Anselm Revisited
[“God is a being than which none greater can be imagined. A being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist” (Anselm [c.1033-1109], Proslógium).]
O Lover,
My initial contact with Anselm’s ontological argument for Your existence was in an Essentials of Christianity course my concluding semester of college (1962). His formulation, together with several other arguments deployed by Aquinas (1225-74), all of which sought to make the case for You and theism via logic and the cognitive faculty, greatly excited me at the time. After all, I was progressing from a pre-reflective received worldview to one both rational and owned. You, Lord of the Universe, demonstrably rescued from nonbeing by way of erudition of the intellect. Heady stuff!
In my youthful melding of zeal and naiveté, I could not have anticipated the brief shelf-life of such an argument, one first mounted a half-millennium before the enlightenment! But a fuller awareness of the implications of this dearth of staying power would come only after decades devoted to theological reflection about You more than opening to receive You experientially. Medieval (or modern) arguments might reassure those on the quest for the grail of doctrinal certitude, but they were unlikely to escort me into being encountered by You, the Lover. Besides, positing existence as a necessary part of the ultimate hypothetical deity, one “than which none greater can be imagined,” seemed like a parlor card trick, an intellect’s slight-of-hand, and I was not buying.
Concurrent with the above evolution was a growing suspicion that beyond the reach of sense, reason, image, imagination and the affective might be terrain where an alternative perception was operative. Initially disproportionately populated by Christian mystics, I would later run into mystics there of many sorts. I was skewered by commonalities within this aggregate: their trans-cognitive vocabulary—terms like awareness, intuition, consciousness, experiential, attentiveness, intimation; and their propensity toward a deep wisdom of the heart more than soaring argument of the head. And so for more than a half-century Anselm’s construct lay stashed in an unvisited drawer.
However, of late an entirely different thrust of Anselm’s “than which none greater can be imagined” has been surfacing within me. Rather than intellectual argument, the phrase has been gently and teasingly goading me to think about You less in favor of simply being attentive to You, and this via the mystics’
“alternate perception.” Anselm’s phrase “than which . . . imagined” seems now to be drawing me both to the Abyss who is You, undemarcatable by any human imaginings, and to the profound inadequacy of all such human god-talk. What was first Anselm’s rational argument is becoming a trans-cognitive escort into the Unspeakable, not only beyond but of a different sort than all beyonds! But unlike the aggregate of possible beyonds, all of which remain objects which I as subject might assess, You oxymoronically envelop, permeate, “Self-diffuse” (Bonaventure), and transcend that entire structure, nothing excepted. Anselm’s phrase is being transformed into a sipping participation in You, The One, the “I AM” (Ex 3:13,14), the “All in All” (I Cor 15:24-8).
This acknowledgment of Your transcending of both all this-and-thats and the subject/object structure as such is presently this trekker’s wormhole into the Oneness who is You toward which we humans recurringly and variously grope. It is this singularity (advaíta [“not seconded,” non-dualism]) of which the mystical edge of Indian religiosity has been singing for millennia; it is this singularity, hinted at by the transcendence/immanence tension in Christian theology, that some of its panentheistic outliers (e.g., Eckhart) have been humming since the late medieval period. And this day a deeper meaning of Anselm’s argument is added to this faint humming, at least in the experience of this plodder. Glória!
