Below is an excerpt of Martin Thornton commenting on a passage of St Anselm. First the passage from Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, I.2:
As on the one hand, right order requires that we believe the deep things of the Christian religion before presuming to subject them to the analysis and test of reason, so on the other hand it looks to me like indolent neglect if, already established in the faith, we do not take the trouble to gain an intellectual intimacy with what we believe.
Hence the importance of “lay theology”; that is, the importance for the laity to do theology in their parishes and in their devotional/ministerial lives. This “method” of lay theology is hardly one at all: first, to know the authoritative teachings (doctrines, dogmas) of the Church, and second, to grapple with these teachings and to try to “gain an intellectual intimacy” with them. To Anselm, Thornton responds (English Spirituality, p. 159):
Thus Anselm speaks to modern Anglicanism: we are right to grapple with the deep mysteries of the faith; ‘blind faith’ is not loyalty but sloth. If doubts arise in the mind, they are to be calmly faced and resolved as the struggle continues, they are hurdles to be jumped as we progress toward understanding and love. That is truly Anglican, for it is neither ‘free thought’ in the sense that anyone has the right to believe what he likes, nor does it make dogma anything but dogmatic, but it does not impute sin to honest inquiry.
Thus the pastoral answer to intellectual doubt is not that it is wicked to doubt the dogmas of the Church, nor that it does not very much matter. The answer is in the acceptance of a creative challenge. So, to a spiritual guide, such difficulties should be neither shocking nor unimportant. They should be seen as positive not negative, a call to further action: it should be “let us see how to use this” rather than “oh but you must trust the Church” or “try not to worry”. What Anselm is saying, in Sunday school language, is when in doubt go and tell God about it, and keep on arguing: the result could be another Proslogion.
The Anglican Church, therefore, is wise not to promulgate a series of new dogmas, to be held on pain of ecclesiastical censure. It is very unwise to allow contrary opinions on fundamental doctrine. Anglicanism needs no Index of prohibited books, not through lack of discipline but because of its Anselmic spirit. But it is both foolish and unfair not to give positive pronouncements as to what Baptism, Confirmation, the Real Presence, and the Virgin Conception really mean, because such dogmatic statements, rather than inhibiting reason and understanding, are the basis for them. One cannot “believe in order to understand” when one does not know what to believe in the first place; one cannot even indulge in the creative process of doubting.
“because of its Anselmic spirit.”
Anglicanism needs an Anselmic spirit, Thornton is saying, or else it is not authentic Anglicanism. And what’s more, having an Anselmic spirit is part of what gives Anglicanism its Catholic imagination. This is not about grappling with what the teachings are, for these are stated succinctly in Prayer Book catechisms such as in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Rather, this is about grappling with what the teachings mean. And from the process of doing that, undoubtedly something life-long, emerges naturally and organically an imaginative life recognizably Catholic, although always in some sense unique to particular persons and contexts, according to their life, their conditions, their particular path of grappling. Communities of people doing that we call the Holy Church.