Today the Church remembers Anselm, abbot, archbishop, teacher of the faith, 1109
Anselm works
Anselm spent nearly twenty years exploring how to please God more in prayer before he became the abbot of the monastery. He was continually attempting to analyze and illumine the truths of faith through the aid of reason. This led him to a new discovery of prayer, which has been practiced for centuries, and is recorded in his “Prayers and Meditations”.
Greatly important is that St Anselm was the first in the Church to oppose the slave trade. He obtained from the National Council of Westminster the passage of a resolution prohibiting the sale of human beings. He had a great care and concern for the poorest people. A minor miracle was recorded in his life; on an occasion when Anselm was ill, he was asked what he would like to eat. He replied that he fancied partridge and a dog appeared with a partridge in its mouth! *
Anselm’s connection with Canterbury began in 1070 when Lanfranc became archbishop. In 1079 Anselm visited Canterbury and, we are told, was received with honour as Abbot of Bec and a great scholar. He stayed with the monks who long remembered his talks in the cloister.
By the time of Lanfranc’s death in 1089, Anselm had become well known, and was suggested as the next archbishop. But he was content as a monk and scholar. He had no talent or relish for political strife or the administration of great estates. King William Rufus kept the archbishopric vacant for four years, appropriating much of the church’s income to his own coffers. It was only when the king was suffering a life threatening illness in 1093 that he finally decided to appoint and Anselm reluctantly agreed.
Anselm took his tasks as archbishop and abbot of Christ Church Priory very seriously. These duties laid upon him the need to maintain the lands and possessions of the church, even against the King. In the same spirit he sought to prove and enforce the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury over the province of York. In the midst of all this, Anselm still found time, between 1095-8, to write a study of the incarnation, perhaps his most famous work.
The growth of the religious community at Canterbury caused a major extension to be made to Lanfranc’s church – a new choir with eastern transepts and chapels reflecting the latest designs in Europe. Anselm provided funds for the rebuilding, though he never saw it completed. As far as we can tell, at the time of his death in 1109 the crypt was probably complete, but the great choir above was not consecrated until 1130.
The cathedral was a marvel. “Nothing like it had been seen in England”, we are told. When the new choir was ready Anselm’s body was moved from the nave to the chapel of St Peter and St Paul in his own “new work”. However, he was not canonized until 1494, when Pope Alexander VI declared Anselm a Saint. **
* From G.M. Bevan’s “Portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury” (1908)
**Dr Margaret Sparks, Consultant Cathedral Historian
Tags: Christian Life, Church Life