As late antiquity gave way to the Middle Ages, the spiritual traditions sketched above
were preserved, but little applied or developed. The spirituality of the 6th century to the
11th focused first on missions and expansion, then on the establishment and
regularization of the monastic and clerical life. Within monasteries, emphasis was not so
much on personal spirituality as on public celebration of the liturgical hours and the
Mass. One sees much evidence of “spiritual reading” and reflection on Scripture and
earlier authors but little evidence of ec-static mysticism. However, as the 11th century
progressed and reform movements began to gain ground, the spiritual life and the
mystical quest began to claim more and more interest.
One of the first “schools” of mysticism to flourish in medieval France was that of the
regular canons of the ab-bey of Saint-Victor at Paris. Two 12th-century canons were
among the leading mystical writers of the whole medieval period: Hugh of Saint-Victor
and Richard of Saint-Victor. Hugh was one of the first persons in the West to write
treatises that offered systematic instruction in the mystic way. According to Hugh’s
theology, the first humans had been immediately aware of the divine presence and had
also been able to perceive the outward, material world as a symbolic manifestation of
God’s power, wisdom, and goodness. With the Fall, humans lost the inward sense of
divine presence and the ability to discern fully the cosmos as symbolic of the divine. In
Hugh’s powerful image of the “three eyes” with which humans had been created, the Fall
produces varying degrees of “blindness”: the “eye” of the intellect (which sees God and
spiritual things) is totally blinded; the “eye” of reason (which knows the self and those
things within the self) is partly blinded; only the “eye of the flesh” functions fully and
leads one to a deceptive relationship with the external world of matter. A major aspect of
the salvation of human beings is the restoration of the immediate inward awareness of the
divine, the “eye” of the intellect. Hugh’s treatises on the symbolic meaning of the Ark of
Noah and Isaiah’s vision of the Lord and the Seraphim (De arca Noe morali and De arca
Noe mystica), and also his treatise De arrha animae are complex explorations of the
stages by which the soul recovers the immediate awareness of God through discipline of
mind and body and the concomitant gift of divine grace. Hugh defines four stages, which
correspond to a classic pattern in Christian mysticism: awakening, purification,
illumination, union. Each is divided into three degrees, yielding a twelvestage way.
Awakening is divided into stages of fear, sorrow, and love; Purgation, into patience,
mercy, and compunction; Illumination, into thinking, meditation, and contemplation;
Union, into temperance, prudence, and fortitude. These twelve stages outline
advancement in discipline, insight, and experience, culminating in the transformation of
the self and experience of God. In De arrha animae, Hugh uses the theme of the Bride
and Bridegroom from the Song of Songs to develop a long dialogue on the role of love in
relation to the world, the self, and the divine, with a focus on the soul’s yearning for a
unique experience of the divine in intimate relationship, even union. One of the striking
aspects of Hugh’s spirituality is the use of a visual diagram to present it; his treatises on
Noah’s Ark describe and use for meditation a drawing that shows in the form of a
mandala both the unfolding of the cosmos and history from Christ and the return to union
with Christ through the twelve stages of mystical ascent.
Hugh was also crucial in the introduction of the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite into the mystical and theological traditions of the West. His commentary on
Pseudo-Dionysius’s Greek Celestial Hierarchy made that work accessible to his
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1236