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.

Happy Birthday G.K. Chesterton

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite philosophers -- indeed, in my book a writer legitimately termed a philosopher, though many would rather recall him as a novelist, a cultural critic, an essayist, perhaps even in a sense a theologian -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton.  If I had to adduce only one reason for calling him that, I might cite his own words from the first page of his own Orthodoxy, where he tells us:

I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe.  I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.  God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Now, as one of the so down-to-earth-characters into whose mouth that author inserted so many excellent quips, paradoxical assertions, and deductions, might have said, we ought not allow ourselves to be followed into concluding that someone is actually a philosopher, simply on the say-so of their speaking of having a philosophy, even of believing in one -- or still yet attributing it to others and claiming to have been shaped and reformed by it.  After all, people are prone to say all sorts of things about themselves, true, false, sage, foolish, deceptive, furtive, bold, craven -- even sometimes to reveal to the attuned eye or the attentive ear realities they only dimly know themselves. 

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.