Foundation and Restoration in Hugh Of St. Victor's De Sacramentis

P. Dillard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137377463
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Taking Hugh of St. Victor's On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith as his source text, Dillard applies the methods of analytic philosophy to develop a systematic theology in the spirit of Christian Platonism, exploring questions that remain pressing for readers interested in philosophy, theology, religion, and the history of medieval thought.

C H A P T E R 1

THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOCENTRISM

TWO INITIAL QUESTIONS

Hugh of St. Victor compares theology as the elucidation of allegorical scriptural meaning with a spiritual building raised on the foundation of literal scriptural meaning.

Already the foundations of history have been laid in you: it remains now that you found the bases of the superstructure. You stretch out your cord, you line it up precisely, you place the square stones in the course, and, moving around the course, you lay the track, so to say, of the future walls. The taut cord shows the path of the truth faith. The very bases of your spiritual structure are certain principles of the faith—principles which form your starting point.¹

The principles of faith serving as the bases of the spiritual building are the principal Christian mysteries including the Trinity, creation ex nihilo, rational creatures’ freedom of volition, original sin, the natural law, the written law, the Incarnation, grace, resurrection, and beatitude.² Hugh believes that philosophy helps theologians to elucidate these principles by constructing illuminating conceptions of incorporeal realities without employing sensory experiences of corporeal things. This approach to philosophical theology immediately faces a pair of questions.

Someone like Bernard of Clairvaux might ask the first question. To put it bluntly, why bother? The mysteries of the Christian faith allegorically signified in sacred Scripture are just that: mysteries that are not amenable to purely rational proof. One either believes them or not. Any principle we succeeded in proving would no longer be a mystery accepted on the basis of faith alone. Thus the very idea of “philosophical theology” is an oxymoron.

This argument assumes that the sole goal of philosophical theology is to devise rational proofs for religious beliefs. Admittedly, the history of philosophical theology is replete with many notable attempts to prove God’s existence and conclusions about God’s nature using only clear concepts, true premises, and valid forms of inference available to any intelligent and impartial investigator. Sometimes Hugh himself seems to be offering such proofs. However, as Augustine, Anselm, and other thinkers in the Christian tradition have emphasized, seeking an adequate understanding of what we already believe on faith is also a legitimate goal of philosophical theology. The reason is not mere intellectual curiosity. After a careful reading of the Old and New Testaments supplemented with the writings of the Church Fathers, we may wonder how the Christian mysteries can possibly be true, either because upon reflection we do not understand them at all, or because our understanding of them obviously conflicts with what we already know. Much of Hugh’s philosophical theology aims at clarifying the allegorical meaning of Scripture by constructing a coherent and systematic interpretation of its doctrinal content that is not only compatible with what we know but also might very well be true. The objective is not purely rational proofs but a prima facie plausible picture.

The second question is exactly how constructing conceptions free of sensory experiences helps to elucidate the principles of the Christian faith. Some of these principles, including belief in the Trinity and the soul’s free will, concern incorporeal realities. Yet other principles plainly pertain to corporeal realities. God not only created angels and human souls but also the heavens, the earth, and indeed the entire material universe from nothing. Humans possessing freedom of will also have bodies. One such body was assumed by Christ; and like Christ’s body, all other human bodies will be resurrected. Hence in addition to signifying immaterial and imperceptible things, Scripture also signifies material and perceptible things. How, then, can a coherent and systematic interpretation of Christian doctrine avoid using sensory representations drawn from physical objects? And if philosophical theology utilizes sensory representations, then how can we prevent them from confusing our understanding of God and other incorporeal realities?

We need a methodology to guide our inquiry so that we do not conflate what is incorporeal and “intellectible” with what is corporeal and “intelligible.” Early in De Sacramentis Hugh describes the position he takes human beings to occupy in the larger scheme of things:

For man was made that he might serve God for whose sake he was made, and the world was made that it might serve man for whose sake it was made . . . Man was so placed in the middle position, that he might both be served and he himself serve, and that he himself might receive from both sides and claim all for himself, and that all might redound to man’s good, both the homage which he received and that which he rendered.³

Humanity stands midway between divinity and the rest of reality. Hugh takes the scriptural account of this middle position to unfold in a particular order:

But to show the first condition of man, it was necessary to describe the foundation and creation of the whole world, because the world was made for the sake of man; the soul indeed, for the sake of God; the body, for the sake of the soul; the world, for the sake of the body of man, that the soul might be subject to God, the body to the soul, and the world to the body.⁴

A series of corresponding relationships obtains between distinct incorporeal and corporeal realities. The relationship between the human soul and the human body mirrors the relationship between the natural world and the human body, as well as the relationship between God and the entire creation consisting of the natural world subordinated to human nature. Scripture illuminates the human condition by beginning with God’s creation of the natural world and then proceeding to human nature for the sake of which God created the world.

More immediate to us than the God, the natural world, or anything else are our own souls and bodies. Since the soul-body relationship mirrors all the other relationships between incorporeal and corporeal things, the possibility arises of a methodology that reverses the order of scriptural exposition by first learning about human nature as a composite of soul and body and then proceeding to learn about the other incorporeal and corporeal realities allegorically signified in Scripture. Provided that we do not conflate soul and body, we should be able to give equal justice to other incorporeal and corporeal realities without conflating them either. We shall call this methodology guiding Hugh’s interpretation of Christian doctrine theological anthropocentrism.⁵

Theological anthropocentrism raises a slew of new questions. Why should we think that human nature is a composite of an immaterial soul and a material body? Even if each human being is a soul-body composite, what reason is there to believe that there are any other incorporeal things, or that the soul-body relationship mirrors corresponding relationships between other incorporeal and corporeal things throughout the rest of reality? Isn’t Hugh begging important philosophical questions at the outset? To address some of these questions, we turn to Hugh’s opening arguments.

THE MIND ARGUMENT

Hugh distinguishes knowledge of God through divine revelation from knowledge of God through human reason, with the latter knowledge divided into discovery of God by reflection on the mind and by reflection on things outside the mind: “And human reason indeed discovered God by a twofold investigation; partly, to be sure, in itself, partly in those things which were outside it.”⁶ We begin by reconstructing Hugh’s argument that the mind discovers God by reflecting on itself:⁷

(1) I cannot be ignorant of my own mind’s existence.

(2) I believe that my mind began to exist.

(3) My mind began to exist [by (1) and (2)].

(4) Whatever begins to exist receives its existence from another being that already exists.

(5) My mind receives its existence from another being that already exists [by (3) and (4)].

(6) All other beings besides my mind that begin to exist receive their existence from the same being from which my mind receives its existence.

(7) Therefore, the being from which my mind receives its existence does not begin to exist [by (5) and (6)].

Hugh argues that the being from which my mind and all other beings that begin to exist receive their existence cannot itself begin to exist. For if it did, then by (6) it would receive its existence from itself and hence already exist before it begins to exist, which is absurd. Thus the being from which my mind and all other beings that begin to exist receive their existence always exists “and faith declares him God to be adored.”⁸

This argument faces numerous problems. Premise (1) is ambiguous between “I cannot be ignorant that my mind exists” and “I cannot be ignorant of anything concerning my mind’s existence.” On the first reading (1) is true, since I certainly cannot avoid knowing that I have a mind in the minimal sense of having the ability to think. Yet I may know that my mind exists while remaining ignorant of how long it has existed. Perhaps I mistakenly believe that my mind began to exist when in fact it has always existed without my always having been aware of its existence, as some Neoplatonists might counter. But then the inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is invalid. If (1) is interpreted as claiming that I cannot be ignorant of anything concerning my mind’s existence, then in particular I cannot be ignorant of whether or not my mind began to exist. Given that my mind “is compelled of itself to believe this also”⁹—namely, that it began to exist—it follows that my mind did indeed begin to exist. However, since Hugh gives no reason for why my mind is self-transparent to the degree that it is compelled to believe all and only the truths concerning its own existence, he provides no justification for asserting (1).

Even assuming that my mind began to exist, further problems abound. It is hardly obvious that whatever begins to exist receives its existence from some other being; Hugh does not rule out the logical possibility of a being simply popping into existence without receiving its existence from anything else. Finally, even if my mind and every other being that begins to exist do receive their existence from some being that already exists, it hardly follows that my mind and all these other beings receive their existence from one and the same being. My mind could receive its existence from some other being X, which in turn receives its existence from some being Y, and so on ad infinitum. Perhaps this sort of infinite regress is somehow impossible, but Hugh does not explain why. Thus (4) and (6) are left unsubstantiated.

Hugh apparently infers God’s existence from contingently existing minds (or, in the next argument, bodies) in a manner that anticipates the more sophisticated “cosmological arguments” by Aquinas, Scotus, and others.¹⁰ Insofar as they proceed from observed instances of motion, change, causation, and other natural phenomena to the existence of a First Cause, such arguments have a decidedly empiricist bent. The strongly rationalist constraint Hugh places on his philosophical theology should make us leery of reading his argument along empiricist lines, since then the danger arises of confusing a human mind with some empirically observable item. Is there another interpretation of Hugh’s reasoning?

Let us go back to Hugh’s initial remarks:

To state what occurs to us first, (for even to those who know nothing it cannot be less), the mind cannot be ignorant that itself is something, since it sees that it is nothing nor can it be anything of all those things which it sees visible in itself, that is, in its body. Therefore, the mind separates and divides itself by itself from all that it sees visible in itself, and it sees that it is quite invisible, in so far as it sees itself, and yet it sees that it cannot be seen. Therefore, it sees that there are invisible things which, however, it does not see visibly, because it sees that it itself is invisible and yet does not see itself visibly.¹¹

The considerations broached in this passage sound different from any so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Theological Anthropocentrism
• 2   Creation Ex Nihilo
• 3   Sacramental Realism
• 4   Divine Immutability and Eternity
• 5   From Epistemological to Trinitarian Exemplarity
• 6   Of Rebel Angels
• 7   Of Human Hubris
• 8   Human Significance Crippled and Restored
• 9   Hugh’s Dualism
• 10   Personhood, Human and Divine
• 11   Evil, Theodicy, and Divine Love
• 12   Ecclesiology and Eschatology
• Notes
• Index