In the late eleventh century, in a small monastery on the rocky coast of Normandy, a monk sits awake before dawn. The stone walls hold the night’s cold; a single candle throws a small, trembling circle of light across his desk. On the table in front of him is a piece of parchment covered in neat Latin script, and near the top, one line that has begun to haunt him. It’s a definition, really, a simple phrase about God. But the more he stares at it, the more he feels that if the phrase is taken seriously, it carries with it something shocking: the claim that from the mere idea of God, one can show that God must exist. This monk is Anselm of Bec, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and that line will become famous as the seed of the “ontological argument.” For Anselm himself, though, it is not a clever trick. It is a kind of prayer in the form of logic, a way of letting his mind move toward the God he already believes in.Selenius Media

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