Richard of Saint Victor

Richard was a Scot, the tradition is firm on that, though nothing certain is known of his birth or his early years. He came to Paris and entered the abbey of Saint-Victor, a house of canons on the left bank that had become the great centre of contemplative theology in twelfth-century Europe. He studied under Hugh of Saint-Victor, its founding master. He was made sub-prior about 1159 and prior in 1162, and he died on 10 March 1173.

His years as prior were not peaceful. The abbot over him, an Englishman named Ervisius, ran the house so badly that the pope and the king of France both intervened, and Ervisius was eventually forced to resign. Richard held the community together through it.

He wrote two kinds of book, and both mattered.

The first kind is about how a person actually comes to contemplate God. Benjamin Minor and Benjamin Major, his own titles were The Twelve Patriarchs and The Mystical Ark, use the family of Jacob and the ark of the covenant as extended figures for the training of the mind: how attention is disciplined, how imagination is purified, how reason works and where it stops, and what happens beyond it. They are careful, orderly books about something most writers treat as disorderly, and they were read for centuries as the standard map of the interior life. Dante puts Richard in the sphere of the sun in the Paradiso and says that in contemplation he was more than a man.

The second is De Trinitate, six books, and it contains his one great original argument.

Richard started from the fact that God is love. Love, he said, is not a private quality; it needs another. A solitary God could not be love, only self-regard. So the Father loves the Son. But love shared between two, if it is perfect, is not jealous, it wants a third to share the joy with, someone loved together. The Latin word he uses is condilectus, the co-beloved. So charity itself, followed honestly, requires three.

No one had argued the Trinity that way before. It is an argument from the nature of love rather than from psychology or authority, and it has been picked up repeatedly since, by Bonaventure in the thirteenth century, and by a good many modern theologians.

He also wrote biblical commentaries, treatises on the Apocalypse and on Ezekiel's temple, and shorter pieces on the degrees of love.

Sources: Richard of Saint-Victor, The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, and Book Three of the Trinity (Classics of Western Spirituality); Dante, Paradiso X; Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 196; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).