Anselm brought about a great change in theological teaching. Berengar of Tours had but recently made an attack upon the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and was the immediate cause of the “storm and stress” period of scholasticism that followed. Anselm’s teacher and predecessor, Lanfranc, had defended the doctrine. The doctrine had not yet been settled, and each side claimed the basis of authority. Anselm was therefore a witness of the first attempt to apply philosophy to dogma, and he was the first to use dialectics with the serious purpose of defending dogma. From this time on, dialectics was no longer an intellectual diversion. He, the last of the monastic teachers, was the first to employ dialectics with the new purpose of instructing the believer. His entire life was animated by the desire to add knowledge to faith by the means of philosophy. Anselm’s scholasticism therefore circulates about the Patristic theology as a centre; and his spirit and method is so similar to that of Augustine and the Apologists, that he has been justly called “the second Augustine” and “the last of the Fathers.” Beside the safe and traditionally centralized teaching of Anselm, the imaginative pantheism of Erigena seems like a body that had been loosened from its natural place and was floating away beyond control. Both Erigena and Anselm were inspired by the Platonism that until the year 1200 dominated the Middle Ages. That is, both were realists. The realism of Erigena, however, expressed in full the mystic element of Platonism. It destroyed all grades of reality below God, and made unnecessary the church and its offices. Erigena was an extreme realist; Anselm was consistent with the attitude of the church in being a moderate realist. The _credo ut intelligam_ (faith as the basis of intellectual belief) was the anchor which saved him and became the safeguard of all future orthodox scholastics. The world to Anselm is a hierarchy of universal reals, such as the sacraments, the church, and the Trinity. To such dogmas of the church he applied philosophy, not because they needed support, but in order to make them clear by analysis. Philosophy shall only clarify dogma.