What is fides quaerens intellectum?

Anselm of Canterbury, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Anselm of Canterbury answers

The phrase itself came to me before the work that bears it. When I first composed what became the Monologion — a meditation on the rational grounds of faith, written at the request of my brothers at Bec — and then the Proslogion, I gave that second work the working title Faith Seeking Understanding before Hugo, the reverend Archbishop of Lyons, urged me to attach my name and settle on the title Proslogium instead.1

The title was not ornamental; it named the method. The method is this: the believer does not seek to understand in order that he may believe, but believes in order that he may understand.2 This is Augustine's principle, drawn from Isaiah — nisi credideritis non intelligetis — and I receive it whole. Faith is not a provisional holding-place to be vacated once reason arrives; it is the very condition that makes genuine understanding possible.

The mind that does not believe is not thereby more free to reason; it is, rather, without the orientation that allows the deepest objects of thought to come into view at all. Yet faith is not the terminus. Boso puts the matter well in Cur Deus Homo: it seems a neglect, once established in faith, not to seek to understand what one believes.3

The work of reason within faith is not optional for those who have the capacity for it. To rest in bare assent when the mind could press further toward intellectus is to leave undone what faith itself calls forth. The inquiry is genuinely shared. When Boso asks why God, being omnipotent, should have assumed the weakness of human nature for the sake of its renewal, he speaks for many — believers seeking understanding, not unbelievers seeking grounds for belief.4

And I proceed not as one handing down conclusions but as one who inquires together with his interlocutor, under the constraint that whatever I say must yield to higher authority should that authority speak against it, and that for all a man can say or know, deeper grounds of great truths remain concealed.5 That last admission is not false modesty. Fides quaerens intellectum sets the range of the enterprise honestly: reason moves within faith, illuminates what faith holds, demonstrates where demonstration is possible, and shows fitness and congruence where strict demonstration is not — and then falls silent before what exceeds it.

The proof I found for the Proslogion, which came to me after long resistance when I had nearly despaired of finding it, was found in that spirit: not as conquest of the divine mystery but as the mind's grateful recognition of what, once seen, cannot be unseen.6

Sources

  1. I accordingly gave each a title, that the first might be known as, An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith, and its sequel as, Faith Seeking Understanding... I named the first, Monologium, that is, A Soliloquy; but the second, Proslogium, that is, A Discourse.
    Proslogium, Monologium, Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool, and Cur Deus Homo
  2. I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, — that unless I believed, I should not understand.
    Proslogium, Monologium, Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool, and Cur Deus Homo
  3. as the right order requires us to believe the deep things of Christian faith before we undertake to discuss them by reason; so to my mind it appears a neglect if, after we are established in the faith, we do not seek to understand what we believe.
    Proslogium, Monologium, Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool, and Cur Deus Homo
  4. I desire that you should discover to me, what, as you know, many besides myself ask, for what necessity and cause God, who is omnipotent, should have assumed the littleness and weakness of human nature for the sake of its renewal?
    Proslogium, Monologium, Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool, and Cur Deus Homo
  5. I wish all that I say to be received with this understanding, that, if I shall have said anything which higher authority does not corroborate, though I appear to demonstrate it by argument, yet it is not to be received with any further confidence... we must understand that for all that a man can say or know still deeper grounds of so great a truth lie concealed.
    Proslogium, Monologium, Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool, and Cur Deus Homo
  6. So, one day, when I was exceedingly wearied with resisting its importunity, in the very conflict of my thoughts, the proof of which I had despaired offered itself, so that I eagerly embraced the thoughts which I was strenuously repelling.
    Proslogium, Monologium, Gaunilo's In Behalf of the Fool, and Cur Deus Homo