ŚLĄSKIE STUDIA HISTORYCZNO-TEOLOGICZNE

This paper discusses the two-phase publication of the Proslogion and its significance for understanding the nature of Anselm’s endeavour in the treatise. The introduction highlights the importance of making sense of the peculiar combination of argument and devotion in the treatise. It also pays attention to an important recent article by R. Sharpe (2009), which effectively shatters the authoritativeness of the editorial matter in F. S. Schmitt’s edition of Anselm’s works. The second part offers a critical discussion of Schmitt’s and Sharpe’s views concerning the early versions of the Monologion and Proslogion. The third part investigates the evidence related to the publication history of the Proslogion, arguing that Anselm incorporated all the additional features, including the exchange with Gaunilo, at the same time. To elucidate why the publication history of the Proslogion is vital for the interpretation of the treatise, the last part of the paper offers an outline explaining Anselm’s objectives in the two-phase publication. It is proposed that the Proslogion should be read as Anselm’s subtle attempt to defend and justify the kind of rational method that he had been using in the Monologion.

Anselm`s thinking is a stimulating enterprise – inspiring since the later Middle Ages and early modern thinkers who were smart enough to avoid the gap of circulus vitiosus deus (Friedrich Nietzsche) seeing in God the identity of human mind, absorbed by the errors of void mirroring.
It is evident that the Gerberon edition of Anselm`s works (1675) and the modern edition by Dom Schmitt (since World War II , finished 1961) inspired Anselmian studies. Here we are focussing on 20th century’s studies since Guardini`s and Karl Barth`s insights into the ecclesiastical dimension of Anselm`s thought (opposing misleading formalized analytical interpretations even before these became fashionable). After all, we can see in Anselm a landmark thinker of frontiers – starting from giving voice to the wishful thinking of the good in itself and leading to see what is given to us, starting from monologue to dialogue. In this way we can see in Anselm`s work a path – directly through the tremendous self-denying errors of modernity.

This paper deals with observing the peripatetic motives and influences of Boethius on the education and thinking of the late 10th and 11th centuries. The connection between Anselm‘s proofs of G od‘s existence from Monologion and Proslogion and so called mensa geometricalis, i.e. the abacus, a counting board used for arithmetical calculations and geometrical demonstrations circa 1,000 A.D., is presented as the entirely natural way of peripatetic interpretation of the intellectual world of Anselm of Canterbury, initiated by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, through a search for other traces of Aristotelian heritage in the 11th century and in the period around the year 1,000 (primarily under the influence of Boethius‘s texts).