Richard of St. Victor.

Now, let us pass on to Richard of St. Victor. He was a native of Scotland, first the pupil and afterwards the successor of Hugo. Richard was a man whose fearless integrity and energetic character made themselves felt at St. Victor not less than the intellectual subtilty and flowing rhetoric which distinguished his prelections. He had far more of the practical reformer in him than the quiet Hugo. Loud and indignant are his rebukes of the empty disputation of the mere schoolman,—of the avarice and ambition of the prelate. His soul is grieved that there should be men who blush more for a false quantity than for a sin, and stand more in awe of Priscian than of Christ.[[64]] Alas! he exclaims, how many come to the cloister to seek Christ, and find lying in that sepulchre only the linen clothes of your formalism! How many mask their cowardice under the name of love, and let every abuse run riot on the plea of peace! How many others call their hatred of individuals hatred of iniquity, and think to be righteous cheaply by mere outcry against other men’s sins! Complaints like these are not without their application nearer home.[[65]]

His zeal did not confine itself to words. In the year 1162 he was made prior. Ervisius the abbot was a man of worldly spirit, though his reputation had been high when he entered on his office. He gradually relaxed all discipline, persecuted the God-fearing brethren, and favoured flatterers and spies; he was a very Dives in sumptuousness, and the fair name of St. Victor suffered no small peril at his hands. The usual evils of broken monastic rule were doubtless there, though little is specified—canons going in and out, whither they would, without inquiry, accounts in confusion, sacristy neglected, weeds literally and spiritually growing in holy places, wine-bibbing and scandal carried on at a lamentable rate, sleepy lethargy and noisy brawl, the more shameful because unpunished. Ervisius was good at excuses, and of course good for nothing else. If complaints were made to him, it was always that cellarer, that pittanciar, or that refectorarius—never his fault. These abuses must soon draw attention from without. Richard and the better sort are glad. The pope writes to the king about the sad accounts he hears. Bishops bestir themselves. Orders come from Rome forbidding the abbot to take any step without the consent of the majority of the chapter. Richard’s position is delicate, between his vow of obedience to his superior and the good of the convent. But he plays his part like a man. An archbishop is sent to St. Victor to hold a commission of inquiry. All is curiosity and bustle, alarm and hope among the canons, innocent and guilty. At last, Ervisius, after giving them much trouble, is induced to resign. They choose an able successor, harmony and order gradually return, and Richard, having seen the abbey prosperous once more, dies in the following year.[[66]]

In the writings of Richard, as compared with those of Hugo, I find that what belongs to the schoolman has received a more elaborate and complex development, while what belongs to the mystic has also attained an ampler and more prolific growth. All the art of the scholastic is there—the endless ramification and subdivision of minute distinctions; all the intellectual fortification of the time—the redoubts, ravelins, counterscarps, and bastions of dry, stern logic; and among these, within their lines and at last above them all, is seen an almost oriental luxuriance of fancy and of rhetoric—palm and pomegranate, sycamore and cypress, solemn cedar shadows, the gloom in the abysses of the soul,—luscious fruit and fragrant flowers, the triumphs of its ecstasy, all blissful with the bloom and odours of the upper Paradise. He is a master alike in the serviceable science of self-scrutiny, and in the imaginary one of self-transcendence. His works afford a notable example of that fantastic use of Scripture prevalent throughout the Middle Age. His psychology, his metaphysics, his theology, are all extracted from the most unlikely quarters in the Bible by allegorical interpretation. Every logical abstraction is attached to some personage or object in the Old Testament history, as its authority and type. Rachel and Leah are Reason and Affection. Bilhah and Zilpah are Imagination and Sense. His divinity is embroidered on the garments of Aaron, engraven on the sides of the ark, hung on the pins and rings of the tabernacle. His definitions and his fancies build in the eaves of Solomon’s temple, and make their ‘pendent bed and procreant cradle’ in the carved work of the holy place. To follow the thread of his religious philosophy, you have to pursue his agile and discursive thoughts, as the sparrow-hawk the sparrow, between the capitals, among the cedar rafters, over the gilded roof, from court to court, column to column, and sometimes after all the chase is vain, for they have escaped into the bosom of a cloud.[[67]]

On a basis similar to that of Hugo, Richard erects six stages of Contemplation. The two first grades fall within the province of Imagination; the two next belong to Reason; the two highest to Intelligence. The objects of the first two are Sensibilia; of the second pair, Intelligibilia (truths concerning what is invisible, but accessible to reason); of the third, Intellectibilia (unseen truth above reason). These, again, have their subdivisions, into which we need not enter.[[68]] Within the depths of thine own soul, he would say, thou wilt find a threefold heaven—the imaginational, the rational, and the intellectual. The third heaven is open only to the eye of Intelligence—that Eye whose vision is clarified by divine grace and by a holy life. This Eye enjoys the immediate discernment of unseen truth, as the eye of the body beholds sensible objects. His use of the word Intelligence is not always uniform. It would seem that this divinely-illumined eye of the mind is to search first into the deeps of our own nature (inferiora invisibilia nostra), and then upward into the heights of the divine (superiora invisibilia divina).[[69]]

For the highest degrees of Contemplation penitence avails more than science; sighs obtain what is impossible to reason. This exalted intuition begins on earth, and is consummated in heaven. Some, by divine assistance, reach it as the goal of long and arduous effort. Others await it, and are at times rapt away unawares into the heaven of heavens. Some good men have been ever unable to attain the highest stage; few are fully winged with all the six pinions of Contemplation. In the ecstasy he describes, there is supposed to be a dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit as by the sword of the Spirit of God. The body sleeps, and the soul and all the visible world is shut away. The spirit is joined to the Lord, and one with Him,—transcends itself and all the limitations of human thought. In such a moment it is conscious of no division, of no change; all contraries are absorbed, the part does not appear less than the whole, nor is the whole greater than a part; the universal is seen as particular, the particular as universal; we forget both all that is without and all that is within ourselves; all is one and one is all; and when the rapture is past the spirit returns from its trance with a dim and dizzy memory of unutterable glory.[[70]]

This account presents in some parts the very language in which Schelling and his disciples are accustomed to describe the privilege of Intellectual Intuition.

Atherton. I move thanks to Gower.

Willoughby. Which I second. It has been strange enough to see our painter turn bookworm, and oscillating, for the last fortnight or more, between the forest sunset on his easel and Atherton’s old black-letter copy of Richard of St. Victor.

Gower. The change was very pleasant. As grateful, I should think, as the actual alternation such men as Hugo and Richard must have enjoyed when they betook themselves, after the lassitude that followed an ecstasy, to a scholastic argumentation; or again refreshed themselves, after the dryness of that, by an imaginative flight into the region of allegory, or by some contemplative reverie which carried them far enough beyond the confines of logic. The monastic fancy found this interchange symbolized in the upward and downward motion of the holy bell. Is it not in Longfellow’s Golden Legend that a friar says—