I think it's fun to think about. Start from the premise that Anselm was serious, and wasn't an idiot. How must he have seen the world for this argument to make

I think it's fun to think about. Start from the premise that Anselm was serious, and wasn't an idiot. How must he have seen the world for this argument to make sense? (This is, very loosely, the approach of the Cambridge School in the history of ideas.) Looking back from several centuries, we can think the argument is obviously bad. (We might have heard, for example, that "existence is not a predicate" so you can't just talk about existence as something that God may or may not possess.) But Anselm didn't have that. His argument was a step on the way to where we are now. And sometimes if you squint hard enough at it, you come to see why and how it might make sense, and the arguments don't seem so stupid. Plato does that to you sometimes, for example.