Hugh of Saint-Victor
Hugh of Saint-Victor, also called Hugo of Saint-Victor was an eminent scholastic theologian who began the tradition of mysticism that made the school of Saint-Victor, Paris, famous throughout the 12th century.
Of noble birth, Hugh joined the Augustinian canons at the monastery of Hamersleben, near Halberstadt (now in Germany). He went to Paris (c. 1115) with his uncle, Archdeacon Reinhard of Halberstadt, and settled at Saint-Victor Abbey. From 1133 until his death, the school of Saint-Victor flourished under Hugh’s guidance.
His mystical treatises were strongly influenced by Bishop St. Augustine of Hippo, whose practical teachings on contemplative life Hugh blended with the theoretical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Hugh’s somewhat innovative style of exegesis made an important contribution to the development of natural theology: he based his arguments for God’s existence on external and internal experience and added a teleological proof originating from the facts of experience.
“It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”
“Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.”
“Learn everything. Later you will see that nothing is superfluous.”