105. Hugo and Richard of St. Victor. (Chapter 12. Scholastic and Mystic Theology.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

Literature for Hugo. Works, first publ. Paris, 1618, 1625, etc. Migne, vols. 175-177. Lives by A. Hugonin in Migne, 175. XV-CXXV. In Hist. Lit. de France, reprinted in Migne, 175. CXXVI. sqq. *A. Liebner: Hugo von St. V. und d. Theol. Richtungen s. Zeit., Leip., 1832. B. Haureau: Hugues de S. V. avec deux opuscules inedits, Paris, 1859. new ed. 1886. A. Mignon: Les origines de la scholastique et Hugues de St. V., 2 vols. Paris, 1896. Kilgenstein: D. Gotteslehre d. Hugo von St. V., Wuerzb., 1897. Denifle: D. Sentenzen Z. von St. Victor, in Archiv, etc., for 1887, pp. 644 sqq. Stoekl, pp. 352-381.

For Richard. Works, first publ. Venice, 1506. Migne, vol. 196. J. G. V. Engelhardt: Rich. von St. V., Erlangen, Liebner: Rich. S. Victore de contemp. doctrina, Goett., 1837-1839, 2 parts. Kaulich: D. Lehren des H. und Rich. von St. Victor, Prag., 1864. Art. in Dict. Of Natl. Biogr., Preger, Vaughan, Stoekl, Schwane, etc.

In Hugo of St. Victor, d. 1141, and more fully in his pupil, Richard of St. Victor, d. 1173, the mystical element is modified by a strong scholastic current. With Bernard mysticism is a highly developed personal experience. With the Victorines it is brought within the limits of careful definition and becomes a scientific system. Hugo and Richard confined their activity to the convent, taking no part in the public controversies of the age.

Hugo, the first of the great German theologians, was born about 1097 in Saxony. About 1115 he went to Paris in the company of an uncle and became an inmate of St. Victor. He was a friend of St. Bernard. Hugo left behind him voluminous writings. He was an independent and judicious thinker, and influenced contemporary writers by whom he is quoted. His most important works are on Learning, the Sacraments, a Summa,1 and a Commentary on the Coelestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite. He wrote commentaries on Romans, Ecclesiastes, and other books of the Bible, and also a treatise on what would now be called Biblical Introduction. He recognized a triple sense of Scripture, historical, allegorical, and anagogical, and was inclined to lay more stress than was usual in that period upon the historical sense. An illustration of these three senses is given in the case of Job. Job belonged to the land of Uz, was rich, was overtaken by misfortune, and sat upon the dunghill scraping his body. This is the historical sense. Job, whose name means the suffering one, dolens, signifies Christ who left his divine glory, entered into our misery, and sat upon the dunghill of this world, sharing our weaknesses and sorrows. This is the allegorical sense. Job signifies the penitent soul who makes in his memory a dunghill of all his sins and does not cease to sit upon it, meditate, and weep. This is the anagogical sense.

From Hugo dates the careful treatment of the doctrine of the sacraments upon the basis of Augustine's definition of a sacrament as a visible sign of an invisible grace. His views are given in the chapter on the Sacramental System.

The mystical element is prominent in all of Hugo's writings. The soul has a threefold power of apprehension and vision, the eye of the flesh, the eye of reason, and the eye of contemplation. The faculty of contemplation is concerned with divine things, but was lost in the fall when also the eye of reason suffered injure, but the eye of the flesh remained unimpaired. Redemptive grace restores the eye of contemplation. This faculty is capable of three stages of activity: cogitatio, or the apprehension of objects in their external forms; meditatio, the study of their inner meaning and essence; and contemplatio, or the clear, unimpeded insight into the truth and the vision of God. These three stages are likened to a fire of green fagots. When it is started and the flame and smoke are intermingled so that the flame only now and then bursts out, we have cogitatio. The fire burning into a flame, the smoke still ascending, represents meditatio. The bright glowing flame, unmixed with smoke, represents contemplatio. The carnal heart is the green wood from which the passion of concupiscence has not yet been dried out.

In another place Hugo compares the spirit, inflamed with desire and ascending to God, to a column of smoke losing its denseness as it rises. Ascending above the vapors of concupiscence, it is transfused with light from the face of the Lord and comes to behold Him. When the heart is fully changed into the fire of love, we know that God is all in all. Love possesses God and knows God. Love and vision are simultaneous.

The five parts of the religious life, according to Hugo, are reading, reflection, prayer, conduct, and contemplation. The word love was not so frequently on Hugo's pen as it was on St. Bernard's. The words he most often uses to carry his thought are contemplation and vision, and he has much to say of the soul's rapture, excessus or raptus. The beatitude, The pure in heart shall see God, is his favorite passage, which he quotes again and again to indicate the future beatific vision and the vision to which even now the soul may arise. The first man in the state of innocence lived in unbroken vision of God.

They who have the spirit of God, have God. They see God. Because the eye has been illuminated, they see God as He is, separate from all else and by Himself. It is the intellectual man that partakes of God's bliss, and the more God is understood the more do we possess Him. God made man a rational creature that he might understand and that by understanding he might love, by loving possess, and by possessing enjoy.

More given to the dialectical method and more allegorical in his treatment of Scripture than Hugo, was Richard of St. Victor. Richard is fanciful where Hugo is judicious, extravagant where Hugo is self-restrained, turgid where Hugo is calm. But he is always stimulating. Of his writings many are extant, but of his life little is known. He was a Scotchman, became subprior of St. Victor, 1162, and then prior. While he was at St. Victor, the convent was visited by Alexander III, and Thomas Becket. In his exegetical works on the Canticles, the Apocalypse, and Ezekiel, Richard's exuberant fancy revels in allegorical interpretations. As for the Canticles, they set forth the contemplative life as Ecclesiastes sets forth the natural and Proverbs the moral life. Jacob corresponds to the Canticles, for he saw the angels ascending and descending. Abraham corresponds to the Proverbs and Isaac to Ecclesiastes. The Canticles set forth the contemplative life, because in that book the advent and sight of the Lord are desired.

In the department of dogmatics Richard wrote Emmanuel, a treatise directed to the Jews,1 and a work on the Incarnation, addressed to St. Bernard, 1 in which, following Augustine, he praised sin as a happy misdemeanor, felix culpa, inasmuch as it brought about the incarnation of the Redeemer. His chief theological work was on the Trinity. Here he starts out by deriving all knowledge from experience, ratiocination, and faith. Dialectics are allowed full sweep in the attempt to join knowledge and faith. Richard condemned the pseudo-philosophers who leaned more on Aristotle than on Christ, and thought more of being regarded discoverers of new things than of asserting established truths. Faith is set forth as the essential prerequisite of Christian knowledge. It is its starting-point and foundation. The author proves the Trinity in the godhead from the idea of love, which demands different persons and just three because two persons, loving one another, will desire a third whom they shall love in common.

Richard's distinctively mystical writings won for him the name of the great contemplator, magnus contemplator. In the Preparation of the Mind for Contemplation or Benjamin the Less, the prolonged comparison is made between Leah and Rachel to which reference has already been made. The spiritual significance of their two nurses and their children is brought down to Benjamin. Richard even uses the bold language that Benjamin killed his mother that he might rise above natural reason.

In Benjamin the Greater, or the Grace of Contemplation, we have a discussion of the soul's processes, as the soul rises through self and above self to the supernal vision of God. Richard insists upon the soul's purification of itself from all sin as the condition of knowing God. The heart must be imbued with virtues, which Richard sets forth, before it can rise to the highest things, and he who would attempt to ascend to the height of knowledge must make it his first and chief study to know himself perfectly.

Richard repeats Hugo's classification of cogitatio, meditatio, and contemplatio. Contemplation is the mind's free, clear, and admiring vision of the wonders of divine wisdom. It includes six stages, the last of them being contemplation above and aside from reason, whereby the mysteries of the Trinity are apprehended. In transgressing the limits of itself, the soul may pass into a state of ecstasy, seeing visions, enjoying sublimated worship and inexpressible sweetness of experience. This is immediate communion with God. The third heaven, into which Paul was rapt, is above reason and to be reached only by a rapturous transport of the mind per mentis excessum. It is above reason and aside from reason. Love is the impelling motive in the entire process of contemplation and contemplation is a mountain which rises above all worldly philosophy. Aristotle did not find out any such thing, nor did Plato, nor did any of the company of the philosophers.

Richard magnifies the Scriptures and makes them the test of spiritual states. Every thing is to be looked upon with suspicion which does not conform to the letter of Scripture.

The leading ideas of these two stimulating teachers are that we must believe and love and sanctify ourselves in order that the soul may reach the ecstasy and composure of contemplation or the knowledge of God. The Scriptures are the supreme guide and the soul by contemplation reaches a spiritual state which the intellect and argumentation could ever bring it to.

Rupert of Deutz. Among the mystics of the twelfth century no mean place belongs to Rupert of Deutz. A German by nationality, he was made abbot of the Benedictine convent of Deutz near Cologne about 1120 and died 1136. He came into conflict with Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux through a report which represented them as teaching that God had decreed evil, and that, in sinning, Adam had followed God's will. Rupert answered the errors in two works on the Will of God and the Omnipotence of God. He even went to France to contend with these two renowned teachers. Anselm of Laon he found on his death-bed. With William he held an open disputation.

Rupert's chief merit is in the department of exegesis. He was the most voluminous biblical commentator of his time. He magnified the Scriptures. In one consecutive volume he commented on the books of the Old Testament from Genesis to Chronicles, on the four Major Prophets, and the four evangelists. The commentary on Genesis alone occupies nearly four hundred columns in Migne's edition. Among his other exegetical works were commentaries on the Gospel and Revelation of St. John, the Minor Prophets, Ecclesiastes, and especially the Canticles and Matthew. In these works he follows the text conscientiously and laboriously, verse by verse. The Canticles Rupert regarded as a song in honor of the Virgin Mary, but he set himself against the doctrine that she was conceived without sin. The commentary opens with an interpretation of Cant. 1:2, thus: 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.' What is this exclamation so great, so sudden? Of blessed Mary, the inundation of joy, the force of love, the torrent of pleasure have filled you full and wholly intoxicated you and you have felt what eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has entered into the heart of man, and you have said, 'Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth' for you didst say to the angel 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.' What was that word? What did he say to you? 'You have found grace,' he said, 'with the Lord. Behold you will conceive and bare a son.'... Was not this the word of the angel, the word and promise of the kiss of the Lord's mouth ready to be given? etc.

Rupert also has a place in the history of the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, and it is an open question whether or not he substituted the doctrine of impanation for the doctrine of transubstantiation.