Volume 1, Number 1 (Fall 2003)
Anselm's Proslogion: The Desire for the Word
Eileen C. Sweeney
Boston College
ABSTRACT
The paper confronts an important tension in Anselm's project in the Proslogion that mirrors a
conflict in how the Proslogion has been read. Some readers see the Proslogion as the successful
search for necessary and indubitable arguments, while others read the work as expressing pious
incapacity to understand God. Historians of philosophy tend to do the first, historians of religion
and spirituality, the second. The paper argues that Anselm's project in the Proslogion, is one that
Anselm himself views as both necessary and paradoxical. The paper examines the way in which "faith
seeking understanding," the ontological argument, and the derivation of the divine attributes from the
original formula in the Proslogion repeat this pattern of yielding conclusions which are both necessary
and paradoxical.
|
