of God in some way parallels Plato’s Agathon: it is both everything and beyond everything. It is both a starting point and a notion, more the former than the latter.88 The idea of God is not an innate idea for Anselm: it is found in and by faith and is “demonstrated” by the epistemological concept of fittingness within the larger metaphysical structure of participation and the analogia entis. So that the idea of God is not “self-evident,” and Anselm is not inferring existence from essence, and least of all is the idea of God as that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought a “clear and distinct idea” in any modern sense. It is closer to Saint Thomas’s fourth way than might at first be noticed.89 Saint Thomas’s rejection of the existence of God as self-evident must be taken as a cautionary tale and not a rejection of our underlying immediacy as such. The demonstrations for the existence of God are directed towards those who must recover what lay hidden as foundational for the first principles. This is why his Five Ways get us, beyond a reasonable doubt, to God but also place us squarely within the mystery and incommunicability of the divine. Saint Thomas paradoxically rejects self-evidence on grounds not incompatible with Anselm’s own defense of self evidence—namely, the unavoidability of supernatural meaning particularly when beings naturally lead to Being-as-such. Any self-evidence reducible to the intellect would, for Saint Thomas, destroy the truth that God is not merely the highest in the ladder of beings but of a different order altogether, a Being whose demonstration must also demonstrate his mystery, refusing reflection in order to be its grundsatz:
God is greater than all we can say, greater than all that we can know; and not merely does he transcend our language and our knowledge, but he is beyond the comprehension of every mind whatsoever, even of angelic minds, and beyond the being of every substance.90
Thomas’s rejection of self-evidence seeks to protect the truer recovery of our connatural self-evidence, that the arche is the telos not only in the metaphysical but also in the epistemological registers: we seek what we already possess, we are dispossessed of what we never possessed. This is why Saint Thomas argues that we can demonstrate God’s existence—that this difference-as-such exists, but what exactly that Being is cannot be reducible to the mind. This “that” which is being demonstrated is first triggered by the undeniability of first principles which place us interrogatively within the Five Ways.
The name qui est [‘He who is’] expresses ‘Being’ [esse] as absolute and not determined through any addition; and Damascene says, therefore, that it does not signify what God is but as it were an infinite ocean of substance which is without determination. When therefore we proceed towards God by the way of remotion, we first deny of him anything corporeal; and then we even deny of him anything intellectual, according as these are found in creatures, such as ‘goodness’ and ‘wisdom’; and then there remains in our minds only the notion that he is, and nothing more: wherefore he exists in a certain confusion for us. Lastly, however, we remove from him even ‘being’ itself as it is found in creatures; and then he remains in a kind of show of ignorance, by which ignorance, in so far as it pertains to this life, we are best united to God, as Dionysius says, and this is the cloud in which God is said to dwell.91
Saint Anselm may take a shortcut in the ontological argument but his footing is not wrong; he never weighted the argument in a conceptio alien to the world of Being. This can be seen in all aspects of Anselm’s life, particularly in how friendship was understood as a mutual intensity and interiorization of the other in order to be the self. In his letters to Gandulf, his greatest friend and fellow monk at Bec Abbey, Anselm unveils a bodily affectus as true transcendent, one that overwhelmingly opposes the disembodied, anti-affective Cartesian rationality of res cogitans. This affectivity invokes dulcedo, the sweetness of being, as its guiding principle:92
You have my consciousness always with you. If you are silent, I know that you love me; when I am silent, you know that I love you. You are conscious that I do not doubt you and I give witness to you that you are sure of me. We are then conscious of each other’s consciousness.93
This type of affectivity as non-reflexive basis for all subsequent intellectual reflections is essential to understanding the Anselmian logic of perfection in its proper place; not as a polar opposite to Saint Thomas, but as a different facet of the same unified meaning. Saints Anselm and Thomas Aquinas recognize the purposiveness of the will’s own union with the self-evidence of Being. If there is goodness, if meaning, truth and thus beings are self-evident—what then fulfills and orders them? Is it a natural or super-natural cause? If the existence or thatness of goodness, truth and beauty cannot be denied, what kind of causation is its source principle?: this is the inevitable question. Saint Thomas’s distinction therefore relies on the strange self-evidence to the will and the emphatic non-self-evidence to the intellect. The Ways unite certitude and mystery so that each reflects the other, both embodying the self-evidence of the unified will-in-Being and the intellect which must take the longer way. These demonstrations stand for those who have no faith, but their subtlety invites one into the faith. When Saint Thomas gets us to the door of the divine, he does not arrive at an impersonal entity with little or no potential for relationality, but at a being whose fecundity of Goodness is identical with His Being.94 This powerful union returns us again to the fact that Saint Thomas demonstrates God beyond a reasonable doubt, and yet what it is that is beyond any doubt is mystery itself. This is the very mystery which, when the intellect engages it as Other, realizes that its reflection requires it be prepossessed in a non-reflexive way, in the affective basis of the Good. Saint Thomas never departs from his Pseudo-Dionysian heritage:
The cause of all things, through an excess of goodness, loves all things, produces all things, perfects all things, contains and turns all things towards himself; divine love is good through the goodness of the Good. Indeed, love itself which produces the goodness of beings, pre-subsisting super-abundantly in the Good, did not allow itself to remain unproductive but moved itself to produce in the super-abundant generation of all.95
Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.96
Through a glass darkly we recognize the first principles through our connatural pre-possession, but our intellect cannot grasp that unmeasured essence in its startling effulgence.97 We can only recognize that our pre-possession cannot be rooted in a natural power, where essence is distinct from existence. Moreover, whatever steps ground our trajectory to the divine cannot be passed over as if rungs of a ladder on the great chain of Being.98 This non-reflexive pre-possession speaks more to our ethical life than anything else because it is a union of the will with Being. What we lay out in the demonstrations for the existence of God will also provide a renewed accounting of the meaning of the natural law, not merely as imposition but as the fundamental unity with Being as Personal, because it is our originary and connatural relation of Being as the Good.
1. Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, 44.
2. ST I, 83, 2, ad. 2. And this accomplishment, for Saint Bernard, is only so because of a grace-filled union which enables one to desire the good, fulfilling the will in its activity. See Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 28: “It is creative grace which gave existence to the will; it is saving grace which giveth it moral success; it is the will itself which bringeth about its own moral failure. Accordingly, free choice maketh us possessed of will; grace maketh us possessed of good will. It is in virtue of free choice that we will, it is in virtue of grace that we will what is good.”
3. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1–8.
4. Cf. C. Gilson, “Rebellion of the Gladiators,” 13–72.
5. This reflects the unitive relationship between immanent acts and transitive acts in Aristotle. See Met. IX, 1050a; NE VI, 1140a.
