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Anselm’s Metaphysics in the Lineage of Parmenides: Nihil est per nihil 



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Maria Leonor Xavier

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2016.08.003

Among those who pay homage to Parmenides as a source of unquenchable inspiration for Western thought, we now revisit the Poem Of Nature as the birthplace of the principle of causality through the elimination of non-being at the origin of being. Indeed in Parmenides’ Poem, a negative conviction can be found—the refusal that the non-being is at the origin of the being—which leads most philosophers to the affirmative conviction that something is at the origin of the being. The two convictions are two rational beliefs which have stimulated ancient Greek philosophy, and have continuously represented a structuring axis in the history of Western thought. With Aristotle, that affirmative conviction was converted into a principle of causality, that is, into a principle which requires a causal explanation for the intelligibility of reality. In Latin Middle Ages, we find a singular figure who promotes the synthesis of the two fundamental beliefs, the negative conviction, explicit in Parmenides, and the affirmative conviction, explicit in Aristotle: It is Saint Anselm. In an initial chapter (III) of his first work, the Monologion, Anselm declares that “nothing is by nothing” (nihil est per nihil), and that consequently “all that is, is not but by something” (quidquid est, non nisi per aliquid est). All of Anselm’s metaphysics is an analysis and a development of this affirmative rational belief. Therefore, we claim Parmenides’ paternity of Saint Anselm’s metaphysics, of whom one may say he was the medieval Parmenides.

Parmenides, Saint Anselm, Monologion, nothing, Principle of Causality, being inborn, metaphysics