Hugh of St. Victor stands in a century-old tradition in which the book is not just a mere attribute; it is a strong metaphor and, beyond this, it has become the principal analogue for an understanding of nature. Reading can be a search for wisdom because all things are impregnated with sense, and this sense only waits to be brought to light by the reader. Hugh does not simply understand nature as if it were like a book; he conceives it as book. Reading is an act of decipherment; reading is an act of midwifery which helps the sense to come forth from all realities, and not just from their description.
In accordance with St. Augustine, wisdom was for Hugh not something but someone. Wisdom in the Augustinian tradition is the second person of the Trinity, Christ. "He is the wisdom through whom (God) has made all things. . . He is the Form, He is the Medicine, He is the Example, He is your Remedy."
The Wisdom Hugh seeks is Christ himself. Learning and, specifically, reading, are both just forms of a search for Christ the Remedy, Christ the Example and Form which fallen man, who has lost it, hopes to recover. The need of fallen man for reunion with wisdom is central to Hugh's thought. This makes the concept of "remedy" or "medicine" crucial for an understanding of Hugh. God became man to remedy the disorder, usually represented in visual terms as "darkness" in which man, through his sin, has been steeped. The ultimate remedy is God as wisdom. Art and sciences derive their dignity from the fact that they share in being remedies for the same purpose.
On Reading | According to Hugh, there are three modes of reading: reading for ones own ears, reading for the ears of others and reading with ones eyes.
Today, silent reading is the norm; it has become an activity where the letters, through the eyes, speak to the mind, rather than activating the mouth, making one hear what they read. Yet, when I read Hugh, I'm still in the old world. When Hugh speaks about the page, he still remembers that pagina means a vineyard, or, more precisely, the espalier along which he walks in a vineyard. The lines on the page were the thread of a trellis which supports the vines. He still picks and tastes words, like berries; he still sucks words from the page. It is an oral activity, literally, with the mouth, the lips. Hugh still walks through the pages; he still conceives of reading as a pilgrimage. Reading is not solely a visual activity for him; not an accumulation. Rather, reading is a pilgrimage toward regions ever lighter, toward the light, into the light, until the light becomes so strong that he doesn't go on reading, but begins to contemplate.
The art of memory is closely intertwined with the art of reading; one cannot be understood without the other. As public speaking became a majot art, the rhetor wanted to memorize not only sentences, but also the argumental structure and metaphors he would use to stress his point.
The one most common method used by the Greeks to achieve this purpose was the mental construction of a memory palace. To become the student of a reputable teacher, the pupil had to prove that he was at home and at ease in some vast architecture that existed only in his mind, and within which he could move at an instant to the spot of his choice. Each school had its own rules according to which this edifice had to be constructed. It had to contain several visually distinct classes of features such as columns, angles, rafters, rooms, archways, niches and thresholds.
The public speaker learned in late Roman antiquity how to "take notes" in his mind and "read them off" on the right occasion.
The rhetorical virtuoso was henceforth he who could mentally register and label each sentence that he intended to use, and promptly recover it from the appropriate architectural feature in his own inner topology.
Today, in an age dazed by the feats of computers, this skill sounds like an impossible undertaking or freakish acrobatics for some academic circus. But this mental control, which Hugh achieved in his students by having them imagine a sequence of whole numbers that ran to the horizon and which they could "mentally visit" at random, was part of the mental equipment expected from the beginner.
Hugh encourages his readers to seek pleasure in everything they can ream. "Later you will realize that nothing has been superfluous. Stifling knowledge gives no joy." He encourages an attitude in which the reader advances because he yearns for that mastery which puts the mind to rest. "Reading" is an iconogram for the foretaste of wisdom. To set the tone for the reader, Hugh quotes Psalms: Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then I would fly away, and be at rest.
On Studying | The word "study" in the Oxford English Dictionary gives the following first and second meaning: 1) affection, friendliness, devotion to another's welfare; partisan sympathy; desire, inclination; pleasure or interest felt in something -- obsolete since 1697; 2) an employ' meet, occupation -- obsolete since 1610.
Only with this qualification can the book be called a guide to higher studies. Studies pursued in a 12th-century cloister challenged the student's heart and senses even more than his stamina and brains. Study did not refer to a liminal epoch of life, as it usually does in modern times when we say that someone "still studies." They encompassed the person's daily and life-long routine, his social status and his symbolic function.
Enlightenment in Hugh's world and what is understood as enlightenment now are different things. And the difference is not merely that we flip the light switch and Hugh used candles. The light, which in Hugh's metaphoric usage illuminates man, is the counterfoil of the 18th century light of Reason. The light of which Hugh speaks here brings man to a glow. Approaching wisdom makes the reader radiant. The studious striving that Hugh teaches is a commitment to engage in an activity by which the reader's own "self" will be kindled and brought to sparkle.
Hugh expresses dissatisfaction with the students of his days who, "...whether from ignorance or from unwillingness, fail to hold to a fit method of study, and therefore we find many who study but few who are wise."
Seneca, the contemporary of Peter and Paul, the stoic tutor of Nero, distinguishes three ways of life in which a person might choose to "engage" himself: lust, contemplation or (political) action. With generosity, he urges, one should choose what to be free for. True leisure can be found only by those who give themselves to wisdom.
Saint Augustine, shortly after his baptism in 387, went to Africa, feeling God's calling to practice leisure, and founded a small community in the town of Thagaste. He defines the purpose of the group's common life as "to be deified by leisure." Reflecting on his conversion to Christianity, he interprets it as a vocation to "be free for learned unhurriedness." God calls him to leisure, which does not stop him from "engaging beyond all measure in reading."
Hugh thus demands that the reader who desires to reach perfection engage himself in led' sure. "This especially is that which takes the soul away from the noise of earthly business and makes it have, even in this life, a kind of foretaste of the sweetness of eternal quiet."
"In Spite of Slender Income" | Hugh writes that, "Lack of family wealth and a slender income decrease the opportunity for learning. Yet, we decidedly do not believe that these (persons) can be altogether excused by these circumstances, since we see many laboring in hunger, thirst, and nakedness to attain the fruit of knowledge."
The studium legendi, according to Hugh, is a vocation addressed to all which translates into a duty to ream. "All," be they dull or bright, more or less able, be their will powerful or weak, become blameworthy if they refuse to advance in learning. No one before Hugh had formulated in such terms the doctrine of a universal duty to learn.
By raising the issue of economic inequality Hugh makes it clear that he nots not address a closed monastic community but the general population -- the inhabitants of a budding and bustling medieval town. For townsmen, economic conditions obviously determine the student's leisure for studies.
Quite obviously it would be wrong to understand Hugh as an advocate of universal education, schooling, or what we understand today by "literacy." Yet, in this treatise Hugh speaks of a universal call to learning.
No doubt, the idea that "all men" are called to learn some specific thing is implicit in the doctrine of the Church. All are called to the faith and to its profession. And Islam, in a formal sense, has given a specific expression of the duty to learn: Muslims have to know the prayers which they recite five times each day, be they in community or utterly alone.
Between Knowledge and Wisdom | Before Hugh, old books grew by mere accretion. During Hugh's life-time editing starts; legal decrees are ordered and collected; all known commentaries of Church Fathers on the Bible, verse by verse, are assembled; Abelard gathers contrasting opinions on the same theological issue. Tradition is cannibalized and compiled according to the next editor's whim. But Hugh is not one of them.
After Hugh's death, students begin to use these compilations. A new kind of reader comes into existence, one who wants to acquire in a few years of study a new kind of acquaintance with a larger number of authors than a meditating monk could have perused in a lifetime. These new demands are both stimulated and met by new reference tools. And their existence and use is profoundly new. Once these tools were invented they remain fundamentally unchanged until the computer text-composer program reaches its 1980 stage. A mutation of comparable depth begins only then.
Modern reading, especially of the academic and professional type, is an activity performed by commuters or tourists; it is no longer that of pedestrians and pilgrims. The speed of the car and the dullness of the road and the distraction of billboards put the driver into a state of sensory deprivation which continues when he hurries through manuals and journals once he arrives at his desk. Like the tourist is equipped with a camera, so today's student reaches for the Xerox to keep a souvenir snapshot.
The following is excerpted from lllich's unpublished book, In The Vineyard of the Text A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, and from a recorded conversation between Illich and David Cayley for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
ILLUSTRATION
Ivan Illich In interpreting Hugh of St. Victor's 12th century text Didascalicon de studio legend) translated, Teaching Tool On the Effort of Reading -- lvan lllich has brought to light not only the insights and motivations of a brilliant contemplative of the Middle Ages, but he has also illuminated the great changes that have taken place between then and now in our appreciation of learning, reading, knowledge, and wisdom.