St. Anselm

Who they were

Anselm left Italy young after a hard father, wandered, and found his life at the Norman abbey of Bec under Lanfranc, where as prior and then abbot for over thirty years he made a middling monastery into Europe's school and wrote the works that named an entire method: faith seeking understanding.

His Proslogion set down the ontological argument, God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived, which philosophers have been productively arguing with for nine centuries and which he composed as a prayer. His Cur Deus Homo asked, with a directness that still organizes the syllabus, why God became man. Dragged into the archbishopric of Canterbury at sixty, he spent his last years in the era's grinding fight over investiture, exiled twice and unbending. But the Anselm the sources love is the teacher. His recorded counsel to a neighbouring abbot who beat his students, that boys formed by blows grow crooked like trees pinned down, and that they need kindness and the workshop of gentleness, reads as though it were written this morning.

Why people turn to St. Anselm

Students and teachers of philosophy and theology, with St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Catherine of Alexandria. And every teacher and parent choosing between fear and gentleness as the method, since Anselm is the patron of the second.

How to ask their intercession

Before the hard intellectual work, in his own mode: his arguments were prayers, so pray the question. Teachers can ask his crooked trees counsel as a grace before class.