Their choice and treatment of subject was partly guided by the needs of his pupils and friends at Bec and elsewhere in Normandy or Francia or England. For he wrote much at their solicitation; and the theological problems of which solutions were requested, suggest the intellectual temper of those regions, rather than of Italy. In a way Anselm’s works, treating of separate and selected Christian questions, are a proper continuation of those composed by northern theologians in the ninth century on Predestination and the Eucharist.[345] Only Anselm’s were not evoked by the exigency of actual controversy as much as by the insistency of the eleventh-century mind, and the need it felt of some adjustment regarding certain problems. Anselm’s theological and philosophic consciousness is clear and confident. His faculties are formative and creative, quite different from the compiling instincts of Alcuin or Rabanus. The matter of his argument has become his own; it has been remade in his thinking, and is presented as from himself--and God. He no longer conceives himself as one searching through the “pantries” of the Fathers or culling the choice flowers of their “meadows.” He will set forth the matter as God has deigned to disclose it to him. In the _Cur Deus homo_ he begins by saying that he has been urged by many, verbally and by letter, to consider the reasons why God became man and suffered, and then, assenting, says: “Although, from the holy Fathers on, what should suffice has been said, yet concerning this question I will endeavour to set forth for my inquirers what God shall deign to disclose to me.”[346] Certain works of Anselm, the _Monologion_, for instance, present the dry and the formal method of reasoning which was to make its chief home in France; others, like the _Proslogion_, seem to be Italian in a certain beautiful emotionalism. The feeling is very lofty, even lifted out of the human, very skyey, even. The _Proslogion_, the _Meditationes_, do not throb with the red blood of Augustine’s _Confessions_, the writing which influenced them most. The quality of their feeling suggests rather Dante’s _Paradiso_; and sometimes with Anselm a sense of formal beauty and perfection seems to disclose the mind of Italy. Moreover, Anselm’s Latin style appears Italian. It is elastic, even apparently idiomatic, and varies with the temper and character of his different works. Throughout, it shows in Latin the fluency and simple word-order natural to an author whose _vulgaris eloquentia_ was even closer to Latin in the time of Anselm than when Dante wrote.