SOURCE: Collinge, William. “Monastic Life as a Context for Religious Understanding in St. Anselm.” American Benedictine Review 35, no. 4 (December 1984): 378-88.

In the following essay, Collinge applies a Wittgensteinian concept of “seeing-as” (in this case: viewing through the paradigm of monastic obedience) to arguments in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and Proslogion.

Is the study of monastic life of interest to philosophers as philosophers?¹ There is much in contemporary philosophy of religion to suggest that it can be.

One of the dominant tendencies of the philosophy of the past two centuries in the West is the effort to reintegrate the realm of thought, ideas, logic, with the realm of life, existence, praxis. This is reflected preeminently in Marxism, but also (partly derivatively) in existentialism, pragmatism, and, most important in the present context, the movement of linguistic analysis that grows out of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein on Religious Language