Hugo belonged to the aristocracy of contemplative piety, with its scorn of whatever lies without the pale of the soul’s companionship with God. In his independent way he followed Augustine, and Augustine’s Platonism, which was so largely the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Porphyry. He also followed the real Plato speaking in the _Timaeus_, with which he was acquainted. Plato would have nothing to do with allegorical interpretation as a defence of Homer’s gods; but he could himself make very pretty allegories, and his theory of ideas as at once types and creative intelligences lent itself to Christian systems of symbolism. In this way he was a spiritual ancestor of Hugo, who found in God the type-ideas of all things that He created. Moreover, if not Plato, at least his spiritual children--Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Plotinus--recognized that the highest truths must be known in modes transcending reason and its syllogisms, although these were the necessary avenues of approach. Hugo likewise regarded rational knowledge as but the path by which the soul ascends to the plateau of contemplation. The general aspects of his philosophy will be considered in a later chapter. Here he is to be viewed as a mediaeval symbolist, upon whom pressed a sense of the symbolism of all visible things. An examination of his great _De sacramentis Christianae fidei_ will disclose that with Hugo the material creation in its deepest verity is a symbol; that Scripture, besides its literal meaning, is allegory from Genesis to Revelation; that the means of salvation provided by the Church are sacramental, and thus essentially symbolical, consisting of perfected and potent symbols which have been shadowed forth in the unperfected sacramental character of all God’s works from the beginning.[72] Hugo’s little Preface (_praefatiuncula_) mentions certain requests made to him to write a book on the Sacraments. In undertaking it, he proposes to present in better form many things dictated from time to time rather negligently. Whatever he has taken from his previous writings he has revised as seemed best. Should there appear any inconsistency between what he may have said elsewhere and the language of the present work, he begs the reader to regard the present as the better form of statement. His method will be to treat his matter in the order of time; and to this end his work is divided into two Books. The first discusses the subject from the Beginning of the World until the Incarnation of the Word; the second continues it from the Incarnation to the final Consummation of all things. He explains that as he has elsewhere spoken at length upon the primary or historical meaning of Holy Writ,[73] he will devote himself here rather to its secondary or allegorical significance. Hugo further explains the subject of his treatise in a Prologue: