“The mysticism of Hugo de St. Victor withdrew the contemplator altogether from the outward to the inner world⁠—from God in the works of nature, to God in his workings on the soul of man. This contemplation of God, the consummate perfection of man, is immediate, not mediate. Through the Angels and the Celestial Hierarchy of the Areopagite it aspires to one God, not in his Theophany, but in his inmost essence. All ideas and forms of things are latent in the human soul, as in God, only they are manifested to the soul by its own activity, its meditative power. Yet St. Victor is not exempt from the grosser phraseology of the Mystic⁠—the tasting God, and other degrading images from the senses of men. The ethical system of Hugo de St. Victor is that of the Church, more free and lofty than the dry and barren discipline of Peter Lombard.”

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