Doctoral Dissertation Contemplation and the Cognition of God. Victorine Theological Anthropology ...

361 Pages·2013·2.31 MB·English

Doctoral Dissertation
Contemplation and the Cognition of God.
Victorine Theological Anthropology and its Decline
by
Csaba Németh
Supervisor: György Geréby
Submitted to the Medieval Studies Department
Central European University, Budapest
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations 6
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 8
PART I. BACKGROUNDS TO THE VICTORINES 13
Chapter I. The Patristic heritage 14
Augustine: five great themes 14
Gregory the Great 27
Chapter II. Twelfth-century problems 32
Conclusion 37
PART II. VICTORINES AND VICTORINE THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE
TWELFTH CENTURY 39
Introduction 40
Chapter I. Hugh of Saint-Victor 41
Introduction 41
I. Doctrinal background: selected and edited influences 44
II. Doctrinal background: the Hugonian framework 60
III. Contemplation in contexts. From eschatology to ecstasy 70
IV. Hidden things in God, the limits of cognition and Seraphic love 77
Conclusion 86
Chapter II. Richard of Saint-Victor 89
Introduction 89
I. Background to contemplation 98
II. Richard on contemplation: four investigations 110
III. Contemplation as face-to-face vision? A case study 138
Conclusion 148
Chapter III. Achard and Walther of Saint-Victor 151
Achard of St. Victor 152
n Walther of Saint-Victor 156
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Chapter IV. The question of a twelfth-century Victorine spirituality 163
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Victorine spirituality versus Cistercian spirituality? Attempt at a comparison 169
Conclusion 176
Chapter V. The early Scholastic theories on prelapsarian cognition of God (c. 1140-c. 1200)
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Introduction 178
I. Adaptations: the Summa sententiarum and the Sentences of the Lombard 178
II. Alternatives and interpretations. The prelapsarian Adam in the schools of Paris 185
Conclusion 194
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PART III. THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY RECEPTION OF THE VICTORINE
THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: REJECTION, TRANSFORMATION, OBLIVION
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Introduction: the thirteenth-century milieu 196
Chapter I. Paul’s rapture and the visio mediastina 206
Introduction 206
I. Peter Lombard’s Collectanea (and its limits) 209
II. The emergence of the visio mediastina (c. 1160 to c. 1215). Five witnesses 211
III. The creation ofraptus and the elimination ofvisio mediastina (the 1210s to the 1230s) 217
Conclusion 228
Chapter II. The prelapsarian cognition in the thirteenth-century university theology 231
Introduction: the limits of interpretation 231
I. Glosses on the Sentences 233
II. The first commentaries on the Sentences 237
III. The Summa Halensis 245
IIII. After theSumma Halensis: a dozen variants of the same 252
Conclusion 263
Chapter III. Reinterpretations of the Victorine theological anthropology in the spiritual
literature 267
Introduction 267
1. Thomas Gallus 271
2. The sermons of Anthony of Padua OFM 287
3. Saint Bonaventure OFM 289
4. Thomas Aquinas OP 299
5. Hugh of Balma OCart 302
6. Rudolph of Biberach OFM 305
Conclusion 309
PART IV. CONCLUSION. THE VICTORINE THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND
ITS DECLINE 312
APPENDICES 321
n Appendix 1. Hugh of Saint-Victor, De sacramentis: corrected passages 322
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1145-c. 1245) 325
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T 1. Compiling from the Summa sententiarum: the Sententiae divinitatis and the Sententiae Sidonis
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2. Compiling from the Sentences of Peter Lombard: ten witnesses 326
Appendix 3. Anonymous glosses on the Sentences 329
Appendix 4. Richard Fishacre, Richard Rufus and Odo Rigaldi on the prelapsarian cognition
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Richard Fishacre, In IV Sent. dist. 1 331
Richard Rufus, Lectura Oxoniensis, In II Sent. dist. 23 331
Odo Rigaldi OFM, In II Sent. dist. 23 332
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Bibliography 338
1. Census of the manuscripts consulted 338
2. Bibliography of printed sources 341
3. Selected list of secondary literature 347
A detailed table of contents 356
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Desiderium cognoscendae veritatis intantum naturale animae est, ut, quantumlibet sit perversa, illo
omnino carere non possit. Quotidianae quaestiones indicant quod scire verum omnes cupimus. Tota
vita hominis in quaestione est. Quandiu vivitur, quaeritur.
Miscellanea I, lxxii
magistrum Hugonem de sancto Victore, quem et ignotum diligis et absentem ueneraris, inter
ceteros immo pre ceteris frequentarem
Laurentius
Croyez-vous donc que je me serai levé toute ma vie à quatre heures du matin, pour ne dire que ce
que d’autres avaient dit avant moi?
Jean Hardouin SJ
It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by
myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.… I did try to found a heresy of
my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
G.K. Chesterton
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Abbreviations
AHDLMA Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge
BGPTM Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie [und Theologie] des
Mittelalters (Munster: Aschendorff)
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953-)
CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Continuatio Mediaevalis
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1966-)
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Hölder /
Pichler / Tempsky,1866-)
DS Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris: Beauchesne,
1937-)
DTC Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (Paris: Letouzey et Ané)
LMA Lexikon des Mittelalters (Zürich: Artemis)
PL Patrologiae cursus completus series Latina, ed. Jacques Paul Migne
(Paris, 1841-1864)
Quar. D.S.S. Bonaventurae opera omnia, edita studio et cura pp. Collegii a S.
Bonaventura (Quaracchi: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras
Aquas, 1882-1902)
RMAL Revue du moyen âge latin
RSPT Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques
RTAM Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale
RTPM Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales
SC Sources Chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf)
TRE Theologische Realenzyklopädie (Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 1977-)
Sent The Sentences of Peter Lombard
qu. quaestio
dist. distinctio
art. articulus
co corpus
sc [argumentum] sed contra
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank the Department of Medieval Studies at the Central
European University and my supervisor György Geréby; it was their support, trust and patience that
made this work first possible and then finished. I am grateful to those institutions that, in one way or
another, made the necessary research possible. Research grants received from the Department and
the Central European University helped to start my investigations and permitted me to spend a
semester in Paris at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and in the Bibliothèque
Nationale. The Mellon Fellowship granted me access to the Pius XII Memorial Library at the Saint
Louis University (Saint Louis, Missouri), housing the Vatican Film Library; my thanks go to Susan
L’Engle and Gregory Pass. Research in two institutes helped me to devise this project nearly a
decade ago, the Martin-Grabmann-Forschungsinstitut (Munich) and the Hugo von Sankt Viktor-
Institut (Frankfurt am Main): I am thankful for their then leaders, Professors Marianne Schlosser
(then Munich) and Rainer Berndt (Frankfurt). I am grateful to Ineke van’T Spijker and Sylvain
Piron for their remarks on the earlier variants of the present work, to Patrice Sicard and Dominique
Poirel for our encouraging discussions, and to Piroska Nagy for her inspirational questions. I am
especially indebted to three scholars, György Heidl, István Perczel and Sylvain Piron, who taught
me most about reading and understanding texts, asking questions and seeing (even our own)
positions critically. I dedicate this work to my parents and friends and to the memory of whose who
saw its beginning but not the end.
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Introduction
The main motivation behind the present work was unsatisfied curiosity. It started first as a
exegetical attempt to clarify certain passages in Benjamin major III, ix, where, in allegorical form,
theories on epistemology and contemplation were discussed by Richard of Saint-Victor.
Contemplation, conceived as the ultimate form of the cognition of God possible in this life, seemed
to me then the crucial subject in the study of Richard. But after having witnessed the undeniable
doctrinal similarities among Victorine authors, and the relentless efforts of thirteenth-century
theologians to reinterpret Victorine doctrines (even against their original meaning), the investigation
turned into a hermeneutical and historical inquiry, guided by two questions: What is Victorine
theology? and What happened to it after the end of the twelfth century? The bulk of the literature
that I consulted offered no sufficient answer to these questions; therefore I looked for an answer
myself: the present volume is that answer. One of the many insights gained in the course of the
research was that such questions also demand hermeneutical reflection. The historical and doctrinal
position of the readers substantially defines what can be understood from earlier texts (in other
words, what the meaning attributed to the texts is) – and this is true for both medieval readers and
modern scholars. The present work attempts to (re)construct, on the one hand, a particular model of
theological anthropology that was conceived nearly 900 years ago by Victorine authors; on the
other hand, it also tries to describe the history of its reception, taking into consideration the position
of medieval readers, too.
In the literature, the term “Victorines” commonly refers to a twelfth-century group of nearly
a dozen theologians who were Augustinian canons and belonged to the abbey dedicated to Saint
Victor. Their community, located outside the city walls of Paris, was founded in 1109 by the
renowned teacher William of Champeaux, and was soon promoted to the rank of royal abbey. From
the 1120s to the end of the twelfth century an unparalleled period can be observed, when
theologians belonging to that same community of Saint-Victor created a remarkable corpus
involving doctrinal theology and didactic works (Hugh), spiritual works (Hugh, Achard and
Richard), Biblical exegesis (Hugh, Andrew and Garnier), liturgical poetry (Adam), philosophy
(Godfrey), and theological polemics (Walther). Their works have long been an important subject of
intellectual history.1 The present study focuses on those few of them whose spiritual writings
addressed issues of theological anthropology: Hugh (d. 1141), Richard (d. 1173), Achard (d.
1170/71) and Walther (d. after 1180). Hugh and Richard were considered as major authors on
contemplation even in the Middle Ages. With the nineteenth-century emergence of the concept of
“mysticism” (Mystik), issues that earlier belonged to Christian spirituality became subjects of
mysticism: this happened to theories about contemplation as well. Medieval mysticism is a natural
subject of the historiography of mysticism: the most significant, large-scale and comprehensive
n histories of mysticism, most notably by Bernard McGinn and Kurt Ruh, treat the Victorines as
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(Turnhout: Brepols, 1991); for the single authors, see Jean Châtillon, “Chronique de Guillaume de Champeaux à
Thomas Gallus. Chronique d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale de l’école de Saint-Victor,” RMAL 8 (1952): 139-162 and
247-272; Dominique Poirel, “L’école de Saint-Victor au Moyen Âge: Bilan d’un demi-siècle historiographique,”
Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 15 (1998):187-207; for the recent status of scholarship, see Dominique Poirel, ed.,
L’école de Saint-Victor de Paris. Influence et rayonnement du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne. Actes du Colloque
international du C.N.R.S. pour le neuvième centenaire de la fondation (1108-2008) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). See also
Dave Coulter’s “Annotated Chronology of the Twelfth-Century School of St. Victor,” in his Per visibilia ad invisibilia.
Theological Method in Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 232-256, and Rainer Berndt’s articles,
“The School of St. Victor in Paris” In Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Sebo,
vol. 1 part 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2000), 467-495 and “Sankt Viktor, Schule von.” TRE 30: 629-635.
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representatives of twelfth-century mysticism.2 The period is regarded as a sudden flowering of
mysticism after the Patristic and early medieval times, when only a handful of Latin authors (such
as Augustine, Cassian, Gregory the Great and Eriugena) could be qualified as “mystic.” In the
twelfth century, dozens of “mystics” can be found: they write in Latin, and mostly belong to the
“new” orders of Cistercians, Augustinian canons, Carthusians or Premonstratensians. In importance,
Hugh and Richard can be compared only to the greatest authors of the Cistercians, Saint Bernard or
William of Saint-Thierry. The next century brings different, sometimes overlapping manifestations
of mysticism: the emergence of vernacular mysticism, female mysticism (Frauenmystik),
Franciscan mysticism, Areopagitic mysticism and affective mysticism. But however detailed this
kind of presentation can be, it does not suit a study of twelfth-century Victorine authors, for
multiple reasons.
a) What modern scholars of mysticism perceive in Victorine (or other) theories is defined by
their various concepts of “mysticism.” The term “mysticism” does not have a consensual meaning.
For example, one of the most famous meanings recently attributed to the term is, as McGinn defines
it, a way of presenting the consciousness of the (direct) presence of God.3 For the aims of our study
this definition is of no avail. On one hand, it is constructed to cover various traditions and various
periods of Christian mysticism from the Patristic age to the late Middle Ages: such a term is
necessarily too vague if a particular school of a given period will be studied. On the other hand, it
narrows down the possible subject to such an extent that it cannot give a substantial and
characteristic picture of any author (even less of a school). In the view of the present study, this
“mysticism” (but also the concrete “mystical statements”) is only the most visible element of a
structure (or a model) of theological anthropology. “Theological anthropology,” as the present work
uses the term, is a system of theoretical positions (and concluding doctrinal statements) that
describe the position of the human subject in its relation to God. It includes both the privileged
moment that can be called “mystical experience,” that is, ecstatic cognition or contemplation of
God, but also the theoretical background that permits the possibility of such (loving or cognitive)
acts. This model is what defines what can be stated about any “experience of God,” and also defines
the way in which those statements can be constructed.
b) Studies of mysticism try to give a neutral presentation of what they consider as the
mysticism of a given author, more or less tacitly assuming that all the various forms of mysticism
are equally valid, different “ways to God.” The consequence of this (entirely theological) premise is
that the authors’ doctrinal positions (and their validity) are left uninvestigated. The postulate of the
present study is that “mysticism” is not independent of “doctrinal” theology: the “official” doctrines
accepted by the Church may suggest, tolerate or ban models of theological anthropology; the
changes of doctrines may also have similar effects. Consequently, a historical study of mysticism
(at least, the present investigation of Victorine mysticism) necessarily involves doctrinal history as
well.
n c) The historiography of mysticism records the succession of different themes and types of
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2 See Kurt Ruh, Die Grundlegung durch die Kirchenväter und die Mönchstheologie des 12. Jahrhunderts (Geschichte
der abendländischen Mystik Bd. 1) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), and Bernard McGinn,The Growth of Mysticism: From
Gregory the Great through the 12th Century (The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 2)
(London: SCM, 1995). For other representatives, see Part II, Chapter II Introduction.
3 See Bernard McGinn,The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (The Presence of God: A History of
Western Christian Mysticism vol. 1) (London: SCM, 1992), xvi-xvii.
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transformations or the emergence of newer forms of mysticism, cannot give a sufficient
explanation.
d) Monographs on single authors (but also histories of mysticism) offer descriptions of
mystical theories of single authors or of several (for example, Victorine or Cistercian) authors
juxtaposed. The problem with this form of presentation is that it cannot say whether a particular
Victorine spirituality existed or not (and consequently it cannot say what it was like), or what the
distinctive character of the Victorines was. General terms, such as “monastic theology” or
“canonical spirituality,” do not offer much help in understanding the character of the Victorines;
neither do statements that are valid for most twelfth-century authors regardless of their affiliation.
Such difficulties prescribe different principles and different methods to follow. To obtain a
description that also has heuristic and explanatory value, a complex approach is necessary: one that
involves both systematic and historical aspects. From such a perspective, Victorine “mysticism” is
the manifestation of the Victorine theological anthropology, and this latter is a model based on early
and mid-twelfth century premises, and its reception can be understood only in a wider context of
doctrinal history.
Introduction to reading: a dynamic view of the sources
While investigating theological sources from the twelfth and the thirteenth century a certain
hermeneutical awareness is necessary. Scholastic theologians focused on the continuity of their
doctrines with the earlier ones, and thirteenth-century doctrinal positions are very often points of
reference for modern authors interpreting earlier theories. The present dissertation, by contrast,
focuses on discontinuities: on those often overlooked changes that, between c. 1100 and c. 1240,
delineated certain fields of Christian theology. The twelfth century (especially its first half) can be
considered a period when the periphery of Christian doctrine was largely undefined. Not all the
possible subjects of theology were covered by theories; the existing theories were also in
development, and only some of the theories later became unanimously accepted doctrines. This
creation of theories and then the solidification of doctrines led to the totality of the Christian
doctrine that is often presented with such later works as the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas.
But there is another aspect of changes: unsuccessful attempts at formulating theological issues,
doctrines that had only a temporary validity, or concepts that were silently redefined (although these
changes are more characteristic of the period c. 1170 to c. 1240). Only a dynamic view, one that
considers both aspects of changes, can offer, in my opinion, a heuristic approach: since Victorine
theological anthropology is a mid-twelfth-century set of theoretical positions (as Part II will
demonstrate), its afterlife can only be understood in connection with the doctrinal changes.
In order to illustrate the dynamics of development, we may take an example central for the
present investigation: the issue of prelapsarian cognition of God. Creating theories about the
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Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis, show the same interest.4 The subjects related to that
state were miscellaneous: some were given by the exegesis of the text (such as the meaning of the
trees, the snake and the burning sword: the explanation was usually based on Augustine’s De
Genesi ad litteram), some reflected Augustine’s doctrines (focusing on the original sin and the loss
4 See the relevant pages of Sententie divine pagine and Sententie Anselmi, in Anselms von Laon systematische
Sentenzen, ed. Franz P[lacidus] Bliemetzrieder (BGPTM 18, nos. 2-3. Munster: Aschendorff, 1919), here 20-35 and 57-
66; of theElucidarium of Honorius, PL 172: 1117B-1119C.
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