To fall in love: St Anselm and the point of faith and reason

From the outside, a cathedral can seem like a daunting structure, especially if it’s built in the Gothic style. Take Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral: its dark stone and colourless windows may initially strike us as a little forbidding, but once we’re inside, our perception changes. With the sun shining in, the whole space glows and we can appreciate its gorgeous, masterful detail.

Something similar happens when we talk about faith. While the term faith might be misunderstood by many people today, many great thinkers and evangelists have helped us to understand that it is not antithetical to reason or vice versa. Instead, there is an essential harmony between the two. In Fides et ratio, for example, St John Paul II likens faith and reason to ‘two wings’ with which we rise to contemplation. If we have one without the other, we’ll never get off the ground.

St Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), whose feast is celebrated on 21 April, contributed significantly to our Catholic understanding of faith and reason. While this 11th-century bishop might at first seem remote from the concerns of 21st-century society, he is arguably more relevant than ever.

Anselm’s motto was fides quaerens intellectum, which translates to ‘faith seeking understanding’. In one of his most famous texts, the Monologion, he resists the idea that faith simply believes because it should believe, describing this kind of faith as ‘dead’. What he proposes instead is a ‘living faith’, one that doesn’t just believe something but believes in it (§78). If this distinction is hard to grasp, then think back to the image of the cathedral: there’s a big difference between believing that cathedrals are beautiful because we’re supposed to and stepping foot in a cathedral and letting its beauty transform our vision, enticing us to fall in love with it.

Even before Anselm, this model of faith was promoted by St Augustine, whose words credo ut intelligam—‘I believe in order to understand’—convey something very similar to Anselm’s idea of faith seeking understanding. It’s a principle that can be applied outside of religious belief too. Sometimes it’s not enough to examine something from the outside; we have to take a risk and see it from the inside before we can understand what’s going on.

This can certainly be the case when it comes to our relationships. Examining someone analytically or from a distance will rarely give us much insight into who they really are. We have to interact with them and let them speak. Only when we are in relationship with a person and are listening to them attentively can we truly begin to understand them. When we allow that to happen, we might be pleasantly surprised.

Another thing Anselm puts in context for us is the nature of reason, asking what it means for us to possess a rational nature. In the same text, the Monologion, he says that reason allows us to discover things and distinguish between them. Through reason, we’re able to discover the good and distinguish it from the bad; we can make distinctions between the just and the unjust, the true and the false. This is all basic to what it means to be a rational animal.

But what’s the point of it? Why do we have this kind of nature? Anselm says that in the same way that love is the point of faith, love is also the point of reason. As we discover what is good and true, we must also fall in love with it, otherwise our reason is useless to us (§68).

For Anselm, to discover the good is invariably to discover the Supreme Good; it is to discover God, however long it might take us to get there (and hopefully we do). This is why God created us with rational natures: so that we might fall in love with him. But we will never fully love him, Anselm says, unless we strive to understand or know him. Faith, energised by love, seeks understanding. Or in the words of Jesus himself, the goal is to love God ‘with all your heart, with all your understanding and strength’ (Mark 12:33).

As many have observed, there is a deep hunger for meaning in our world today. Pope Francis talks about going to the peripheries, and in this he includes the ‘existential peripheries’, those places where people are lost and struggling to find answers to their deepest questions. Archbishop Peter A Comensoli has recently spoken about the burden we place on young people by encouraging them to create rather than discover the meaning of their lives. Saddled with such impossible burdens, we quickly lose any sense of what faith and reason are ultimately for, forgetting that both are intended to guide us in our ongoing quest for the true, the good and the beautiful.

Anselm might at first seem an unlikely guide through current crises of meaning, but he offers elegant answers to some of the common misconceptions that have contributed to these crises, setting our feet firmly back on the path to God and to a truly meaningful life.