St. Anselm Analysis

St. Anselm, an Italian monk, first initiated the ontological argument. He was a firm As a firm believer in God and hoped to prove and share his strong faith on God’s existence by using logic and reason. He defines God as ‘something than which nothing greater can be thought.’ Anselm states that there is a difference between understanding God as a concept and understanding him to exist. To back up this claim he uses the analogy of a painter. He elaborates that the first step a painter takes is by picturing his masterpiece in his head although he knows for a fact that it does not exist yet, he understands it as a concept. However, once the painter has interpreted the visual image in his head to a painting only then can it be seen by man, he now …show more content…
Therefore, God is a possible being and might exist in reality. Anselm also strongly stresses that God is perfect and greater than anything in existence. He argues that an existent God is clearly greater than a non-existent one, and therefore, God is perfect by definition, he must exist otherwise if it only existed in our understanding and not in reality then God wouldn’t satisfy the word “perfect” and therefore, wouldn’t be God. Living things are contingent and depend upon the existence of other things, for instance, a child can not be born if his parents hadn’t conceived him and even if he hadn’t been born, the world would go on. This emphasizes that everything and everyone exists today because of God. He is the ultimate creator of all things, and he is impossible not to exist. There is nothing greater than God that can be imagined and it is not only in our understanding but also reality. Anselm’s argument attracted many critics. One of the arguments was by Gaunilo, also a monk and believed strongly in God, however, he strongly disagreed with Anselm’s theory. He claimed that if Anselm’s logic were true then anything that was imagined could be brought into