Richard of St Victor
Prior of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris and author of De Trinitate. He built the strongest argument anyone has for exactly three divine persons, and he built it out of the nature of love rather than out of counting anything.
Richard led the abbey school of Saint-Victor in Paris in the mid-twelfth century. His *De Trinitate* is the source of the argument from love: God must have supreme charity, charity cannot be self-directed, and shared charity requires a third.
He is the only figure located anywhere in this program's search whose argument has the right shape to close the question — an irreflexivity premise drawn from the nature of a specific relation, a floor at two, a further argument to three, and an explicit argument against four. Most modern versions of the love argument stop at three by saying there is no reason to go further, which is a silence rather than a barrier. Richard saw that objection, stated it himself, and wrote another book against it.
Where he is exposed is the ascent, not the stop. The published objection to the modern versions — that a pair is not, as a matter of conceptual necessity, better than a singleton — hits his three parallel arguments from goodness, happiness and glory just as hard.
Where this comes up
Sources
- Richard of St Victor, De Trinitate III
- Debby research packet OTC-002, on the condilectio argument