Overview

Anselm of Canterbury is an important and early source of two key themes in Western thought and religion that are hard to reconcile. In his arguments based only on reason, Anselm develops a model of pure and neutral rationality. In his intensely personal and passionate prayers, meditations, and letters of spiritual direction, Anselm is the forerunner of later experiential and emotional spirituality. Scholars have been largely content to compartmentalize these different elements in Anselm, but his most famous works, the Monologion and Proslogion, are both prayerful meditations and argumentative assays of """"reason alone."""" Any account of Anselm as a thinker or of his place in Western intellectual and religious history must make sense of this enigma. In Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word, Eileen C. Sweeney addresses these tensions, offering a new cumulative and comparative interpretation of Anselm's writings. She finds common concerns and patterns across his prayers, logical analysis, and Christological and Trinitarian speculation. Sweeney argues that seeing the common structure and goal in the many topics and genres in the Anselmian corpus yields a new way of considering much-discussed questions in Anselm scholarship--the relationship of faith and reason, the search for """"necessary reasons,"""" the concurrence of freedom and grace. It also sheds further light on Anselm's engagement with non-Christian objectors and on the emotional content of Anselm's prayers and letters. Sweeney's study offers a comprehensive picture of Anselm's thought and its development, from the early, intimate, monastically based meditations to the later, public, proto-scholastic disputations. She reveals Anselm as a thinker as relentless in his exposure of ambiguity, paradox, and separation as in his pursuit of certainty, necessity, and unity.

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Reviews

Offers some highly illustrative examples of how authoritative writings, both scriptural and patristic, play their role in Anselm's endeavor to clarify the content of faith with the aid of reason. Sweeney is well informed about recent studies on different areas of Anselm's thought and makes good use of them. The work is carefully documented and well written... Highly recommmended to anyone striving to achieve a historically grounded understanding of Anselm's oeurve. - Journal of the History of Philosophy Rarely is a book reviewer more grateful for the chance to engage a demanding study than in this case. Sweeney, professor of philosophy at Boston College, provides the academy with a superb, chronological overview and an in-depth and judicious exposition of Anselm of Canterbury's impressive oeuvre... Her book is warmly recommended as reading for anyone seriously interested in Anselmiana. - Speculum It is difficult to do justice to this excellent book in a brief review, for Eileen Sweeney offers us a wide-ranging account of what she calls Anselm's project, doing so through careful attention to Anselm's texts and discussions of Anselm in the secondary literature. - New Blackfriars A landmark piece on Anselm, a narrative in which episodes are arguments punctuated by paradox and desire (duly supplemented, of course, with an encyclopedic consideration of the secondary literature). Anyone proposing an alternative narrative, the narrative of a reckless rationalist or a mystagogue for example, will find Sweeney a formidable opponent. - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly A vivid, compelling intellectual portrait, and certainly one of the most significant studies of Anselm to be published in the last two decades. - Choice

Author Information

Eileen C. Sweeney is professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille.

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