Anselm's prayers

 

From a manuscript of Anselm's Prayer to Saint Peter

In addition to writing Anselm: A Very Short Introduction this summer, I'm revising translations for a volume of Anselm's complete treatises, plus selected letters and prayers and the Meditation on Human Redemption. Sr Benedicta Ward's translation of the prayers is excellent as prose but awfully free, and she doesn't do much to preserve Anselm's characteristic style and rhetorical devices. My draft of selected prayers is still just that, a draft, but I'm happy with the approach I've taken.


I like Anselm's prologue to the prayers, which shows a keen awareness of how they should, and should not, be used:

The prayers and meditations that follow were written to arouse the minds of readers to love or fear God, or to examine themselves. So they should not be read in the midst of commotion, but in tranquility; not quickly and in a hurry, but a little bit at a time, with attentive and deliberate meditation. Nor should readers set out to read any of them all the way through, but only as much as they feel will serve, with God’s help, to kindle their affections for prayer, or as much as pleases them. And there is no need always to start one from the beginning; readers should start wherever it suits them. For this very purpose they are divided into paragraphs, so that readers can begin and end wherever they choose to; in this way the abundance of words and frequent repetition of the same theme will not grow annoying, and instead readers can derive from them something of the spirit of devotion for the sake of which they were written.

The illustration above accompanies a text of Anselm's Prayer to Saint Peter, which I'm actually not translating. But I quite like the illustration, because Jesus seems to be saying "I am giving you the keys of the kingdom," and Peter seems to reply, "Who? Me?"

Comments

  1. Ethan ColeJune 8, 2021 at 1:12 PM

    This is lovely. I love his humility about his own writing here. Anselm as spiritual director

    ReplyDelete

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