'And This We Call God'

Richard Campbell

Abstract

One of the most remarkable achievements of the European medievals was their use of philosophical concepts and arguments to explicate theological doctrines. In so doing they manifest distinctive understandings of the relations between faith and reason. Yet the standard accounts regularly commit the scholarly sin of anachronism, and cannot withstand critical scrutiny that pays careful attention to the texts on which they purport to be commenting. This paper takes up the issue of this relation by comparing how Anselm and Thomas Aquinas connect the conclusion of their 'existence proofs' to God. It begins with a discussion of the final sentence of four of Thomas's Five Ways, the status of which is unclear. By contrast a neglected aspect of Anselm's argument is that he offers two arguments to justify his invocation of God. Of the two, it emerges that Anselm is the more subtle, and the more explicit in demonstrating how his philosophical reflections inform his quest to understand what he believes.

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