Around the time of the Middle Ages, a group of educated Christian leaders began to emerge called “schoolmen”.They sought to discover how reason (the power of the mind to think) and faith could work together. They wanted to use their minds to think deeply about why God exists and who He is. The “first of the schoolmen”, and perhaps the greatest, was Anselm of Canterbury.
Anselm entered the world during a time when the church had been in decline spiritually and culturally for hundreds of years. The leaders of the church were sometimes more ignorant than the common people. One of the sparks of hope in an otherwise gloomy world was Anselm, sometimes called the “Second Augustine”. He became a godly saint that not only served Jesus with his heart and hands, but also with his mind.