Hugh of St Victor

English

But fire, once distinguished, furnished light of some kind to the lower world, and had a circular motion: it was carried round like a kind of luminous cloud, as the sun is now.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

PL 175, col. 34C · pd

Notes

One sentence of physics, and it names the material: the first light is the element of fire, separated out and carried round the world in a circuit. Honorius says the same in the same decade — this bodily light he brought forth from the element of fire — and Comestor's luminous cloud is the same image. Hugh's fuller treatment is in De sacramentis and is built separately; the Adnotationes give the picture without the argument.

Threads

• → parallel · Honorius Augustodunensis
  Two Paris and Regensburg sentences of the same decade with the same physics: the light is the element of fire, separated out, carried round the world in a circuit like a luminous cloud, as the sun is now.
• ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  The same author giving the picture in the Adnotationes and the argument in De sacramentis: bodily things can only be lit by a bodily light, every body is in a place, and a light that made evening and morning must have moved, since without motion no span of time is traversed.
• ← echoes · Peter Comestor
  The luminous cloud verbatim — nubes lucida, driven round much as the sun is — with Hugh's element of fire dropped and the dawn brightness of Remigius and Honorius kept.