Saint of the Day — April 21. Kimi K2.5 provisional draft — awaiting Sonnet polish pass.
Life
St. Anselm was born of noble parents at Aosta in Piedmont about the year 1033. [Butler "st-anselm"] His pious mother gave him an early tincture of piety, and the impressions her instructions made upon him lasted his entire life. [Butler "st-anselm"] At fifteen he petitioned an abbot to admit him into the monastic state, but was refused out of apprehension of his father's displeasure. [Butler "st-anselm"] During his subsequent studies he neglected to cultivate the divine seed in his heart, lost this inclination, and after his mother's death fell into tepidity, beginning to walk in the broad way of the world. [Butler "st-anselm"]
The ill usage he met with from his father induced him to leave his own country, where he had made a successful beginning in his studies. [Butler "st-anselm"] After three years of diligent application in Burgundy and in France, invited by the great fame of Lanfranc, prior of Bec in Normandy, he went thither and became his scholar. [Butler "st-anselm"] On his father's death, Anselm advised with Lanfranc about the state of life he was to embrace—whether to live upon his estate employing its produce in alms, or to renounce it for the monastic and eremitical life. [Butler "st-anselm"] Lanfranc, feeling an overbearing affection for so promising a disciple, durst not advise him in his vocation, fearing the bias of his own inclination; instead he sent him to Maurillus, the holy archbishop of Rouen. [Butler "st-anselm"] By him Anselm was determined to enter the monastic state at Bec, and accordingly became a member of that house at the age of twenty-seven in 1060, under the abbot Herluin. [Butler "st-anselm"]
Ministry
Three years after his profession, Lanfranc was made abbot of St. Stephen's at Caen, and Anselm prior of Bec. [Butler "st-anselm"] Several monks murmured on account of his youth, but by patience and sweetness he won the affections of them all. [Butler "st-anselm"] He had so great a knowledge of the hearts and passions of men that he seemed to read their interior in their actions, discovering the sources of virtues and vices and knowing how to adapt to each proper advice and instructions. [Butler "st-anselm"]
While prior at Bec, he wrote his Monologium, explaining the metaphysical proofs of the existence and nature of God, and his Proslogium, or contemplation of God's attributes. [Butler "st-anselm"] These and his like works show the author to have excelled in metaphysics all the doctors of the church since St. Augustine. [Butler "st-anselm"] He also wrote On Truth, On Free-will, and On the Fall of the Devil, or On the Origin of Evil. [Butler "st-anselm"] His reputation drew to Bec great numbers from all the neighbouring kingdoms. [Butler "st-anselm"]
Herluin dying in 1078, Anselm was chosen abbot of Bec at forty-five years old, of which he had been prior fifteen. [Butler "st-anselm"] The abbey of Bec being possessed of some lands in England, this obliged the abbot to make his appearance there in person at certain times. [Butler "st-anselm"] King William himself, whose title of Conqueror rendered him haughty and inaccessible to his subjects, was so affable to the good abbot of Bec that he seemed to be another man in his presence. [Butler "st-anselm"]
The metropolitan see of Canterbury had been vacant since the death of Lanfranc in 1089. [Butler "st-anselm"] King William Rufus, who succeeded his father in 1087, usurped the revenues of vacant benefices and deferred his permission to fill the sees. [Butler "st-anselm"] In 1093, seized with a violent sickness, the king signed a proclamation releasing prisoners and granting general pardon, and nominated Anselm to the see of Canterbury. [Butler "st-anselm"] The good abbot made all decent opposition imaginable, alleging his age, want of health, and unfitness for public affairs, but they forced a pastoral staff into his hands and sung Te Deum on the sixth of March, 1093. [Butler "st-anselm"] He was consecrated with great solemnity on the fourth of December, 1093. [Butler "st-anselm"]
Anselm had not been long in possession of the see when the king, intending to wrest Normandy from his brother Robert, made large demands on his subjects. [Butler "st-anselm"] Not content with the five hundred pounds offered by the archbishop, the king insisted on a thousand for his nomination, which Anselm constantly refused to pay. [Butler "st-anselm"] The king was extremely provoked and from that day sought to deprive Anselm of his see. [Butler "st-anselm"] Finding the king always seeking occasions to oppress his church, Anselm set out from Canterbury in October 1097 in the habit of a pilgrim, landed at Witsand, and made his way to Rome. [Butler "st-anselm"]
At the council of Bari in October 1098, convened to effect reconciliation of the Greeks with the Catholic Church, the pope called aloud for Anselm: "Anselm, our father and our master, where are you?" [Butler "st-anselm"] Causing him to sit next to him, he told him the occasion required his learning and elocution to defend the church. [Butler "st-anselm"] Anselm spoke with such learning, judgment, and penetration that he silenced the Greeks, and all present joined in pronouncing anathema against those who should deny the procession of the Holy Ghost from both the Father and the Son. [Butler "st-anselm"]
King William Rufus being snatched away by sudden death on the second of August, 1100, St. Anselm made haste to England, whither he was invited by King Henry I. [Butler "st-anselm"] He landed at Dover on the twenty-third of September and was received with great joy. [Butler "st-anselm"] But harmony was of no long continuance: the new king required Anselm to be re-invested by him and do the customary homage, which the saint absolutely refused. [Butler "st-anselm"] In 1102 he held a national council at Westminster in which, among other things, it was forbidden to sell men like cattle, which had till then been practised in England. [Butler "st-anselm"]
The contest over investitures became every day more serious. [Butler "st-anselm"] At last the king and nobles persuaded Anselm to go in person and consult the pope; he embarked on the twenty-seventh of April, 1103. [Butler "st-anselm"] Pope Paschal II condemned the king's pretensions and excommunicated those who should receive church dignities from him. [Butler "st-anselm"] Receiving on his return an intimation from Henry forbidding him to proceed unless he would conform, Anselm remained at Lyons and then retired to his abbey of Bec. [Butler "st-anselm"] The king coming into Normandy in 1106, articles of agreement were drawn up between him and the archbishop, which the pope readily confirmed. [Butler "st-anselm"] St. Anselm returned to England in 1106 and was received by the whole kingdom in triumph. [Butler "st-anselm"]
Death and veneration
The last years of his life, his health was entirely broken. [Butler "st-anselm"] Having for six months laboured under an hectic decay with an entire loss of appetite, under which disorder he would be carried every day to assist at mass, he happily expired laid on sack-cloth and ashes at Canterbury on the twenty-first of April, 1109, in the sixteenth year of his episcopal dignity and of his age the seventy-sixth. [Butler "st-anselm"] He was buried in his cathedral. [Butler "st-anselm"]
By a decree of Clement XI in 1720, he is honoured among the doctors of the church. [Butler "st-anselm"] The Roman Martyrology records: "At Canterbury, in England, of St. Anselm, bishop, renowned for sanctity and learning." 04-21
Why the Church remembers him
The Church remembers St. Anselm as a theologian who gathered the doctrine of the points he treated into a regular system, in a clear method and a chain of close reasoning—the method which St. John Damascene had followed among the Greeks and which Peter Lombard and all the schoolmen have followed ever since. [Butler "st-anselm"] Whence St. Anselm is regarded as the first of the scholastic theologians. [Butler "st-anselm"]
His exterior occupations did not hinder him from continuing to employ his pen in defence of the church. [Butler "st-anselm"] Towards the end of his life he wrote On the Will, On the Concord of Divine Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Free-will, and a tract On Azymes against the Greeks. [Butler "st-anselm"] His epistles are divided into four books, and his dogmatical writings stick close to the fathers, especially to St. Augustine. [Butler "st-anselm"]
It was rather his delight to be employed in the interior exercises of devotion, being himself one of the most eminent masters in the contemplative way. [Butler "st-anselm"] His ascetic works—Exhortations, Prayers, Hymns and Meditations—are written with a moving unction and express a most tender devotion, especially to the cross and passion of Christ, to the holy sacrament of the altar, and to the Blessed Virgin. [Butler "st-anselm"] Eadmer, his disciple and constant companion, relates that the saint used to say that if he saw hell open and sin before him, he would leap into the former to avoid the latter. [Butler "st-anselm"]
He had a most lively faith of all the mysteries and great truths of our holy religion, and by the purity of his heart and an interior divine light he discovered great secrets in the holy scriptures. [Butler "st-anselm"] His hope for heavenly things gave him a wonderful contempt and disgust of the vanities of the world. [Butler "st-anselm"] His fortitude was such that no human respects could ever turn him out of the way of justice and truth, and his charity for his neighbour seemed confined by no bounds. [Butler "st-anselm"] He seemed to live, says his faithful disciple, not for himself but for others; or rather so much the more for himself by how much the more profitable his life was to his neighbours and faithful to his God. [Butler "st-anselm"]
Sources
- Butler (T5) — Butler, Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints. 1842 Dublin public-domain edition.
Locators cited: "st-anselm" Source: https://archive.org/details/livesoffathersma
- Mart (T4) — Roman Martyrology (1897 Baltimore reprint of the 1749 Benedict XIV edition).
Locators cited: 04-21 Source: https://archive.org/details/romanmartyrology00cath
— Benjamin Rodriguez