Chester Cathedral
Dorothy Nicholl took me to Chester while I was visiting her at the home in Betley near Crewe where she and Dorothy's husband Donald had retired, after a career and service together that had taken them across the world, from England to Santa Cruz to Jerusalem and then home.
Before we went to the pub, we went to Chester. There in the cathedral the Gothic stonework was impressive, but it was an overlay on the centuries-earlier Romanesque. During renovations a section of the earlier work was left exposed. I slapped my hand on the ancient stone, and said, "This is the cathedral that Anselm knew." Dorothy replied, "Donald would have said exactly the same thing."
Donald was a historian and I was his student. Anselm had been a friend of the dean of the cathedral and had come to visit - from Canterbury.
I first knew Anselm as Anselm of Bec, in an undergraduate philosophy course taught in a Stevenson College classroom. The textbook referred to him that way, as it described his 'ontological proof of the existence of God' - Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). Written around 1094-1098 of our era. He had been in Bec, as monk and abbot. But they did not tell us the rest of the story: he became Archbishop of Canterbury. A stellar intellectual.
In face a prominent English theologian recently remarked on the retirement of one of Anselm's successors (a friend of Donald and Dorothy as it turned out) that, "he's the most intellectually gifted man to become Archbishop of Canterbury since St Anselm.”
So that I came to know in time. What we know of a man changes some perception of him. It was only years after that first encounter in a college classroom that I came to know of Anselm in his religious garb, in a religious building.
At first he was a dusty-book author, who came up with what was at the time (his or mine?) an ingenious shortcut to demonstration of a reality beyond our conception.
In fact that was something the point. God is that than which no greater can be conceived; and to be honest, we still don't get it. We really can't. Can we?
Can we be satisfied seeing through a glass darkly, knowing that someday, with Anselm, Donald and Dorothy and all the saints, we will see the reality face to face?
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-curdeus.asp
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-press-and-journal-aberdeen-and-aberdeenshire/20120320/283897339955847
Almighty God, through your servant Anselm you helped your church to understand its faith in your eternal Being, perfect justice, and saving mercy: Provide your church in all ages with devout and learned scholars and teachers, that we may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
https://episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/anselm-canterbury-archbishop-canterbury-and-theologian-1109
Revised Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 1980. p. 240-241. https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/21034
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