Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 211 - Learn Everything - the Victorines.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Learn Everything, the Victorines. Religion put the history into the history of philosophy. The pagans of antiquity by and large saw history as irrelevant to a philosophical understanding of the world. Whether you were a Platonist who saw physical things as mere images of eternal forms, an Aristotelian who believed that the celestial bodies are moved everlastingly by a divine intellect, or an Epicurean who thought that all things result from random atomic interactions, you were offering an account of the universe's permanent state. No particular historical event figured importantly into any of these worldviews. But for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, history was central. All three faiths accepted the reality of prophecy, with the figures of Moses and Muhammad, of course playing an especially crucial role for Jews and Muslims respectively. The divine had manifested in the created world at certain times and places. Die-hard Aristotelian philosophers of these two religions could nonetheless just about preserve a, the more things change, the more they stay the same, attitude. They could and did explain prophecy as a naturally occurring interaction between immaterial principles and unusually gifted humans. The possibility of such interaction is always present, and its mechanism is rationally comprehensible. It's just that it only occurs when circumstances are especially favorable. But for medieval Christians, this sort of compromise was not really available. For them, the universe was ultimately a stage upon which is played out the drama of humankind's fall and redemption. Already in antiquity, Christian thinkers historicized philosophical doctrines in order to fit them into this theological picture. The Greek church father Origen is a perfect example. He adapted Platonism into a cosmic morality tale in which souls err and fall away from God, later returning to him through the guidance of Christ. For the medievals, a more influential reimagining of this fall-and-rise structure was that of Augustine. He understood the universe and its relation to God in thoroughly historical terms, with the key events being the original sin of the first humans and the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God. The philosophical implications were far-reaching. For medieval Christian thinkers, God intervenes in, and even enters into, the world in a way that is not necessary but contingent on his will. History teaches us when and how this has occurred, so these thinkers were bound to take history very seriously. No medieval thinker took it more seriously than Hugh of St. Victor. For him, the correct understanding of history was foundational for all knowledge, or at least, all knowledge worth having. It was the most basic of three approaches he described for interpreting Scripture. When taking up the Bible, one must first understand it as what we would call a literal record of real events. This is what Hugh calls a historical interpretation. One should not stop there, though. A second approach discerns a further symbolic meaning behind historical events. Hugh calls this type of exegesis allegorical. Finally, there is what he calls tropological interpretation which means taking an ethical message from the text. Hugh applies all three kinds of approach to the same scriptural material, for instance in a treatise he wrote on Noah's On the one hand, the Ark was a real boat. Hugh describes it in bewildering detail to the point that it seems clear he was envisioning an intricate diagram of the Ark, even though no such diagram is found in the existing manuscripts of his treatise. He dwells on descriptions found in the Bible, for instance about the dimensions of the boat, and adds details of his own, like little side compartments to allow seals and otters to swim into the sea and then return to the Ark. I haven't seen the recent movie Noah starring Russell Crowe, and when I do see it I'm going to be really disappointed if they left this out. The Ark's structure is then mined for its symbolic significance, as when Hugh says that the Ark had two exits, a door and a window, which represent the soul's ability to engage in practical action or to look upwards in contemplation. Finally, the story of the Ark teaches us a moral lesson. The flood waters that have covered the earth represent the worldly desires that deluge the soul, and the Ark, a place we build within ourselves, safe from these desires. Hugh produced a number of other exegetical, contemplative, and educational works, the best known of which is his Didascalicon, which means something like educational handbook. Much copied and much read in the Middle Ages, it provides an overview of secular and religious learning aimed at budding scholars. This was Hugh's natural audience, because he was head of the school at the Abbey of St. Victor. In no small part thanks to Hugh, this institution became one of the most important intellectual centers of the entire Middle Ages. Historians even have a collective name for the scholars who taught and studied there, the Victorines. The Abbey was founded in 1108 by none other than William of Champo, whose Realist theory of universals was twice refuted by Peter Abelard. Perhaps in reaction to his defeat at the hands of Abelard, William and some colleagues retired to an empty hermitage dedicated to St. Victor, which was near Paris on the River of Seine. This might sound like a simple retreat, in every sense of the word. But in founding the Abbey, William of Champo was joining a Reformed movement that reshaped the Church in the 12th In the previous century, Peter Damian had already urged that stricter discipline should become the norm in monastic settings. Despite Abelard's unforgiving portrayal of him, William was a skilled dialectician who could blend expertise in the secular arts with the sort of spiritual reform pioneered by Damian. That blend would become the trademark of the Abbey of St. Victor. It was a place to engage in austere contemplation, but also a school that produced highly trained scholars who traveled throughout Europe, spreading the reformist practices and the knowledge they had acquired on the banks of the Seine. The list of scholars who were associated with St. Victor is effectively a roll call of the major intellectuals of the time. Hughes students Andrew and Richard of St. Victor took on different aspects of their master's legacy, Andrew achieving renown as a scriptural interpreter, Richard as a contemplative or mystical author. Peter Lombard, author of the most influential theological synthesis of the century and subject of an upcoming episode of this podcast, also studied under Hughes. Bernard of Clavo, had friendly relations with the Victorines, and Thomas Becket, of will-no-one-rid me of this troublesome priest fame, was friends with Ashard, the second man to serve as abbot at St. Victor. Among all these leading lights, Hugh shined most brightly. This, at least, was the opinion of the 13th century theologian Bonaventure, who reportedly commented on his predecessors, Hugh of St. Victor's most famous remark befits this versatility and his attention to the educational needs of the students at the Abbey. He wrote in his Didascalicon, Hugh's remark could be a motto for this podcast series, yet the quotation needs to be understood within its original context, namely a discussion of the things a student needs to know in order to interpret Scripture. Hugh was under no illusions about the difficulty and unwelcoming nature of this task. He compared the works of the philosophers to a freshly painted wall whose inviting color conceals the clay of error beneath, whereas the Scriptures are more like a honeycomb, seemingly dry, yet sweet once one delves into them. The rigorous and comprehensive course of study described in the Didascalicon is designed to prepare students to do just that. Expertise in geometry, for instance, comes in handy when analyzing the dimensions of the ark. For this same reason, Hugh is also quick to criticize those who pursue knowledge uselessly. He complains that in his day, there are many who study, but few who are wise. The targets of his lament are those who engage in learning for its own sake rather than for the sake of understanding God and the Bible. It is easy to dismiss this attitude as typically medieval, and not in a good way. Speaking of the cultivation of the liberal arts in the Carolingian era, the great historian Edward Gibbon wrote that, were only cultivated as the handmaids of superstition. Now, he might seem to be carrying forward that same approach in the 12th century, even as men like Avelard were pursuing what may seem a more enlightened and rational form of philosophy. But, just as we saw that the Carolingians were considerably more sophisticated than Gibbon's quote suggests, so Hugh's attitude toward secular learning rests on a nuanced understanding of humankind. As Platonists of various religious persuasions had been teaching for centuries, we are divided between two natures, immaterial souls attached to physical bodies. Philosophy must address itself to both aspects. For Hugh, our incorporeal aspect is served by theoretical philosophy, which culminates in contemplation and pure understanding, whereas practical philosophy teaches us how to engage with the bodily realm and to attain virtue. His two-fold project was reflected in the life that Hugh and his colleagues lived at St. Victor, with their dual commitment to scholarship and ascetic discipline. When William of Champo was debating the merits of founding the abbey in the first place, a colleague named Hildebert encouraged him by saying that William's previous attainments as a dialectician had made him only half a philosopher. What was missing was strict ethical discipline. Hugh provided a theoretical framework for this approach to philosophy. The reason that his Didy Skelikon became the medieval equivalent of a bestseller was that it provided a concise and clear encapsulation of the Victorine program of study. His overview of the secular sciences is fairly traditional, built around the seven liberal arts already familiar to us from the Carolingian period. He does, however, innovate by adding a list of seven so-called mechanical arts like fabric-making, hunting, and medicine. Less obvious but deeper novelty is Hugh's interest in the very process of learning. The first stage involves wide reading and, above all, memorization of what one has read. Nowadays, memorization seems to have gone out of fashion as a learning method. What's the point of having lots of information in your head when you can just look it up on the internet? Hugh can tell you what the point is. By memorizing, we internalize what we have read, beginning to reshape the soul itself by conforming it to that which we seek to know. Hugh keeps this in mind throughout his works. From the schematic presentation of the sciences in the Didy Skelikon to the richly symbolic correspondences detailed in his work on Noah's Ark, he is constantly trying to help his readers remember what they are reading. Next, the educational process continues to another stage, which Hugh calls meditatio. An obvious translation here would be meditation, but a better one might be rumination. Hugh describes it as a kind of undirected procedure of pondering over what one has read and memorized. He seems to see it almost as a kind of reward for the hard work one has put into reading and memorization, speaking of the delight of the ruminative process. Finally, after memoria and meditatio comes moralia, which means putting one's insights into practice ethically. In another of Hugh's beloved parallels, and in this case a fairly plausible one, the three stages of learning are said to correspond to his three approaches to Scripture. History is analogous to memory, the more open-ended search for allegorical interpretation is analogous to meditation, and the trophological discovery of ethical lessons in Scripture is of course analogical to moralia. Hugh compares the learning process to the minting of a coin, with the malleable soul of the learner taking on the likeness of whatever it knows. It is in this sense that the mind is said to be all things. There's a nice wordplay here which works in both English and Latin. Through learning, the soul is reformed, just as monastic culture was being reformed through the efforts of the Victorines and others. For Hugh, these two sorts of reformation are individual and social enactments of the cosmic redemption that is at the heart of Christian theology. Here we come back to the Augustinian understanding of history, with its central moments of fall and redemption. When we achieve understanding and virtue, we are acquiring something that we lacked at birth, but we are also recovering something that was lost by human nature through sin. In fact, we have the chance to attain an even higher degree of perfection than the first humans ever had. Adam and Eve were created with a natural knowledge that we lack, but they never achieved the crowning perfection that comes through obedience to God. Hugh's educational theory depends not only on this theological background, but also on a metaphysical framework that is assumed throughout the Didascalicon. Like Ariugina, the most sophisticated of those surprisingly sophisticated Carolingians, Hugh sees created things as images of paradigmatic forms, called primordial causes. These causes are like the plan that a skilled craftsman makes in his mind before producing something. Hence they are ideas within the wisdom of God, which is identified with the second person of the Trinity. The Christian trappings of the view are not merely incidental. If the paradigms were not identical with the divine Son, Hugh could not equate growth and understanding with the path towards redemption. In fact, given his warning that knowledge is useless if it does not bring us closer to God, Hugh can really only justify the attempt to achieve understanding of paradigmatic forms by associating those forms with divinity. Nonetheless, the metaphysical picture itself is fundamentally Platonist. Plotinus and like-minded pagans would readily have agreed that philosophy is nothing more nor less than, as Hugh puts it, the pursuit of that wisdom which is the sole primordial idea or pattern of things. The ancient Platonists had been divided when it came to the question of using physical things to attain wisdom. Since we are trying to reach immaterial paradigms, the material world could seem to be at best a distraction. This seems to have been the view of Plotinus and his student Porphyry. But Porphyry's student Eamblichus and later Neoplatonists like Proclus held that pagan religious and magical practices could enable one to make contact with divinity through bodily things. Probably none of them would appreciate the comparison, but Hugh of St. Victor is in this respect more like Eamblichus and Proclus than like Plotinus and Porphyry. Where the Neoplatonists spoke of theurgy, Hugh speaks of sacraments. In fact, he composed a major theological treatise entitled On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. We normally associate this term sacraments with a very specific set of Christian ceremonial practices, such as marriage, ordination of priests and, of course, the Eucharist. But Hugh uses the term more broadly, to refer to any physical thing that also has a symbolic meaning and bears the operation of divine If you want to see an example, just look around. Hugh considers the creation of the world itself to be a sacrament, an infusion of grace into the corporeal realm. Impressive though creation is though, Hugh believes that the restoration of fallen nature is more difficult than creating nature in the first place. So, it took God only six days to fashion the world, whereas the restoration of humankind takes six ages. Yet again, there is a connection here to Hugh's understanding of history. Broadly understood, history is, quite simply, everything that has happened in the physical universe. Though a factual or historical understanding of the world is foundational, we will never reach an understanding of nature's divine paradigms unless we also think allegorically. Hence, Hugh remarks in the Didascalicon that things as well as words have meaning. This is the occasion for one of Hugh's many slighting references to the philosophers. With their expertise in dialectic, they remain at the level of words, which are mere representations of human concepts, whereas things that have actually existed in history are representations of divine ideas. Later medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas will justify philosophical inquiry by citing a famous biblical text, Romans 1.20, Hugh would agree to an extent, but is convinced that in our fallen state no such inquiry can succeed on its own in bringing us to God. Only the grace offered in sacraments and, above all, in the Incarnation, makes this possible. This is why he dismisses what one might call the merely philosophical, secular learning that makes no attempt to understand Scripture or to see history itself in allegorical terms. It's fitting that someone as interested in history as Hugh was should have had a big impact upon it. It was William of Champo who had founded the abbey and initiated the characteristically Victorian fusion of scholarship and spirituality, but Hugh was the real intellectual father of the Victorines who followed. Among his successors, Richard of St. Victor particularly stands out. He originally came from Scotland. So if there are any patriotic Scots out there listening who have been waiting impatiently for me to arrive at countrymen like David Hume, you just got your wish a few hundred episodes early. As implied in that quote I mentioned from Bonaventure, Richard was the one who excelled in contemplation, he especially continued the allegorical and contemplative aspects of Hugh's legacy. Two of his most significant works allegorize parts of the Old Testament. One is devoted to Jacob and his family, the other to the Ark, not Noah's work but the Ark of the Covenant, the one that Indiana Jones was looking for. Richard's treatise on the Ark of the Covenant lays out an entire theory of contemplation. Whereas Hugh speaks of this as a final stage in the mental transformation that brings us closer to God, for Richard, contemplation itself comes in six different stages. These range from imaginative reflection on the beauty of the sensible world to the mystical attitude appropriate for things that are beyond human reason. It's common to say that this contemplative aspect of the Victorines exemplifies a widespread feature of the 12th century, interiorization. This was a period when thinkers urged us to turn our gaze inward in search of divinity, and to reshape the inner self that we find there so that it reflects God's image more truly. We've just seen Hugh understanding Noah's Ark in this way, Abelard's idea that moral goodness lies in the soul's intentions and not outward actions is another example. This observation is illuminating to a degree, but like any historical generalization, should be qualified with a few caveats. For one thing, it was not really all that new. Rather, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor were laying particular emphasis on long-standing contemplative themes in the Augustinian, monastic, and Platonist traditions. Furthermore, these Victorine heroes of interiority also laid great emphasis on the beauty of nature. Contemplation can be directed outwards as well as inwards. As we'll see in due course, other 12th century thinkers were even more deeply engaged in the study of nature. This time of interiority was also a time for celebrating the exterior world as the visible manifestation of divine grace. Finally, whatever interiorization we find with the Victorines was compatible with political engagement. Their monastic lifestyle echoed the so-called Gregorian Reform, led by Pope Gregory VII at the end of the 11th century. The Victorines may have been great spiritualists, but they also traveled to other monasteries, taking on positions of leadership and trying to spread the Reform movement. As the historian Giles Constable has written, this movement sought to monasticize first the clergy by imposing on them a standard of life previously reserved for monks and then the entire world. So the Victorines were not just writers of the lost arks. They were morally and politically active as reformers and preachers. This is something they had in common with their powerful ally Bernard of Creveaux. Actually, saying that Bernard of Creveaux was merely politically engaged would be like saying that Indiana Jones had a fairly hands-on approach to archaeology. Bernard was a central figure of the 12th century, who not only pushed the Reform agenda but also took a hand in church politics and helped to launch the Second Crusade, unlike Indiana Jones, who of course was involved in the last Crusade. In the history of philosophy, Bernard usually plays a more subsidiary role, featuring above all as the scourge of Peter Abelard. We have yet to delve into the nature of that dispute. Doing so will give us a further opportunity to appreciate the Victorines and the subtle mind of Abelard, as we take up the most controversial topic of Christianity in the 12th century, and most other centuries too for that matter, the Trinity. You won't want to miss the next episode, because, to quote what might have been Hugh of St. Victor's favorite line from Raiders of the Lost Ark, we are merely passing through history, but this, this is history. The history of philosophy, without any gaps.