Homily for the Memorial of St. Anselm
April
21, 2021
Collect
St.
Theresa, Bronx, N.Y.
This
is slightly adapted from the homily I gave on St. Anselm 3 years ago in
Washington.
“Bishop St. Anselm sought out and taught the depths of divine wisdom” (cf. Collect).
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]
Anselm
was 27 when became a Benedictine monk in Normandy and before long became the
monastery’s master teacher. Like
Benedict XVI when he was theology professor Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, Anselm was noted
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 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? He said that
since our sins have offended an infinite God, they require of us an infinite
form of 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 how he answered 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 the abbot of
Anselm’s monastery, whom he made archbishop of Canterbury. So Anselm was elected abbot and governed the
monastery as wisely as he had taught there.
Following
the deaths of both William and the archbishop, the new king and the English
bishops (who were all Normans) forced Anselm to become archbishop in 1093. 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, including in our country, where the rights of the Christians to
follow our beliefs in schools, hospitals, social agencies, and private
business, and of medical professionals to follow their consciences, is gravely
threatened.
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, and our following and loving
Jesus.
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