QUOD IN DEO NEC IN AETERNITATE EIUS, QUAE IPSE EST, NULLAE SINT PARTES.
The Soul's Dark Frustration
The soul's repeated experience of wanting joy but finding only deeper darkness and lack, rooted in the ancestral fall.
And again, turmoil — again, sorrow and mourning meet the one seeking joy and happiness! My soul was already hoping for satisfaction, and yet again it's overwhelmed by want! I was already trying to eat, and now I hunger even more! I was trying to rise toward the light of God, and I fell back into my own darkness. In fact, I didn't just fall into it — I feel myself wrapped up in it. I fell before my mother could conceive me. Truly, I was conceived in that darkness, and born wrapped up in it. Long ago, surely, we all fell in him — "in whom all of us" have sinned.✦
The Vanity of Seeking Apart from God
Human beings have lost the true good and cannot find it on their own, because seeking, finding, and satisfying are all disordered.
In him we have all lost what he once held easily and what he has ruined for himself and for us: when we want to seek it, we don't know how; when we do seek, we don't find it; and when we do find it, it isn't what we were looking for.
A Prayer to Be Lifted and Illumined
Anselm prays for God's help to be cleansed, strengthened, and directed toward beholding God's face.
Help me, Lord, out of your goodness. "I have sought your face, your face, Lord, as my rest; do not turn your face away from me." Lift me up from myself to you. Cleanse, truly sharpen, and illumine the eye of my mind, so that it may behold you. Let my soul gather its strength again, and with my whole understanding let it direct itself toward you once more, Lord.
What Then Are You, Lord?
Anselm enumerates God's attributes and then questions how a being that is each of these things in its fullness can be one without parts.
What are you, Lord? What are you — what will my heart make of you? Surely you are life, you are wisdom, you are truth, you are goodness, you are blessedness, you are eternity, and every true good. These are many things, and my narrow mind can't take in so many at a single glance and delight in all of them at once. How then, Lord, are you all these things? Are they parts of you, or is each one of these the whole of what you are? For whatever is joined together from parts isn't altogether one, but is in a sense many things and different from itself, and can be broken apart either in act or in thought.
No Parts in God
Since God has no parts, each divine attribute is not a part but the whole of what God is.
These things, then, that are alien to you — you, than whom nothing better can be conceived. Therefore there are no parts in you, Lord, nor are you many things, but you are so one and the same to yourself, that you are in no way unlike yourself; rather, you are unity itself, divisible by no intellect. Therefore life and wisdom and the rest are not parts of you, but all are one, and each one of these is the whole of what you are, and so are all the rest together.
Wholly Everywhere, Wholly Always
Because God and God's eternity have no parts, God is wholly present everywhere and wholly enduring at every moment.
Since, then, you have no parts, and your eternity—which you are—has no parts either, there is no place and no moment where any part of you, or of your eternity, is located; rather, you are wholly everywhere, and your eternity is wholly always.
Read the original Latin
Et iterum ecce turbatio, ecce iterum obviat maeror et luctus quaerenti gaudium et laetitiam! Sperabat iam anima mea satietatem, et ecce iterum obruitur egestate! Affectabam iam comedere, et ecce magis esurire! Conabar assurgere ad lucem dei, et recidi in tenebras meas. Immo non modo cecidi in eas sed sentio me involutum in eis. Ante cecidi, quam conciperet "me mater mea". Certe in illis "conceptus sum", et cum earum obvolutione natus sum. Olim certe in illo omnes cecidimus, "in quo omnes" peccavimus.
In illo omnes perdidimus, qui facile tenebat et male sibi et nobis perdidit, quod cum volumus quaerere nescimus, cum quaerimus non invenimus, cum invenimus non est quod quaerimus.
Adivua me tu "propter bonitatem tuam, domine". "Quaesivi vultum tuum, vultum tuum, domine, requiem; ne avertas faciem tuam a me". Releva me de me ad te. Munda, sane, acue, "illumine" oculum mentis meae, ut intueatur te. Recolligat vires sues anima mea, et toto intellectu iterum intendat in te, domine.
Quid es, domine, quid es, quid te intelliget cor meum? Certe vita es, sapientia es, veritas es, bonitas es, beatitudo es, aeternitas es, et omne verum bonum es. Multa sunt haec, non potest angustus intellectus meus tot uno simul intuitu videre, ut omnibus simul delectetur. Quomodo ergo, domine, es omnia haec? An sunt partes tui, aut potius unumquodque horum est totum quod es? Nam quidquid partibus est iunctum, non est omnino unum sed quodam modo plura et diversum a seipso, et vel actu vel intellectu dissolvi potest;
quae aliena sunt a te quo nihil melius cogitari potest. Nullae igitur partes sunt in te, domine, nec es plura sed sic es unum quiddam et idem tibi ipsi, ut in nullo tibi ipsi sis dissimilis; immo tu es ipsa unitas, nullo intellectu divisibilis. Ergo vita et sapientia et reliqua non sunt partes tui sed omnia sunt unum, et unumquodque horum est totum quod es, et quod sunt reliqua omnia.
Quoniam ergo nec tu habes partes nec tua aeternitas quae tu es: nusquam et numquam est pars tua aut aeternitatis tuae sed ubique totus es, et aeternitas tua tota est semper.
Scripture echoes
- ↩Rom.5.12 — Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, and so death spread to all people, because all sinned—
Proslogion (Address / Discourse on the Existence of God) companion
One chapter of historic wisdom, every day
Chosen Portion delivers works like the Proslogion as short daily readings with a prayer — free on iOS.
Anselm designed the Proslogion to be read slowly as prayer, and the Chosen Portion app serves it exactly that way — one short portion per day.
- Finish the entire Proslogion in 14 days at about 10 minutes a day
- Modern-English rendering of all 27 chapters, no Latin required
- Each reading paired with Anselm's own prayers so study ends in worship