When we consider how much the philosophers of this world have labored, we should be ashamed to be inferior to them"; "We should seek always to comprehend by reason what we hold by faith." Richard of St. Victor.
His works fall into the three classes of dogmatic, mystical, and exegetical. In the first, the most important is the treatise in six books on the Trinity, with the supplement on the attributes of the Three Persons, and the treatise on the Incarnate Word. But greater interest now belongs to his mystical theology, which is mainly contained in the two books on mystical contemplation, entitled respectively "Benjamin Minor" and "Benjamin Major", and the allegorical treatise on the Tabernacle. He carries on the mystical doctrine of Hugh, in a somewhat more detailed scheme, in which the successive stages of contemplation are described. These are six in number, divided equally among the three powers of the soul — the imagination, the reason, and the intelligence, and ascending from the contemplation of the visible things of creation to the rapture in which the soul is carried "beyond itself" into the Divine Presence, by the three final stages of "Dilatio, sublevatio, alienatio". This schematic arrangement of contemplative soul-states is substantially adopted by J. Gerson in his more systematic treatise on mystical theology, who, however, makes the important reservation that the distinction between reason and intelligence is to be understood as functional and not real.
In addition to the De Trinitate, he was known for such mystical writings as the Benjamin Minor or Twelve Patriarchs, the Benjamin Major or Mystical Ark, and the Four Degrees of Violent Charity. The De Trinitate seems to be a work of Richard's later years, written probably toward the end of his life; the style, the structure, the content all bear witness to the workings of a mature theological life.