St. Anselm, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor of the Church

St. Anselm, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Benedictine monk, who fought intrepidly for the faith and liberty of the Church. He is one of the greatest philosophers and mystics of the eleventh century. He died in 1109.

99 years ago today, on the 8th centenary of St. Anselm's death, Pope St. Pius X issued the Encyclical Letter Communium Rerum (On St. Anselm of Aosta).

In this Letter, the pope praises St. Anselm especially for his tireless defense of the liberty of the Church (in the era of the investiture controversy), and for his intellectual defense of the true doctrines of the Church. He is thus a salutary example in an age in which the rights of the Church are so often set at naught, and in which the pernicious heresies of modernism have spread to so many members of the Church.

I have chosen the good saint as something of a personal theological patron especially for his speculative doctrine of the atonement, found especially in Cur Deus Homo (Why God [became] Man), and usually known as the "satisfaction theory" of the atonement.

In my history classes at Ave Maria College, the prof. used to say that St. Anselm (d. 1109) was the first really brilliant thinker since St. Augustine (d. 430)! High praise indeed considering the intellectual merits of such luminaries as Leo the Great and Gregory the Great.

St. Anselm is often called the Father of Scholasticism: "Anselm laid the foundations of the true principles of philosophical and theological studies which other most learned men, the princes of scholasticism, and chief among them the Doctor of Aquin, followed, developed, illustrated and perfected to the great honor and protection of the Church." (CR, 55)

St. Anselm, ora pro nobis!