Walter of Saint Victor (d. c. 1180) was a mystic philosopher and theologian, and an Augustinian canon of Paris.
(1665) first called attention to Walter's treatise Contra quatuor labyrinthos Franciae (Against the Four Labyrinths of France) and published excerpts from it.
It is a bitter attack on the dialectical method in theology, and condemns the use of logic in the elucidation of the mysteries of faith.
Discarding the best traditions of the School of St-Victor, he pours abuse on the philosophers, the theologians, and even the grammarians.
Four years after his polemic was published, Peter of Poitiers, one of the "labyrinths", was raised by the pope to the dignity of Chancellor of the Diocese of Paris, and before the end of the decade Peter Lombard, another of the "Labyrinths", was recognized as an authority in theology, his method adopted in the schools, and his famous Books of Sentences used as a text and commented on by all the great teachers — a distinction which it retained all through the thirteenth century.