In the first chapter, Anselm paints a very bleak and wretched human condition. Humanity exists in darkness and sin. This state of great supplication leads humanity to seek for God. But God seems nowhere to be found especially since God seems to exist in glory and inaccessible light. This search for God seems futile.
Anselm uses images familiar to medieval western Christendom, like the idea of exile from God's presence expressed in Genesis as the fall of humanity through the sin of Adam and Eve. And it seems that the human condition is also worsened by this knowledge of exile and fall from grace.
Be that as it may, chapter 1 is still relevant to a secular 21st century global society. We still live in a bleak and wretched condition tainted by war, violence, division, forced migration, economic instability, broken relationships, broken societies, and so on. Where lies the hope of the human race? We may have emerged out of the middle ages but things have not changed much.
Within the darkness and the seeming silence, Anselm still utters his prayer: "Speak now, my whole heart; speak now to God: I seek your countenance; your countenance, O lord, do I seek." Where does his confidence come from?
Implicit in the text is an intuition. Let us try to bring that intuition out by reflecting on the act of searching.
When I am on a quest, at the very least, I have an idea about what I am looking for and where I may perchance find it. Negatively stated, I would never look for something I am totally ignorant of (thus the saying: "we never know what we miss"). Neither would I look for it in random places nor in the least likely places where it could be.
The same could be said about questions (Ever wonder why "quest" and "question" have the same Latin root word?): we never ask from total ignorance. Fr. Ferriols wrote somewhere: If you ask a question, you have a known and an unknown and you know that you do not know. For example, when I ask someone what time a bus will leave, I know that there is such a thing as time, there is a bus that has a schedule, the bus leaves the terminal at a particular time, the person I ask may know the answer to my question, I trust that that person will not deceive me, and so on and so forth. I will be totally bewildered if i get responses like: "There is no such thing as time," or "What bus?", or "Who said anything about leaving? That bus is permanently parked there!"
Now let us express Anselm's intuition. He intuits that if I am searching for God, then I must have a hidden knowledge of God. Where is that hidden knowledge from? Most probably from the fact that God has revealed or is revealing God to me but I don't see it completely or I don't see it at all. But it must be there. This insight somehow completes the circle. If I am questing for God, then maybe it is because God is revealing God to me. This intuition gives Anselm the confidence to utter his prayer of supplication.
Now someone might ask: If he already has an intuition of God's existence, why must he still set out to prove God's existence? Doesn't that make all this at least redundant and at most superfluous?
My answer: intuition is different from reason. Thus Anselm sees the necessity of the task. He seems to ask himself whether or not he could rationally prove what he mysteriously intuits.
This then brings us to chapter two of the Proslogion.
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