Commemorating St. George & St. Anselm
The Church of England traditionally commemorates St. George, Patron Saint of England, on April 23rd, and also with the wider Church, St. Anselm of Canterbury on the 21st. Two English saints of very different character have thus been commemorated in this one week.
Tradition identifies George as a Roman soldier who was tortured and executed during Diocletian’s persecution, probably around 303 A.D., though it is his reputation as a martyr Saint that we know far more about than the actual details of his life and death.
He became important because of his witness — as one who refused apostasy, accepted suffering, and upheld to the point of death the principle that allegiance to Christ outweighs all else, including the importunate demands of the state and even the Emperor.
Yet, it was paradoxically an act of a sovereign that made St. George the object of national veneration in England. In 1348, Edward III founded the Order of the Garter and linked it to the new College and Chapel of St. George at Windsor, where each knight had a stall in the chapel. This innovation neatly conjoined saintly patronage, royal power, and regular ceremonial observance together with the elevated ideals of Knighthood. And as the kingdom’s most prestigious order of chivalry, its patron saint immediately acquired unusual public honors, with an annual ritual of observance that has endured over the centuries ever since.
But what about the legend of the dragon slaying?
This story came from the east to the medieval West seemingly through the Golden Legend (a compilation of 153 biographies of saints assembled by Jacobus de Voragine between around 1259 to 1266). A later interpretation saw the dragon as a moral and spiritual allegory for St. George’s conquest of evil, defense of the weak, and the ultimate triumph of Christian holiness — thus allowing St. George to be cited to great effect in art, preaching, civic ritual, and the national memory over the subsequent centuries.
In the words of the Church of England’s collect:
St. George “bore witness to the risen Lord,” and we should pray that we and all the faithful may share both his faith and “the fullness of the resurrection.”
In St. Anselm, the sometime Archbishop of Canterbury (from 1093 to 1109), we have by contrast a very different figure — who does however stand in firm continuity with the ideals represented by St. George — while giving them very substantial theological depth.
By background, Anselm was a Benedictine monk and Abbot with formidable philosophical gifts. These he deployed to forge a hugely influential intellectual legacy in the areas of faith and reason, the existence and nature of God, freedom and sin, and the logic of atonement.
His whole approach was guided by the principle of fides quaerens intellectum — “faith seeking understanding” — which allowed him to see that rational inquiry can serve to deepen powerfully an already given faith and is no threat to it.
His philosophical theology is therefore not only about proving that God exists (which he robustly argued can be done), but also about clarifying what it means for God to be the highest and most fundamentally real being who is thus at the center of all else.
He famously defined God as “that than which none greater can be conceived,” and argued that such a being cannot exist only in understanding, because existence in reality is greater than existence merely in the mind, and therefore, God must exist in reality. This leads in turn to a robust doctrine of God as supreme good, supreme greatness, and self-existent being, the one reality that exists through itself while all other things depend on it.
He next offers an account of the problem of evil, which treats evil not as a positive substance, but as privation or negation, a lack of the good that ought to be present. (An account that allows him to preserve the goodness of creation while explaining sin as a defect in rational willing rather than as something created by God).
But perhaps St. Anselm’s most influential theological work of all was his account of atonement in Cur Deus Homo.
He there argues that sin creates a debt or dishonor that humanity cannot adequately repair. Accordingly, only one who is truly divine can make fitting satisfaction, yet because the debt belongs to humanity, the satisfier must also be truly human.
Hence redemption requires the God-man who was Jesus Christ — whose self-offering alone can suitably undo the damage in sin and restore humanity to a right relationship with God.
This resulted in an important shift in Western theology, as the incarnation and passion were no longer a simply divine display or moral example, but rather met rationally the demands of justice and reconciliation.
Later theologians may have sought to revise his satisfaction theory, but his basic claim remains foundational: salvation is intelligible only when one holds together divine justice, mercy, and the unique person of Christ, as it is only when these component elements are properly understood that we can begin to understand the profundity of how the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross accomplished our redemption.
Anselm does not frame the cross primarily as the Father punishing the innocent Son; rather, Christ offers a superabundant act of obedient self-gift that restores what sinful humanity failed to render. (Contra Calvin and the penal substitution theory).
If some of this could seem academic, so it is important to remember that St. Anselm could nonetheless write with powerful effect – indeed so well as to make it fitting to close by citing his own words;
“Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts…..
(O God) You exist so truly that You cannot even be thought not to exist.
I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it; but I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves.
For I believe this also, that unless I believe, I shall not understand.”