Ian Logan's aim is to place Anselm's Proslogion historically (he speaks of himself as offering an ‘audit trail’) and to comment on the worth of its argument. He starts by noting what he takes to be the Proslogion's origins, paying particular attention to what we know of what Anselm might have read and to authors such as Augustine and Boethius. Basing himself on part of a text now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS Bodley 271), he then presents a Latin text and translation of the Proslogion, the Pro Insipiente (Gaunilo's much cited reply to Anselm), and the Responsio (Anselm's less cited reply to Gaunilo). Next, he provides a commentary on the Proslogion running to around 29 pages. In his remaining chapters we find a discussion of Anselm's Responsio, an account and discussion of the Proslogion's medieval reception, an account and discussion of the Proslogion's reception from the early sixteenth century to the twentieth century, and an account and discussion of how the Proslogion has fared at the hands of some contemporary philosophers. Logan concludes his book by remarking on the significance of Anselm's argument. His suggestion, in line with what we find throughout his book, is that Anselm succeeded in doing what he set out to do.
It is unfortunate that what people often think that they know of the Proslogion comes from sources which are not to be trusted when it comes to exegesis. Hence, for example, it is commonly and mistakenly said that Proslogion 2 and 3 amount to what Descartes argues in certain works and to what Kant attacks in his Critique of Pure Reason. A great virtue of Logan's text is that it shows to what extent many have been deceived in their impressions of what the Proslogion has to say and how it relates to what others than Anselm have written. Logan's historical approach to Anselm is excellent and much to be welcomed. Having done as good a job as can be done to relate Anselm to his predecessors (here, of course, a lot of guess work is needed), Logan continues firmly and successfully to show how numerous discussions of the Proslogion (or works often thought to have a bearing on it) have failed to engage with the text as it stands. Take, for example, what he has to say about Karl Barth's Anselm, Fides Quaerens Intellectum (English translation, 1960). Barth's line was that Anselm never dreamed of offering a philosophical argument for the existence of God in the Proslogion. Rather, says Barth, his approach to God in that work was that of Barth himself (an avowed opponent of natural theology considered as an attempt to argue for the existence of God in philosophical terms). Yet, as Logan rightly observes, ‘Barth's account is flawed because he does not take account of the fact that Anselm is a dialectician who has great confidence in the power of reason’ (p. 169). To be sure, Barth and Anselm are at one when it comes to the importance of faith and the radical distinction between God and creatures. But Anselm had a philosophical nose that Barth clearly lacked. And Logan shows this to be so not only in his discussion of Barth but also throughout his book. At one point he observes: ‘The monastic, prayerful Anselm, the author of the Orationes sive Meditationes, who reads scripture for spiritual nourishment, is not to be too strongly distinguished from the Anselm who applies the skills of the grammarian and dialectician to scripture’ (p. 20). The remark captures Anselm very nicely. ‘That Anselm has been consistently misunderstood and misrepresented’, says Logan, ‘is a central thesis of this book’ (p. 1). In my view, Logan has well defended this thesis.
I have to say that I am puzzled by some of the other things than he has to say. Speaking about Proslogion 2 he says that Anselm ‘does not draw the conclusion that God exists from his argument’ (p. 91). But Anselm, surely, does just that, for, having noted that God is ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’, he claims in Proslogion 2 that, considered as such, God must exist both in intellectu (in the understanding) and in re (in reality). In a perfectly obvious sense, Proslogion 2 does conclude that God exists. Again, I do not see that Logan has, as he seems to believe, disposed of the Kantian charge that the ‘Ontological Argument’ wrongly takes existence to be a ‘predicate’. According to Logan, Anselm is concerned with whether or not existence is a predicate only in the case of ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’. Anselm, says Logan, holds that ‘existence subtracted from the concept of God … leaves one with the concept of something else’ (p. 160). Yet as Logan presents Anselm's way of thinking it seems as though Anselm is taking existence in re to be a perfection of some sort. On p. 95, for example, Logan suggests that Anselm is asking us to believe that ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ is in re since ‘if it exists in re, it must be the possessor of greatness in a sense which is clearly greater than if it exists in intellectu alone’. In that case, however, it looks as though Anselm is working with the idea that existing in re is a perfection, which is at least part of what Kant's ‘existence is not a predicate’ slogan is denying.
In replying to this slogan as employed in critiques of Anselm one might, of course, deny that Anselm wished to suggest that existing in re is a perfection. This approach to Anselm was adopted by the late Elizabeth Anscombe in her paper ‘Why Anselm's Proof in the Proslogion Is Not an Ontological Argument’ (Thoreau Quarterly, 17, 1985). Logan, though, and in my view unfortunately, does not pursue it and makes no mention of Anscombe's paper. If Anscombe is right in her reading of the Proslogion, as I think she is, then Logan is wrong in his reading. Unlike Logan, she thinks, as I do, that Anselm's Proslogion 2 argument depends on the premise that we can think of there being something greater than something in the mind, a premise not asking us to suppose that being in re makes something to be great/perfect/good in some sense or other. This premise of Anselm was one that he defended at some length in his Responsio.
All of that being said, however, there is much more to praise than to worry about in Logan's distinguished volume, which provides a much needed reference work for anyone wanting seriously to understand and think about the Proslogion. I think that Logan misrepresents Anselm in certain ways. But he does a fine job when it comes to giving readers a sense of Anselm in his historical context.
