April
21, 2018
CollectNativity, Washington, D.C.
“Bishop
St. Anselm sought out and taught the depths of divine wisdom” (cf. Collect).
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National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
Washington
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St.
Anselm (1033-1109) embodied the universalism of the Church, at least in his own
time. He was born in Italy, became a
monk in France, and was made archbishop of Canterbury in England.
His
career also had a universalism about it.
In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, he was “a monk with an intense
spiritual life, an excellent teacher of the young, a theologian with an
extraordinary capacity for speculation, a wise man of governance, and an
intransigent defender of the Church’s freedom … who was able to harmonize all
these qualities, thanks to the profound mystical experience that always guided
his thought and action.”[1]
When
his father wouldn’t let him enter the Benedictines, young Anselm adopted a
dissipated life and began to travel.
Arriving in Normandy, he regained his faith and morals under the
influence of the great abbot and teacher Lanfranc and at age 27 became a
monk. In short order, he succeeded
Lanfranc as the monastery’s master teacher.
He was remarked for his respect for the freedom of his students (“an
excellent teacher of the young”).
The
monastic schools were the forerunners of the universities, and Anselm is
considered the father of scholastic theology—that great system of thought, the
“theology of the schools,” that flourished in the medieval universities in the
12th, 13th, and 14th centuries and whose finest examples are St. Thomas Aquinas
and St. Bonaventure. It was Anselm who
defined theology as “faith seeking understanding,” which is still as fine a
definition as ever, and it was alluded to in today’s Collect, when we prayed “that
our faith in God may aid our understanding.”
He
wrote many books, the best known being those concerning the existence of God
and the mystery of redemption.
Concerning our redemption, Anselm wrote a book titled Why did God become human? in
which he said that since our sins have offended an infinite God, they require of
us an infinite form of satisfaction or atonement, which, of course, we’re
incapable of offering. Only a Redeemer
who combines the infinite nature of God and our humanity could do so—and that
was the answer he posited to his question, “Why did God become human?”
After
the Norman conquest of England in 1066, just a few years after Anselm entered
the monastery, William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy and now king of England,
brought many Norman monks and clergy to his new kingdom, including Lanfranc,
whom he made archbishop of Canterbury.
So Anselm was elected abbot in his place and governed the monastery as
wisely as he had taught there.
And
following the deaths of both William and Lanfranc, the new king and the English
bishops (who were all Normans) forced Anselm to become archbishop. He was unwilling, but eventually he had to
accept a papal command. He was
successful in reconciling the old Anglo-Saxon Church and the new,
Norman-dominated one. He was much less
successful as a man of the world, as a politician, and soon had such great
quarrels with 2 successive kings over the rights of the Church—concerning
taxes, property, and episcopal appointments—that twice he had to go into exile
(like his successor some 80 years later, Thomas Becket). It seems that the liberty of the Church to
carry out its mission to preach the Gospel in word and action is always in
jeopardy from governments, which have a natural tendency to want to rule
everything about the lives and even the souls of their subjects. It was true in the Roman Empire, in Anselm’s
England, behind the Iron Curtain, in Red China—and remains a danger in our own
Western world.
Anselm
was a great devotee of our Blessed Mother and a great man of prayer. All of his study aimed at knowing God better,
at entering more deeply into contemplation.
One of his prayers is: “I pray, O
God, to know you, to love you, that I may rejoice in you. And if I cannot attain to full joy in this
life, may I at least advance from day to day, until that joy shall come to [its
fullness].”[2] Perhaps that prayer was the inspiration for
our Collect petition that our faith-aided understanding “may give delight to
our hearts.” For delight—eternal joy—is
the final object of all our believing, our study, our following and loving Jesus.
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