BASA

The Foolish of the de Utilitate Credendi 135 and comprehension of the truth is not a purely cogmtive, shall we say 'antisceptically' cognitive, process , but is linked to moral and spiritual prerequisites which are autochthonous to Christian life. The spirit should be 'simple', life should be 'ordered', subjected to the discipline of 'necessary precepts'. 0 Without God's help even the most excellent of intelligences can, at most, slither on the ground. The paralleis to Anselm's thought are obvious, and perhaps historically inevitable. In the Proslogion, for example, reason not only exercises the task of constructing demonstrations but, in addition, engages in the therapeutic work of purifying the mind, disposing it for a realm that transcends discursive reason. lt also takes the form of a pilgrimage, this time a sort of monastic pere– grinatio in stabilitate in which the human soul endeavors to recover something of its original, pre-lapsarian, status. lt was a naive hermeneutic indeed which could maintain that the argument was completed in Proslogion II-IV and that the remainder of the treatise was no more than a pious afterthought. As far as the Pool is concerned, De Utilitate Credendi makes a noteworthy distinction between the 'wise' and the 'foolish', the first being those who possess a well-formed notion of God and whose life reflects this notion, and those who do not. 7 Between human foolishness and Divine Truth stands human wisdom: 8 the Pool of the Proslogion is separated from God by the same measure. Returning to Anselm we know how the Pool denies the exis– tence of God. lt is possible because he does not really know what he is saying: the Pool remains on the level of mere words (vox) and fails to advance to the level of the reality (res) they signify. 9 This denial is then not really a statement about God's existence but rather about the Pool's deficient mode of thought, grounded, as it is, on the level of mere words. But why does he exist on 7 « Nunc autem sapientes voco, non cordatos et ingeniosos homines, sed eos quibus inest, quanta inesse homini potest, ipsius hominis Deique firmissime percepta cognitio, atque huic cognitione vita moresque congruentes: ceteres autem, cuiusque modi artibus inertiisque affecti sint quolibet victu probandi sini improbandi, stultorum in numero deputaverim ». Ibid., 12, 27. " Ibid., 12, 27. • Proslogion IV, 103, 18-20.