Monologium, on the Being of God53 Chapter LIII. This love is identical with the supreme Spirit, and yet it is itself with the Father and the Son one spirit.

St Anselm († 1109) · Monologion · 1075-1076

Chapter LIII. This love is identical with the supreme Spirit, and yet it is itself with the Father and the Son one spirit.

But, what can be equal to the supreme Spirit, except the supreme Spirit? That love is, then, the supreme Spirit. Hence, if no creature, that is, if nothing other than the supreme Spirit, the Father and the Son, ever existed; nevertheless, Father and Son would love themselves and one another.

It therefore follows that this love is nothing else than what the Father and the Son are, which is the supreme Being. But, since there cannot be more than one supreme Being, what inference can be more necessary than that Father and Son and the love of both are one supreme Being? Therefore, this love is supreme Wisdom, supreme Truth, the supreme Good, and whatsoever can be attributed to the substance the supreme Spirit.

Verum quid potest esse par summo Spiritui, nisi summus Spiritus? Iste itaque amor est summus Spiritus. Denique si nulla unquam creatura, id est si nihil unquam aliud esset quam summus Spiritus, Pater et Filius nihilominus seipsos et invicem Pater et Filius diligerent. Consequitur itaque hunc amorem non esse aliud quam quod est Pater et Filius, quod est summa essentia. At quoniam summae essentiae plures esse non possunt, quid magis necessarium quam Patrem et Filium, et utriusque amorem unam esse summam essentiam? Est igitur idem amor summa sapientia, summa veritas, summum bonum, et quidquid de summi Spiritus substantia dici potest.

Sidney Norton Deane (1878–1943), Chicago: Open Court, 1903. Digital text: English Wikisource transcription of the 1903 edition (each chapter checked against the OCR of the Internet Archive scan stanselmeproslog00anseuoft). Original text: Corpus Corporum (University of Zurich) TEI of the Patrologia Latina, via the CatholicCorpus mirror. Public domain in the US and Canada: published 1903; translator died 1943. Latin: Migne, PL 158 (1853), public domain.

Save for later

Enter your email and we will send you a sign-in link. No password. What you save (articles, verses, chapters, documents) follows you to any device.