What happens when faith seeks understanding?  Is it an attempt by faith to change, to become something new, higher–say, knowledge?  Is it an attempt to understand something that is held by faith but held in, say, incomplete understanding, but where complete or at any rate more complete understanding would not change my relationship to what is understood (it would remain faith)?  Or is it an attempt to secure knowledge that could be somehow ranged alongside faith without turning that faith into knowledge?  Or is it an attempt to come to know something that could only be known by first having faith in it, so that the subsequent knowledge has to be regarded as faith-having-molted-into-knowledge, not as faith-replaced-by-knowledge?  (I take it that not all knowledge is required to begin in faith.  But how would we understand the distinction between knowledge that is so required to begin, and knowledge that is not?)  Or should understanding here be juxtaposed with knowledge (say, in a Cavellian way) so that faith seeking understanding cannot be taken to put faith in relationship to knowledge (at least not straightforwardly)?  Would the sense of ‘understanding’ here be factive or quasi-factive?  If so, how far could we keep it from knowledge?  If not, what then is understanding?  (A set of propositions expressed, a la Frege, in the That p form–showing that the propositions are entertained but not asserted?  Something else?)  –Questions, questions, questions.

You knew it was coming:  What is Anselm doing?