Richard of Saint Victor and the four degrees of violent love

Abstract

In a writing titled De IV gradibus violentae caritatis, Richard of Saint Victor designs in a surprising way the movement of love between the man and God, using the paradoxical symbol of violence. Using the same terms as the monastic philosophy of XII century, the movement of love is understood as an ascend through different rungs, to each of which corresponds a particular primacy of a spiritual potentia. The movement also depends on his orientation, towards God or towards perdition, although the structure of violence is identical for both orientations. Interestingly enough, alongside ascending, the author offers a conclusive time of discending, understood as collaborating with God or as an autodissolution. We propose a review on how Richard presents ascending and descending, extracting its turnouts: a model of ecstatic reason configured by affectus, a suggestive way of referring to human perdition (that we associate to nihilism) and a mystic of descending for men joined to God, that points towards martyrdom as an existential category.