Volume 48, Issue 3, September 2008
Ben Novak
Pages 305-320
Anselm on Nothing
The article analyzes Anselm of Canterbury’s development of three meanings of “nothing” in the Monologion, and a fourth in three later works: De casu diaboli, one of his letters, and his Incomplete Work. By focusing exclusively on the points where the meaning of nothing is first presented and then successively redefined, we can see that Anselm rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo by arguing that the things created by God had some form of existence before they were created, and that creation refers not to coming into existence but to coming into being. In the three later works Anselm extends the meaning of nothing to show that it has a surprisingly positive content, since it is a term of negation that has meaning only in terms of what it excludes or negates. Anselm’s analysis of nothing seems to presage many modern discussions this subject.