1. Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm on faith seeking understanding

Anselm informs the reader in his preface to the Proslogion that his original title for the work was Fides Quaerens Intellectum, faith in search of understanding.Footnote ³ What he attempts in the text is to try to understand the nature of the God in whom he believes. So, he begins with an opening prayer to God to enlighten his understanding and concludes the prayer at the end of Section 1 with a fundamental assertion about the nature of faith and knowledge, understanding is impossible without belief:

This sets the stage for his famous arguments for God’s existence in Sections 2 and 3. When removed from the context of the rest of the Proslogion Anselm might seem like he is arguing for God’s existence from reason alone, but it is clear when read after the opening prayer that it is really a continuation of that prayer because Anselm addresses the argument to God. The argument is an exercise in what Anselm says it is, a believer in God seeking to understand the nature of God’s existence, viz. that God exists in such a way that his existence must be understood as necessary.Footnote ⁵ And he makes this argument while believing in God yet without appealing to theological or biblical authority, but by using reason.Footnote ⁶

Based on how Anselm conceives of the relationship between faith and knowledge in the Proslogion, it is clear that for Anselm faith is necessary to proceed to knowledge of God, but I would like to suggest that Anselm’s process of faith seeking understanding applies to many other things besides God. So, while I will not provide a complete account of how Anselm conceives of the relationship between faith and reason in this essay, I will highlight some key features of Anselm’s approach to faith and reason that pertain to how Anselm can help us see why the Nicene Creed requires the believer to believe in the Church and how we might proceed from that belief to understanding.

A first piece of evidence in support of my claim that belief seeking understanding applies beyond God is that Anselm thinks that we move from belief, accepting something as true based on the authority of another, to understanding for ourselves why something is true about many everyday, non-divine objects of our knowledge. As Marilyn McCord Adams points out in her discussion of Anselm on belief seeking understanding, most commentators focus on how Anselm uses this move in his inquiries about God, but ‘[l]ess noted are verbal echoes in dialogues about less mysterious subjects (viz., the motivational psychology and just deserts of rational creatures), where the student uses such words simply to acknowledge that he is a beginner, who is only now undertaking a systematic study of beliefs already acquired’.Footnote ⁷ In noting the role of belief as an often necessary gateway to understanding, Anselm is following in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo who says in Book Six of his Confessions, ‘Unless we believed what we were told, we would do nothing at all in this life’.Footnote ⁸ If it is true that for Anselm (following Augustine) that we can move from belief to understanding about not only God but many less mysterious objects of our knowledge, then the move from faith to understanding can apply to the Church, which, after all, is a mystery tied up with the mystery of God according to St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.

A second feature of Anselm’s understanding of the relationship of faith seeking understanding that is relevant to what I am concerned with in this paper is that for Anselm when it comes to items of the Christian faith, the Christian should seek understanding but be careful not to reject what cannot be comprehended, nor presume that one’s reason is the final arbiter on matters of faith. In a letter to Fulk, the Bishop of Beauvais, Anselm clearly lays out how Christians should proceed to understanding in creedal things: ‘A Christian should progress through faith to understanding, not reach faith through understanding or, if he cannot understand, fall away from faith. Indeed, someone who can attain understanding should rejoice, but someone who cannot understand should venerate what he is unable to comprehend’.Footnote ⁹ For Anselm, while the human person has a natural drive to understand because of their rational nature, this does not permit the Christian to reject what she is required to believe but cannot understand. This would seem to apply just as much to what the Creed says about God as to what it says about the Church.

A final feature of how Anselm conceives of belief seeking understanding that is worth considering in its relation to the Church is to notice Anselm’s comment in his dedication of Cur Deus Homo to Pope Urban II, ‘that the understanding which we gain in this life stands midway between faith and revelation. It follows, in my view, that, the nearer someone comes to attainment of this understanding, the nearer that person approaches to revelation, for which we all pant in anticipation’.Footnote ¹⁰ Anselm insists that no matter how much we desire to know in this life we will always fall short of perfect understanding. Faith seeking understanding does not mean that faith will be left behind. In this life, faith will always be necessary. While Anselm is speaking in this context about understanding the mystery of why God became man, it would also seem to apply to the mystery of the Church in which we are required to believe.

2. Anselm on the Church

Before examining the details of how Anselm might help us think through the Nicene Creed’s claims about the Church, it ought to be established that Anselm in fact accepts the Nicene Creed. While the contemporary reader might assume this goes without saying, Anselm’s contemporaries did not seem to be as sure. In fact, Anselm acknowledges that Roscelin appealed to both his and Lanfranc’s authority in his heretical claim that if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God, this requires the claim that all three members of the Trinity became incarnate in the person of Jesus. If this is not the case, then the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct things. So, in the same Letter (136) quoted above, Anselm makes it clear to Bishop Fulk in no uncertain terms that he fully endorses the three creeds of the Church and he instructs Fulk that, if necessary, he should read aloud his letter at the council called by the Archbishop of Reims to discuss Roscelin’s teaching: ‘I want all men to be aware of my real opinion: I hold what we confess in the Creed when we say ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator’, and ‘I believe in one God, the Father almighty, the maker’, and ‘Whoever would be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith’, and all that follows’.Footnote ¹¹ When given the opportunity, Anselm wants to make it as clear as possible that he fully subscribes to the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds in their entirety. Of course, we might not always want to take Anselm’s statement at face value. (For example, his claim in the letter of dedication in the Monologion that he is essentially not going beyond the blessed Augustine in de Trinitate obscures the point that his method of inquiry is different than Augustine’s even if they come to similar conclusions). But, if Anselm is telling the truth that he fully endorses all that the creeds contain, then one way he could be vindicated is to find in his writings evidence of his belief that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

While Anselm does not have a systematic treatise on the Church, this does not mean that he is uninterested in the Church or that he thinks ecclesiology is irrelevant for theology. He is deeply concerned with the Church from his time teaching monks as a prior at Bec to his battles with the Norman kings over investiture and other church matters in his role as Archbishop.Footnote ¹² Many of his writings emerge from a concern to understand the faith that he received from the Church of which he is a part and to which he recognizes he must submit.Footnote ¹³ As he says in On the Incarnation of the Word: ‘Indeed, no Christian ought to argue how things that the Catholic Church sincerely believes and verbally professes are not so’.Footnote ¹⁴ But, since Anselm does not have a specific treatise laying out his ecclesiology the reader has to see what Anselm either says about the Church when writing about other matters or what he implies about ecclesiology from his writings.

An example of how Anselm’s thinking about the Church may be discovered by what he implies or explicitly states when writing about other subjects may be seen in the way he goes about defending the Latin use of the filioque clause in the Creed in On the Procession of the Holy Spirit. In this work, he defends the position of the Latin Church on the filioque clause against the Greeks, trying to prove from what the Greek and Latin Church share that the Greeks should accept the filioque: ‘I should make use of the faith of the Greeks and the things that they undoubtedly believe and profess, as the surest arguments to prove what they do not profess’.Footnote ¹⁵ This passage and his entire approach to his argument in this work suggest a number of claims about the Church that are relevant for an account of Anselm’s ecclesiology. First, it shows that Anselm is deeply concerned with the Church’s unity. He is concerned that both the Greek and Latin Church accept the truth of the filioque clause because it can be demonstrated by reason that it follows from the Creed that the Latins and Greeks both accept. Also, he consciously writes this work as a member of a particular tradition within the Church (the Latin/Western Church), but his goal is to show that it is part of the whole, that it is catholic, by getting the Greeks to accept what the Latin Church accepts. The passage also nicely illustrates Anselm’s use of what faith seeking understanding means in the context of the Church. He defends the Latin Church’s position in order to try to convince the Greek Church to accept this position and he does so by moving from faith to understanding. That is, he proceeds from what the Latins and Greeks both believe about the gospels, the Trinity, and other established doctrines, and then he uses reason to demonstrate that a true understanding of what we believe should lead to the conclusion that the filioque clause is true and the best way to understand the procession of the Holy Spirit, i.e., from the Father and the Son. For Anselm, this process of faith seeking understanding takes place within the framework of believing that what the Church teaches must be true.

Now that I have addressed some preliminaries about how Anselm approaches the Creed and assumptions he makes about the Church, I will look at how Anselm might help illuminate what the Creed means by describing the Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. I will discuss each of these attributes in turn, but it should be noted that these terms are distinct but not entirely separable.

One – What does it mean to call the Church one? We might think that the Creed is simply asking us to believe in the bare fact that the Church is one because every Church worships the same God. Or, maybe the Church is one because there is only one true Church that Christ established and has continued through apostolic succession. Or, the Church is one in a mysterious sense because it is Christ’s body.

I do not want to suggest that Anselm rejected those senses of what it means for the Church to be one. However, there is another sense in which we can talk about the Church as one: The Church is one in an eschatological sense, its unity is rooted in divine reality but it is a unity that has not been fully accomplished. In John 17, Jesus says,

In this passage, we can see both the ontological unity of the Church because it is rooted in the Church’s being part of Christ and Christ is one with the Father, but also that this unity is something to be achieved. For Anselm, we can see this desire for unity, this sense of what it means for the Church to be one, in his work mentioned above, On the Procession of the Holy Spirit, where he argues from the Greek and Latin Church’s unity to show by reason the errors of the Greek Church for refusing to accept the filioque clause. He seems to be working for the kind of unity that Jesus wanted his disciples to find, not a facile unity but a unity grounded in the mutual acceptance of what is true. Based on his desire to see the Greeks accept what the Latins believe about the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, it is clear that Anselm desires a unity of not just what the two Churches believe but also a unity in what they understand. It is not enough to have unity in what the Creed explicitly states, but the Churches should have unity in what follows clearly by reason from what the Creed explicitly states. Anselm thus advocates for a unity, a oneness that is much stronger than a oneness of mere belief. The unity of the Church must be sought and found through the process of faith seeking understanding. The unity of the Church is not rooted in its shared belief alone, but it is rooted in the hope that reason can unify the Church to understand the full implications of what the Church believes.

Holy – The second attribute of the Church given in the Nicene Creed is that she is holy. The church may be considered holy in a fundamental sense in that she is both Christ’s body and Christ’s bride. She has therefore been made holy by God. As the author of 1 Peter states about the Church, ‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light’.Footnote ¹⁷ For Anselm, the Church is holy in that she has been made holy by God through the work of his Holy Spirit. But, Anselm also thinks that God’s Holy Spirit is given to the Church through the communion of saints.Footnote ¹⁸ Because the Church is one throughout time and space, she shares in the holiness of the saints who have gone before and are currently interceding for the Church on earth before the Father.

This distinctively Anselmian contribution to thinking about what it means for the Church to be holy may be found in his Prayer by a Bishop or Abbot to the Patron Saint of his Church.Footnote ¹⁹ The prayer makes it clear that the holiness of the Church is not due to the current bishop or pastor, nor their flock, but due to the holiness of the saint to whom it is dedicated. The prayer continually contrasts the sinfulness of the penitent bishop or abbot with the holiness of the patron. In fact, the bishop/abbot of the Church is not really the pastor of the church, the patron is: ‘I, I say, whom God and you after God, either ordered or permitted (I know not which) to be called abbot of this church under your patronage, under your leadership, constituted under your name’, and later in the prayer,

According to this prayer, the holiness of the Church derives ultimately from Christ, but Christ’s holiness is significantly mediated through the holiness of the saint to whom the Church is dedicated and who is the true pastor and shepherd of the souls of the congregants. So, for Anselm to believe that the Church is holy is to believe that she participates in Christ’s holiness by being part of the communion of saints. Her holiness is thus inextricable from the Church’s unity, her oneness, through time.

Catholic – By Catholic, of course, Anselm does not simply mean the Latin or the Western Church. As we have seen, in On the Procession of the Holy Spirit he distinguishes the Latin from the Greek Church but argues for a unity between them based on what they hold together, which is the Creed. Obviously when the Greek Church recites the Creed they are assuming that the Church being Catholic does not imply the Roman or Western, but the universal Church.

There are at least two ways in which we can see Anselm thinking of the Church as Catholic. One way he uses the term seems to be in a simple historic sense (probably the time of greater unity between Latin and Greek Churches). For example, in the Prologue to the Monologion, he states, ‘In the course of frequent rereadings of this treatise I have been unable to find anything which is inconsistent with the writings of the Catholic Fathers, and in particular with those of the Blessed Augustine’.Footnote ²¹ Another way he thinks of the Church as Catholic is that it is rooted in what is universally held to be true. The fact that the universal Church accepts a doctrine means that the truth of the doctrine must be recognized. To provide one example from On the Incarnation of the Word: ‘Indeed, no Christian ought to argue how things that the Catholic Church sincerely believes and verbally professed are not so, but by always adhering to the same faith without hesitation’.Footnote ²² If the Catholic, i.e., universal, Church accepts something as true, then it is incumbent on every Christian to accept it as true whether one can understand it or not. The Christian must accept this as true not because it is something the Church universal happens to accept as a historical accident, but the Catholic Church accepts it because it is true.

Apostolic – On a fundamental level, the Church is apostolic in the sense that, through her Bishops, she has apostolic authority. Based on his account of the necessity of the Church and not the King to have the final authority to appoint Bishops to their episcopal offices (for example, when he declares his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury by Rufus void until he receives permission from the Archbishop of Rouen), we can presume that Anselm would accept this understanding of what it means for the Church to be apostolic.Footnote ²³ Another example is found in the prologue to the Proslogion in which he references Archbishop Hugh of Lyons’ apostolic authority as the primary reason for him to disseminate both the Monologion and Proslogion under his own name,

The Archbishop’s command must be obeyed because it is apostolic. Just as the apostles were given authority to lead the Church, so their successors have authority to lead. So, for the Church to be apostolic at least means that it is led by Bishops who have apostolic authority. However, despite the fact that Anselm clearly thinks that the Church is apostolic in the sense that it derives historically from Christ through the apostolic succession of his bishops, this would not seem to be the only sense in which Anselm thinks of the Church as apostolic.

I think in Anselm’s writing and life we can tease out another sense in which the Church is apostolic. The Church is apostolic in the ancient definition of an apostle as one who is sent. The Church is sent on a mission to, most fundamentally, be the body of Christ in the world by living the fullness of God’s kingdom. In the prayer to the patron saint of the church referenced above, the penitent refers to the patron saint of the Church as an ‘apostle of God’.Footnote ²⁵ This is unsurprising if the Church were to be dedicated to Peter or Paul, but it is clear from the opening lines of the prayer that it may be prayed to any patron saint whether they were an original apostle, bishop, or another saint. I am not sure how far to take this because it is admittedly a passing reference, but this brief passage suggests that to be apostolic may be something more universally given to the whole Church and not just those in the apostolic line, in that any saint is an apostle for the Church because they mediate Christ’s holiness and authority. Thus, the people of God may be holy and apostolic because through the patron saint they can participate in revealing the holiness of God to the world. For Anselm, it may not be too much of a stretch to say that to believe in the apostolic Church is to believe that any of her members may live a life that is wholly and pleasing to God.

3. Conclusion: believing in the Church

By way of conclusion, I will return to the second question that I asked near the beginning of the paper: How do we move from faith in the church to understanding? As I mentioned in the introduction, there have been many commentators who have explored how belief seeking understanding operates when it comes to knowing God. To summarize a few of these points from my discussion in Section 1:

1. 1. Understanding is impossible without first believing in God. – Following Augustine, Anselm holds that we must initially believe in what the Church and Scriptures teach about God before we can begin to understand what we are told to believe.

2. 2. Understanding God thus comes about by reflecting on our experience of God. – To believe in God means that we begin to trust him by not just relying on what an outside authority says, but we begin to understand who God is, his perfect love, goodness, faithfulness, etc., for ourselves. We learn to understand God’s nature not from the outside but from the inside.

3. 3. Reason or understanding cannot be the final arbiter on matters of faith. – Anselm suggested that if we cannot comprehend something about God that we are required to believe, or even if what we are told to believe seems to contradict our reason, the solution is to fall back on what we believe. Faith seeking understanding does not mean that reason then becomes the sole standard by which we are to judge what we must believe.

4. 4. Finally, our understanding and knowledge of God is always incomplete. – Following Augustine, Anselm does not think we will ever get beyond faith in any real sense. Faith seeking understanding does not mean that we leave faith behind when we come to understand. Faith is not a childish thing that we give up as we move into the maturity of understanding.

I will focus on how these features of Anselm’s account of faith seeking understanding may apply to the Church.

To 1: Just as when it comes to God, so we will not understand the essence of the Church without first believing in the Church’s oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. This is particularly true as the Church does not always obviously embody these four attributes. So, what does it mean to believe in the Church? It is helpful to recall Anselm’s distinction in the Monologion between believing that something is true versus believing in something.Footnote ²⁶ When discussing this distinction as it pertains to belief about God, Anselm says that it is essential not just to believe that certain claims about God are in fact true but also one must have the kind of faith in God that leads to the pursuit of God. Mere belief that God exists and has certain attributes does not make one live in God’s kingdom:

For Anselm, progress towards God requires that one seeks to become like the object of her belief. To do this requires the experience of relationship with God.

To 2: Since belief in God, that is coming to more fully understand what we believe, is impossible without experience, then we can say something similar for the Church. To understand what the Church is requires being a participating member of it. And the only way to be a participating member in the Church is through love, which Anselm recognizes is the fundamental Christian duty: ‘Then what shall I, a beggar and poor, a creeping thing of dust, what return can I make to my God, except to obey his commandment from my heart? For this is your commandment, that we love one another’.Footnote ²⁸ Love for others is the only possible bond among all Christians. To love the Church is not to love it as an idea but to love it as what it is, the people of God. Thus, we will only make progress in our understanding of the Church by reflecting on the experience of loving the Church.

To 3: Since reason or understanding cannot be the final arbiter on matters of faith in God, it cannot have the final say on the Church either, since the Church is ultimately defined in relation to God, as God’s people. Just as Anselm calls on the seeker after God not to presume that her reason is capable of making the ultimate decision about what is true concerning God, the same would be true of the Christian’s rational reflection on the Church. Anselm’s emphasis on the role of the experience of love in coming to know God is an important contribution that Anselm makes that sometimes gets overlooked in the faith and reason discussion in Anselm. We must not forget about the role of desire or love in this trajectory.Footnote ²⁹ To return to a passage I quoted above from On the Incarnation of the Word:

Just as we cannot come to know God without loving Him, so we cannot come to understand the Church without loving and humbly participating in it.

To 4: Anselm’s claim about reason never being the final arbiter of what we cannot comprehend about divine matters, whether God or God’s Church, suggests that our understanding and knowledge of these matters will never be complete. We thus return to the eschatological nature of what we are called to believe about the Church. I discussed this in the prior section in relation to the Creed’s claim that the Church is one, but it is true of all the other attributes. Just as God’s kingdom is both here and not yet, so the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic reality of the Church is both true now and becoming more realized. They are realities to be acknowledged and attributes to be believed in because they await their ultimate fulfillment in hope. But, as I suggested above, to believe in the Church requires participating in her life.Footnote ³¹ To more fully understand what it means for the Church to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic requires that each member who recites the Creed participates in making the Church more fully embody these characteristics. Thus, Anselm would claim that we cannot come to understand the depths of what it means for the Church to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic without desiring and working towards its unity and holiness, humbly submitting to its universal teachings and desiring every member to be an apostle of God to the world.