Being and good : a study of the influence of Platonism on St. Anselm
Date
1976
Authors
Burton, Rosemary Jean
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Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to examine certain assumptions which emerge very clearly in St. Anselm's writings. These are the belief that things are good by the mere fact of existing, and that they can be arranged in a scale in which degrees of goodness and degrees of existence correspond. These assumptions, it is contended, can be shown to be derived, albeit indirectly, from Plato.
The first chapter, after a brief discussion of the sources likely to have been directly available to St. Anslem, and of his attitude towards reason and authority, discusses the evidence for this conception of the correlation of being and goodness in Anselm's earliest major work, the Monologion. It is shown that the arguments for the divine existence given in the Monologion depend upon a theory of universals (realism) which had its origin in Plato, and upon a hierarchical conception of nature derived, by way of the Neoplatonists, from Plato. In this view of the universe God, or the Form of Good, has an existence superior in degree and kind to that of all other beings, which themselves have a greater or lesser degree of both goodness and existence according to the closeness of their resemblance to God or the Good.
The second chapter discusses Anselm's Proslogion, and it is argued that Anselm's ontological proof for God's existence also depends upon Platonic realism and upon the doctrine that being itself implies goodness. The concept of a 'necessary existent', known by a priori reasoning, which Anselm regards as a superior kind of knowledge to the reasoning by which we know other things, is shown to have parallels with the Platonic theory of Forms and with Platonic epistemology.
The third chapter discusses a group of three of Anselm's dialogues. In the first, De Veritate, the idea of truth is very closely connected to the moral notion of 'rightness', and things are said to be true insofar as they are based upon a supreme reality or truth. These notions, it is pointed out, very clearly recall Plato's doctrine of Forms, especially of the Form of the Good, as being the sources of both the goodness and the reality of particulars. The second dialogue, De Libertate Arbitrii, with its doctrine that the 'power' to do evil is actually weakness, it is shown to contain parallels to with Boethius, Plotinus, and Plato. The third dialogue, De Casu Diaboli, depends, it is argued, upon Platonic and Plotinian ideas of moral evil as a disruption of the natural order, and of the identity of evil and non-being.
The conclusion is that there is ample evidence for the influence of Platonic thought upon Anselm. Since the ideas discussed have been shown to have close similarities to those of St. Augustine, who is known to have been strongly influenced by Platonism, it can safely be concluded that the main source for Platonism in Anselm is Augustine, though Boethius probably also had some influence. These Platonic notions are, naturally, considerably altered through being Christianized but are still recognizable as basically Platonic when we meet them in Anselm. This Platonism, it is concluded, though never explicitly acknowledged, constitutes one of the fundamental assumptions of St. Anselm's thought.