About Anselm

 

Anselm of Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury was a theologian and philosopher, a Benedictine monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century and was later canonized as a saint. In my Anglican Book of Common prayer calendar, Anselm is remembered each year on April 21st, the anniversary of his death in 1109.

When I first thought of making Anselm’s quest of faith seeking understanding the name of this website, it was primarily on the basis of his writing, specifically the Proslogion. When I actually began to map out the website, I realized how little I knew about Anselm the man: his life story, what kind of person he was, how he thought, or even what he looked like.

That led to a flurry of research and inevitably to historian R. W. Southern, one of the twentieth century’s finest medieval scholars, who wrote extensively about Anselm and his biographer, Eadmer. 

R. W. Southern lived up to his own standards for historians, producing “works which are emotionally and intellectually satisfying … and portray people whose actions are intelligible within the framework of their circumstances and character,” according to his obituary in The Guardian. He brought Anselm alive and made it possible for me to paint a small watercolour portrait of him.

The following notes are based on Southern’s translation of Eadmer’s Life of Anselm and his book about Anselm and Eadmer, Anselm and his Biographer.

Anselm was born in Aosta (now part of Italy) to a wealthy father and a devout mother, both from noble families. His mother was the prudent manager of the family estates, while his father had a reputation as something of a spendthrift, generous to a fault.

He first tried to enter a monastery as a teenager, but lacking his father’s consent he was refused. Eventually a rift grew between the son and his father, and Anselm renounced his inheritance and left his home, arriving in the area of Normandy in northern France several years later. At the age of twenty-seven he became a novice at the Benedictine abbey of Bec, located not far from the city of Rouen. Only three years later he was elected prior or “second-in-charge” to the abbot. Following the death of the abbey’s founder fifteen years later, his fellow monks elected him abbot. With Anselm as the abbey’s leader, it became the primary centre of learning in Europe.

It was here that Anselm wrote the Proslogion, which contained his “ontological argument for the existence of God.” The Proslogion was part of the Foundation Year Program (FYP) during my first term at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Anselm proved to be a wise and thoughtful leader as abbot as well as being a spirited defender of the abbey’s independence from both Church and state. He was a wise mentor and disciplinarian to the monks under his leadership, and would have preferred to spend the rest of his days at Bec.

Eventually, however, he was called to England, where he became a reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury, finally enthroned at Canterbury Cathedral after months of resistance. His reluctance was well-founded, for while he was well-suited to the life of monastic leader, he had no taste or aptitude for the political intrigue or royal opposition to the Church’s claims to power that went with the role of archbishop. He spent years abroad in exile, and there is evidence that he enjoyed these periods far more than he did the life at Canterbury. He was never again as happy as he had been at Bec.

People often ask me how I painted Anselm’s portrait. They’re not interested in the medium or technique, but in how it is possible to paint the portrait of someone who died almost a thousand years ago. After all, the few images there are of Anselm were created centuries after his death.

The simplest answer is, I painted him from the inside out. That is, I painted the man described by Eadmer in his Vita Anselmi or Life of Anselm. Eadmer wasn’t interested in physical descriptions. He was a monk and not focused on external appearances so much as thoughts and actions. Eadmer described what Anselm thought and wrote about, what he said and did, the kind of person he was.

When I looked for images online, only one resonated with me, a 16th-century engraving, and even that differed from the idea of Anselm I had from reading the Life. Finally it occurred to me that since every image of of him is essentially a work of imagination anyway, I could feel free to imagine my own Anselm, and that is what I did. Watercolour was the medium I used, though any watercolour artist can see at a glance that I’m an amateur.

Still, I needed some sort of living model to work from. The elements of the engraving that seemed most true to me were the long nose, the high forehead, the long hair and the receding hairline. However, the man in the engraving seemed too well-fed to represent the ascetic Anselm, who was never a hearty eater at the best of times. According to Eadmer, he sometimes forgot to eat altogether if he was reading to the monks or having a discussion at mealtimes.

I also expected Anselm to be bearded, since he lacked the vanity to worry over his appearance, and the will to waste time changing it. Anselm was a Benedictine monk, so I chose to model his beard on Fra Angelico’s painting of St. Benedict. Fortunately, I had a real-life model to work from in Fr. Gary Thorne, who at the time was Chaplain at the University of King’s College Chapel.

My first try missed the mark altogether, and resulted in a pencil sketch of someone more like a court dandy, or perhaps Anselm as the young man who led a worldly life before he entered the monastery. Finally I looked for images of men from northern Italy, the area where Anselm was born and raised. The one I eventually used as a model gave me a general layout for the planes of the face as well as the colouring, although my Anselm looks very different.

For background I chose the doorway of a stone building in that part of France where the Abbey of Bec is located. This is much later architecture than that of Anselm’s time, but I like the juxtaposition of the sun-warmed stones and the dark shadow. The contrast is a reminder of Anselm’s happy life at Bec and the difficult and sometimes dark years that followed it after he became Archbishop of Canterbury. To lay out the whole painting, I mounted a cut-out of Anselm’s portrait in progress on the shoulders of a Benedictine monk and placed them within the doorway.

It took over a year to finish this very small portrait. In the past I had mainly used watercolour to create cartoons for  complex needleworks. These were washed-out versions which I then graphed, but the real work of colour was done in the graphs themselves. To actually finish a portrait in watercolour, I needed to pray my way through each stage and study a lot of videos on YouTube. After each difficult part was completed I would put the work away for a time, while I thought and prayed about what to do next.

The finished portrait is of Anselm in the latter years of his life, during one of his exiles from Canterbury. His  look is meant to be pensive with a touch of sadness. He was much loved by most of the monks who knew him, but despised and even hated by his enemies. They mistook his charity for weakness and his faith, goodness, and integrity were an affront to those lacking his fine character.