Notable was the career of allegory in politics. Throughout the long struggle of the Papacy with the Empire and other secular monarchies, arguments drawn from allegory never ceased to carry weight. A very shibboleth was the witness of the “two swords” (Luke xxii. 38), both of which, the temporal as well as spiritual, the Church held to have been entrusted to her keeping for the ordering of earthly affairs, to the end that men’s souls should be saved. Still more fluid was the argumentative nostrum of mankind conceived as an Organism, or animate body (unum corpus, corpus mysticum). This metaphor was found in more than one of the Latin classics; but patristic and mediaeval writers took it from the works of Paul.[61] The likeness of the human body to the body politic or ecclesiastic was carried out in every imaginable detail, and used acutely or absurdly by politicians and schoolmen from the eleventh century onward.[62]
We turn to the symbolical explanation of the universe. In the first half of the twelfth century, a profoundly meditative soul, Hugo of St. Victor by name, attempted a systematic exposition of the symbolical or sacramental plan inhering in God’s scheme of creation. Of the man, as with so many monks and schoolmen whose names and works survive, little is known beyond the presentation of his personality afforded by his writings. He taught in the monastic school of St. Victor, a community that had a story, with which may be connected the scanty facts of the short and happy pilgrimage to God, which made Hugo’s life on earth.[63]
When William of Champeaux, according to Abaelard’s account, was routed from his logical positions in the cathedral school of Paris,[64] he withdrew from the school and from the city to the quiet of a secluded spot on the left bank of the Seine, not far distant from Notre-Dame. Here was an ancient chapel dedicated to Saint-Victor, and here William, with some companions, organized themselves into a monastic community according to the rule of the canons of St. Augustine. This was in 1108. If for a time William laid aside his studies and lecturing, he soon resumed them at the solicitations of his scholars, joined to those of his friend Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans.[65] And so the famous school of Saint-Victor began. William remained there only four years, being made Bishop of Chalons in 1112, and thereafter figuring prominently in Church councils, frequent in France at this epoch.
Under William’s disciple and successor, Gilduin, the community flourished and increased. King Louis VI., whose confessor was Gilduin himself, endowed it liberally, and other donors were not lacking. Saint-Victor became rich, and its fame for learning and holiness spread far and wide.[66] Abbot Gilduin lived to see more than forty houses of monks or regular canons[67] flourishing as dependencies of Saint-Victor. He died in 1155, some years after the death of the young man whose scholarship and genius was the pride of the Victorine community.
Notwithstanding a statement in an old manuscript, that Hugo was born near Ypres in Flanders, the ancient tradition of Saint-Victor, confirmed by the records of the cathedral of Halberstadt, shows him to have been a son of the Count of Blankemberg, and born at Hartingam in Saxony.[68] His uncle Reinhard was Bishop of Halberstadt, where his great-uncle, named Hugo like himself, was archdeacon. Reinhard had been a pupil of William of Champeaux at Saint-Victor, and after becoming bishop continued to cherish a profound esteem for him. The young Hugo renounced his inheritance and entered a monastery not far from Halberstadt; but soon, in view of the disturbed affairs of Saxony, his uncle Reinhard urged him to go and pursue his studies at Saint-Victor. The young man persuaded his great-uncle Hugo to accompany him. By circuitous routes, visiting various places of pious interest on the way, the two reached Saint-Victor, where they were received with all honour by the abbot Gilduin. This was not far from the year 1115, and Hugo was about twenty at the time. He was already an accomplished scholar, and doubtless it is to his previous studies that he refers when he speaks as follows in his book of elementary instruction, called the Didascalicon:
“I dare say that I never despised anything pertaining to learning, and learned much that might strike others as light and vain. I practised memorizing the names of everything I saw or heard of, thinking that I could not properly study the nature of things unless I knew their names. Daily I examined my notes of topics, that I might hold in my memory every proposition, with the questions, objections, and solutions. I would inform myself as to controversies and consider the proper order of the argument on either side, carefully distinguishing what pertained to the office of rhetoric, oratory, and sophistry. I set problems of numbers; I drew figures on the pavement with charcoal, and with the figure before me I demonstrated the different qualities of the obtuse, the acute and the right angle, and also of the square. Often I watched out the nocturnal horoscope through winter nights. Often I strung my harp (Saepe ad numerum protensum in ligno magadam ducere solebam) that I might perceive the different sounds and likewise delight my mind with the sweet notes. All these were boyish occupations (puerilia) but not useless. Nor does it burden my stomach to know them now.”[69]
Not long after Hugo’s arrival at Saint-Victor he began to teach at the monastery school, and upon the death of its director, in 1133, succeeded to the office, which he held until his death in 1141.[70] Colourless and grey are the outer facts of a monk’s life, counting but little. The soul of a Hugo of Saint-Victor did not soil itself with any interest in the pleasures of the world: “He is not solitary with whom is God, nor is the power of joy extinguished because his appetite is kept from things abject and vile. He rather does himself an injustice who admits to the society of his joy what is disgraceful or unworthy of his love.”[71]
Hugo belonged to the aristocracy of contemplative piety, with its scorn of whatever lies without the pale of the soul’s companionship with God. In his independent way he followed Augustine, and Augustine’s Platonism, which was so largely the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry. He also followed the real Plato speaking in the Timaeus, with which he was acquainted. Plato would have nothing to do with allegorical interpretation as a defence of Homer’s gods; but he could himself make very pretty allegories, and his theory of ideas as at once types and creative intelligences lent itself to Christian systems of symbolism. In this way he was a spiritual ancestor of Hugo, who found in God the type-ideas of all things that He created. Moreover, if not Plato, at least his spiritual children—Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Plotinus—recognized that the highest truths must be known in modes transcending reason and its syllogisms, although these were the necessary avenues of approach. Hugo likewise regarded rational knowledge as but the path by which the soul ascends to the plateau of contemplation. The general aspects of his philosophy will be considered in a later chapter. Here he is to be viewed as a mediaeval symbolist, upon whom pressed a sense of the symbolism of all visible things. An examination of his great De sacramentis Christianae fidei will disclose that with Hugo the material creation in its deepest verity is a symbol; that Scripture, besides its literal meaning, is allegory from Genesis to Revelation; that the means of salvation provided by the Church are sacramental, and thus essentially symbolical, consisting of perfected and potent symbols which have been shadowed forth in the unperfected sacramental character of all God’s works from the beginning.[72]
Hugo’s little Preface (praefatiuncula) mentions certain requests made to him to write a book on the Sacraments. In undertaking it, he proposes to present in better form many things dictated from time to time rather negligently. Whatever he has taken from his previous writings he has revised as seemed best. Should there appear any inconsistency between what he may have said elsewhere and the language of the present work, he begs the reader to regard the present as the better form of statement. His method will be to treat his matter in the order of time; and to this end his work is divided into two Books. The first discusses the subject from the Beginning of the World until the Incarnation of the Word; the second continues it from the Incarnation to the final Consummation of all things. He explains that as he has elsewhere spoken at length upon the primary or historical meaning of Holy Writ,[73] he will devote himself here rather to its secondary or allegorical significance.
Hugo further explains the subject of his treatise in a Prologue: