Journal of the History of Ideas

Abstract:

The contention informing this essay is that the side-effects of the so-called Berengarian controversy about the Eucharist jeopardized the first steps Anselm of Bec, later of Canterbury († 1109), was taking as a learned author in the late 1070s. Anselm wrote his first treatises, Monologion and Proslogion, in an atmosphere heated by the exploitation of anti-intellectual rhetoric and the public condemnation of Berengar’s teaching by his enemies. This identification of Anselm’s predicament prompts a re-evaluation of the subject matter and literary aspect of Proslogion, the work that delivers his famous ontological argument for the existence of God.