirely to being a true monk and to understanding the rational basis of monastic life, and expounding it to others." Before going back to touch base with the last three posts on Anselm and humility, as well as addressing a reader's question whose brevity belies its great usefulness, there are three things I'd like to quickly point out about the perhaps not-so-aptly-named Scholastic Doctor and his works -- some of which are worthy of their own blog posts later, when I have more time.

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Jun 1, 2011

Whose Flourishing Ought We Be Concerned With? (part 1)

A very interesting question was raised recently in one of the LinkedIn groups to which I belong: "Whose flourishing ought we be concerned with?" Given the nature of group forums -- both that they invite collaboration and dialogue between multiple interlocutors, and that any notions I might work out in detail there would have their readership confined to that group -- I decided the question would provide an excellent blog topic. I've been working recently on a paper for an upcoming ISME conference on MacIntyre's virtue ethics and prison teaching, so the notion of "flourishing" -- a moral term and goal in virtue ethics -- has been on my mind even more than usual of late.

For those not (yet, or explicitly. . . one can always hope!) virtue ethicists, here's in a nutshell the significance of what is being talked about in the discussion. "Flourishing" is one of those somewhat quaint-sounding but actually quite apt terms by which we render a family of teloscertain not-so-easily- translated Greek and Latin terms -- Western virtue ethics goes back to those cultures -- like eu zein / bene vivere (literally "living well") or eudaimonia / beatitudo ("happiness"). Now, why bring up these terminological transformations? They represent a continuity in a conception of the good for human beings. In short, for virtue ethics, the Good is not a specific or generic good thing or a possession or enjoyment of such goods. It consists in a certain way, a kind of pattern and shape, of one's life, one's relationships, one's actions and activities -- put another way, a progressive, ongoing, appropriate, and as full as possible realization of one's potentials as a human being.

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May 29, 2011

The Two Guardians of the Mountain of Humility

humility sisters anselm canterbury lesson mountain god religion modesty

Finally settled in and more or less unpacked up at my new home in Kingston, New york, I am now resuming my entries in Orexis Dianoētikē, a bit more tardily than I had hoped (to my chagrin), but at least getting on with it. The translation below is from the second part of chapter 1 of the Dicta Anselmi, and with it, I am taking back up the latest project of my Sunday posts: discussing the virtue of humility and depictions of gradations or levels of humility in Christian monastic literature.

The last post in this series, More on Anselm and Humility -- I'm almost embarrassed to admit -- dates back almost one month. Today, in order to get things moving again, I'm just providing long-overdue translation, sans commentary on this extremely interesting set of metaphors. Next week I'll go into the twists and turns of these passages and discuss them in detail. So, here they are: those two previously promised sisters, the guardians of the mountain of humility.

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May 1, 2011

More on Anselm and Humility

As I make my way through the seemingly myriad steps required for me to be able to extricate myself from my current position at Fayetteville State University and the life that I've made for myself over the last three years in Fayetteville, North Carolina -- and as I prepare to deliver my penultimate public lecture, on the Seven (or the Eight?) Deadly Sins, a little more than a week away I've been able to devote somewhat less time to translating and meditating on Anselm's writings than I'd have liked. But, I want to keep the momentum generated last Sunday going -- an impetus for ascending the mountain or ladder, or levels of the virtue of humility -- if only in words, in imagination, in a scholarly manner.

Humility is one of those virtues central not only to the monastic profession and way of life but to Christianity itself, taught about, learned, practiced, ruminated upon, and modeled not only by Jesus Christ himself but by so many of His followers, many of whom have unfolded portions of its intrinsic intelligibility previously unrealized or even suspected. This was and remains one of the distinctive contributions by Christianity to moral philosophy, one which seems at times to have been lost sight of in many modern philosophical perspectives -- just look for example at Hume's or Nietzsche's construals of humility.

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Apr 24, 2011

Anselm on the Seven Levels of Humility

Having finished the six-entry series on Anselm's views on anger, I've decided on a new Sunday blogging project for the time being, one which still focuses on the (somewhat inaptly epitheted) Scholastic Doctor, but now on a different aspect of his moral theory: the virtue of humility, so central to his life, practice, thought, and counsels -- so difficult and trying a virtue to cultivate (I'll admit, in my experience and after very limited success). Humility, Anselm says, is needed in order to prepare the ground for, and to stabilize the other moral virtues.

Unlike anger, Anselm did devote some thematic discussion to humility as such, particularly through a metaphor he develops in considerable depth -- that of a mountain with levels. Each level corresponds to one degree of humility, a new qualitative addition or deepening of that virtue, in practice, in action. In the weeks to come, I'm going to compare Anselm's treatment, and the successive levels he outlines, with those of other Christian thinkers who also discussed humility, and similarly distinguished successive degrees, steps, or levels, of that virtue. One of these at least Anselm knew with an intimacy than which a greater can barely be conceived, for St. Benedict, the founder of the very order in which Anselm lived out nearly all of his adult life, distinguishes and briefly discusses twelve steps or levels of humility.

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