stantiation. The refusal to accept this dogma constituted the offence for which, in the reign of Queen Mary alone, hundreds of Protestants were burned at the stake. True, this dogma was suggested at the Seventh General Council, held at Nice in 787; but it met with no welcome; and though revived in 831 by Paschaise Radbert, an obscure monk, the Church received it with mingled horror and ridicule. Berenger of Tours met it with pungent sarcasm, and Raban Maur, Archbishop of Mentz-counted by some among the Fathers denounced it as "an error and a novelty." It remained for the period that gave birth to Anselm's satisfaction theory, to sanction by Papal authority, Leo IX., this blood-stained dogma of the Material Presence. This state of affairs in the ecclesiastical world reflected a condition even worse in the social life of the people. The peasants were little Life of Anselm, Page 22. more than serfs, and the feudal lords were the worst of despots. A vile fetichism of factitious relics, that were working pretended miracles in all directions, constituted the individual piety. Even the ordinary religious life was no better. Ecclesiastical preferments, bishoprics, benefices, etc., were generally bought and sold. Simony, in short, was openly justified. In Normandy Dean Church, the clergy were as a whole "rude, ignorant and self-indulgent to a degree that was monstrous and intolerable." In the midst of all this there arose a Norman monastery, by far superior to any religious institution of that perverse age, the House of Bec. It was founded by a hermit soldier, Herlwin by name, and was first made famous by Lanfranc, who afterwards, in the reign of William the Conqueror, was the spiritual father of England. To this monastery, for the purpose of study, there came a youth of varied life and diverse fortunes. He was born at Aosta in Piedmont, in 1033. His home life, owing to the brutality of his father, was not happy. But his mother, a devout and godly woman, made a deep impression upon his passive nature. Monastic life attracted him from the first; but in consequence of his father's refusal to permit him to enter upon it, he strayed off into a worldly life in which there was much of licentiousness. After his mother's death he left home and wandered through Burgundy and France. Lanfranc attracted him to Bec, and shortly afterward he assumed the monastic vows (1060), devoting himself to the study of that abstruse philosophical theology that made him the father of scholasticism. The superiority of his mind soon made itself felt, and he succeeded Lanfranc as Prior of Bec in 1063, when the latter was promoted to the Abbacy of Caen. On the death of Herlwin (1078) he became Abbot. For fifteen years he remained in this position, becoming widely renowned for austerity and intellectual acumen. Here he wrote the Monologion and Prologion-apologies for the Christian religion. Bec flourished and acquired property even in England, so the Abbot Anselm must go thither to attend to the interests of his monastery. The intercourse with that country, then begun, ended with his being almost compelled to accept the Archbishopric of Canterbury from the hands of that villainous prince, rough-handed William Rufus, then very ill and doubtful of his recovery. With that king and his successor (Henry) Anselm waged an almost continual contest, which ended, in Henry's reign, by the formal acknowledgment of the Papal power in England. During this time he was more than once an exile from the land. It was while sojourning at the village of Schlavia, that he wrote his "Cur Deus Homo" (Why God Became Man), with which we are chiefly concerned; for therein he originated his judicial theory of the Atonement. Anselm may with justice be called the flower of mediæval monasticism. His character was the purest with bravery and heroic devotion he sought to serve God through the Pope, whom he sincerely believed to be His representative. His greatest apologist, however, tells Church's us that he was a "monk of monks, a Life of Anselm, dogmatist of the dogmatists, powerful and severe in mind, stern in individual life,” yet he did not escape the evil influences of his age, though in some respects far superior to it. He died on the 21st of April, 1109. His infirmity and fatal illness were the results of a tortuous ascetism. It is but natural that one who believed that God delights in such self-torture, would also agree to that intellectual and legal doctrine of the Atonement that he originated. Dean Hook concludes his life of Anselm by the statement (in substance) that they will praise him most effectively who see in his life. both the evil and the good. We may praise him then for his heroism, his virtue, and his sincerity; but we must not forget that it was |