Commentary

This prayer opens the Proslogion and expresses the dependence of the seeker upon the divine initiative. Anselm asks to be taught how to seek God, acknowledging that the search itself is possible only through grace. The devotional frame shows that the argument of the book is conceived as a form of prayer rather than an abstract demonstration. R. W. Southern notes the intimacy of Anselm's prayers, which he wrote for the monks of Bec and which circulated widely in the twelfth century. Jasper Hopkins draws attention to the reciprocity of seeking and finding that the prayer describes, a pattern that structures the whole of Anselm's theology. Brian Davies and Gillian Evans's introduction (1998) places the prayer within the Benedictine tradition of meditative reading. The sentence is central to the spirituality that informs Anselm's rationalism.