Hugh of Saint Victor

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Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096–1141) was a canon regular at the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris and the leading teacher of its school in the first half of the twelfth century. His origins are uncertain — Saxony and the Low Countries have both been proposed — but his working life is firmly placed: he entered Saint-Victor in the 1110s or 1120s and remained there, teaching and writing, until his death. The abbey had been founded a generation earlier by William of Champeaux as a community of canons living under the Rule of Augustine, and under Hugh it became one of the intellectual centers of the age.

What set him apart was a refusal to choose between study and prayer. In an era when the new cathedral schools were turning theology toward sharp dialectical argument, Hugh held that learning and contemplation belonged on a single road. His Didascalicon, a guide to reading and the arts, lays out a complete curriculum and argues that all human knowledge, rightly pursued, restores something the Fall had damaged; “learn everything,” he wrote, “you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous.” His large systematic work, De sacramentis christianae fidei (On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith), organizes Christian doctrine around the long arc of creation and restoration, and was among the first attempts at a comprehensive theological summa.

Alongside these he wrote a body of contemplative treatises — on Noah’s ark as a figure of the soul, on the stages of meditation, on the love of God — that gave the Victorine school its mystical character. He described an ascent through cogitation, meditation, and contemplation, and spoke of three “eyes”: the eye of flesh that sees the world, the eye of reason that sees the soul, and the eye of contemplation that sees God, the last of these dimmed by sin and needing to be reopened. The structure is Augustinian in temper, but Hugh also absorbed the negative theology of the writer then known as Dionysius the Areopagite, on whose Celestial Hierarchy he composed a commentary that helped carry that current into Latin thought.

His influence runs forward through his own house — Richard of Saint Victor, who pressed the analysis of contemplation further, and Andrew, a biblical scholar — and beyond it. Later medieval writers drew on him steadily; Bonaventure took up the Victorine pattern of an ordered ascent of the mind toward God. Modern scholarship, while sorting genuine works from those once attached to his name, treats him as a pivotal figure: the thinker who, at the threshold of scholasticism, held the whole of learning and the whole of the spiritual life within one frame, and tried to keep them there.

→ Related: Bonaventure · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Middle Ages