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.

• The Doctrine of Participation
• Degrees of Being
• Arguing to the Supreme Good
• Arguing to the Supreme Being
• The Supreme Being's Existence Per Se
• Creation Ex Nihilo
• Things Existing in the Divine Word
• Three Kinds of Expression
• What Can Be Affirmed of the Divine
• Divine Simplicity
• Divine Ubiquity
• Divine Eternity 
• Divine Substance and Other Substances
• Divine Word as Utterance and Essence
• The Word's Expression of Created Being
• The Unity of the Father and Son
• Father and Son as Essence of Each Other
• The Trinity of the Divine Substance
• Grasping The Divine Through Images
• The Human Mind as Mirror of the Divine
• The Rational Creature's Love of the Divine
• Eternal Happiness or Misery
• Love, Hope, and Faith

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. 

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: