On Love: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, and Godfrey of St. Victor (review)

It is today a cliché to assert that Western civilization cannot be understood unless we recognize that—in both religious and philosophical terms—there is a deep and profound recognition of love’s creative and redemptive power. This impressive volume gainsays contemporary meaninglessness on the subject and proclaims vociferously the indispensability of love—its related transcendence, altruism, mystery, and the bonds of human community it vouchsafes. Moreover, in ethical terms (eudaemonistically speaking), as the basis of morality lies in the tendency of right actions to produce happiness, especially in a life governed by reason rather than pleasure, love guided by rationality doubtless seems abhorrent to today’s lovers of what I have called elsewhere “Hookerdom.”

For the 1100s, target of the texts treated here, the new enthusiasm in the spiritual realm is the phenomenal rediscovery, in the psychological arena, of love; for never before, in Western European history, were human feelings so frequently rarefied, analyzed, split, discussed, defined, codified, examined, and commented on as in the twelfth century, the Atomic Age of emotion. While the fundamental causes for this new interest in love even today remain complex and widely discussed, perhaps the more refined life of the period, with fewer hardships and greater leisure, could suffice to explain, provisionally at least, the rather obvious and frequently recognized fact that in the secular and in the spiritual realm, a new kind of society was emerging, more sensitive, less restricted by the demands of strict physical comfort, in an atmosphere conducive to unhurried development, contemplation, and, mutatis mutandis, self-expression. On the spiritual side, a host of twelfth-century theological and mystical texts converge and focus on the subject of love.

The editor’s wide selection of pivotal writings composed at the very productive Abbey of St. Victor in Paris during the twelfth century, while narrowly though usefully focused, reveals a high-caliber discourse on love as a pervasive metaphysical theme—a “stairway to the divine,” so to speak—among the celebrated Victorines, canons regular, and mystics on the threshold of scholasticism. The version of the Rule of St. Augustine used at the abbey began with the command to love God above all things and one’s neighbor as oneself. “Love is the root of all Christian existence,” writes Feiss (60). As Augustine himself said: “Dilige et quod vis fac” [Love and do what thou wilt] (In Epist. Ioann. ad Parthos, Tractatus VII, 8), and “quantum in te crescit amor, tantum crescit pulchritudo; quia ipsa caritas est animae pulchritudo” [insofar as love grows within you, thus also does beauty, for charity itself is the soul’s beauty] (In Epist. Ioann. ad Parthos, Tractatus IX, 9). Now, thanks to Feiss and his team of translators (namely, medieval scholars Vanessa Butterfield, Franklin T. Harkins, Juliet Mousseau, and Andrew B. Kraebel), we finally have a definitive set of translations based on the most reliable and/or recent editions (principally from the Corpus christianorum), along with authoritative introductions and references. Five relevant authors are represented:

1. 1. Five lyrical essays by Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141): The Praise of the Bridegroom (De Amore Sponsi ad Sponsam), On the Substance of Love (De substantia dilectionis), On the Praise of Charity (De laude caritatis), What Truly Should Be Loved? (Quid vere diligendum est), and Soliloquy on the Betrothal Gift of the Soul (Soliloquium de arrha animae).

2. 2. Two of Adam of St. Victor’s sequences, which exemplify well how these authors wove love into their writings (i.e., Let us rejoice/for the feast [Gratulemur ad festivum] and May the spirit/simple in spirit . . . [Simplex in essentia]).

3. 3. One sermon by Achard of St. Victor (d. 1170), Sermon 5: On the Sunday of the Palm Branches.

4. 4. On the Four Degrees of Violent Love (De quattuor gradibus violentae caritatis), by Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), which...