Richard of St. Viktor

Richard of St. Viktor

Richard of St. Victor ( Latinized : Richardus de Sancto Victore * to 1110 ; † 16th March 1173 in Paris ) was Augustinerchorherrenstift and at that time one of the most important theologians in Paris.

Life

Nothing at all is known about Richard's early life. You don't know your place of birth or your exact birthday. Although he is referred to as a Scot in a work on the monastery of St. Viktor in Paris, which was written in the second half of the 16th century, he himself wrote several letters to the then Bishop of Hereford in England, to his homeland. It can therefore be assumed that he was an Anglo-Saxon and came from what is now England.

Between 1114 and 1141 he entered the aforementioned Augustinian monastery in Paris. When exactly that was, like so much in his life, is not known. Both the monastery founder, Guildan, and his teacher Hugo were both still alive.

After the death of his theological teacher, he succeeded him in the teaching body. In 1162 he was finally appointed prior of the convent, a fact which shows that he was already enjoying a high reputation within the Victorian monastic community at that time .

But Richard's fame, apparently, went beyond the monastery walls. So he followed the current political events and fought alongside Thomas Beckett (Becquet) against the English King Henry II and supported Bernhard von Clairvaux in his fight against Abelard . In the monastery too, Richard turned out to be a contentious personality. With vehemence he proceeded against his "quarrelsome" Abbot Ervis, but could not do anything on his own, so that Pope Alexander III. had to be switched on.

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Although the then newly elected Abbot Guérin restored the old order, Richard didn't get on at all with Ervis' successor: "He takes the word out of my mouth and the pen out of my hand." Less than a year after Guérin took office, Richard died in the monastery.

For Richard von St. Viktor the monastery school is a unity of theological way of thinking and religious way of life. It thus combines scientific knowledge and spiritual experience.

Works

Opera, 1650

We learn from the introductions and preambles of his books that he wrote them in an unusually large number of copies in order to meet the wishes of his students and colleagues, which shows that he must have been incredibly popular with his contemporaries. Richard's high level of awareness is certainly related to his basic subject. Like his teacher Hugo, he was of the opinion that the sacred scriptures differ from profane works by the complex ambiguity of the text. With him everything was metaphor, allegory and symbolism. He still recognized a moral sense even when the sentences were only traditions through the centuries.

Its main goal was to build the kingdom of God in the souls of men. Like his teacher, he was thus in the tradition of Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius with his Neo-Platonism , but also in that of Anselm of Canterbury . But unlike Hugo, Richard's works enjoyed a larger audience. In all likelihood, this was largely due to his writing style, as correct understanding is guaranteed by God revealing himself as the author, which does not mean that Richard had divine visions.

Apart from that, he always tried to establish a relation to reality and investigated the question of the meaning of the connection between God and creation. His mode of knowledge is therefore the consideration in which the symbolic content of reality is reliably determined.

His main work is the "Tractatus Exceptionum" with comments on almost all books of the Old and New Testaments. He uses this book after Hugo's “didascalicon” and reveals his reflection on methods in it: Holy Scripture and creation convey knowledge that science must secure.

These and numerous other works made Richard a consistently unsurpassed teacher of the spiritual life. His writings in turn influenced subsequent theologians and philosophers such as Alexander von Hales , Bonaventure , Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus .

Theological relevance

In today's theology of the teachings of Richard in particular the Trinity theology is used, which he presents in his work De Trinitate . His concept of the Trinity is based on the model of interpersonal love. Unlike Augustine and the tradition that followed him, he does not see the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in parallel to the trinity of lover, beloved and the bond of love that connects the two, but in the trinity of lover, beloved and " Beloved ”(condilectus). He argues that in divine love, in order to be perfect, the lover shares everything with the beloved , including his own divinity, which is why God the Father and God the Son are equally God. At the same time, perfect love cannot remain in togetherness, but must open itself unreservedly to a third party, the Holy Spirit as a beloved, in order to achieve perfection.

Editions of works and translations

• Ruben Angelici: Richard of Saint Victor: On the Trinity . English Translation and Commentary, Cascade, Eugene, Oregon 2011.
• R. Baron: Hugues et Richard de Saint-Victor . Introduction et choix de textes, Bloud & Gay 1961.
• Boyd Taylor Coolman, Dale M. Coulter (eds.): Trinity and Creation : A Selection of Works of Hugh, Richard and Adam of St. Victor, Brepols, Turnhout 2010.
• Jean Ribaillier: Ricardus, Prior S. Victoris Parisiensis, De Trinitate: texte critique avec introduction, notes et tables , Textes philosophiques du Moyen Age 6, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris 1958.
• Gaston Salet: Richard de St.-Victor, La Trinité: texte latin, introduction, traduction et notes , Sources chrétiennes 63, Éditions du Cerf, Paris 1959.
• Grover A. Zinn: Richard of St. Victor: the Twelve Patriarchs, the Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity , Classics of Western Spirituality , Paulist Press, New York 1979.

literature

• Johannes Beumer SJ: Richard von St. Viktor, theologian and mystic , in: Scholastik 31 (1965), 213-38.
• J. Châtillon: L'heritage littéraire de Richard de Saint Victor , in: Revue du Moyen âge latin 4 (1948), 23-53, 343-64.
• Dale M. Coulter: Per visibilia ad invisibilia: Theological Method in Richard of St. Victor , Brepols, Turnhout 2006.
• G. Fritz: Richard de St.Victor , in: Dict. Theol. Cath. XIII / 2, 2678-2695.
• Rudolf Goy: The handwritten tradition of the works of Richard von St. Viktor in the Middle Ages , Brepols, Turnhout 2005 ISBN 978-2-503-51908-1
• Martin Grabmann : History of the Scholastic Method , Volume II, Freiburg 1911, 480 ff.
• Oswald Schwemmer : Richard von St. Viktor , in: Jürgen Mittelstraß (Hrsg.): Encyclopedia Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. 2nd Edition. Volume 7: Re - Te. Stuttgart, Metzler 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-02106-9 , pp. 141 - 142 (with a detailed list of works and literature)

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard von St. Viktor in the catalog of the German National Library
• Digitized Patrologia Latina vol. 196 (ed. F. Hugonin, 1855 and others after the edition Rouen 1656)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See e.g. B. Jürgen Werbick: Trinity doctrine . In: Theodor Schneider (Ed.): Handbuch der Dogmatik. Vol. 2. Patmos, Düsseldorf 1995, pp. 481-576, here pp. 508-511
2. ↑ Richard von Sankt-Viktor: The Trinity . Transmission and comments by Hans Urs von Balthasar . (Christian Masters Vol. 4) Johannes Verlag, Einsiedeln 1980.