- Length
- 128 pagesWilliams, Anselm: Basic Writings, Hackett, 2007
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Proslogion
Twenty-six short chapters of prayer containing the most argued-about proof in the history of philosophy. Anselm wanted one argument that stood on its own, found it, and nine hundred years of philosophers have been unable to agree on whether it works.
- Date
- 1078
- Author
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Region
- Bec, Normandy
- Language
- Latin
- 1903 English, Sidney Norton Deane Public domain Attested
- 1965 English, M. J. Charlesworth With Latin text and commentary; in copyright Attested
- 2007 English, Thomas Williams Current teaching standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
The argument has been refuted and revived in every century since it was written, most recently in modal logic, and no consensus exists about what is wrong with it or whether anything is.
What the book says
A short book, written as a prayer, containing in its second and third chapters the argument that has never stopped being argued about. Anselm sets out to find a single proof that needs no other - his earlier book had assembled many - and the one he finds turns on what the word God means. Take the phrase: that than which nothing greater can be thought. Even someone who denies that God exists understands the phrase, and what is understood exists in the understanding. But if it existed only there, then something greater could be thought, namely the same thing existing in reality as well. So that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot exist only in the understanding, on pain of being something than which a greater can be thought. The third chapter pushes further: such a being cannot even be thought not to exist, which is why the psalm's fool who says in his heart that there is no God has not managed to think what he says. The rest of the book is not argument but consequence, working out what follows about God's justice, mercy, timelessness and simplicity, and ending in a meditation on a light too bright to see by.
What it argues
That the concept of God, properly understood, cannot be the concept of something that might not exist. The argument does not appeal to the world at all - no motion, no causes, no design - which is what makes it unlike every other proof and what makes it suspicious to many readers. Its whole weight rests on the claim that existing in reality is greater than existing only in thought, and that a being defined as unsurpassable therefore cannot be confined to thought. Anselm is clear that he is not trying to reach belief by reasoning; he says he believes in order to understand, and the proof is offered as understanding sought by a faith that already has its object.
What answered it
Gaunilo immediately, with the lost island. Aquinas two centuries later, on different grounds: he accepts that God's existence is self-evident in itself and denies that it is self-evident to us, since we do not have the kind of grasp of God's essence the argument requires - which is why he offers five proofs that start from the world instead. Kant delivered what is usually taken to be the decisive blow, arguing that existence is not a predicate and adds nothing to a concept. And then it revived: Malcolm, Hartshorne and Plantinga reconstructed it in modal terms in the twentieth century, and the argument is a live topic again.
How it argues
As a prayer, in the second person, addressed to God throughout. This is not decoration: the argument appears inside an address to the being whose existence is at issue, which is precisely the position Anselm thinks the enquiry starts from. The reasoning itself is compressed into two chapters and is short enough to quote entire, which is part of why it has had the career it has - almost every philosopher who has written on God has had to say something about it, and there is no barrier of length or technicality to doing so.
The moment
Bec in the 1070s, a Norman abbey that had become a centre of learning, with Anselm as prior and later abbot before being made archbishop of Canterbury and spending much of that office in exile over disputes with two kings. The Proslogion belongs to the quiet years. Eadmer's account of its composition is unusually vivid - the argument pursued, abandoned as a distraction, arriving unbidden, and the first draft mislaid twice.
How it travelled
Attached to its own refutation, which is rare. The manuscript tradition carries Gaunilo's objection and Anselm's answer alongside the text, so a reader has always encountered the argument together with the best contemporary case against it. Beyond that it travelled simply by being short and startling: Descartes produced a version, Leibniz tried to repair it by first proving the concept coherent, and every history of philosophy since has had a chapter on it.
The strongest objection
Kant's, though Gaunilo's is the more entertaining. If existence is not a property that a thing can have or lack in the way that being red or being wise is, then adding it to a concept adds nothing, and the move from a concept of an unsurpassable being to that being's existence never gets off the ground - a hundred imagined coins have exactly the content of a hundred real ones. Defenders reply that necessary existence, which is what the third chapter actually claims, may be a property even if plain existence is not. That reply is where the modern argument lives, and it has not concluded.
Why read it
Because the whole of it takes an hour and the crucial passage takes five minutes, and because reading the argument in its own setting - inside a prayer, by someone not trying to convince an unbeliever - changes how it reads. Get an edition that prints Gaunilo and Anselm's reply, which is the only honest way to encounter it.
- First printed
- 1491
- First in English
- 1903
- Digitised
- Yes
The Proslogion, Gaunilo's reply and Anselm's response circulate together and are printed together in every serious edition. Schmitt's critical edition of the complete works is the scholarly text.
Deane's 1903 English is public domain. Williams, Charlesworth and Davies-Evans are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live, and unusually so for a medieval argument. The modal reconstructions of the last sixty years are taken seriously, and the debate now turns on whether a necessary being is possible - which shifts the question rather than settling it, since if such a being is possible it exists, and if it is impossible it does not.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain and Deane's English is too, but the argument turns on the exact rendering of a single formula and the older versions differ from current usage. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Anselm has one argument or two - the second chapter and the third are not obviously the same proof, and much twentieth-century work turns on treating the third as the real one. Whether the enterprise is a proof at all, or an exercise in understanding conducted from inside faith, is argued from his own statement that he believes in order to understand. And whether the formula should be rendered as a description of a being or as a rule for thinking about one bears directly on whether the objections land.