influences in the story of English mysticism. And, through the
writings of his latter-day followers, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton,
and the anonymous author of the Divine Cloud of Unknowing, Richard
of St. Victor is, perhaps, the most important of the three.

Himself either a Scot or an Irishman by birth, Richard entered the
famous abbey of St. Victor, a house of Augustinian canons near
Paris, some time before 1140, where he became the chief pupil of the
great mystical doctor and theologian whom the later Middle Ages
regarded as a second Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor. After Hugh's
death (1141), Richard succeeded to his influence as a teacher, and
completed his work in creating the mystical theology of the Church.
His masterpiece, De Gratia Contemplationis, known also as Benjamin
Major, in five books, is a work of marvellous spiritual insight,
unction, and eloquence, upon which Dante afterwards based the whole
mystical psychology of the Paradiso.2 In it Richard shows how the
soul passes upward through the six steps of contemplation--in
imagination, in reason, in understanding--gradually discarding all
sensible objects of thought; until, in the sixth stage, it
contemplates what is above reason, and seems to be beside reason, or
even contrary to reason. He teaches that there are three qualities
of contemplation, according to its intensity: mentis dilatatio, an
enlargement of the soul's vision without exceeding the bounds of
human activity; mentis sublevatio, elevation of mind, in which the
intellect, divinely illumined, transcends the measure of humanity,
and beholds the things above itself, but does not entirely lose
self-consciousness; and mentis alienatio, or ecstasy, in which all
memory of the present leaves the mind, and it passes into a state of
divine transfiguration, in which the soul gazes upon truth without
any veils of creatures, not in a mirror darkly, but in its pure
simplicity. This master of the spiritual life died in 1173. Amongst
the glowing souls of the great doctors and theologians in the fourth
heaven, St. Thomas Aquinas bids Dante mark the ardent spirit of
"Richard who in contemplation was more than man."[3]

Benjamin, for Richard, is the type of contemplation, in accordance
with the Vulgate version of Psalm lxvii.: Ibi Benjamin
adolescentulus in mentis excessu: "There is Benjamin, a youth, in
ecstasy of mind"--where the English Bible reads: "Little Benjamin
their ruler."[4] At the birth of Benjamin