Wide, indeed, is the difference between the spiritual mysticism of Bernard and the gross materialism and arrogant pretension which characterise the vision and the prophecy to which Hildegard laid claim. The morbid ambition of theurgic mysticism received a new impulse from the sanction afforded her by Bernard and the contemporary popes. Bernard makes no doubt of the reality of her gifts, and desires a place in her prayers. (Epist. 366.) He did not foresee that the most extravagant and sensuous mysticism must soon of necessity displace the simpler and less dazzling. He would be afraid of taking his place with Rationalist mockers, and a superstitious awe would readily persuade him that it was better to believe than to doubt. When emperors and popes corresponded on familiar terms with the seeress; when haughty nobles and learned ecclesiastics sought counsel at her oracle concerning future events, and even for the decision of learned questions; when all she said in answer was delivered as subject to and in the interest of the Church Catholic—was often the very echo of Bernard’s own warnings and exhortations—who was he, that he should presume to limit the operations of the Spirit of God? Many of Hildegard’s prophecies, denouncing the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, were decidedly reformatory in their tendency. In this respect she is the forerunner of the Abbot Joachim of Calabria, and of St. Brigitta, whose prophetic utterances startled the corrupt Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In her supernatural gift of language, her attendant divine radiance, and her fantastic revelations, she, like her friend Elizabeth of Schonau (who had an angel to wait upon her, and saw the eleven thousand virgins), prepares the way for Catharine of Siena, Angela of Foligni, and St. Theresa.
CHAPTER II.
Licht und Farbe.
Wohne, du ewiglich Eines, dort bei dem ewiglich Einen!
Farbe, du wechselnde, komm’ freundlich zum Menschen herab![[56]]
Schiller.
On the next evening of meeting, Gower commenced as follows his promised paper on Hugo and Richard of St. Victor.
Hugo of St. Victor.
The celebrated School of St. Victor (so called from an ancient chapel in the suburbs of Paris) was founded by William of Champeaux at the commencement of the twelfth century. This veteran dialectician assumed there the habit of the regular canons of Augustine, and after an interval, began to lecture once more to the students who flocked to his retirement. In 1114, king and pope combined to elevate the priory to an abbacy. Bishops and nobles enriched it with their gifts. The canons enjoyed the highest repute for sanctity and learning in that golden age of the canonical institute. St. Victor colonized Italy, England, Scotland, and Lower Saxony, with establishments which regarded as their parent the mighty pile of building on the outskirts of Paris. Within a hundred years from its foundation it numbered as its offspring thirty abbeys and more than eighty priories.
Hugo of St. Victor was born in 1097, of a noble Saxon family. His boyhood was passed at the convent of Hamersleben. There he gave promise of his future eminence. His thirst after information of every kind was insatiable. The youth might often have been seen walking alone in the convent garden, speaking and gesticulating, imagining himself advocate, preacher, or disputant. Every evening he kept rigid account of his gains in knowledge during the day. The floor of his room was covered with geometrical figures traced in charcoal. Many a winter’s night, he says, he was waking between vigils in anxious study of a horoscope. Many a rude experiment in musical science did he try with strings stretched across a board. Even while a novice, he began to write. Attracted by the reputation of the abbey of St. Victor, he enrolled his name among the regular canons there. Not long after his arrival, the emissaries of an archdeacon, worsted in a suit with the chapter, murdered the prior, Thomas. Hugo was elected to succeed him in the office of instructor. He taught philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. He seldom quitted the precincts of the convent, and never aspired to farther preferment. He closed a peaceful and honoured life at the age of forty-four, leaving behind him those ponderous tomes of divinity to which Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais acknowledge their obligations, and which gained for their author the name of a second Augustine.[[57]]