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Brief Lives

Anselm (1033-1109)

Martin Jenkins recalls the being of the creator of the ontological argument.

To Italians, he is Anselm of Aosta; to the French, Anselm of Bec; to the English, Anselm of Canterbury. If you’re a Catholic, you can dodge the nationalism by calling him ‘Saint Anselm’. But whatever you call him, Anselm is probably the most important thinker of the eleventh century, and he was responsible for one of the big philosophical ideas about God which is still discussed today: the ontological argument for God’s existence.

Anselm was born about 1033 in Aosta in northern Italy. At some point he quarrelled with his Lombard noble father Gundulf, and began the life of a wandering scholar.

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