port of which view he appealed to John the Scot, who was therefore posthumously condemned.
Berengar denied transubstantiation, and was twice compelled to recant. His heresies were
combated by Lanfranc in his book De corpore et sanguine Domini. Lanfranc was born at Pavia,
studied law at Bologna, and became a first-rate dialectician. But he abandoned dialectic for
theology, and entered the monastery of Bec, in Normandy, where he conducted a school. William
the Conqueror made him archbishop of Canterbury in 1070.
Saint Anselm was, like Lanfranc, an Italian, a monk at Bec, and archbishop of Canterbury ( 1093-
1109), in which capacity he followed the principles of Gregory VII and quarrelled with the king.
He is chiefly known to fame as the inventor of the "ontological argument" for the existence of
God. As he put it, the argument is as follows: We define "God" as the greatest possible object of
thought. Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist, is
greater. Therefore the greatest of all objects of thought must exist, since, otherwise, another, still
greater, would be possible. Therefore God exists.
This argument has never been accepted by theologians. It was adversely criticized at the time; then
it was forgotten till the latter half of the thirteenth century. Thomas Aquinas rejected it, and
among theologians his authority has prevailed ever since. But among philosophers it has had a
better fate. Descartes revived it in a somewhat amended form; Leibniz thought that it could be
made valid by the addition of a supplement to prove that God is possible. Kant considered that he
had demolished it once for all. Nevertheless, in some sense, it underlies the system of Hegel and
his followers, and reappears in Bradley's principle: "What may be and must be, is."
Clearly an argument with such a distinguished history is to be treated with respect, whether valid
or not. The real question is: Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can
think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought? Every philosopher would like to say yes,
because a philosopher's job is to find out things about the world by thinking rather than observing.
If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things; if not, not. In this
generalized form, Plato uses a kind of ontological argument to prove the objective reality of ideas.
But no one before Anselm had