Hugh of St. Victor: Didascalicon. Books IV-VI. Jerome Taylor translation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Much as he admires the writings of philosophers, Hugh ranks them far below the Sacred Scriptures. “Like a whitewashed wall of clay,” philosophers’ writings “boast an attractive surface all shining with eloquence,” but beneath that surface is nothing but error, the stuff idols’ feet are made of. The Sacred Scriptures instead resemble a honeycomb, “for while in the simplicity of their language they seem dry, within they are filled with sweetness,” containing “nothing contrary to truth.”
He begins with a list of the Sacred Books in the right order, so that “the student may know what his required reading is.” The list includes the Old and New Testaments, of course, but also the Decretals and the writings of the holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church: Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, Ambrose, Isidore, Origen, Bede, “and many other orthodox authors.” The Decretals are helpful because “they were set up in order that by their means we might discover and know which of the Evangelists said things similar to those found in the others, and unique things as well.” The canon law, which “sets straight what is distorted and corrupted,” provide the needed moral compass for the student as he reads the Sacred Books. This pair of right books and right conduct parallels his advice in the first three books of the Didascalicon. [1]
How to read these books? The student must understand their three dimensions: history, allegory, tropology. This takes effort, but honey too is “more pleasing because enclosed in the comb, and whatever is sought with greater effort is also found with greater desire.” More than merely pleasing, however, Sacred Scriptures consist of “the voice of God speaking to men.” While “the philosopher knows only the significance of words,” the reader of Sacred Scripture learns the Word, the word of “Nature”—that is, the word of Jesus as Creator of “what philosophers call nature.” The Word of God “is a resemblance of a divine idea,” through which we “arrive at the truth,” God Himself. “Because certain less well instructed persons do not take account of this,” remaining within the dimension of history, “they suppose that there is nothing subtle in these matters on which to exercise their mental abilities and they turn their attention to the writings of philosophers precisely because, not knowing the power of Truth, they do not understand that in Scripture there is anything beyond the bare surface of the letter,” the literal meaning. So, for example, Old Testament law “ought to be understood not only in a historical but also in a spiritual sense: for it is necessary both to remain faithful to the historical sense,” the ‘letter of the law,’ “and to understand the Law in a spiritual way.”
To read Scripture in a spiritual way requires a soul prepared for spiritual perception. As with the liberal arts, profitable reading requires work and also method, as “whoever does not keep to an order and a method in the reading of so great a collection of books wanders as it were into the very thick of the forest and loses the path of the direct route.” Like the philosophers derided by Paul the Apostle, they are always learning yet never reaching full knowledge. Students face three obstacles: “carelessness, imprudence, and bad fortune.” Carelessness prompts hastiness, omission of some of “those things which are there to be learned.” It can be addressed by admonishment. Imprudence “arises when we do not keep to a suitable order and method in the things we are learning,” perhaps because we are then inclined to read on a whim. It can be corrected by instruction. Bad fortune means poverty, illness, or “some non-natural slowness.” “A scarcity of professors” is another instance of bad fortune. A student afflicted with bad fortune “needs to be assisted.”
The reading of the right books by a student practicing right conduct will fortify both his knowledge, which “has more to do with history and allegory,” and his conduct, which “has more to do with tropology.” “Although it is clearly more important for us to be just than to be wise, I nevertheless know that many seek knowledge rather than virtue in the study of the Sacred Word.” Both purposes “are necessary and praiseworthy,” so Hugh will “expounds what belongs to the aim of each,” beginning with a description of “the man who embraces the beauty of morality.”
To correct his morals, the student should “study especially those books which urge contempt for this world and inflame the mind with love for its Creator.” The study of the lives of the saints provides moral examples. The study of any of the Scriptures will provide instruction, so long as the student reads not only to be stirred “by the art of their literary composition,” the aim of a person who, centuries later, would be called an esthete, but “by a desire to imitate the virtues set forth”—the “beauty of truth” rather than the beauty of style. Nor should he read animated “by an empty desire for knowledge,” studying “writings which are obscure or of deep meaning, in which the mind is busied rather than edified,” never inclined to good works. As Jerome Taylor remarks, Hugh’s figure of “the Christian philosopher” recalls the Socratic turn from natural philosophy to moral philosophy (p.220-221 no.27). [1] Reading should “feed good desires, not kill them.” He recalls “a man of praiseworthy life who so burned with love of Holy Scripture that he studied it ceaselessly,” beginning “to pry into every single profound and obscure thing and vehemently to insist upon untangling the enigmas of the Prophets and the mystical meanings of sacred symbols.” This exhausted his human, all-too-human mind, paralyzing him for useful and “even necessary tasks.” That is, he “lacked the moderating influence of discretion.” God’s grace saved him, commanding that he read “the lives of the holy fathers and the triumphs of the martyrs and other such writings dictated in a simple style,” which brought him “internal peace,” at last. And so, Student, since “the number of books is infinite,” “leave well enough alone.” “Where there is no end in sight, there can be no rest. Where there is no rest, there is no peace. Where there is no peace, God cannot dwell.”
For a monk, simplicity “is his philosophy.” If you aspire to be a teacher, bear in mind that “it is inexpensive dress, the simplicity expressed in your countenance, the innocence of your life and the holiness of your behavior [that] ought to teach men.” Instruction is for beginners; graduate to practice. Study should serve as the prelude to meditation, meditation to prayer, prayer to performance, and performance, finally, to the contemplation of God—a “foretaste, even in this life, of what the future reward of good work is.” In this sequence, prayer serves as the indispensable link between man and God, once the Holy Spirit has informed man’s soul. “The counsel of man is weak and ineffective without divine aid”; therefore, “arouse yourself to prayer and ask the help of him without whom you can accomplish no good thing.” God’s grace enlightens the path for your feet along “the road of peace.” “It then remains for you to gird yourself for good work, so that what you have sought in prayer you may merit to receive in your practice.” In this, God does not force you “but you are helped. The principle is straightforward: “If you are alone, you accomplish nothing; if God alone works, you have no merit.” Ergo work with God, neither without nor against Him.
Hugh emphasizes that because God enlightens your path that does not mean He smooths it. “The instability of our life is such that we are not able to hold fast in one place.” Watch how you walk. “We are forced often to review the things we have done, and, in order not to lose the condition in which we now stand, we now and again repeat what we have been over before.” Pray for continued vigor in right action; “meditate on what should be prayed for, lest [you] offend in prayer”; if not confident in your self-counsel, seek advice in reading. “Thus it turns out that though we always have the will to ascend, nevertheless we are sometimes forced by necessity to descend—in such a way, however, that our goal lies in that will and not in this necessity.” The descent is for the sake of continued ascent.
The problem arises when readers of Scripture descend and stay there, when they “seek knowledge of Sacred Scripture either in order that they may gather riches or in order that they may obtain honors or acquire fame,” in either case instances of “perversity.” Others “delight to hear the words of God and to learn of His works not because these bring them salvation but because they are marvels,” “turning the divine announcements into tales,” as if they were attending the theater, but “in vain do they gape at God’s power when they do not love his mercy.” “Their will is not evil, only senseless.” The right intention respecting Scripture is to ready oneself to understand and defend the faith, to “forthrightly demolish enemies of the truth, teach those less well informed, recognize the path of the truth more perfectly themselves, and, understanding the hidden things of God more deeply, love them more intently.” Of these three types of readers, “the first are to be pitied, the second to be helped, the third to be praised.”
The third type of reader, who may or may not start out as one of the other two, requires understanding the order of study and the method of study. By “order” Hugh means, first, the order of the “disciplines,” second, the order in which the books of the Bible should be read, third, the order in which they should be read as narrative, and fourth, the order in which they should be read for “exposition,” i.e., for understanding the meaning of Scripture. Exposition includes the literal meaning of a passage, its “sense,” and its “deeper meaning.” By “method” Hugh means two things: analysis and meditation.
As to the order of the disciplines, Scripture consists of history, which he likens to the foundation of a building, allegory, which he likens to the structure of a building, and “tropology” or the moral teaching, which he likens to the decoration of a building, although this might more accurately be described as the building’s purpose. That is, the reader should undertake to discipline himself in an ‘architectonic’ manner. “You have in history the means through which to admire God’s deeds, in allegory the means through which to believe His mysteries, in morality the means through which to imitate His perfection.” The central point is indeed ‘central’: allegorical interpretation makes what is otherwise unbelievable believable.
“First, you learn history and diligently commit to memory the truth of the deeds that have been performed,” remarking the person who acts, the acts committed, their time, and their place. Without understanding the history—that is, the narrative of the course of events—you cannot properly move to the next step, allegory. So, “do not look down” upon the narrative’s details, as “the man who looks down on such smallest things slips little by little.” “I know that there are certain fellows who want to play the philosopher right away,” but “the knowledge of these fellows is like that of an ass.” “I myself never looked down on anything which had to do with education, but I often learned many things which seemed to others to be a sort of joke of just nonsense.” Move “step by step” instead of attempting “a great leap ahead,” which will cause you to fall on your face. Admittedly, “there are indeed may things in the Scriptures which, considered in themselves, seem to have nothing worth looking for, but if you look at them in the light of the other things to which they are joined, and if you begin to weigh them in their whole context, you will see that they are as necessary as they are fitting.” Continuing the architectural metaphor, these seemingly unimportant things might be likened to the building blocks of the building; remove one, and the structure will so much the less sound. Or, in Hugh’s new metaphor, the literal meaning is the honeycomb or structure that contains the honey of allegory, of spiritual wisdom.
Allegory “demands not slow and dull perceptions but matured mental abilities”; it is “solid stuff, and, unless it be well chewed, it cannot be swallowed.” Whereas history requires the discipline of attention to detail and memorization, allegory requires the discipline of intellectual restraint, so that “while you are subtle in your seeking, you may not be found rash in what you presume.” Allegorical interpretation seeks the meaning of the several mysteries: the Trinity and creation ex nihilo; God’s gift of “free judgment” to man, “the rational creature,” His grace, so that creature “might be able to merit eternal beatitude”; then, the way God “strengthened [men] so that they might not fall further,” after they did fall; the origin of sin, what sin is, and what its punishment; the “mysteries He first instituted for man’s restoration under the natural law”; His Divine Law; God’s incarnation; “the mysteries of the New Testament”: and, finally, “the mysteries of man’s own resurrection.” The “great sea of books” and “manifold intricacies of opinions” on these mysteries “often confound the mind of the student,” who accordingly needs “some definite principle which is supported by firm faith and to which all [these mysteries] may be referred.” That principle of interpretation consists of taking “those things which you find clear” and seeing which of these eight categories of mystery they belong to. As to “doubtful things,” interpret them “in such a way so that they may not be out of harmony” with the clear things. As for the obscure passages, “elucidate if you can,” but if you can’t, “pass them over so that you may not run into the danger of error by presuming to attempt what you are not equal to doing.” Do not dismiss them; “be reverent toward them,” since God “made darkness His hiding-place” (Psalms 17:12). Seek advice from “men more learned than yourself,” unless you have “learned what the universal faith, which can never be false, orders to be believed about it,” and so can weed out any false conjectures you might entertain. Above all, “it is necessary both that we follow the letter in such a way as not to prefer our own sense to the divine authors, and that we do not follow it in such a way as to deny that the entire pronouncement of truth is rendered in it.”
For the study of allegory, Hugh recommends an order of study: the Genesis creation account; “the last three books of Moses on the mysteries of the law”; the Book of Isaiah; the beginning and end of the Book of Ezekial; the Book of Job; the Psalter; the Song of Songs; the Gospels of Matthew and John; the Epistles of Paul; the Canonical Epistles; the Book of Revelation; and “especially the Epistles of Paul, which by their very number show that the contain the perfection of the two Testaments”—that is, fourteen or seven times two, seven being the number symbolizing perfection as seen in the Genesis creation account’s seven days.
Finally, tropology or morality pertains more to “the meaning of things than the meaning of words.” Morality is practice. The meaning of the tropological things lies in “natural justice, out of which the discipline of our own morals, that is, positive justice, arises.” “By contemplating what God has made we realize what we ourselves ought to do” because every natural thing, including man himself, has an “essential form” to which it must conform if it is to be a good specimen of what it is. God “made everything else for the rational creature”; in all His works He “must have followed a plan especially adapted to the benefit and interest” of that creature. “The rational creature itself was first made unformed in a way proper to it”—a physical body made of clay, not yet human—and only then “formed by conversion to its Creator,” brought to life by the divine breath. This demonstrates “how great was the distance between mere being and beautiful being,” thereby “warned not to be content with having received mere being from the Creator through its own creation, but to seek beautiful and happy being,” “turning toward” God “with love.”
For the study of morality, the right order of reading differs from that appropriate to history or to allegory, since “history follows the order of time” and allegory “belongs more to the order of knowledge” (beginning with clear things, progressing to the obscure things). To learn the moral truth of Scripture, begin with the New Testament, “in which the evident truth is preached,” then move to the Old Testament, “in which the same truth is announced in a hidden manner, shrouded in figures,” that is, in symbolic terms prefiguring the teachings of the New Testament. “It is the same truth in both places, but hidden there open here, promised there, shown here.” “Unless you know beforehand the nativity of Christ, His teaching, His suffering, His resurrection and ascension, and all the other things which He did in the flesh and through the flesh, you will not be able to penetrate the mysteries of the old figures.”
The fourth and final discipline, exposition, includes the letter, the sense, and the sententia or “deeper meaning” of the text. Words taken in the literal sense may be “perfect,” as in a sentence in which “nothing more than what has been set down needs to be added or taken away,” such as “All wisdom is from the Lord God” (Ecclesiastes 1: 1). Others are “compressed,” leaving something “which must be supplied,” as in a salutation such as “The Ancient to the lady Elect” (2 John 1:1). And some are “in excess,” repeating the same thought or adding an “unnecessary one,” as seen a sentence with “many parenthetical remarks” (Romans 16: 25-27). Literal meaning gives the reader the construction of sentences and of series of sentences, continuity.
Sense or the meaning of Scripture in the straightforward, human way of understanding can be “fitting,” explicit, or “unfitting,” whether incredible, impossible, absurd, even false. Metaphors come under this category, since a sentence might read “They have devoured Jacob” (Psalms 78:7) without saying that they cannibalized him. A more complex problem occurs when “there is a clear meaning to the words” but they seem to make no sense, as in Isaiah 4:1, a passage beginning “Seven women shall take hold of one man,” saying “let us be called by thy name” without reproach. This and similar passages must be “understood spiritually,” reading the seven women as “the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit,” the one man as Christ, the name as ‘Christians.’ What a passage like this “may mean to say literally what you do not understand” (italics added to the cautionary “may”), but it also may have a literal meaning, so that it might refer to the destruction of the people, leaving one man for every seven women, the women desperate for husbands, but justifiably unreproached because they want to obey the commandment “Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth.”
In contrast to the human meaning, “the divine deeper meaning can never be absurd, never false,” never self-contradictory. Interpretation of the deeper meaning requires even more discipline, more caution, interpretation of the human meaning. “Let us not plunge ourselves into headlong assertion” of such matters, lest we embroil ourselves while “battling not for the thought of the Divine Scriptures but for our own thought.” Rather than “wish[ing] the thought of the Scriptures to be identical with our own…we ought rather to wish our thought identical with that of the Scriptures.”
As to the method of parsing a text, this “consists of analysis,” separating into parts “things which are mingled together,” thereby “open[ing] up things which are hidden.” His brief account of analysis or “method” completes Hugh’s presentation of how to read Scripture, but there is another thing to do: to think about it. “We are not here going to speak of meditation,” since “so great a matter requires a special treatise,” being “a thing truly subtle and at the same time delightful,” both “educat[ing] beginners and exercis[ing] the perfect.” To guide future meditation, Hugh ends with a prayer, asking “Wisdom” to “deign to shine in our hearts and to cast light upon its paths for us, that it may bring us ‘to its pure and fleshless feast.'” That final quotation comes from a text titled Asclepius, whose title alludes to Socrates’ final words, “I owe a cock to Asclepius,” the god of healing, the god said to have the power even to revive the dead. A figure of Christ, then?
Note
- It is noteworthy that the twentieth-century Christian Personalist, Emmanuel Mounier, identifies the Socratic turn as crucial to resisting the impersonal historicist philosophic doctrines of that arose in the nineteenth century. See “Personalism,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
Note
- See “Reading with Hugh of St. Victor,” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
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