How I Became an Anselm Scholar - Philosophical Development and Commitments

among other things in my academic and scholarly career I am a st. Anselm's fellow that is I am somebody who focuses on the works the thought the life the importance the influence of st. Anselm of Canterbury also known as the st. Anselm abacus enansal Iost depending on on where you are because the English like to claim him as their own with Canterbury the French like to claim him as their own Trebek and the Italians like to claim him as their own throughout the three places that they spend portions of his life this you know this this development of becoming a st. Anselm's scholar which has been going on for me for over a decade is not something I would have ever have predicted or let alone expected when I was early on in my philosophical career you know I didn't really have much much use for for Christian thinkers to begin with when I was an undergraduate other than Kierkegaard and that was because its emphasis on individuality and even you know a good ways into my graduate career if you would have told me that you know midway through my life at the 40-year point I would be working on a book on st. Anselm and actually more than one book but you know got to get one done before you start talking about the others I would probably laughed at you and said well who do you think you're fooling so I think the story about how I became a saint anselm scholar and and why I'm so interested in this guy what I find so so fruitful it's an interesting story it's a very idiosyncratic story - it's got its twists and turns that again would have been very difficult to predict and probably would not have have worked as a path for many other people but did for me because of my own predilections and and my own weird areas of interest and my own quirks and my own narrative and history and I have to say I'm very pleased about how things have gone along the way and I also have to say that I have to be very grateful to many people for encouraging my my interest in Ansem and for giving me the right Nadja's and the right pushes at the right times so sometimes I took advantage of them sometimes I didn't and I like to think that st. Anselm himself has a role in that not merely as a thinker but as as part of a larger community as part of a communion so what I'm going to talk about in this this video is a little bit more structured than some of the other philosophical development videos I am going to talk about Anselm's writings and you know what this guy actually did and and who he was a little bit I'm gonna talk about my own timeline which I plot out of how I became an Ansel scholar what were the key things I'm going to talk about a particular place and I've got some some some not video footage but some pictures I'm going to show you and talk a little bit over it a place that's been particularly important for me as an Ansel scholar and I think is an important place in general for an some scholarship and a place that I very much would love to see grow and become yet more fruitful and become a locus for for Ansem scholarship and for for younger scholars coming up in the end the ranks to get there they're there push and they're poll the way I did from and that is the Institute receipt anselm studies at Saint Anselm College in Manchester New Hampshire I'll talk about about that in a few minutes and then I'll talk about what what Anselm means to me in in particular as a not just a scholar but a person so Saint Anselm has left us quite a body of work and writings and it's interesting stuff most of it has been translated a lot of it's been translated many times by by multiple people as a matter of fact there's a new translation apparently of the pro slow Gian coming out with with commentary through st. Augustine's press that's probably been his most translated work I would say and I'd like to talk a little bit about just to give you an impression about what this guy did and the framework in which he did it about his writings and sort of situate that in in the framework of his his life as a whole and you know you can say I think if there's one thing to say about handsome as a a thinker a scholar a writer it's that he got his writing done despite being pulled off in multiple directions by many people at different points in his life yeah that's that's probably the best way to put it because he's a guy who was you know very very competent and also very saintly sometimes these clash dad Martell's us a little bit about that and one of his his stories in the life of st. Anselm which by the way is a great work to read if you want to know something about this guy Ansem it it may come across as kind of Haga graphical you know that is you know can a hazy aura of sainthood about the guy but really there's a lot of prosaic incidents in there which which are probably pretty accurate in representing who this guy was we look at the other evidences that we have and we know that an saan himself looked over the stuff and some had a scrupulous regard for for truth and didn't say that anything and it was it was particularly untruthful so anyway and some was a guy who early on decided that he had some sort of religious vocation but wasn't quite sure what it was and he came from a noble family in oh stop which was that in Burgundy at that time you know it's part of Italy and he fled across the Alps there's a whole interesting story there went into France at that time was you know split up into a whole bunch of different little kingdoms and and Normandy was an important part of it and the Normans had recently conquered England Anselm is is a contemporary of all these great great events that are taking place in the the 11th century so Anselm eventually settles down it back it becomes a monk and then gets promoted to Pryor which is the sort of second-in-command and in a monastery who handles a lot of the day-to-day business and also handled the education of the monks and perhaps of other other people there at the monastery back it was a new monastery and the abbot heroin was not a sort of guy who'd come up through the ranks of of you know the organisation so to speak he was an old warrior who settled down and became a monk and then eventually became a habit when heroin died and some was elected really against his his wishes to be a 'but and he tried to wiggle his way out of it and he had to be told no you've been chosen you're the guy for the job and so he took it on and he was a very good abbot and he ran things very well and that got him known over in england where the you know the Normans were consolidating their conquest and because the the Norman monastery back had some some little Holdings here and there where Anson would have to go out and see how are the monks doing over here and that brought him to the notice of the King blame Rufus who decided I'm gonna make him Archbishop and there's a whole long story there that I'm not going to go into maybe I'll do a video on that some other time any case an Somme was dragged literally kicking and screaming and installed his bishop trying to get out of that couldn't do it and finally agreed to it and then not after that relations with the king started to break down and anthem was at the very heart of very tangled church-state relations not only in England but all across Europe the Gregorian reforms were in place there were a lot of there are a lot of problems within the church as there always are at any given point in time anybody who thinks that this is an aside but anybody who thinks that you know there's a big scandal in the church or something like that really they ought to study some church history and that'll put things into perspective and you know it's not to take away from the largeness of any one given scandal but you'll realise that that's always what's going on and it's not because you know it's such a bad institution or something like that it's because it's made up of human beings who are always three-quarters screwed up and like you know one-quarter trying to do good anyway Anselm was was at the heart of that and so he managed to get a lot of writing done during this time and some of his writing is motivated by what he what he's going through but a lot of it is motivated by his his quest and we know this in part from some of his his letters and correspondence with people and we know this in part because some of his prayers and meditations and and because of the life of st. Anselm what his actual motivations were why did he write in some cases he wrote because the monks bugged him until he would write down some of the things that he was teaching orally and sometimes he wrote because he wanted to communicate the pleasure that the thoughts that he had worked out and that he was meditating upon had communicated to him sometimes he wrote in order to provide pieces for meditation practical meditation to help people get their lives straight that's what a lot of his prayers and meditations are actually intended to be sometimes he wrote because he saw an abuse that needed to be corrected he saw a situation that you know was going to get out of hand that needed to be addressed sometimes he wrote because there was a theological problem that was actually put before the the church his writings on the incarnation of the word for example are trying to combat some of the the problematic interpretations coming out of dialectic that that people were having of the Trinity or his letter on the procession of the Holy Spirit comes from the Council of Bari were and some was one of the chief speakers on the part of the the the Western Church and its understanding of things as opposed to the the Eastern the Orthodox Church probably one reason why Orthodox quite often have a very dim view of an something by the way anyway what did what did he write so I've given you this long prologue what did the guy right well you can divide up his his corpus into a number of different genres writing there's what we call the treatises and these are kind of a mixed bag they include the manalo Jim the pro slogan the on truth on freedom of choice on the fall of the devil why God became man on the Virgin conception on the incarnation of the word on the concordance there's a whole long title to that that I'm going to sort of skip over a lot of times people will put the on the processional Holy Spirit in there as well and there's also the on the on the grammarian which sometimes gets gets you know left out or ignored or downplayed and then those are the ones that have been translated there's also the de simul to deny boosts or on similitudes which is attributed to handsome this is something kind of kind of kind of interesting to think about there are a lot of works that are actually attributed to an Psalm in means patro logia letlet inna that's the sort of big compendium of all the Latin works of well church doctors and fathers and people like that and the Anselm got so famous that people would write stuff and then attribute it to him even though he didn't write it because that way they could get other people to read it now the de simple to tip us what the the scholars you know scholars way up at the high level think like southern and people like that was that it contained portions which were perhaps not insomnia but the core of it was actually on Sonia and so southern reconstructed what he calls a take him on it was more of us which is not translated yet I'm working on a translation of it and it's included in this memorials of Saint Anselm long as some other really really cool works like the dicta Unseld me literally the sayings of seeing and some which are recorded by one of his fellow monks Alexander from from Canterbury and they're consistent with and they expand upon an Psalms other teachings so there's all this whole body of treatises and some of these are sort of in a meditative argumentative form some of them are in dialogue form some of them are more straightforward treaty sees so they've got varied what you call genres to them and some also wrote several meditations that we think three and a number of prayers addressed to different different and some of them are addressed to Christ or you know to to God on behalf of one's friends to get on behalf of one's enemies three of them are addressed to to Mary and then there's a bunch of them that are addressed to figures that are particularly important in the Gospel story like Saint John the Baptist John the Evangelist Mary Magdalene Peter then there's there's one to Saint Benedict and there's also one to say Nicolas and these are really interesting bits of work I shouldn't say bits I mean they are carefully constructed edifice with you could think of them as sort of verbal constructions that you don't sort of mumble along rope you know and recite them they're supposed to place you in this dramatic context in relation to the saint who is an intercessor with with God and they're supposed to help you know something about yourself they're there they're instruments of self-knowledge awakening the right sort of emotions and affections and understanding your your your past your present your future brilliant stuff so he wrote a lot of those prayers and his prayers are very popular they were circulated around a lot of people use them as aids to pray and also to meditate he wrote a number of letters hundreds of them and he actually had his letters saved because we realized that these would be useful for other people to think about it to read later on down the line he didn't write a memoir or anything like that but you know this is almost sort of like saving saving stuff for your memoirs later on and letters reveal to us all different sides of this is character sometimes he's the practical Bishop who has to you know keep keep the realm from falling apart you know because it's always like one step away from that and in force you know church discipline on these these totally on roof monks Abbott's priests you know priestly weren't where he says stuff like don't let that guy go into town because you know when he does he gets drunk and then he causes all sorts of problems you know he wrote to a lot of noble people he had a family who he wrote to he had fellow monks he developed these friendships that are carried out and then we know about them largely through epistolary relationships so anyway there's that whole corpus of letters there's the life of st. Anselm by a odd mer which I would say is is great to supplement by the you know again the dicta Unseld me the sayings of st. Anselm I think that pretty much covers it as far as the whole gamut of stuff and and you know it takes a while to read your way through this and it's stuff that you need to read through multiple times I'm still rereading treatises that I've been reading for you know some of them more than ten years and getting more and more out of them each time that I do and that fits in very well with an Psalms conception of writing and thinking and what it is that human beings do with with language with with reality that we're trying to grasp so that gives you no review of an Psalms works and kind of places them in the context of his time and his projects and his his life he didn't get to write everything that he wanted to towards the end of his life he actually he actually said to some of his fellow monks I meant to write this treatise on the origin of the soul and I didn't get to it and I don't think anybody else is going to be able to get to it now that I'm gonna be gone so that's kind of a fitting place to end at this point in my career and this has been going on for quite a while a good portion of my scholarship is is concerned with st. Anselm's thought and with digging into it and trying to you know systematically study it communicated to other people show how how st. Anselm has something to say about a lot of the things that we're interested in and and that's been going on for for quite some time for me if you take my teaching out of the picture and my my other work oriented in the same sort of things my videos all that out of the picture a lot of my conference presentations my academic writing my my projects are oriented around st. Anselm and how did that come to be well that's kind of a long and tangled story and I actually ended up having to sit down and can plot it out and figure out well how did I get from here to here to here to here because there's a number of different projects that that culminated in in articles or conference papers or things like that along the way so it really starts back in 1998 so we're talking about 15 years ago and in 1998 I had finished my Master's I wrote my master's thesis in in continental philosophy on whose role and I was particularly interested in language after abandoning a first abortive attempt to write a thickened Steinem language which I've talked about in my life against inian phase video and I started reading in some in part because I've gotten tired of reading Thomas Aquinas stylistically not not in terms of his lot or the content of it but I wanted I was working on my Latin and when you're working on Latin one thing that you have to do is well and would you have to you know read works in that language and accumulate vocabulary and sort of like practicing and going onto an obstacle course so I decided look I'm gonna have to read this guy for I had read them before anyway but never really paid much attention to I'm gonna have to read him for my my preliminary examinations let's dig into him and by then I was kind of primed because Thomas Aquinas the experience of reading him in the Latin and and you reading around not just reading what was prescribed for this class or this class of this class had shown me that my instructors their take on Thomas Aquinas and his philosophy was dead wrong that there was a lot more there than I had thought that this this Christian thinker who really centered his metaphysics and his moral theory around God but incorporated a lot of philosophy had a lot of interests and things to say could could anticipate a lot of the criticisms that would be made later on so studying Thomas had kind of primed me for being able to take an some a bit more seriously and I started reading the Proust low gem III got myself to charlesworth facing page addition then had the Latin on one side and Charles Worth's sometimes faithful sometimes not quite so faithful translations on the other along with Charles Worth's terrible terrible commentary which takes about half the book where he devotes like almost all of the the commentary to through the three chapters that are considered the ontological argument oh you know the rest of it you heard that hardly discusses at all but as I was reading it I did find it more stylistically complex and Anselm was very fond of using the key astok structure as a way of arguing and it's quite quite interesting what's going on in there and once I started getting a feel for the language I also started getting a feel for some of the concepts and the fact that the way in which the concepts had been translated or were being discussed by other people are not often that that faithful to an some zone text so that started me and then in 1999 I had to start preparing for my preliminary examinations at Southern Illinois University you took four preliminary examinations each was three and a half hours you had three and a half hours to write an essay answers to four questions selected out of a pool of 12 and each exam was focused on a particular area in our set of areas in philosophy and focused on a particular reading list and the reading lists were immense we we had a pluralistic Department which meant that we had analytic classical American and continental philosophy and a few history of philosophy people and everybody tried to shove their stuff into that reading list as much as possible and you could literally you could be asked questions on anything in that reading list so you had to a lot of people try to game you know the system I actually read everything on the reading lists and not only read everything on the reading lists studied just about everything on the reading lists and so for the metaphysics and philosophy of religion one Anselm's Pro slogan was on there because of course the ontological argument is part of that so I you know I as I was preparing and I was going I was studying not only for that but also for the value fields exam at the same time and you know I was reading some of the same stuff that would show up in the epistemology philosophy of science one later on that I was also reading Hegel too because that was my special thinker yet it have a special thinker exam so I was reading a lot of the people who had addressed Anselm's argument not just dance on himself but I was reading Thomas Aquinas I was reading decart and of course kiss and II you know his objections to to de cartes meditations I was reading John Locke I was reading Immanuel Kant it was reading Hegel and gradually this is interesting because there was a question that I answered on the the exam and he had to do with the ontological argument and I traced out this this sort of history of ontological argument starting with an Psalm and looking at Anselm and Gunn yellow and anillos rejection of it and then Thomas Aquinas is semi rejection because it was interesting I learned from Thomas's commentary on the Psalms which I was translating parts ovenproof reading other people's translations of that Thomas didn't really think that Anselm was wrong he just thought that nobody's going to grant all the stuff that you need in order to get the argument going but that Anselm was actually correct strictly speaking so we had three different you know possibilities and some you know ontological argument works here it is Canelo no it doesn't work at all it's you know terrible Thomas Aquinas well yeah it works but there's better proofs and then when we went to modern philosophy we saw something similar decart kasundi john locke when we get to you know 19th well 18th 19th century philosophy we've got cantaloup and Hegel sort of taking an Psalms position so I included all that in that question and that would show up later on in the very first paper that I wrote for for a conference so that takes us up to 2000 and in 2000 fortunately for me providentially Anselm would say there was a there was a flyer on the bulletin board that had to do with conferences and events and things like that and it's an anthem his legacy and influence the first and the first st. Anselm conference at the Institute for CNN some studies say in some college Manchester New Hampshire and by then this is actually before 2000 it was it was late 1999 when I saw the night I thought well I just answered a prelim question about that I can write a paper about that so I sent in a proposal and it was accepted and then I was you know still the graduate student at the time I'd been to a few conferences but not too many and in the meantime though you know while I was getting ready for this my my last remaining parent died and I had to handle the the inheritance and and all that and so by the time that April rolled around I had just barely got my paper written and I flew out there to - to New Hampshire and I was you know staying there and it was a wonderful conference there were people first of all there there were people who were you know Catholics there there was some Orthodox there there was some Anglicans there because they're very interested in Anselm there's some evangelicals there of course there were some people who have no religious you know connections whatsoever there and you know I'm sure there was some atheists there as well but they didn't they make any big play of it there and there were monks because this was a monastery and there the monks were staying with their fellow monks at the monastery and you know this is a very different world to me I didn't grew up around that that sort of thing even though I grew up you know sort of nominally Catholic as a kid and you know heard some excellent papers I got some good feedback on my paper and then I met two people who had really influenced my career as an anthem scholar for for the the batter and they were both Benedict and monks I actually credit both of them in a later piece that I wrote with with my vocation one of them is father John Thornton who is from that Abbey st. Anselm's Abbey his great love is actually he's a medieval philosophy expert but he also has a great love for international relations you can talk all day long about that sort of stuff brilliant guy great organizer as well and he was the first person in charge of the st. Anselm Institute so I got to talking with him he was very down-to-earth and he was very encouraging and just a very he's a guy who he has somewhat of a gruff exterior at times but there's a lot of love in him and I got to see that on many occasions we get we became friends and then there was father Paschal bomb Steen from Belmont Abbey down in North Carolina and he was there with another monk because Father Pascal was not well he had he had some some brain problems that are required surgery at one point and he wasn't you know at that point everything was kind of touch and go with him so he had this this other monk father John who had accompanied him to sort of help him out and I talked with him a little bit at the reception and then later on I talked with him and father John for a good hour at a breakfast at the hotel that we were staying at and I learned all sorts of things that I didn't know about the Benedict and rule and about their way of life and about how this had influencing and some and I didn't realize this but I was talking with somebody who was you know in the top tier of and some scholars father Pascal is a was in still I mean he's he's either in heaven or purgatory brilliant the Anselm scholar who managed to really dig into certain aspects of Anselm's thought that other people just I've kind of passed over and father Paschal and I would continue our conversations and through correspondence and he became a very good good friend of mine and he sort of pushed me to keep reading this about Anselm keep thinking about this on and some he was very encouraging so I met them there and didn't do anything with that paper they they had a call for papers you know but I didn't think it was good enough to actually submit then I went to the the second st. Anselm conference in 2002 and I gave a paper at that time I was writing my dissertation on Maurice Blondell and below and l had written a bit about Anselm and the ontological argument and about Descartes and Moll brush specifically so I wrote this this piece which was later published in 2005 in the st. Anselm Journal and I I was in a panel basically about about Anselm and Neoplatonism and that that gave me a lot of interesting things to think about as well and then I started really reading and some seriously the the second conference again you know given me the idea there's a lot more to this guy than just this ontological argument I better I better dig into this so I started reading you know the Mona loggia paying attention to that and seeing what wasn't contained in the pro slogan from the mother-in-law and then I start reading the the three you know theological treatises that are supposed to pertain to the study of sacred scripture but are really about moral life and the will and its structure and truth and you know things like that the on truth on freedom of choice and on the fall of the devil and I was just being more and more drawn in in 2004 I started writing a paper on something that had been under explored in the prosto Gian you know everyone wants to focus on the one single argument which actually runs a whole the pro slogan and they think that it's Pro slogan two through four the ontological argument about God's existence well there's other stuff in there and there's a you know several chapters about how can God be merciful and just at the same time which for me as a bigger conundrum then does God exist and Anselm had a really ingenious way of describing and discussing and delving into this that requires you know quite a bit of sort of mental gymnastics and I don't mean that in the pejorative sense I mean that in the auditory sense you have to really work your brain in order to dig your way into these kind of mysteries and Anselm provided an apparatus a structure for doing that in those chapters so I wrote a piece on mercy and justice and in st. Anselm's Pro Sailaja and I thought where should I send this so I sent it to the American Catholic philosophical quarterly and they accepted it and then it was published later on in 2006 I kept on reading and writing on and some and in 2006 I gave a conference paper at the Indiana Philosophical Association and it was centered on the question you know what is actually st. Anselm's argument to the pro slow-jam and it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually I've got to find something to do with this this paper because I have never published it and it's it's grown perhaps too large they actually even be a journal article unless I said it to a European Journal or to you know philosophy and phenomenological research one of these journals that accepts longer papers but it is quite quite important because what I'm doing is is taking the best scholarship on you know Ansem a lot of it has been overlooked here in the anglo-american world one French scholarship especially reflexive philosophy talking about Ansem yeah trying to make sense out of what is actually going on here in this argument in an Psalms own terms you have to think about what an saan himself makes of argument what he thinks language is doing how truth is connected with ideas so there was that and then I also published another piece in the st. Anselm Journal that year in 2006 I was beginning to do the work that would eventually culminate in my book on the Christian philosophy debates and I saw that Ansem was a figure who had been talked about in the Christian philosophy debates and that there the implications that were you know the positions that were being taken he had to do with whether an Psalms philosophy or her thought was actually Christian philosophy or not so I published seeing Anselm's Phoenix quietens intellect um ISM is a model for Christian philosophy and things started to really get moving at the at that point 2007 I gave a paper entitled Cattrall cheekily when should students be beaten at the midwest medieval historical I think it's Association or conference or Society it was a new field for me you know talking to historians about this and the paper had to do with an Psalms views on punishment and coercion and by the way Handsome's answer to when should students be beaten very very rarely as opposed to most of the people of his his own time and eventually I would I would have that that published in Cistercian studies quarterly they accepted it entirely with the one proviso that I had to change the title because they didn't want you know their journals the king that has like you know the titles of the articles on it they didn't want people looking at and saying oh so the Cistercians are about beating beating students so that got published as another another article I gave a conference paper at the American Catholic Philosophical Association conference which was focused on freedom and the will that year excellent excellent conference I gave I gave a paper on an some freedom inclinations of the will and and moral virtue that was published in the proceedings I got to meet Kate Rodgers which it was something that was really an important thing for me Kate Rodgers was as it still is a major and some scholar she's got a recent book out and Anselm and freedom several other books going back to her years all the way back to her doctoral work at Notre Dame so meeting her was sort of like you know you know meeting her your favorite rock star and again very a lot of these Anselm scholars very down there with people we had some great conversations and I've run into her again at several other conferences 2007 I also did something else I I saw that the internet encyclopedia of philosophy article on Anselm was very short and they were looking for somebody to write a longer article so I said well I could do that so I did it and it was a long lengthy writing process and then revision process and and you know a lot of work but eventually culminated in this this encyclopedia article that is getting used by a lot of people to learn about who this this Anselm guy is and what his thought is in 2008 one of the high points of my career took place and it took place in part because of John Fortin inviting me out to st. Anselm College to give the annual st. Anselm lecture which to me felt like kind of a leap of faith at the time you know who the hell are I and he asked me to come out and and give a you know the talk on st. Anselm that year and so I did and I decided I was going to take from my my central theme got simplicity and and our complexity so I gave this talk there's about 45 minutes long you can see it if you want it's it's published in the st. anselm journal and there's a podcast of the talk and of my Q&A available on the city and some website and I think I have links to it in my own blog website as well so it was called you know a simple God and are complicated moral lives a perfectly simple God in our complicated moral lives and explore the nature of divine simplicity the way that Anselm understands it and then how that how that should affect us us human beings I also I moved down to cut to Fayetteville that year and in the North it I gave the paper in the North Carolina Religious Studies Association on an Psalm justice and ontological dignity Anselm is a neoplatonist and and I you know he distinguishes degrees of being and I said that perhaps justice just being should be understood as adding a greater amplitude or dignity ontological dignity of being to the human being controversial thesis again a paper I haven't done much with I did send it out to one journal where it was rejected but in a very weird way they said it was a great paper but they couldn't publish it at the time and then they just left it at that and I sort of fell through the cracks and I I didn't send it out anywhere else 2009 I a couple more conference papers one is fetus cuarón's rectitude earnest intellect 'm Christian faith and practical rationality and handsome I gave that at the fourth in Saint Anselm conference in 2009 2009 was a very important year because that was the the anniversary of a centennial 900 year anniversary of an son's death I gave another paper called a personalist aspect of st. Anselm's neo platonic metaphysics at the the Neoplatonism conference in Steubenville Ohio at Franciscan University stupid ago that was later published in their their journal cuestiones dispute dispute Tati in 2011 I had a paper that was supposed to be published in a book that was going to come out in 2009 called meeting God through moral life and it was about an Psalms moral theory and about how it would lead us to understand a God how the practical and theoretical come together and John Thornton was was editing that that was kind of an interesting turn of events because Notre Dame press ended up and this this is a volume that he had like the who's who of Anselm scholarship contributing to it I was sort of riding her coattails in as a junior scholar Notre Dame press pantsed on it after all the essays have been written and after things were supposed to like go to go to the presses and so all of these these papers just were kind of orphaned hung out to dry and I haven't done anything with mine that's becoming a common theme and I'm realizing another thing that was really important for me was that in 2009 in the summer I I stayed for a portion of the summer as a resident scholar being supported by the Institute for Saint Anselm Studies and getting to do research in the library the Geisel library is Saint Anselm collection I also was able to participate in the metaphysics colloquium which which was held at st. Anselm as well and and that was a wonderful time the backstory of that was I decided I wanted to write a book on Anselm and moral theory before I moved down to Fayetteville State University so I was I was already beating to work on it and then at Fayetteville State University they came up with these faculty development grants and they said hey if you've got a book project you know something you're doing well we'll help you out with it we want to help you you know develop yourself as a scholar just write yourself a grant proposal and send it in and so I did and it was you know got accepted but it was a huge huge hassle there were all sorts of headaches I'm not going to go into the whole story but let's just say there was a ton of mismanagement on FSU sparked shortly after the the money was starting to finally get disbursed we went into a budget crisis a massive budget crisis and they started freezing things and I have never seen grant money actually taken back but that's what they did they had agreed to and they had promised that I would get money for travel to these conferences and for a stay up at you know st. Anselm's and I think I'd also written in there some study at Notre Dame as well they took back all of that so now it was like well I guess I'll just suck up the conference's you know I'll have to pay for those myself because I'm not going to not go to the conference's but what am I going to do about you know this this summer of study that I had planned to work on my on my book and Duane Bruce stepped up he was by now John Thornton and had moved on to a lot of other things and Duane Bruce was now the the head of the Institute and Duane Bruce said well let me see what I can do to help out and there was a lot of sort of finagling and making things work on a shoestring and I got myself up there I drove all the way up to it to Manchester and they put me up dorm room and you know made the library you know available to me hooked me up to the research librarian gave me a card for making copies said you know whatever else you need let us know we can't actually like you know give you give you a board money but here's here's a room that you can actually stay in and you know you can get this work done and so that was an invaluable time for me it was a great outpouring of charity at a time in my life when things were were in many respects particularly dark you know I was teaching at a school that was just going through all sorts of problems in a state that was going through all sorts of problems my personal life is was kind of a mess as well and I was trying to get my scholarship back back in gear after having had to jump ship from you know the prison job that I'd been teaching down to Fayetteville State University only to find out that the things were in such a mess there so this was kind of an oasis for me to carry out some some good scholarship and I did in 2010 I was contacted by Rio Press and asked if I wanted to contribute to a volume called living called death an anti-death volume seven nine hundred years after Sammy Ansel and I thought well that's kind of weird stuff and it was tied in with all this futurist anti-death kind of kind of things but they had some you know some some you know pretty big-name and some scholars like well okay seems you know like like a forum where I could actually write some some reasonable stuff on CD and some and get it in there and so I said I'm going to do something on Saint Anselm and eternal life and and and human life temporal life I said sure sounds good so I wrote something called living towards eternal life st. Anselm's Christian anthropology I also gave a paper at the wisdom conference in Wisconsin back in my home state of a terrible University up Macross I give the paper on human and divine wisdom and Anselm of Canterbury again which I haven't done anything with they suppose I there really ought to then 2012 once I've moved up here to New York I gave a paper at the Felician ethics conference what kind of moral theory to st. Anselm actually hold another paper I still have to do something I've promised it so there there journal actually but I haven't revised it the way I ought to and what was kind of interesting is is that trip down there to Felician which is in New Jersey coincided with going further down into New Jersey because my wife and I were invited by st. Anselm parish to go as gasps and give a dinner address and so I did a little talk about who is Saint Anselm because you know they did found out about me through my internet article will be the internet encyclopedia of philosophy entry st. Anselm which by the way is you know if you put it into like a paper format it's like 50 pages long that's a that's a pretty deep article so anyway that was kind of fun I got to meet a lot of nice people who were quite interested in Ansem we were going to do some talks but then of course you know the hurricane hit and kind of put the kibosh on that and they've been doing some rebuilding but eventually I think will probably do that and then I recently gave a paper while two papers this year in 2013 one was in April and it was at another you know conference at Franciscan University Steubenville that was oriented around the question must morality be grounded upon God and so I gave the paper called it in Sami and grounding a morality where I said yeah France all more or less and here's how it would play itself out that paper I'm actually revising for for a very soon looming deadline for qui Sione's to Cebu Tati where they want to publish the conference proceedings and papers they're the ones that they particularly liked and I recently gave another paper just this last month in Grand Valley State University because that's where the International Society for McIntyre inquiry was it was called an overlooked medieval occasion Anselm unjustice virtues and vices of moral inquiry it's quite a mouthful there and it was basically saying Alistair McIntyre is this great account of the history of philosophy in the history of moral theory he talks about certain medievals but he gives all this precedence to st. Thomas he talks about Anselm a little bit but really only in terms of the ontological argument here's how he could have talked about st. Anselm here's my scene Ansel this was particularly important for medieval thought and could still be today so it's quite a quite a long discussion there about how I ended up getting into that and hopefully you got an idea that you know it's not just about conference papers or publications but it's really about the content you know some of the things that I write about have to do with Anselm's arguments and what's going on debt a lot of things on his moral theory including the book that I'm working on other things having to do with you know time and eternity or other aspects of Anselm's thought friendship for example you know the role that that played I got you know the more and more that I research him the more and more I'm finding things that I'm really drawn to in his thought and so where my current projects are a lot of those papers actually got written because I thought I was going to use them as chapters in the book that I'm so you know I'm writing it was gonna say supposed to be writing what I am writing on state Anselm's moral theory I've got several chapters actually written although they'll probably get revised as I as I finish other chapters I'm also curing out a project where I'm translating the decimal to tuna boat later on after I get that done I'll translate the the dicta on saw me because I think these are works that really deserve to be out there and available to to non-latin readers and then where I'm going to go after that I don't know I've submitted a few other conference paper proposals one recently for a paper on Anselm and Heidegger believe it or not having to do with truth and nothingness and I'll probably write on ants on the rest of my life because there's so much stuff there that I just haven't yet explored what I really need to do besides getting my butt in gear about the book is take a lot of these papers that I've written that haven't found a home yet and find them a home either what I need to do is get them into journals which means actually going through the business of sending them out and then what you know if they get rejected send them somewhere else if they get accepted it's usually you have to revise something you know it's a fit they're what it would they're bill so I got to get on with that and either that or I need to pitch them as a book of essays because I actually have enough unpublished handsome essays that I could probably publish a whole book the problem with that is I'm you know when it comes to an some studies I would say that at this point in my career I am no longer a junior scholar but I'm not in the you know like the top tier of just big heavyweight and some scholars that you know if you're going to do something i Anselm you better bring these people in I'm sort of in the middle ground people in people who are interested in Anselm know my work they may not know exactly what what I'm doing but you know I get I get a lot of good good compliments on doing good good scholarly and some writing and exploring interesting avenues in his thoughts sometimes I get from the react the reaction from people well there's two interesting reactions I get from people one is the I had no idea this was an an Psalms work because you know people don't always read as widely and the other is I'm really not sure I understand what you're talking about here are you sure that Hansel thinks that and so I probably need to make a probably need to do a better job in making a case for that sort of thing so that's probably a good place to close you know go from the perfectly clear beginning to ending and in mystery and ambiguity I wanted to finish up this already pretty long video by showing you st. Anselm's college and in particular two places where i spent quite a bit of time during my summer stay there and two places i like to go back to visit so this is the the patron of st. Anselm College himself st. Anselm a very dramatic statue of him this is one of the places this is the chapel interesting design to it as you'll see in just a moment beautiful circular design some some really interesting stained glass for me this was a place where I could learn the how to pray the Liturgy of the hours by going there and doing so with the monks which is something that I really got a lot out of it was interesting seeing how slow how meditated they were with it and and it helped me to better understand how that ought to be how that ought to be done the other place where I spent a lot of my time and study was the st. Anselm collection which is a room in the Geisel library on the second floor which is lined with these these bookshelves containing volumes dealing with st. Anselm either about Saint Anselm or on Saint Anselm or pursuing the scholarship further they also have a lot of really interesting old volumes that I try to keep my hands off of because I could probably you know just just damage them and I don't have too much to get out of them myself but I do consult a lot of the studies that are available and I think younger scholars would find that very as well the other thing that's really remarkable about this is that they gather all of the research as it comes out on st. Anselm and they categorize it and put it into these boxes and that is what I really worked from a lot and I think that's what younger scholars would find most interesting there so that is my life as a st. Anselm scholar

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 6,097

Rating: 4.9710145 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Student, College, University, Sadler, Anselm Of Canterbury (Saint), Saint Anselm College (Organization), Graduate School, Proslogion (Book), Ontological Argument, Philosophy, Religion, Christianity (Religion), Saint, Research, Study, Institute for Saint Anselm Studies, History Of Philosophy (Field Of Study), God, Bishop, Monasticism, Theology, Scholarship, Divine Simplicity, Moral Theory

Id: JSG_e_MwXxc

Length: 58min 25sec (3505 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 25 2013