I recently lost my grandfather, Jerry Barrett, to an aggressive form of cancer. He was a scholar, a mediator, a labor advocate, a devout Catholic, and a family man. He has exercised a profound influence on my life, serving as a role model for me both in my studies and in my personal ethics. For the last few days of my grandpa’s life, I sat in the hospital room with my family, talking to him, listening to his stories, caring for him, and engaging in the little intimacies I previously would’ve taken for granted, like applying Chapstick to his cracked lips and holding his hand. While I was allowed to share in the love-filled experience of saying goodbye to the man who had touched all our lives and so often been the caretaker for us, my mind kept returning to a book I had recently read for class—Richard of St. Victor’s On the Trinity. I think the Victorine’s account of the trinitarian life is an equally compelling account of the love that binds us as members of human communities—especially in the face of the loss of a loved one or the isolation of quarantine.

Richard of St. Victor was a twelfth century regular canon—a priest who lived a life of poverty and community under the Rule of St. Augustine. Although born in Scotland, he lived and taught at the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris, originally founded by William of Champeaux. This abbey was home to a group of mystical and exegetical theologians who have come to be known as the Victorine School, a group including Richard as well as his teacher Hugh of St. Victor. In addition to his writings on the trinity, Richard wrote several influential and instructive works on spirituality. He was considered by Bonaventure to be their age’s definitive master of the contemplative life.

For Richard, because God is love and charity, God must be more than one. There is no other way for this love to be expressed than between the persons of a divine community. This insight isn’t new—it’s at the heart of the Christian understanding of the relationship between the Father and the Son (whether trinitarian or non-trinitarian, Nicaean or Arian, to varying extents), dating back to the Gospel accounts. However, Richard doesn’t stop there. He continues, arguing that for the love that God is to be full, God must be three—so that each person of the Godhead can share in the joy of loving the other divine persons. For the Father’s love of the Son to be full (and vice versa), the Father must have someone else to share in the joy of loving the Son. That third person is, of course, the Holy Spirit.

As Richard writes, “When one person gives love to another and he alone loves only the other, there certainly is love [dilectio], but it is not a shared love [condilectio]. … Shared love is properly said to exist when a third person is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community, and the affection of the two persons is fused into one affection by the flame of love for the third.”¹ The persons Richard here discusses are, of course, the divine persons of the Trinity, but they are also human persons in human communities, such as Richard’s fellow canons regular.

This is born out in Richard’s anthropology. Drawing on Genesis 1:26, he teaches that humanity was created in God’s “image according to reason and [in] his likeness according to love…; to his image according to understanding, to his likeness according to love.”² In Richard’s mystical theology, to know God is not enough, we are only fully actualized as humans created in the image and likeness of God when we love—both our creator and each other.

A crucial aspect of the medieval theological project was the search for vestiges and images of God within creation and human society. Augustine chiefly mapped his search within the mind, seeing its remembering, intellective, and willing faculties as trinitarian vestiges. Richard extends this, positing the love that links him to his canon brothers as the exact same principle linking the persons of the Trinity. His vivid descriptions of the joy of sharing with someone the love of a third person read like the writings of someone who has experienced this joy first-hand.

Like Richard, my grandfather was a teacher, a writer, a deeply spiritual man, and a man who lived his life guided by his love for many people. In his final days, as we all sat around his deathbed listening to his stories, and then, once he could no longer speak, reading old stories he had written down back to him, I experienced a new kind of love for this man I have loved all my life. My love for my grandfather was enhanced by sharing it with others, by seeing the obvious love for him in the eyes of his sons, my father and uncles, and his grandchildren, my sister and cousins. As Richard might put it, my love for my grandfather is only made full by this experience of sharing it with all my other relatives who, like me, rushed from across the country to be by his bedside in his final days.

I vividly remember one night (my grandfather’s last), standing around the kitchen with my family after my grandpa had finally fallen asleep. We all shared root beer floats (grandpa’s favorite) and recalled the many ice creams we’d all had with him, laughing and crying at once. In that moment, I realized that I had never loved my grandpa more than then, when I shared in my love with the rest of my family, and they shared theirs with me. The same principle of condilectio that draws the persons of the divine community together was drawing me together to my family and to our dying father and grandfather. It was a powerful moment of shared care, shared grief, and shared love. Furthermore, it was probably the most powerful moment of community that I have known since quarantine began.

I’m lucky in that I live with my fiancée, the love of my life, as well as our attention hog of a cat. I have also been able to share Zoom calls with friends throughout the pandemic, and recently meet up for a few socially-distanced get-togethers. But I have still felt profoundly the isolation and lack of community that we all have. And now, with the threat of a “second lockdown” upon us, this isolation is felt even more strongly. This isn’t the aloneness-with-God that the great ascetic authors of the Christian tradition discuss. This is the strange, paradoxical loneliness of a city dweller—alone yet never more than a dozen feet from another person. Reading Richard of St. Victor’s On the Trinity in quarantine enabled the spiritual richness and communal quality to immediately jump out to me. The lack of spiritual community in my own life made the presence of it in Richard’s feel all the more obvious.

Maybe it’s fitting that the most intimate and moving experience of community I’ve felt in recent months has been to say goodbye to a loved one. It is in these moments of farewell that we are brought together and reminded of what matters most. As humans created in the image and likeness of God, we are at our fullest—our most complete—when in community. The love we share doesn’t just bind us together, it makes us more whole. I see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that this was the lesson my grandfather had been trying to teach me my whole life.

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