The thesis aims to describe Anselm's years as prior and abbot and his archiepiscopal career. Analyzing the years spent in the Norman monastery of Bec as a missionary and teacher in its school, the thesis notes the amount of knowledge and experiences which prepared Anselm for his archiepiscopal career. His intellectual qualities and theories are examined as well as some of his highly influential theological texts. Anselm also strove to spread the reforms of his teacher and mentor at Bec and his predecessor at Canterbury, Archbishop Lanfranc. Anselm's following archiepiscopal career spanned the reigns of two kings: William Rufus and Henry I. The study proves that the policies and attitudes of both rulers were quite different. Under the reign of William Rufus, Anselm tried to bring his ideal theoretical state of things into actuality, but the king resisted everything he attempted to do. With his death, Anselm's position changed rapidly and dramatically. Henry, on the other hand, excelled in the ability to work out a compromise. In the end, Anselm's archiepiscopal career concluded with cooperation between king and archbishop.

Nota-se, a partir do período carolíngio, um paulatino aumento da presença da dialética no cenário filosófico latino. A questão que se coloca a esses pensadores, sobretudo nos séculos X e XI, diz respeito à articulação entre o estudo das Sagradas Escrituras e a dialética. Anselmo de Cantuária representa um momento importante na dissolução dessa tensão, chegando a escrever uma obra exclusivamente dialética, o De grammatico. A originalidade de seu pensamento ganha contorno quando comparada à solução hierárquica de seu contemporâneo Pedro Damião, ou quando voltamo-nos à disputa sobre a eucaristia, na qual Lanfranco é visto pela tradição como defensor da proeminência da fé, e Berengário, apregoado como defensor da dialética. Este trabalho investiga os deslocamentos teóricos que permitem a Anselmo propor uma solução diferente para o problema da dialética em teologia. / From the carolingean period, one may note the gradually increasing presence of dialectic in the latin philosophical scenario. The question that arises to those thinkers, specially on the 10th and 11th centuries, concerns the relation between the study of the Sacred Scriptures and dialectic. Anselm of Canterbury represents an important moment on the dissolution of this tension, even writing an entirely dialectic work, De grammatico. The \"originality\" of his thinking gains proportions when compared to the hierarchical solution of his contemporary, Peter Damian, or when we turn attention to the dispute on the eucharist, in which Lanfrac is seen by the tradition as a defensor of the prominence of faith, and Berengar proclaimed as defensor of dialectic. This thesis investigates the theoretical shifts that allow Anselm to propose a different solution to the problem of dialectic in theology.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany, 1945—the year of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, and subsequently, the end of World War II. His own beginnings were shrouded by a national “repression” of history. This repression was at odds with Kiefer’s needs to establish his own origin. For this reason, the spirituality in his earlier work is often overshadowed by its subject—Nazi Germany. This thesis will look back on Kiefer’s work through the lens of mythology in an effort to re-evaluate his earlier art within the context of his works since 1990. From the 1970s to the present, Kiefer has drawn from mythology to find links between personal and universal human experience. We begin by examining Kiefer’s controversial Attic Paintings of 1973. In the Attic Paintings, German and Christian mythology helped Kiefer understand his origin as a post-war German artist. Kiefer then turned his attention to myths from outside cultures throughout the 1980s. We will look closely at three paintings from the 1980s that incorporate Greek, Judaic, and Egyptian mythology in an effort to understand Kiefer’s larger goals in broadening his mythological base. Following this discussion, we will examine two paintings from the 1990s and his 2007 permanent installation at the Louvre Museum. These selected works serve to illustrate how Kiefer presented his own cultivated, personal mythology under the stars in his still ongoing cosmic series. The 1990s mark Kiefer’s broadest expansion yet; in a sense, he went from “the attic to the universe” over the course of three decades.

Ce mémoire s'interroge sur l'actualité de la mélancolie à l'ère du présentisme. Ce questionnement émerge de l'observation d'œuvres d'art singulières : un tableau du peintre catalan Antoni Tàpies (Calligraphie, 1958), une installation de Claudio Parmiggiani (Sculpture d'ombre, 2002) et une sculpture de l'artiste allemand Anselm Kiefer (La Brisure des vases, 1990). Ces œuvres ont en commun de représenter des livres illisibles, évoquant la dépossession d'un héritage culturel et la suspension de la transmission historique entre le passé, le présent et le futur, qui caractérisent très précisément le présentisme, soit le régime d'historicité (Hartog, 2003) propre aux sociétés occidentales contemporaines. Depuis 1989, en effet, celles-ci se montreraient de plus en plus préoccupées par les enjeux du seul présent, se désintéressant tant des leçons de l'histoire que du sort des communautés à venir. En prenant pour objet un corpus d'œuvres d'art contemporaines, ce mémoire entend montrer comment la mélancolie peut revêtir une dimension critique à l'égard de notre rapport au temps. Il s'agit donc d'étudier principalement trois sujets : la mélancolie, l'œuvre de Tàpies, Parmiggiani et Kiefer, et le présentisme. Dans un premier temps, nous nous intéressons à l'évolution de la notion de mélancolie à travers ses représentations artistiques de manière à mieux cerner la nature de la mélancolie qu'affichent les œuvres de Tàpies, Parmiggiani et Kiefer. Dans un second temps, nous nous penchons sur l'origine de la mélancolie manifeste dans l'œuvre de chacun, ainsi que sur l'engagement humaniste qui sous-tend leur pratique. Dans un troisième temps, nous dégageons les caractéristiques du présentisme lui-même et la manière dont la mélancolie des livres illisibles peut agir comme critique de celui-ci. Une telle démonstration implique deux présupposés: le premier est que la mélancolie ne saurait se réduire à la conception freudienne à laquelle on la réduit souvent en la définissant comme un attachement maladif au passé; le second est que les œuvres d'art sont les symptômes des maux ou des crises qui affectent les sociétés d'une époque à l'autre. Il en ressort que non seulement la mélancolie des livres illisibles est un indicateur du vide de sens qui affectent nos sociétés, mais qu'elle incarne aussi la liberté qui nous est offerte, dans une époque affranchie tant de ses attaches à la tradition que des utopies qui marquèrent la modernité, de repenser un monde commun. ______________________________________________________________________________

In recent years a controversy has arisen in the scholarship dealing with St. Anselm of Canterbury. Since R. W. Southern published his biography of Anselm, his views have been widely accepted. In his view, Anselm was a devout monk who spent his life contemplating, with clear insight, profound theological issues. Forced to accept the Archbishopric of Canterbury, Anselm was never content with his responsibilities and longed to return to the simple life of a monk. The result was that Anselm blundered his way through conflicts with the Kings of England, William Rufus and Henry I. Because of his inability to handle himself in political spheres, Anselm was forced into exile twice. Within the last decade, however, Sally N. Vaughn has challenged Southern's prevailing views with a re-examination of the sources. In her opinion, Anselm was an astute politician who determined, early on, that he was destined to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Vaughn tries to show that Anselm carefully orchestrated events so that he was in fact elected to the position. Sally Vaughn's Anselm is very different from the contemplative monk of Southern's book. The controversy now centres on whether or not a devout contemplative monk could also be an astute politician while still maintaining an other-wordly detachment. This is the view of Eadmer, Anselm's companion and first biographer. Southern and Vaughn's views, while defensible from the sources, both fail to recognise, unlike Eadmer, the compatibility of vocations as an archbishop and a monk. This thesis will re-examine the sources--Eadmer's biographies and Anselm's writings--to show that Eadmer's view is the correct one. Anselm clearly transferred his intellectual powers into his monastic vocation and from there used his principles as a guiding force of his episcopacy.

Although the interpretation of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo in the tradition of Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack and Gustaf Aulen has led to a suspicion about its usefulness for a Peace Theology, a reading through the lens of more recent scholarship, which assumes its original Catholic, sacramental and sacrificial framework, reveals a beautiful understanding of the cross in this medieval classic that is perfectly compatible with a commitment to nonviolence. Three Mennonite scholars writing in pursuit of an Anabaptist Peace Theology, John Howard Yoder, John Driver and J. Denny Weaver display varying degrees of dissatisfaction with the explanation that Anselm provided in Cur Deus Homo, and none held out many prospects for its usefulness. Yoder highlighted the weaknesses, Driver essentially repeated them, and Weaver went a step further to charge that Cur Deus Homo depicted divinely sanctioned violence and ought to be rejected. They did not demonstrate much awareness of or reliance on the contributions of scholars who have focused on Anselm's theology and context. Reading Cur Deus Homo through the lens of more recent anselmian scholarship reveals that the honour and justice of God are one with the mercy and love of God. Humanity is restored not through punishment, but through the means of satisfaction and reward, while the whole explanation is seen in a sacrificial framework. Anselm's insistence upon human participation, and on satisfaction are very congenial to certain emphases of a Peace Theology, namely, discipleship and restorative justice. The real death understood metaphorically as a sacrifice does not violate the commitment to nonviolence, but strengthens it. A rejection of Anselm's metaphysic, ontology and sacrificial framework, a failure to distinguish between punishment and satisfaction, a failure to reflect from the perspective of the guilty, and a neglect of or ambivalence about the doctrines of the two natures and the trinity all lead to a distorted impression of Cur Deus Homo, concealing the contribution Cur Deus Homo might make to a Peace Theology.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-147). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

abstract: Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

This thesis is structured around investigating the philosophical and aesthetic problematics, politics, and possibilities of representing the past for the purposes of demythifying the present as well as commemorating the losses of history, as explored in the artworks of Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng. The first chapter begins with Theodor Adorno’s philosophical understanding of myth and history: how he is influenced by and then develops Karl Marx’s critique of society, Sigmund Freud’s critique of reason and its subject, and particularly Walter Benjamin’s ideas of history as catastrophe, the role of the historian and his messianic materialism. The second section looks at Theodor Adorno’s dialectic of art and society: immanent criticism in aesthetic practice, mimesis, and the shift in conceptions of allegory from Walter Benjamin’s understanding to that of Jacques Derrida. The last section of the chapter looks at Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist theories against boundary-fixing, within that the ethical relation to the ‘other’ and the theorist/artist as psychic exile. The second chapter deals with the politics of remembrance and representation — beginning with Theodor Adorno’s historic interpretation of the Mosaic law against the making of images and Jean-Francois Lyotard on the im-possibility of representing the unrepresentable. The chapter is divided in two parts between the post-Holocaust European artists Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski, and the post-apartheid South African artists William Kentridge and Santu Mofokeng. It explores, within these artists’ specific contexts, their formal and philosophical approaches to myth and history, and the problematics of image-making, representing the unrepresentable, and commemorating the immemorial. The thesis concludes by considering different conceptions of melancholia as they relate to these artists: the Freudian psychoanalytic approach, Benjamin’s notions of the artist-genius, and Julia Kristeva’s Lacanian reading of the humanist melancholic, concluding with the mythic-historical Kaballist notion of melancholia as the historical burden or responsibility to commemorate loss.

Nota-se, a partir do período carolíngio, um paulatino aumento da presença da dialética no cenário filosófico latino. A questão que se coloca a esses pensadores, sobretudo nos séculos X e XI, diz respeito à articulação entre o estudo das Sagradas Escrituras e a dialética. Anselmo de Cantuária representa um momento importante na dissolução dessa tensão, chegando a escrever uma obra exclusivamente dialética, o De grammatico. A originalidade de seu pensamento ganha contorno quando comparada à solução hierárquica de seu contemporâneo Pedro Damião, ou quando voltamo-nos à disputa sobre a eucaristia, na qual Lanfranco é visto pela tradição como defensor da proeminência da fé, e Berengário, apregoado como defensor da dialética. Este trabalho investiga os deslocamentos teóricos que permitem a Anselmo propor uma solução diferente para o problema da dialética em teologia. / From the carolingean period, one may note the gradually increasing presence of dialectic in the latin philosophical scenario. The question that arises to those thinkers, specially on the 10th and 11th centuries, concerns the relation between the study of the Sacred Scriptures and dialectic. Anselm of Canterbury represents an important moment on the dissolution of this tension, even writing an entirely dialectic work, De grammatico. The \"originality\" of his thinking gains proportions when compared to the hierarchical solution of his contemporary, Peter Damian, or when we turn attention to the dispute on the eucharist, in which Lanfrac is seen by the tradition as a defensor of the prominence of faith, and Berengar proclaimed as defensor of dialectic. This thesis investigates the theoretical shifts that allow Anselm to propose a different solution to the problem of dialectic in theology.