Active Imagination : Hugh de St. Victor’s Conversation with His Anima
An Early-Twelfth Century Example of Active Imagination Hugh de St. Victor’s Conversation with His Anima
Before we begin with our material, I would like to make it clear that I will be concerned with this text only from the standpoint of active imagination. I will not touch upon its theological aspects, for that would not only lead me out of my own depths but also away from that which I feel is the main psychological interest of the material.
As I mentioned before, I originally worked on this text for my first seminar on active imagination in 1951, at which time I compared it with the conversation between the World-Weary Man and his Ba (see Chapter 5). The two texts form a most interesting contrast: the one shows how a man can hold his ground when something overwhelming breaks in on him from the unconscious, the other, how it is possible to influence the unconscious when one is wholly convinced—as Hugh de St. Victor evidently was—that this is necessary.
In the Egyptian case, consciousness was still extremely weak. The ego was just emerging from a complete participation mystique with the collective pattern. In our medieval text, the ego is infinitely stronger; in fact, it would be possible to contend that the ego is too strong and wins too complete a victory over the soul. We suffer today from both tendencies; therefore, I regard both these texts as enormously valuable parallels in considering active imagination.
On the one hand, when we touch archetypal material directly, we are always in danger of being drowned in it, thereby losing our hard-won consciousness; on the other, our ego is inclined to be far too stiff and unbending in our attitude toward the unconscious.
Our text comes from the early twelfth century and is a conversation between a monk, Hugh de St. Victor, and his soul. I must mention his background very briefly. In 1108, William de Champeaux, a well-known Parisian theologian, wearied by his quarrels with his pupil, the famous Abelard, retired from his professorship in Paris and restored a ruined monastery on the Seine which was dedicated to St. Victor of Marseilles.
Champeaux originally intended to devote himself and his monks entirely to the love of God and to have nothing more to do with scholastic science. But he was soon persuaded that science was also one of the highest services of God, and St. Victor’s flourished as a center of science and religion.
Three monks who were particularly famous were Richard de St. Victor, Adam de St. Victor, and Hugh de St. Victor. Richard de St. Victor, a Scotsman, was the subject of a lecture by Jung in 1940. In Richard’s interesting Benjamin Minor, he compares knowledge of oneself to the Mountain of Transfiguration, for he, like all the Victorines, regarded knowing oneself as the “summit of knowledge.” Adam de St. Victor, a Frenchman from Brittany, wrote some very beautiful spiritual poems. Hugh de St. Victor, a German from Saxony and the most famous of all, left a great many writings, including our text of his conversation with his soul.
Very little is known of Hugh de St. Victor’s early life. Until the eighteenth century, his origin had been forgotten and legend had attributed him a French, Flemish and even a Roman ancestry. In 1745, his real background was rediscovered in the Halberstadt manuscripts. (His uncle was Bishop of Halberstadt.) Hugh belonged to the German aristocracy, being the son, or possibly the nephew, of the Saxon Count of Blankenburg.
When he was still under 20 years of age, Hugh left a Germany that had been torn by the dissensions between Emperor and Pope, and went to France, where he remained for the rest of his life. He studied first in Paris, then went to St. Victor’s at Marseilles. The exact year that he moved to St. Victor on the Seine is unknown, but he was given a professorship in 1125, and in 1133, the whole of the studies at the monastery was placed under his care. He died in February 1141, at the age of 44.
He was not only an exceptionally learned man, but he was also very good at getting along with his fellow men. His friends said with pride that religion and life were wonderfully united in him, but we also hear that he was exceedingly critical. Evidently, he found St. Paul’s admonition to “suffer fools gladly” by no means congenial! Although he knew so much, we are told that he regarded knowledge as the “vestibule of the mystic life.”
But Paul Wolff tells us that in the case of the Victorines, it is really not possible to separate the mystic from the theologian and philosopher, for the Victorine idea of the term mystic was very much wider than was the case with the mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Everything that was symbolic or hidden in a symbol was called mystical at St. Victor. They regarded the whole world and everything that was in it as a symbol of God. Hugh used to exhort his students to learn everything they could, assuring them that in later life, they would find that nothing was superfluous.
Hugh began contemplation with the world because, as he says, the eternal word is revealed by contemplation of creation. The word itself is invisible, but it has become visible and can be seen in the works of the creator. The world is a book written by the finger of God, and each creature is a letter of God, so to speak. Therefore, mortal man, when he looks at the world, is like an illiterate man who looks at a printed page, for it conveys no sense to him. He only sees the outer forms, but has no eyes for the eternal idea expressed in it. It is, therefore, man’s duty to learn to read the book of the world.
According to Hugh, nature and grace are the two ways by which man can reach God: the sign of nature is the visible world; the sign of grace is the incarnation of the eternal word. Man stands between angel and animal; the former sees only the spiritual side of reality, and the latter, only the outer reality. Man alone can see both. Soul and body are attached to each other by sense perception; the soul participates in the spiritual life of God through the idea.
The Victorines were both mystical and scientific. Hugh in particular was always anxious to keep philological exactness and mystical interpretation together, for the latter would become altogether too speculative if the exact text were ever overlooked.
I have only related a bare minimum from the life and teaching of Hugh de St. Victor—just enough to give some idea of the soil from which our text arose, for it is the active imagination itself which is the most important thing for us.
In medieval times, the existence of the soul as an autonomous, independent being is no longer a shock, as it was to the World-Weary Man, for the soul has emerged from the unconscious and was an established fact for the twelfth century monk. The Self—or at all events, the light side of the Self—appears separated from the soul, as her bridegroom, Christ. The soul is regarded as entirely feminine, so it can be said to be identical with the psychological anima.
Such conversations are a form which is by no means rare in the Middle Ages. But, as far as my limited knowledge goes, they are usually an uninteresting, conscious device. It is quite possible that part of the answers of the soul in our conversation also arises from theological assumptions concerning the anima naturalis, and are therefore not wholly genuine. But the conversation takes so many unexpected turns that it seems impossible to doubt that the anima often slips in spontaneous material from the unconscious.
In the Egyptian text, it was the Ba, representing both the soul and the Self, who played the leading role and who changed the man, whereas in this text, it is the man who plays the leading role and who changes the soul. The man places himself on the side of the Self, of Christ, and is thus able to convince his soul to a great extent. She is allowed, however, and this is very unusual in such texts, to talk quite freely. She expresses her doubts as to the truth of his statements, as well as her extreme dislike to them.
Hugh has a very definite program—the program of the Victorines—to disentangle his soul from the world and to make her one-pointed toward God. That the text strives only upward toward the light belongs to the time; it was the age when Norman architecture, with its comparatively low, rough arch, was giving way to the high, pointed arch of the Gothic style.
The text gives us a very graphic picture of how man can influence the unconscious. Jung once pointed out that the practice of any kind of magical influence or suggestion is only in its right place when used on our own unconscious. The people of Hugh’s age were much more conscious of magical effects than we are—they did not doubt that words and thoughts had an effect both on themselves and on their environment.
Therefore, Hugh attempted to use the magical effect which necessarily emanates from thought and word, in the service of God to prevent it from becoming daemonic, as it will when it is used consciously or unconsciously in the service of the ego. Psychologically, this is obviously exceedingly sound; it is using the forces of our psyche for the sake of the whole, instead of making the part—the ego—the enemy of the whole psyche by its personal greed.
Naturally, from our point of view, the dark is too repressed, although it is by no means wholly lacking.”
Medieval man was much nearer to the instincts than we are, and the way to greater consciousness therefore naturally led upward. Hugh of St. Victor’s great insistence on philological accuracy gives us a hint of how there could have been no science, for instance, if man had not learned to be accurate and undeviatingly honest.
Every movement becomes one-sided if it is persisted in too long, but we must not let the fact that the cause of wholeness in the modern world demands an attitude which includes much more of the dark side of man, prejudice us in considering this text—a text which follows the Christian program of differentiation of the white in accordance with the age to which it belongs. Incidentally, we can also get a startling idea from it of how much we all still think in medieval terms. What was natural for Hugh in the twelfth century has, to a great extent, become a lazy habit with many of us today. ~~Barbara Hannah, Encounters with the Soul, pp. 106–110
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