A contemplação em Hugo de São Vítor (1096-1141): fundamentos de uma epistemologia participativa

Abstract

This thesis engages with the historiographical debate on the so-called “discovery of nature” and “discovery of the individual” in the twelfth century, examining the relevance of these categories for understanding the mysticism and epistemology of Hugh of Saint Victor (1096–1141). Traditional historiography on the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, by emphasizing interest in the natural world and the appreciation of human interiority as signs of an emerging rationality, tends to frame medieval thought within an evolutionary process oriented toward modern naturalism and modern notions of the individual. Such a perspective, however, fails to account for the persistence and centrality of analogical models of knowledge, in which the visible refers to the invisible and the created participates, by similitude, in divine realities. Building on this problem, the thesis proposes an interpretation of Victorine contemplative knowledge as an expression of a participatory epistemology which, far from reducing nature and human interiority to autonomous objects of investigation, understands them as mediations in the relationship between God and humanity. This epistemology, grounded in the idea that all true knowledge is participation in divine Wisdom, shows that the Victorine interest in the created world and the human soul is inseparable from an ontology that conceives them as signs and vestiges of the supreme reality. The research combines the analysis of primary sources — notably the Didascalicon, the De Sacramentis, and the De Tribus Diebus — with an examination of Hugh’s theological categories, relating them to the analogical paradigm and to the intellectual context of the twelfth century.