“that you may understand this I shall use comparisons”: Incarnation and the Rhetoric of Likeness in De sacramentis

Like others yesterday in class, I too felt a little baffled by Hugh of St. Victor’s reflection on the Incarnation and his unyieldingly logical style. Yet difficulty seduces further meditation, so I’d like here to forward some preliminary observations about the way Hugh’s rhetorical choices illuminate rather than obscure his doctrinal claims about the Incarnation. Specifically, this blogpost will explore the way that Hugh uses comparison (simultudo) to instruct his readers in how to read “likeness” in Christological discussions. As Hugh himself writes, “I shall use comparisons, so that from the creature you may understand the Creator.”[1] If comparisons are helpful in this regard, perhaps they can also help us to understand in what sense the Creator became like the creature.

This idea of Incarnation-as-likeness arises from the New Testament itself. We read in Hebrews, “For we have not a high priest, who can not have compassion on our infirmities: but one tempted in all things like as [pro similitudine] we are, without sin.”[2] Similarly, we read in Philippians, “But [Christ Jesus] emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men [in similitudinem hominum factus]…”[3] Notice that both of these passages use a form of the Latin similitudo, translated into English as “like” and “likeness.” But similitudo also would have very specific connotative resonances for medieval Latin readers trained in the writings of Quintilian, who used similitudo to name the rhetorical gesture of comparison itself.[4] With this in mind, the action of the Word in the Incarnation has a rhetorical quality: he crafts likeness in the assumed human flesh in the same way as a rhetor brings images together to illuminate his speech. Hugh, as he opens his discussion of the Incarnation, points to exactly this exchange of likeness: Christ-like-man so that men-can-be-like-God: or as Hugh himself writes, “For God himself deigned to be humbled, descending to human things that afterwards he might raise man up to the divine.”[5] Put another way, the Word’s act—His speech—proves a consonance between the divine and the human.

Yet how are we to read the word like in “one tempted in all things like as we are”? The answer to this is in no way obvious, since like can suggest both the most casual coincidence of qualities (e.g. the sky is blue like my blue dress) to the most intimate co-inherence of identities (e.g. my beloved is like my own body to me).

Hugh is accordingly cautious about how the idea of likeness is employed in theological discussion, since a misapplication of the idea can lead to heresy and error. He shows how the idea of likeness can be misapplied while discussing those who have been “found to have thought wrongly, asserting that the flesh [of Christ] in all those instances which have been displayed in it and about it as kinds of suffering took on indeed a likeness of suffering and pain, but endured no pain or suffering at all.”[6] For Hugh, using the idea of likeness in this way leads to the idea of the Incarnation as a kind of empty parody, a hollow simulacrum in which the postures of suffering are assumed but not the visceral content of physical pain. Such likeness is little more than mockery: we might think of the bullying gestures of those who imitate the disabled. They may have attempted a temporary physical likeness, but that likeness is ultimately empty and, more importantly, alienating—so that the identity of the one who suffers and the one who mocks share in nothing: in fact they are pushed further apart from one another. The bully’s so-called likeness actually opens a breaching aporia of wounding disparity that becomes more and more difficult to repair.

How else, then, can likeness be invoked?

Given more space, we could look to 2.1.3, where Hugh uses comparison in a typical way, showing how the Father’s operation in the Son’s Incarnation is like a father arranging a marriage for a son,[7] but I’d like to look to a less typical use of comparison that occurs later on in the same section, when Hugh asserts that “all that the Father does…the Son does. Not even so do I mean…similar…but the very same thing.”[8] To help us comprehend how the Father and the Son are alike in their works, Hugh rhetorically invokes comparison—but ultimately in order to reject the comparison. Hugh says that the divine cooperation is not like “when I say: ‘I do the same thing that you do…’” Hugh goes on: it is not like when we are both building houses; neither is it like we are building the same house. Rather, it is like what a “man does with fortitude and…[what]the fortitude of man does…”[9] Here, we see a complex chain of similes—several rejected, until through an exploration of unlikeness a truer likeness can be found, and this true likeness is to be understood in terms of absolute co-inherence, one without confusion: strength cooperates with the man’s body, and the man’s body with strength. Comparison is used apophatically until it can be used cataphatically to reveal a true likeness.

In these instances, Hugh pushes the rhetoric of comparison to its limits: proposing likenesses that ultimately dissolve in the face of further meditation. Put another way, comparison is useful not just for pointing out likeness, but also for its moment of incoherence, when divine difference reasserts its reality over earthly similitude. In this way, Hugh’s rhetoric allows difference to co-exist within communion, imitating a Trinity whose very being derives from the sustenance of an essence shared by distinct persons. Yet the Trinity, in the Incarnation, has extended the possibility of communion-in-difference to humanity itself. As Hugh writes, “God assumed man; man passed over into God” but without either undergoing a change in “substance”[10]—that is, humanity’s distinct nature is not obliterated before communion with the divine becomes possible.

-Dawn Treader

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[1] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, ed. Joseph Saint-George, trans. Roy Deferrari (Ex Fontibus Company, n.d.), 213.

[2] Heb. 4:15. All English translations of Scripture are from the Douay-Rheims Version. The Latin is taken from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem published by Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft in 2007.

[3] Phil. 2:7.

[4] For a fascinating discussion of the way Quintilian reconceives of how comparison can aid arguments, see Samuel McCormick, “Argument by Comparison: An Ancient Typology,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 32, no. 2 (2014): 148–64, https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2014.32.2.148.

[5] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, 205.

[6] Hugh of St. Victor, 226.

[7] See Hugh of St. Victor, 208–9.

[8] Hugh of St. Victor, 209.

[9] Hugh of St. Victor, 209–10.

[10] Hugh of St. Victor, 216.