Richard of Saint Victor

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Richard of Saint Victor (died 1173) was a canon, and later prior, of the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris — a regular community of Augustinian canons that, in the twelfth century, became one of the leading centers of theology and spiritual writing in the Latin West. He belonged to the school that Hugh of Saint Victor had shaped a generation earlier, and is remembered above all for two treatises that tried to give contemplation an order: a structure, a sequence of stages, something a mind could be trained to climb rather than simply wait upon.

The abbey itself was young. It had been founded around 1108, when William of Champeaux — archdeacon of Paris, master of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, and one of the dialecticians against whom the young Peter Abelard sharpened himself — withdrew from the schools to take up the life of a canon regular on the Left Bank of the Seine, at a site dedicated to Saint Victor of Marseilles at the foot of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Students followed him there; teaching resumed; and under its first abbot, Gilduin, the house grew into a center of learning endowed by popes and kings, a reformer of other canonical communities, and, together with the schools of Notre-Dame and Sainte-Geneviève, one of the cradles of the University of Paris. What set it apart was a program rather than a doctrine: the canons bound the active and contemplative lives together, joined the liberal arts and the literal-historical reading of Scripture to a systematic ascent of the soul, and held the speculative and the affective in one hand. The abbey took something from the daring of the secular masters and something from the warmth of the Cistercians around Bernard of Clairvaux, without becoming either. Richard inherited this temper and gave it its most exact instrument.

A life mostly absent from the record

Little about his early life is secure. A long tradition holds that he was born in Scotland, but the evidence is late and thin: it rests chiefly on a short Vita composed by John of Toulouse in the seventeenth century, half a millennium after the fact, and historians treat the claim as uncertain. The same tradition makes Richard a direct pupil of Hugh, received into the abbey under Gilduin; some scholars instead place his entry only after Hugh’s death in 1141, which would make him an heir of the school rather than a student at its master’s feet. What the documents do record is the later course of the career. By 1159 he was sub-prior; from around 1162 until his death he served as prior, the abbey’s working head under the abbot — and held that office through a turbulent stretch, including a contested and dissolute abbacy that he could not fully restrain. The necrology of Saint Victor remembers him on the tenth of March, 1173. The rest is the work itself, and the work is unusually self-explaining.

The two Benjamins: ordering the soul, then mapping the ascent

His two best-known books take their titles from the patriarchs of Genesis, read allegorically. The Benjamin Minor — also called the Liber de duodecim patriarchis, the book of the twelve patriarchs — concerns the preparation of the soul through the ordering of its affections. Richard reads the family of Jacob as an interior anatomy: Jacob as the rational soul, his two wives and two handmaids as its faculties — will, reason, imagination, sensation — and the children born of them as the disciplined virtues and well-governed affections that the soul must bring to birth before it can contemplate at all. Rachel, the beloved wife, stands for reason, and her long-awaited last son Benjamin — youngest, born at the cost of her life — stands for contemplation itself. Richard fixes the figure on a single verse of the Latin Psalter, where Benjamin appears in mentis excessu, in the going-out of the mind: contemplation is born at the very point where reason, having done all it can, is overtaken and falls silent. The death of Rachel in childbirth is reason transcended at the threshold of vision.

The Benjamin Major — De gratia contemplationis, more often called the Mystical Ark — takes up contemplation proper, and here the figure shifts from a family to a structure. Richard reads the construction of the Ark of the Covenant, with its overlay of gold and its two cherubim facing each other across the mercy-seat, as a diagram of the ascending mind. Around it he builds a science of contemplation: six kinds of seeing, distributed across the soul’s three powers and rising in pairs — two grounded in imagination and the visible creation, two in reason and the order of invisible things, two in pure understanding, where the mind grasps realities above reason and at last realities that seem to run against it. The summit is not a sixth fact added to five but a change of state: the mind carried beyond itself, an excessus mentis that Richard distinguishes into the enlarging of the mind, its raising up, and its alienation — the last figured by the empty space above the Ark, between the wings of the cherubim, where the gold gives out and nothing can be drawn. In these treatises the inner life is anatomized — its faculties named, its distractions diagnosed, its degrees of seeing distinguished one from the next. Later writers borrowed the precision without always crediting it.

A third, shorter treatise circulated even more widely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: De quatuor gradibus violentae caritatis, the four degrees of violent charity, in which love wounds, then binds, then makes the soul languish, then brings it to a faint. Turned toward creatures, this mounting violence grows ruinous; turned toward God, the same force reverses its logic and becomes the more fruitful the more total it is. The schema would echo for two centuries; the English hermit Richard Rolle, writing in the fourteenth century, framed his own three degrees of love — insuperable, inseparable, singular — on its lines.

Contemplation as the summit of reason

He held that contemplation is not the enemy of reason but its summit, and that the mind rises through what it can analyze toward what it finally cannot. This is the distinctively Victorine balance, and it is worth marking against the alternatives on either side. Richard does not set love against knowledge as rivals, nor does he dissolve the intellect into feeling; he builds an ordered, almost psychological account of the contemplative states and then insists that the highest of them passes beyond the reach of discursive thought altogether. The arrangement carries a debt to the negative theology that had reached the Latin schools through the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite — the Pseudo-Dionysius, in fact a late-fifth- or early-sixth-century Syrian author writing under the name of Paul’s Athenian convert, and steeped in the late Neoplatonic inheritance of Proclus. From that corpus came the conviction, central to apophatic theology, that the divine lies past every name and concept and is approached most truly by unsaying. The channel ran straight through Richard’s own house: Hugh had written a commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy, and one of the Victorine accents — that in the final ascent love reaches where the intellect cannot follow — fused Dionysian unknowing with the Augustinian interiority that the canons drew from Augustine of Hippo, whose Rule they kept.

De Trinitate: the logic of perfect love

Richard also wrote a substantial treatise on the Trinity, De Trinitate, in which he argued, unusually, that the necessity of three divine persons could be approached through the nature of perfect love, which seeks both a beloved and a third with whom the love is shared. The method is that of fides quaerens intellectum — faith seeking understanding — in the manner of Anselm of Canterbury: Richard proposes to reach the doctrine by necessary reasons, rationes necessariae, beginning from the idea of a supremely perfect substance. Where Augustine had read the Trinity through the inner analogies of a single mind — memory, understanding, will — Richard turns outward, to the structure of love between persons. Supreme goodness, he reasons, must be supreme charity; and charity in its fullness cannot be love of self, which would be defective, but must be directed toward another equally worthy of it — so the perfect lover requires a perfectly beloved, and the divine life cannot be solitary. But a love shut between two is not yet perfect either, for the highest love wills that its delight be shared: each of the two must desire a third to be loved in common. This third Richard names the condilectus, the co-beloved — not simply dilectus, the beloved, but the one loved jointly by both. Perfect charity therefore terminates in three, and only three: a lover, a beloved, and a co-beloved. It is a social model of the divine, derived not from psychology but from the inner requirements of love itself, and modern philosophers of religion who defend a social model of the Trinity still return to it as the first sustained working-out of the idea.

A quiet, wide influence

His influence ran wide and quiet. The Victorine synthesis passed forward through identifiable hands. Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century Franciscan, built his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum on a six-step ascent keyed to the soul’s powers and crowned with the cherubim of the Ark — the Victorine substructure showing plainly through the scholastic frame. Thomas Gallus, carrying the school into the next century, took over Richard’s six kinds of contemplation and recast Dionysian unknowing as a knowing-by-love. And the later medieval literature of contemplation — including the anonymous English tradition behind The Cloud of Unknowing — drew on his vocabulary of ascent and unknowing. The Cloud-author himself produced a Middle English adaptation of the Benjamin Minor, the Tretis of the Stodye of Wysdome that Men Clepen Beniamyn, so that Richard’s anatomy of the affections reached an English readership directly, in its own idiom. His analysis of the soul’s powers fed into the schoolmen’s psychology of the inner life, and his structuring instinct — the will to count the degrees of seeing and name each one — became part of how the West thought about prayer. The taste for it was not universal: Richard worked within a community whose interiority was not far from the desert-monastic stream that ran from John Cassian, and a parallel monastic affectivity beat in the Cistercians of his own century.

Dante placed him in the Heaven of the Sun among the great teachers, where the souls of the wise wheel in a crown of light, and had one of them say that in contemplation he had been more than a man. That line is praise, not record. But it registers how the later Middle Ages regarded him — as a writer who had charted the inner ascent with the steadiness of a surveyor, and reported back.

Texts, editions, and scholarship

Richard’s Latin is medieval and therefore long out of copyright; the editions and translations that carry his work into the present are a separate matter. The public-domain spine is the Patrologia Latina, where his collected works fill volume 196, edited under J.-P. Migne in 1855 — a usable witness, though it reproduces older, pre-critical printings and is superseded for scholarship by the modern critical editions in the Sources Chrétiennes and Corpus Victorinum series. The De Trinitate was given a critical Latin text by Jean Ribaillier and a parallel edition by Gaston Salet (La Trinité, Sources Chrétiennes 63); the same Migne tradition that hosts Richard also preserves the Dionysian channel he depended on, in the Eriugena Latin of Patrologia Latina 122, scanned in full at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The standard English gathering of the contemplative works is Grover A. Zinn’s The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity (Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1979), and the De Trinitate and other treatises appear in the Victorine Texts in Translation volume Trinity and Creation, edited by Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale Coulter (Brepols / New City Press, 2010). The reading of the Ark and its cherubim has its own monograph in Steven Chase’s Angelic Wisdom (1995); Bernard McGinn’s The Growth of Mysticism (1994) sets the Victorines in the larger arc of Western Christian contemplation; and Richard’s Trinitarian argument from love is analyzed in the scholarship on the condilectus, including the study in the European Journal of Theology on the Spirit as co-beloved and the dedicated thesis-length exposition of the argument for the necessity of the Trinity. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy carries a current survey of his philosophical theology. Across all of it the constant is the thing Richard cared about: an inner motion that begins in the things the mind can hold, and ends past them.

→ Related: John Cassian · Benedict Of Nursia · Neoplatonism · Middle Ages · Hugh Of Saint Victor · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Apophatic Theology · Bonaventure · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Anselm Of Canterbury · Augustine Of Hippo · Scholasticism · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Richard Rolle De Hampole