studies that he refers when he speaks as follows in his book of elementary instruction, called the Didascalicon:
"I dare say that I never despised anything pertaining to learning, and learned much that might strike others as light and vain. I practised memorizing the names of everything I saw or heard of, thinking that I could not properly study the nature of things unless I knew their names. Daily I examined my notes of topics, that I might hold in my memory every proposition, with the questions, objections, and solutions. I would inform myself as to controversies and consider the proper order of the argument on either side, carefully distinguishing what pertained to the office of rhetoric, oratory, and sophistry. I set problems of numbers; I drew figures on the pavement with charcoal, and with the figure before me I demonstrated the different qualities of the obtuse, the acute and the right angle, and also of the square. Often I watched out the nocturnal horoscope through winter nights. Often I strung my harp (Saepe ad numerum protensum in ligno magadam ducere solebam) that I might perceive the different sounds and likewise delight my mind with the sweet notes. All these were boyish occupations (puerilia) but not useless. Nor does it burden my stomach to know them now."[1]
Not long after Hugo's arrival at Saint-Victor he began to teach at the monastery school, and upon the death of its director, in 1133, succeeded to the office, which he held until his death in 1141.[2] Colourless and grey are the outer facts of a monk's life, counting but little. The soul of a Hugo of Saint-Victor did not soil itself with any interest in the pleasures of the world: "He is not solitary with whom is God, nor is the power of joy extinguished because his appetite is kept from things abject and vile. He rather does himself an injustice who admits to the society of his joy what is disgraceful or unworthy of his love."[3]
Hugo belonged to the aristocracy of contemplative piety, with its scorn of whatever lies without the pale of the soul's
- ↑ Didascalicon, vi. 3 (Migne 176, col. 799). Other contents of this work are given post, Chapter XXXVI., 1.
- ↑ His death is touchingly described in a letter of Osbert, the canon in charge of the infirmary. See Migne 175, col. xlvii and clxi.
- ↑ Hugo, De arrha animae, Migne 176, col. 954. Yet Hugo sometimes was stung with an irrelevant pang for the German fatherland, which he had left: "I have been an exile since my boyhood, and I know how the mind grieves to forsake some poor hut's narrow hearth, and how easily it may then despise the marble hall and fretted roof" (Didascalicon, iii. 20; Migne 176, col. 778). Compare the single letter of Hugo that has a personal note, Ep. i. (Migne 176, col. 1011).
