page_title: Anselm of Canterbury
section_title: Dialogues
hierarchical_section_title: Anselm of Canterbury / Writings / Dialogues
caption_attribution_description: English: An illuminated O featuring an archbishop—presumably Anselm—from the copy of Anselm's Prayers and Meditations found in MS. Auct. D. 2. 6, a 12th-century illuminated text collected by the Benedictine nunnery at Littlemore and held since c.1672 by Oxford's Bodleian Library.
context_page_description: Saint Anselm of Canterbury, also called Anselm of Aosta after his birthplace and Anselm of Bec after his monastery, was an Italian Benedictine monk, abbot, philosopher and theologian of the Catholic Church, who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. After his death, he was canonized as a saint; his feast day is 21 April.
  As archbishop, he defended the Church's interests in England amid the Investiture Controversy. For his resistance to the English kings William II and Henry I, he was exiled twice: once from 1097 to 1100 and then from 1105 to 1107. While in exile, he helped guide the Greek bishops of southern Italy to adopt Roman rites at the Council of Bari. He worked for the primacy of Canterbury over the bishops of York and Wales but, though at his death he appeared to have been successful, Pope Paschal II later reversed himself and restored York's independence.
context_section_description: All of Anselm's dialogues take the form of a lesson between a gifted and inquisitive student and a knowledgeable teacher. Except for in Cur Deus Homo, the student is not identified but the teacher is always recognizably Anselm himself.
  Anselm's De Grammatico ("On the Grammarian"), of uncertain date, deals with eliminating various paradoxes arising from the grammar of Latin nouns and adjectives by examining the syllogisms involved to ensure the terms in the premises agree in meaning and not merely expression. The treatment shows a clear debt to Boethius's treatment of Aristotle.
  Between 1080 and 1086, while still at Bec, Anselm composed the dialogues De Veritate ("On Truth"), De Libertate Arbitrii ("On the Freedom of Choice"), and De Casu Diaboli ("On the Devil's Fall"). De Veritate is concerned not merely with the truth of statements but with correctness in will, action, and essence as well. Correctness in such matters is understood as doing what a thing ought or was designed to do. Anselm employs Aristotelian logic to affirm the existence of an absolute truth of which all other truth forms separate kinds. He identifies this absolute truth with God, who therefore forms the fundamental principle both in the existence of things and the correctness of thought. As a corollary, he affirms that "everything that is, is rightly". De Libertate Arbitrii elaborates Anselm's reasoning on correctness with regard to free will. He does not consider this a capacity to 'sin but a capacity to do good for its own sake (as opposed to owing to coercion or for self-interest). God and the good angels therefore have free will despite being incapable of sinning; similarly, the non-coercive aspect of free will enabled man and the rebel angels to sin, despite this not being a necessary element of free will itself. In De Casu Diaboli, Anselm further considers the case of the fallen angels, which serves to discuss the case of rational agents in general. The teacher argues that there are two forms of good—justice (justicia) and benefit (commodum)—and two forms of evil: injustice and harm (incommodum). All rational beings seek benefit and shun harm on their own account but independent choice permits them to abandon bounds imposed by justice. Some angels chose their own happiness in preference to justice and were punished by God for their injustice with less happiness. The angels who upheld justice were rewarded with such happiness that they are now incapable of sin, there being no happiness left for them to seek in opposition to the bounds of justice. Humans, meanwhile, retain the theoretical capacity to will justly but, owing to the Fall, they are incapable of doing so in practice except by divine grace.
caption: An illuminated archbishop—presumably Anselm—from a 12th-century edition of his Meditations
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