 Anselm retains the personal and intimate nature of meditation also characteristic of Augustine’s Confessions. It is worth noting that among the other works that Anselm labels ‘meditations’ are a “meditation on lost virginity” and a “meditation on redemption.” These are highly personal works, concerned with the existential conditions of sin and salvation. The Proslogion and Monologion share with them this personal or existential character. As Anselm Stolz points out, each step of Anselm’s argument in the Proslogion either takes the form of or concludes in prayer (Stolz 1967, 198–201). According to scholars who take the form of the Proslogion as meditation seriously, that form makes it impossible to understand the argument as a “proof” for God’s existence designed to convince an agnostic or atheist on a purely rational level. Rather, they argue, the text is an attempt by Anselm to address and approach God and is thus written by and for a believing Christian trying to understand and achieve union with God. On the other hand, other scholars take as most significant in the form not Anselm’s prayers but his complete reliance on his own reason without apparent recourse to authority, making the form itself an important model for independent and truly philosophical discourse. Both the introspective element and independence from authority are retained in Descartes’ Meditations, about which similar questions have been raised concerning its form. In the Middle Ages, the importance of the form shows the continuation of philosophy or philosophical theology as what Pierre Hadot has called a “way of life.” On this view, until the high scholasticism of the 13th and 14th centuries, philosophy was essentially a spiritual and personal project of self-discipline and self-transformation, rather than an abstract and school-based problem-solving set of techniques (Hadot 1995, 269–70). Christianity before the 13th century, Hadot argues, presented itself as a philosophy, a way of life, and Christian monasticism and its practices of meditations were meant to be a path into this spiritually transformative experience (See Hadot 1995, 126–141, for the links between ancient “spiritual exercises” and “Christian philosophy”.)