should be debarred from consecration on account of having done homage to the king. In accordance with this compromise appointments were immediately made to several churches which had long been destitute of incumbents without any investiture by staff and ring from lay hands. On Sunday, the 11th, Anselm consecrated several men with whom he had not been able to hold communion to bishoprics, including William Giffard to Winchester, and Reinhelm to Hereford, who had refused to be consecrated by Gerard of York, Roger to Sarum, and William of Warelwast, so long his opponent but now his friend, to Exeter (Hist. Nov. iv. 466). Anselm did not long survive the termination of his protracted struggle for the rights and liberties of the church; and during this brief remainder of his life he was repeatedly attacked by severe illness. But in the intervals he was actively engaged, and we see the same indomitable spirit at work. He not only laboured to enforce the canons of London against simony and the marriage of the clergy, but largely through his efforts the king was moved to put down false coining with a strong hand, and a stricter discipline was maintained amongst his followers, whose acts of violence, when he made his progresses, had long been a cause of misery to the people. Anselm also promoted the erection of Ely into an episcopal see to relieve the great diocese of Lincoln, and he upheld the paramount dignity of the see of Canterbury against the pretensions of Thomas, archbishop elect of York, who tried to evade making his profession of obedience, but was compelled to do so by a decree passed in a gemot at London. Nor were his literary labours diminished; he carried on a wide correspondence with distinguished persons, clerical and lay, who sought his counsel in all parts of Christendom, including Alexander, king of the Scots, Murdach, king of the Irish, and Baldwin, king of Jerusalem; and he wrote a treatise ‘concerning the agreement of foreknowledge, predestination, and the grace of God with free will.’ The composition of this treatise was delayed by frequent interruptions of illness and increasing weakness. At last he became so feeble that he had to be carried in a litter from place to place instead of riding on horseback. Till within four days of his death he was carried daily into his chapel to attend mass. Then he took to his bed. On Palm Sunday, being told by one of those who stood around him that they thought he was about to leave the world to keep his Master's Easter court, he replied, ‘If His will be so, I shall gladly obey it; but if He pleased rather that I should yet remain amongst you till I have solved a question which I am turning in my mind about the origin of the soul, I should receive it thankfully; for I know not any one who will finish it after I am gone.’ This wish, however, was not to be fulfilled. On Thursday he could no longer speak intelligibly, and on Wednesday, 21 April, at dawn he passed away, in the year 1109, the sixteenth of his pontificate and the seventy-sixth of his life. He was buried in the cathedral at Canterbury, next his friend Lanfranc, in the body of the church in front of the great rood; but his remains were afterwards removed to the chapel, beneath the south-east tower, which bears his name, and there they now rest (Eadmer, Vit. Ans. ii. c. 7; Hist. Nov. iv. 467, ad finem). If guileless simplicity, spotless integrity, faithful zeal, and patient suffering for righteousness sake give any one a claim to be called ‘saint,’ Anselm certainly deserved the title. And it was by virtue of these qualities, combined with inflexible firmness, courage, and straightforward honesty of purpose, more than by his intellectual gifts, great as they were, that he won the day in his struggle first with lawless insolence, and then with diplomatic craft. After his death he became the object of increasing veneration to men of his own time, and to later generations. Dante, in his vision of Paradise, saw him ‘among the spirits of light and power in the sphere of the sun.’ A halo of miraculous legend gathered round the story of his life. Yet, strange to say, the first demand for his canonisation made by Thomas Becket was not successful, and he was not formally placed on the roll of saints till 1494, when he suffered what has been well called the ‘indignity of canonisation’ at the hands of Roderic Borgia, Pope Alexander VI (Church's Anselm, p. 301).
A catalogue of Anselm's writings is given below. His fame as a philosopher and theologian rests mainly upon three treatises—the ‘Monologion,’ the ‘Proslogion,’ and the ‘Cur Deus Homo?’
The ‘Monologion,’ which, as the name implies, is in the form of a continuous discourse as distinguished from a dialogue, is an attempt to prove the existence and nature of God by pure reason without the aid of Scripture or of any appeal to authority. It is an application of the Platonic theory of ‘ideas’ to the demonstration of christian doctrine. Some efforts in this direction had been made by the (so-called) Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings had become well known in western Christendom through a
