It was thus that Anselm brought philosophy to the support of theology.  He would combat the philosophical reasonings of Roscelin with still keener dialectics.  He would conquer him on his own ground and with his own weapons.

Let it not be supposed that this controversy about universals was a mere dialectical tournament, with no grand results.  It goes down to the root of almost every great subject in philosophy and religion.  The denial of universal ideas is rationalism and materialism in philosophy, as it is Pelagianism and Arminianism in theology.  The Nominalism of Roscelin reappeared in the rationalism of Abelard; and, carried out to its severe logical sequences, is the refusal to accept any doctrine which cannot be proved by reason.  Hence nothing is to be accepted which is beyond the province of reason to explain; and hence nothing is to be received by faith alone.  Christianity, in the hands of fearless and logical nominalists, would melt away,—­that is, what is peculiar in its mysterious dogmas.  Its mysterious dogmas were the anchors of belief in ages of faith.  It was these which animated the existence of such men as Augustine, Bernard, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas.  Hence their terrible antagonism even to philosophical doctrines which conflicted with the orthodox belief, on which, as they thought, the salvation of mankind rested.

But Anselm did not rest with combating the Nominalism of Roscelin.  In the course of his inquiries and arguments he felt it necessary to establish the belief in God—­the one great thing from which all other questions radiated—­by a new argument, and on firmer ground than that on which it had hitherto rested.  He was profoundly devotional as well as logical, and original as he was learned.  Beyond all the monks of his age he lived in the contemplation of God.  God was to him the essence of all good, the end of all inquiries, the joy and repose of his soul.  He could not understand unless he first believed; knowledge was the fruit of faith, not its cause.  The idea of God in the mind of man is the highest proof of the existence of God.  That only is real which appeals to consciousness.  He did not care to reason about a thing when reasoning would not strengthen his convictions, perhaps involve him in doubts and perplexities.  Reason is finite and clouded and warped.  But that which directly appeals to consciousness (as all that is eternal must appeal), and to that alone, like beauty and justice and love,—­ultimate ideas to which reasoning and definitions add nothing,—­is to be received as a final certitude.  Hence, absolute certainty of the existence of God, as it appeals to consciousness,—­like the “Cogito, ergo sum.”  In this argument he anticipated Descartes, and proved himself the profoundest thinker of his century, perhaps of five centuries.