In this article, I have analyzed certain features and theological themes as found in Noah’s Ark (De archa Noe) composed by Hugh of St. Victor, an Augustinian regular canon who lived at Paris in the Twelfth Century, by collating with his Booklet on the Making of the Ark(Libellus de formatione arche). My findings are summarized as follows: first, in the perspective of medieval biblical hermeneutics, the Victorine author elucidates certain senses that may be implied by the biblical image of Noah’s ark. In accordance with this exegetical method, the ark is understood, first of all, as a vessel that Noah made with wood and pitch as indicated in its literal and historical sense; also the Church as the body of Christ in its allegorical and doctrinal meaning; and, finally, the ark of wisdom, as signified in its tropological or moral sense, which is to be constructed within our soul by the discipline of lectio divina.
Second, Hugh concentrates on the motif of spiritual ascent as implied by the tropologia of the ark. It is a highly Augustinian theological theme about a journey of the soul which, seeing how instable a situation it is driven to by the disordered love of self, becomes stimulated to ascend to the love of God. The Victorine construes this procedure to be a process for restoring to the soul the image of God that has been shattered and dispersed by the destructive effects of the original sin. In poetic imagery reminiscent of The Song of Songs, he depicts how the uplifted and integrated soul, being liquefied by the flame of love in the final stage of contemplation, flows into the mold of the Lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ, indwelling the center and summit of the ark and is re-formed to His likeness at the end.
Third, as regards Dionysius’s influence upon the formation of Hugh’s theology and spirituality, I have noticed that his treatises on Noah’s ark are built up on the Dionysian symbolic principle of proceeding from visible things(the image of the ark) to invisible realities(the inner contemplation). Additionally, I have highlighted that the three ascents starting from the respective corners of concupiscence, ignorance and goodness are certainly associated with the three hierarchical actions of purification, illumination and perfection as presented in the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy. The Victorine master, however, understands the uplifting process in terms of tropological ascent for restoring the divine image to the soul by the practice of virtues whereas the Dionysian anagogical ascension is all about attaining to the union with the unknown God by way of negation, namely, via negativa.
Concerning the topic of Dionysius-rezeption in the medieval Latin Christianity, the recent scholarship remarks that Hugh has laid the first steppingstone for affectivizing the intellectual mysticism of the Areopagite by intensifying the superiority of love over knowledge. In consideration of these observations, the Hugonian treatises on Noah’s ark, permeated with the central motif of love that gives impetus to spiritual ascent and makes possible the restoration of the divine image, should be numbered among certain textual evidences illustrating the Victorine affective reading of the intellectual Dionysianism.

• 서종원(감리교신학대학교) | Seouh, Jong Won