"Listen: there was once a king sitting on his
throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented
with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased
the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly.
The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it
along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God."
Hildegard of
Bingen has been called by her admirers "one of the most important figures
in the history of the Middle Ages," and "the greatest woman of her
time." Her time was the 1100's (she was born in 1098), the century of
Eleanor of Aquitaine, of Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, of the rise of the great universities and the
building of Chartres cathedral. She was the daughter of a knight, and when she
was eight years old she went to the Benedictine monastery at Mount St Disibode
to be educated. The monastery was in the Celtic tradition, and housed both men
and women (in separate quarters). When Hildegard was eighteen, she became a
nun. Twenty years later, she was made the head of the female community at the
monastery. Within the next four years, she had a series of visions, and devoted
the ten years from 1140 to 1150 to writing them down, describing them (this
included drawing pictures of what she had seen), and commenting on their
interpretation and significance. During this period, Pope Eugenius III sent a
commission to inquire into her work. The commission found her teaching orthodox
and her insights authentic, and reported so to the Pope, who sent her a letter
of approval. (He was probably encouraged to do so by his friend and former
teacher, Bernard of Clairvaux.) She wrote back urging the Pope to work harder
for reform of the Church.
The community
of nuns at Mount St. Disibode was growing rapidly, and they did not have
adequate room. Hildegard accordingly moved her nuns to a location near Bingen,
and founded a monastery for them completely independent of the double monastery
they had left. She oversaw its construction, which included such features (not
routine in her day) as water pumped in through pipes. The abbot they had left
opposed their departure, and the resulting tensions took a long time to heal.
Hildegard
travelled throughout southern Germany and into Switzerland and as far as Paris,
preaching. Her sermons deeply moved the hearers, and she was asked to provide
written copies. In the last year of her life, she was briefly in trouble
because she provided Christian burial for a young man who had been
excommunicated. Her defense was that he had repented on his deathbed, and
received the sacraments. Her convent was subjected to an interdict, but she
protested eloquently, and the interdict was revoked. She died on 17 September
1179. Her surviving works include more than a hundred letters to emperors and
popes, bishops, nuns, and nobility. (Many persons of all classes wrote to her,
asking for advice, and one biographer calls her "the Dear Abby of the
twelfth century.") She wrote 72 songs including a play set to music.
Musical notation had only shortly before developed to the point where her music
was recorded in a way that we can read today. Accordingly, some of her work is
now available on compact disk, and presumably sounds the way she intended. My
former room-mate, a non-Christian and a professional musician, is an
enthusiastic admirer of her work and considers her a musical genius. Certainly
her compositional style is like nothing else we have from the twelfth century.
The play set to music is called the Ordo Virtutum and show us
a human soul who listens to the Virtues, turns aside to follow the Devil, and
finally returns to the Virtues, having found that following the Devil does not
make one happy.
She left us
about seventy poems and nine books. Two of them are books of medical and
pharmaceutical advice, dealing with the workings of the human body and the
properties of various herbs. (These books are based on her observations and
those of others, not on her visions.) I am told that some modern researchers
are now checking her statements in the hope of finding some medicinal
properties of some plant that has been overlooked till now by modern medicine.
She also wrote a commentary on the Gospels and another on the Athanasian Creed.
Much of her work has recently been translated into English, part in series
like Classics of Western Spirituality, and part in other
collections or separately. If your university library or bookstore cannot help
you, try a Christian bookstore. If they do not have it, try a trendy (feminist,
New Age, ecology) bookstore.
But her major
works are three books on theology: Scivias ("Know the
paths!"), Liber Vitae Meritorum (on ethics), and De
Operatione Dei. They deal (or at least the first and third do) with the
material of her visions. The visions, as she describes them, are often
enigmatic but deeply moving, and many who have studied them believe that they
have learned something from the visions that is not easily put into words. On
the other hand, we have the recent best-seller, The Man Who Mistook His
Wife For A Hat, by Oliver Sacks, Professor of Clinical Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and author of Migraine and
various other books. Professor Sacks is concerned with the relation of the
brain to the mind, and ways in which the phsical state of the nervous system
can affect our ways of perceiving reality. He views the pictures in Hildegard's
books of what she saw in her visions, and says, "The style of the pictures
is a clear indication that the seer suffered regularly from migraine attacks.
Migraine sufferers tend to see things in this manner." And indeed, it is
true that Hildegard suffered throughout her life from painful attacks of what
may have been migraine. Professor Sacks hastens to add that this has nothing to
do with whether her visions are authentic insights into the nature of God and
His relation to the Universe.
Hildegard has
undergone a remarkable rise in popularity in the last thirty years, since many
readers have found in her visions, or read into them, themes that seem to speak
to many modern concerns. For example:
Although she
would have rejected much of the rhetoric of women's liberation, she never
hesitated to say what she thought needed to be said, or to do what she thought
needed to be done, simply because she was a woman. When Pope or Emperor needed
a rebuke, she rebuked them.
Her writings
bring science, art, and religion together. She is deeply involved in all three,
and looks to each for insights that will enrich her understanding of the
others.
Her use of
parable and metaphor, of symbols, visual imagery, and non-verbal means to
communicate makes her work reach out to many who are totally deaf to more
standard approaches. In particular, non-Western peoples are often accustomed to
expressing their views of the world in visionary language, and find that
Hildegard's use of similar language to express a Christian view of reality
produces instant rapport, if not necessarily instant agreement.
Hildegard wrote
and spoke extensively about social justice, about freeing the downtrodden,
about the duty of seeing to it that every human being, made in the image of
God, has the opportunity to develop and use the talents that God has given him,
and to realize his God-given potential. This strikes a chord today.
Hildegard wrote
explicitly about the natural world as God's creation, charged through and
through with His beauty and His energy; entrusted to our care, to be used by us
for our benefit, but not to be mangled or destroyed.
