ANSELM OF BESATE, called the Peripatetic. - Wandering master of the 11th century, one of the first representatives of the dialectic reviving in early scholasticism. Of his life it is known only that he was from a noble family of Besate (Pavia); that he belonged to the Milanese clergy; that he had as teachers in the liberal arts Drogo of Parma and Sichalmo of Reggio Emilia; that he traveled through Italy, Burgundy, and southern Germany, pushing as far as Mainz and Bamberg, everywhere making a display of his dialectical art and asserting its marvelous demonstrative capacities even with regard to the truths of the faith.
His teaching has come down to us in a curious little work, halfway between logic and polemical-autobiographical writing, entitled Rhetorimachia, dedicated first to his teacher Drogo, then to the Emperor Henry II, under whose successor he held the office of court chaplain. In this work, with a convoluted and bombastic style, he develops the Ciceronian theory of the fundamental importance of rhetoric, displays his erudition in the arts of the trivium, and in particular discusses the applicability of the logical principle of contradiction even in the sphere of dogmatic doctrines. The sources of his dialectic are the same as those of his learned contemporaries, such as Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) and Fulbert, founder of the school of Chartres, that is, the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Aristotelian writings on the categories and the De interpretatione, and finally the treatises on logic of Severinus Boethius.
Compared with the other dialecticians of the time (also called "philosophers," "sophists," "Peripatetics" in a more or less ironic and disparaging sense), who, like the ancient sophists of Greece, traveled through their countries giving proofs of their rationalistic worth and asserting its character as the exclusive and supreme norm of knowledge even in the things of the faith, and therefore also above Sacred Scripture and the Fathers, he is characterized by a certain moderation of his own, even in the one-sided prominence he gives to dialectic. In any case, it was also against him, confused with the "sophists" of the age, of whom the most representative is Berengar of Tours, that the lively reaction of the conservative "anti-dialectical" spirits was directed, particularly that of St. Peter Damian.
Bibliography6 works
Mario Bendiscioli