SALVATION IN HUGH OF ST. VICTOR

The connection between grace, sacraments, and the spirituality of love are best expressed in the writings of Hugh of St. Victor. The bestowal of divine grace emerges in his thought as a twofold goodwill expressed in the action of the Spirit who aspirats a goodwill upon a person and then inspirats that goodwill so that it may move and take effect. This twofold effect of grace is the centerpoint of Hugh’s sacramental theology. Sacraments are vessels for this grace, but grace itself is the antidote. The medical language couches participation in the sacraments as means of accessing rehabilitation of one’s spirit. Moreover, this rehabilitation occurs along the same lines that the initial ‘illness’ carried away the patient into disorder. Hugh claims that as humans fell through an inordinate love of material things, so God ordained certain material things to be the means of healing. This highly-specified and symmetrical gift of grace seems also to correspond to Hugh’s definition of love, which is the delight of someone’s heart toward something on account of something. He clarifies that God, who lacks nothing, creates humans so that He might enjoy them, but does not need anything from them. In taking these three key concepts from Hugh’s writings, one sees a vision of salvation emerge such that the human person is sick with sin, whose will to love is wasted by inordinate loves and that by specified rehabilitation of grace via the Spirit, God makes the human person capable of love and loving once more and thus restores them to their proper purpose.

Pastorally, this vision of salvation obtains in our current culture for two reasons. First, its sacramental nature resists the thread of spiritualism so prevalent in American conceptions of religion, but even also among Christians. This spiritualism, as I see it, manifests in two ways. The one is a dualism that creates a binary opposition between spirit and matter and disdains the latter, as seen in certain Eastern philosophies, but also among the more puritanical of Christian traditions. The other is that some seem to think that salvation from sin is a merely internal matter of individual redemption and does not oblige the transformation of action or have creational or cosmic implications. Both border on a sort of revived gnosticism. The sacramental vision of thinkers like Hugh of St. Victor reestablishes the good purposes of God in making the physical world by giving it a place in the Kingdom of God as vessels of grace. Second, this sacramental vision of salvation orients this reunification of spirit and matter in a telos of love. God made humans by love, with love, and for love. That love is self-giving by nature. Such an insight restores to the Christian a notion of what one is saved toward, and not merely a vision of what one is saved from. In so doing, this perspective on salvation works against a flatly moral or legal vision of Christian life and restores to it the relational--and perhaps even romantic--elements so present in the Scriptures.