Anselm of Canterbury, Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas form three examples of intelligence, study, reasoning and faith that have given rise to distinguished schools of thought and whose influence traverses history to the present day.
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselmo of Canterbury was born in Aosta (northern Italy) in 1033 or 1034. Son of noble parents, descendants of a Germanic people, the Longobard; after the death of his pious mother he began a dissipated life and had a conflict with his father that caused him to leave his father's home. Attracted by the fame of Lancfranco, a teacher at a school in Normandy, he joined the school and, in 1060, entered the Norman abbey of Bec as a monk. In 1078 he was elected abbot of Bec, succeeding Lanfranc. In 1093 he was ordained to the archbishopric of Canterbury, where he died in 1109.
Following in the wake of Augustine, he defined Theology as faith that seeks to understand. He is known in good measure for his famous argument, which is at the beginning of his work Proslogion and which was qualified by Kant as ontological because it seeks to demonstrate the existence of God from the very idea of God, without resorting to creation, nor to Sacred Scripture, nor to the patristic tradition:
Therefore, O Lord, You who give the intelligence of faith, grant me, insofar as this knowledge may be useful to me, to understand that You exist, as we believe, and that You are what we believe.
We believe that above You nothing can be conceived by thought. It is a question, therefore, of knowing whether such a being exists, for the fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." But when he hears it said that there is a being above whom nothing greater can be imagined, this same fool understands what he heard said; the thought is in his intelligence, even if he does not believe that the object of this thought exists. For it is one thing to have the idea of any object and another to believe in its existence. For, when the painter thinks beforehand of the picture he is going to make, he certainly possesses it in his intelligence, but he knows that it does not yet exist, since he has not yet executed it. When, on the contrary, he has painted it, he not only has it in his mind, but he also knows that he has done it. The fool must agree that he has in his spirit the idea of a being above which no greater thing can be imagined, for when he hears this thought enunciated he understands it, and all that is understood is in the intelligence: and no doubt this object above which nothing greater can be conceived does not exist only in the intelligence, for, if it did, it might at least be supposed that it also exists in reality, a new condition which would make a being greater than that which has no existence except in pure and simple thought.
Therefore, if this object above which there is nothing greater were only in the intelligence, it would nevertheless be such that there would be something above it, a conclusion that would not be legitimate. There exists, therefore, in a certain way, a being above which nothing can be imagined, neither in thought nor in reality.
Ricardo de San Victor
Richard of St. Victor was a native of Scotland and lived from 1110 to 1173. Incorporated in Paris to the Abbey of Saint Victor, he was elected vice prior in 1157, later succeeding his master Hugo as prior, a position he held until his death. Dante Alighiere, in his Divine Comedy, placed Richard in Paradise, in the fourth sphere, where he placed the wise men. In his tenth Canto Dante says:
Look also at the flaming spirit/ of Isidore, of Bede and of Richard/ who to consider was more than man.
Richard of St. Victor uses three ways to prove the existence of God:
First. - The temporality of perceived beings supports the need for an eternal Being.
Second. - In the beings that we perceive by the senses, an increase of perfection can be observed among one another, which makes necessary the existence of a Being that is all perfection.
Third. - Starting from the beings that are grasped by the senses, it is possible to deduce the essences that make them up and that find an exemplary model in the essence of God.
Augustine of Hippo, in his work De Trinitatesays: If you see Love, you see the Trinity. Richard of St. Victor, in his work De Trinitate, developed this vision of the divine Trinity proposed by St. Augustine. He tries to answer three great questions about the one and triune Christian God:
Why the divine unity implies at the same time plurality.
2ª.- Why this plurality is of three.
3rd: How these three Persons are to be understood.
In order to respond, it starts from Love as a fundamental category:
There is no true love without otherness. Love for oneself is not true love. If the only God is perfect love, he must be several Persons.
2º.- Three Persons and not two because perfect love does not close in duality, but is directed to a third: the Condilectus, the common Friend of the other two Persons.
Ricardo de San Víctor reviews the concept of Person, a category used for the understanding of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
a) Person is, above all, the subject of oneself. Only in the possession of oneself can the essence, that is to say, nature, be personalized (nature is the quid, what I am, and person is the quis, what I am): as a person, I possess myself and can act as the master of my own reality.
b) Person is what he is according to his origin. Being master of oneself, one must specify the way in which one is. The Father is master of his own divine nature as inborn. The Son is master of his own divine nature received from the Father. The Holy Spirit possesses the same nature that he receives from the Father and the Son.
c) Person is communion: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit possess their divine nature insofar as they give, receive and share it; they possess themselves insofar as they give themselves in love.
The Trinity, then, is one and the same divine nature that is realized in three Persons. The God revealed to us in the Gospel is a trinitarian God. A solitary and pretrinitarian God, without internal love, is inconceivable to the Christian eyes of Richard of St. Victor. According to the Gospel, God is Love and the process of realization of that Love is the Trinitarian mystery, Life as surrender, reception and encounter, shared existence.
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas was born in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in the north of the Kingdom of Naples, around 1225. In 1244 he took the habit of St. Dominic in Naples. He studied with Alberto Magno in Paris and Cologne. In 1252 he returned to Paris where he became a master of theology. He died in Fossanova in 1274 before he was 50 years old. He was canonized in 1323. His most important work is the Summa theologica.
Thomas affirms that, just as theology is founded on divine revelation, philosophy is founded on human reason. Philosophy and theology must be true: God is the same truth and there can be no doubt about revelation; reason, used correctly, also leads us to the truth. Therefore, there can be no conflict between philosophy and theology. He demonstrates the existence of God in five ways, which are the famous five ways:
By movement: there is movement; everything that moves is moved by a motor; if this motor moves, it will in turn need another motor to move it, and so on, until it reaches the first motor, which is God.
2ª.- By the efficient cause (cause that has the power to achieve a certain effect): there is a series of efficient causes; there must be a first cause, because otherwise, there would be no effect, and that first cause is God.
3ª.- For the possible and the necessary: generation and corruption show that the entities we observe can be or not be, they are not necessary. There must be a necessary entity by itself, and it is called God.
By the degrees of perfection: there are various degrees of all perfections, which approach more or less to the absolute perfections, and therefore are degrees of them; there is, therefore, an entity that is supremely perfect, and is the supreme entity; this entity is the cause of all perfection and of all being, and is called God.
By the government of the world: intelligent entities tend to an end and to an order, not by chance, but by the intelligence that directs them; there is an intelligent entity that orders nature and impels it to its end, and that entity is God.
The idea that animates the five ways is that God, invisible and infinite, is demonstrable by his visible and finite effects.
