Anselm was born in 1033 in Aosta, in what is now northwestern Italy, to a noble family that gave him an early education but little peace at home. After his mother's death and a painful rupture with his father, he crossed the Alps and eventually settled at the Benedictine abbey of Bec in Normandy, drawn by the reputation of the scholar Lanfranc. He entered the monastic life there, rose to become prior and then abbot, and in 1093 was appointed, against his own resistance, Archbishop of Canterbury under the English king William Rufus. He held that office through years of conflict with two successive kings over the rights of the church, enduring two periods of exile rather than compromise what he understood to be his duty.
Anselm inhabited a world in which Latin Christendom was reshaping itself — through the Gregorian Reform, the First Crusade, and the early stirrings of what would become the great cathedral schools. Monasticism still held the intellectual center of gravity, and Anselm worked within that world, writing in the quiet of the cloister even when political storms gathered outside it.
His theological contribution was to insist that the believing mind need not remain passive before the mystery it has received. In the *Proslogion*, he offered what later philosophers would call the ontological argument for God's existence, attempting to show by reason alone that a being than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist. In *Cur Deus Homo* he constructed a careful account of why the incarnation and atonement were, in his framing, fitting and necessary. His governing conviction — *fides quaerens intellectum*, faith seeking understanding — did not treat reason as a replacement for faith but as its willing servant.
Anselm was canonized in 1494 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1720. His careful, patient attempt to think rigorously from within belief rather than against it has continued to set a standard for theological reasoning across nine centuries.