THAN WHICH NOTHING IS GERATER

Saint Anselm（1033-1109）defined God as “that than which nothing is greater”（Proslogium,or Faith Seeking Understanding）.This is obviously a philosophical rather than a religious expression of God’s nature,but that is just that Anselm wished to achieve.After all,he had been educated in a Benedictine monastery in France and at the height of his career was named the Archbishop of Canterbury in England.Personally he had no doubts about the existence of God.What he was groping for was an adequate reply to someone who would ask,“What can I believe?” As he says on the first page of his Proslogium,“I began to ask myself whether there might be found a single argument which would require no other for its proof than itself alone;and alone would suffice to demonstrate that God truly exists,and that there is a supreme good requiring nothing else,which all other things required for their existence and well-being…” His purpose,then,was to construct a proof for the existence of God,that is,to provide an intellectual support for belief.His proof appeared to be designed for both the unbeliever who might be persuaded by it and for the believer who,as he says,“seeks to understand what he believes”.His “proof” is known as “the ontological argument”.The word ontological is the key to his argument,as it is composed of the two Greek words ontos（being）and logos（knowledge）—hence the knowledge of being.

We will elaborate Anselm’s line of reasoning in our discussion entitled “Religion”.For the present we can state the short version of his argument as follows：Whenever we utter the word God we know that we are thinking of a supreme being or that than which to greater can be conceived.But there is something greater than that we can merely conceive（which is after all only an idea in our heads）;that greater is the actual existence of a being than which there is no greater.Again we can see why this is called the ontological argument since it is based upon a distinction between different levels of being.The “being” of a human being is very short;a person’s being depends upon another person’s being（parents）.By contrast,says Anselm,God’s being is perfect,depends upon no other being,and is the being upon which everything else depends.Although Anselm was excited by the simplicity and the logical power of his argument,his successors,especially Saint Thomas Aquinas（1225-1274）,thought it would be far more impressive to base an argument not simply upon our “ideas” but rather upon evidence derived from obvious human experiences.Since then,a rich literature has been produced by philosophers providing quite different answers to the question “What can I believe?”