Richard of St. Victor, a 12th-century Scottish theologian, is not exactly a household name in 21st-century Christian circles. Truth to tell, I only know of him because of a curious conversation I once had with my friend, the late Richard John Neuhaus, who, as only he could, told me of a friendly discussion he’d had with Rabbi David Novak one summer about the Scotsman’s Trinitarian theology, which tried to establish by reason that God must be triune. (We talked about a lot of strange and wondrous things, up there on the cottage deck in the Ottawa Valley.)
To greatly simplify a complex argument, Richard of St. Victor proposed that perfect love (“God”) cannot remain in and by itself; it must direct itself to an equally perfect person (“God the Son”); and the mutual love between those two must have a third person as that to which their common love is directed (“God the Holy Spirit”). Or so the old New Catholic Encyclopedia sums up. Richard of St. Victor’s Trinitarian theology didn’t attract many followers, and in any case, it somewhat misses the point about the Holy Trinity—which most preachers also tend to do on Trinity Sunday. And that is that we “know” the Triune God, not through abstract argument, but through history.
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