Reading the World as Scripture: Hugh of St Victor’s De Tribus Diebus

Hugh of St Victor’s De tribus diebus is a difficult work to classify. Strictly speaking, it is neither an hexaemeral commentary nor a cosmological treatise, although it bears affinities to both these types of literature. It is not exactly a mystical work either, despite its stated intention of leading the reader through the visibilia of creation to the invisibilia of the triune God. In some of the surviving manuscripts, it is attached to the Didascalicon de studio legendi, and in Migne’s Patrologia latina it appears as the liber septimus of that work. C.H.Buttimer, modern editor of the Didascalicon, chose to omit the De tribus diebus from his edition, although retaining a somewhat incongruous appendix, the De tribus rerum subsistentiis. His decision seems unfortunate. Granted that the De tribus diebus is a self-contained treatise that can be read and used as such, the evidence of the manuscripts should not be ignored. I would suggest that the De tribus diebus might best be read, in fact, as a contemplative seventh part of Hugh’s six-part work in the Didascalicon, if not actually the meditation proposed in the preface and book six, chapter thirteen. On these terms, it appears both as an exemplary application of exegetical principles expounded in the treatise de studio legendi, and as the completion or conclusion that structurally echoes the hexaemeron, in which God worked during six “days” but on the seventh blessed and contemplated what he had made.