Hildegard of Bingen

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Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary, composer, and writer on medicine and the natural world — among the most productive authors of the twelfth century, and one of the very few women of her age whose name reached far beyond her cloister. She called herself a paupercula feminea forma, a poor little figure of a woman, and from inside that self-description spoke to popes and emperors with the authority of one who held that she was merely the instrument of a voice not her own. The Church canonized her and named her a Doctor of the Church only in 2012, more than eight hundred years after her death; her reputation, however, had never quite faded in the interval, and she was long known as the Sibyl of the Rhine.

Life under the rule

She was placed in religious life as a child, given as an oblate and enclosed, with the noblewoman Jutta of Sponheim, in an anchorage attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg in the Rhineland; the vita records the enclosure on All Saints’ Day, 1112. Jutta taught her the psalter and the rudiments of Latin, and when Jutta died in 1136 the small community of women that had gathered around the cell elected Hildegard their magistra. By her own account she had seen visions since early childhood — not in trance or sleep, she insisted, but with her mind awake and her ordinary senses intact, a luminous seeing she set apart sharply from dream and ecstasy. For decades she told almost no one. Around the age of forty-two she underwent what she described as a burning command, a fire that opened the meaning of the scriptures to her and ordered her to write down what she saw. She resisted, fell ill, and at length, with the encouragement of her secretary the monk Volmar and the approval of her abbot, she began.

What gave her the confidence to publish was an act of high recognition. Portions of her first book reached Pope Eugenius III at the Synod of Trier in the winter of 1147–1148; Bernard of Clairvaux, to whom she had written for counsel, lent his weight, and the pope read her work aloud to the assembled prelates and authorized her to continue. A woman’s prophetic voice had been licensed by the highest authority in Latin Christendom, and Hildegard never afterward lacked for correspondents.

Around 1150 she moved her nuns out of the double monastery at Disibodenberg — against the will of the monks, who were reluctant to lose the prestige and the endowments she had drawn — and founded her own house at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, on the Rhine. The struggle was bitter and her health collapsed under it, a pattern that recurs across her life: illness as the bodily cost of an imperative obeyed or resisted. In 1165 she founded a second house across the river at Eibingen. From these communities she undertook four preaching tours through the German lands during the 1160s — to Mainz, Würzburg, Bamberg, Trier, Metz, Cologne — addressing clergy and laity alike in an age when public preaching by women was all but unheard of, and denouncing clerical laxity and the Cathar heresy with a freedom that her prophetic standing alone made possible.

Her last year was shadowed by a public conflict over the dead. Hildegard had allowed a nobleman who had once been excommunicate, but who she maintained had died reconciled to the Church, to be buried in the consecrated ground at Rupertsberg. The prelates of Mainz demanded the body be disinterred and removed from holy soil; Hildegard refused, and according to her Vita went out herself and obliterated the grave-marker so the corpse could not be identified and dug up. The diocese answered with an interdict — the sacraments suspended, and, what wounded her most, the singing of the Divine Office forbidden, the liturgy silenced in her own church. She wrote a long, unbowed letter on the theology of sacred music, arguing that to silence praise was to side with the devil who had been cast out of the heavenly harmony. The interdict was lifted in March 1179. She died on 17 September of that year, in her eighty-first year.

The three visionary books

The fruit of the divine command was a trilogy of long visionary works, composed across roughly thirty years and forming a single architecture of creation, redemption, and the end of things. Each proceeds the same way: a vision is described in elaborate symbolic detail, often with an accompanying illuminated image, and then a voice from the light expounds it line by line.

Scivias — a contraction of Sci vias Domini, “Know the Ways of the Lord” — occupied her from about 1142 to 1151. Its twenty-six visions are arranged in three books that trace the order of salvation: the creation and fall in the first, redemption through the Incarnation and the Church and its sacraments in the second, and the edifice of salvation history rising toward the end of the age in the third, which closes with a sequence of songs and an early version of the morality play that would become the Ordo Virtutum. The opening vision sets the key for everything that follows: a great mountain the color of iron, and above it One enthroned in such brightness that the seer cannot look directly upon it.

Liber Vitae Meritorum — the “Book of the Rewards of Life,” written about 1158–1163 — stages an extended psychomachia, a contest of the virtues and vices. Thirty-five vices appear and speak in their own voices, each answered by its opposing virtue, the whole framed by the cosmic figure of a man whose body spans the heavens. It is the most ethical of the three books, a moral physics of the soul keyed to the doctrine of penance.

Liber Divinorum Operum, the “Book of Divine Works,” written between about 1163 and 1173–1174, is her cosmological summa and the most ambitious of the three. Its governing image fuses the great wheel of the cosmos with the figure of a man, arms outstretched, set at the center of the elements and the firmament — the human being as microcosm, knit by correspondence into the macrocosm of the created order. Here Hildegard’s reading of the prologue to the Gospel of John runs together with a vision of the Logos as the generative reason within all things, and the natural world is shown as a single fabric in which the motions of the stars, the winds, the humors of the body, and the moral life of the soul are bound into one resonance.

The Living Light

What unites the visions is the medium in which they are given. Hildegard saw, by her own repeated testimony, a brightness she distinguished from any ordinary seeing — present to her since infancy, perceived with the eyes of the spirit while the bodily eyes stayed open and the senses kept their work. She named this abiding radiance the umbra viventis lucis, the reflection or shadow of the living Light, and within it she sometimes glimpsed a second and more intense brilliance she called the Living Light itself. In the account of her experience that Charles Singer translated in 1917, she describes a light “more brilliant than the sun” whose height and breadth she could not measure, in which the words and works of human beings appeared to her as sun, moon, and stars are reflected in water, and within which she beheld at times that inner Light whose gaze stripped away age and sorrow and left her young again. The seeing was not, she was at pains to say, dream or rapture; she walked, ate, and governed her house while it endured.

Viriditas, the greening power

Her thought turns on viriditas — “greenness” — a word she pressed into service for the moist, growing, life-giving power she saw running through the whole of creation and through the soul. It is the sap in the branch, the bloom on the herb, the freshness of grace in a faithful life; its opposite, ariditas, the drying-out, is her figure for sin, sloth, and despair. Viriditas is no mere metaphor in her usage but a single force at work indifferently in plant, body, and spirit, the visible token of the divine fecundity that keeps the world from falling back into nothing. The same greening power that quickens a meadow quickens the virtues in a soul, and the cosmos and the body are legible to one another because the one moisture moves through both. It is the keystone that joins her visionary theology to her natural science, and it is the idea by which later readers have most often recognized her.

The music

Alongside the visionary books Hildegard composed a substantial body of liturgical music — soaring, wide-ranging melodies, far freer in their leaps and melismatic flights than the plainchant of her day, that have found a large modern audience. She gathered these antiphons, responsories, sequences, and hymns under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, the “Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations,” and she understood them not as ornament but as a recovery, however partial, of the music the angels make and that Adam knew before the fall. Song, for Hildegard, was theology in its highest register; to sing was to rejoin the harmony from which sin had exiled the soul, which is why the silencing of the Office under the Mainz interdict struck her as a spiritual injury and not a mere disciplinary inconvenience.

Her Ordo Virtutum, the “Play of the Virtues,” is the earliest surviving morality play, and the only medieval musical drama whose text and music both come down to us from a single named author. In it the Virtues, sung, contend with the Devil — who alone in the play does not sing but only speaks and shrieks, for he has no part in the celestial harmony — over the fate of a human soul, Anima, who falls and is at length restored. The work crowns the same architecture that runs through Scivias and the Liber Vitae Meritorum: the moral combat staged as music, with damnation figured as the loss of song itself.

Natural philosophy: Physica and Causae et Curae

Hildegard also produced two treatises on the natural world and the healing of the body, works she set apart from the visionary books and grounded not in revelation but in observation and the inherited learning of the cloister. The Physica — circulating under the title Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum, the “Book of the Subtleties of the Diverse Natures of Created Things” — is an encyclopedic survey of the natural kinds: plants, the elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, metals, each catalogued with its properties and its bearing on health. Causae et Curae, “Causes and Cures,” organizes a physiology and a pathology around the cosmology: the four elements and the four humors, the seasons and the temperaments, the influence of the heavens upon the body, with the disorders of human life traced to the imbalances that follow from the fall. The two works share the conviction that runs through all her thinking — that the body is a small cosmos, that its health is the viriditas of the macrocosm at work in miniature, and that creation is a single web of correspondences in which everything signifies and everything answers to everything else. They belong to the same project as the visions; the naturalist and the seer are one person reading one book.

Correspondence, the secret language, and reach

She corresponded across Latin Christendom — with the popes Eugenius III, Anastasius IV, Adrian IV, and Alexander III, with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, with Bernard of Clairvaux and a great range of abbots, bishops, nuns, and ordinary petitioners who wrote to her for counsel, prophecy, and rebuke. Several hundred letters survive, and in them the paupercula feminea forma speaks plainly to the powerful, sometimes in the prophetic voice of the Living Light, sometimes in her own. To her closest circle she was a teacher and, in the case of the young nun Richardis von Stade, a beloved companion whose transfer to another house Hildegard fought and grieved.

Her invention reached even into language. The Lingua Ignota, the “unknown language,” is a constructed vocabulary of some thousand coined words with its own alphabet, the Litterae Ignotae, devised perhaps for devotional or communal use — the earliest documented constructed language by a named author, and a small emblem of the fertility that marks everything she touched. Her prophetic writings circulated long after her death in the Pentachronon, a compilation made by Gebeno of Eberbach around 1220 that carried her name and her warnings of the Church’s coming tribulations through the later Middle Ages.

Reception and afterlife

What distinguishes Hildegard is the sheer range of what she produced — visionary theology, prophecy, music and drama, natural science and medicine, letters, a constructed language — and the authority she claimed for it as a woman bound by a rule. She stands at the head of a flowering of women’s visionary writing in the German lands and beyond: her contemporary Elisabeth of Schönau, with whom she corresponded, and later Mechthild of Magdeburg and the beguine mystics, and at a longer remove the English anchoress Julian of Norwich, all work in a register her career helped make possible. Her cosmology of microcosm and macrocosm, her doctrine of correspondences binding star, body, and soul, and her vision of a single greening power animating the world place her within the broad current of Christian thought that later esoteric readers would mine, and her name recurs in the genealogies that modern occult and feminist-spiritual movements have drawn for themselves, sometimes at a considerable distance from the strictly orthodox Benedictine she understood herself to be. She remained, to the end, a woman under a rule, who held that she was only the trumpet through which another voice sounded.

The formal recognition of the Church came slowly. Local cult and the inclusion of her name in the Roman Martyrology kept her memory alive for centuries, but no medieval canonization process reached completion. On 10 May 2012, Pope Benedict XVI extended her cult to the universal Church by equivalent canonization, and on 7 October of the same year he proclaimed her, together with John of Avila, a Doctor of the Church — describing her, in the apostolic letter, as a light for her own people and time, and finding in her “a wonderful harmony between teaching and daily life.” She became the fourth woman, and one of a small handful of saints altogether, to hold that title.

Scholarship and editions

The nineteenth-century editions that first printed Hildegard’s Latin corpus remain the foundation on which all later scholarship rests, even where modern critical editions have superseded them textually. No complete English rendering of any of her major works circulates freely; the freely available English material is limited to early-twentieth-century biography, encyclopedia entries, and science-historical essays.

• Jacques-Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina, tomus 197 (Paris, 1855). The single most important early edition: the only volume of the great Patrologia devoted to a woman, gathering Scivias, the Liber Divinorum Operum, the letters, the Vita, the Explanationes, and the Daremberg–Reuss editio princeps of the Physica. Scanned in full at Gallica: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5505377b, with per-work searchable texts at documentacatholicaomnia.eu.
• Jean-Baptiste Pitra, ed., Analecta Sacra, tomus VIII: Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis (Monte Cassino, 1882). The complement to Migne, supplying the first complete printing of the Liber Vitae Meritorum and the editio princeps of the Symphonia lyrics and the Ordo Virtutum, together with the Lingua Ignota. Scanned via the University of Pennsylvania Online Books Page at onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu.
• Paul Kaiser, ed., Hildegardis Causae et Curae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903). The first complete printing of the medical treatise, from the Copenhagen manuscript, and long the standard edition. Catalogued at catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100322222.
• Joseph Gmelch, Die Kompositionen der heil. Hildegard … phototypisch veröffentlicht (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1913). The first published facsimile of Hildegard’s music with its original neumes, reproduced from the Wiesbaden Riesencodex — the chants of the Symphonia and the Ordo Virtutum. Mirrored with the editions at IMSLP: imslp.org/wiki/Symphonia_et_Ordo_virtutum_(Hildegard).
• Johann Schott, ed., Physica S. Hildegardis (Strasbourg, 1533). The sixteenth-century editio princeps of the natural-science work, resting on a now-lost manuscript independent of the Migne tradition. Digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb11200355.
• Charles Singer, “The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard,” in Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917), pp. 1–55. The essay that translated Hildegard’s account of the Living Light into English, reproduced the codex miniatures, and first proposed that her visions had a pathological, probably migrainous basis, reading her shimmering, fortified light-figures as a case of scintillating scotoma. Full text at Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org/files/46572/46572-h/46572-h.htm.
• Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, vol. 1, ch. XIX (London: Macmillan, 1911). The densest sustained block of freely available English translation of Hildegard’s vision-prose, set among her women contemporaries. Full text at Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org/ebooks/43880.
• Katherine Foxhall, “Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis,” Medical History 58:3 (2014): 354–374. A historiographical study showing how Singer’s migraine diagnosis, taken up and popularized by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, has flourished less for its truth than for the arguments it has served; an essential corrective to the now-reflexive pathologizing of her seeing. Open access: europepmc.org/articles/PMC4103393.
• Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The indispensable modern monograph, which set the terms for reading Hildegard’s theology of viriditas, the feminine divine, and the figure of Wisdom. Newman’s critical edition of the Symphonia (Cornell, 1988) and the volume she edited, Voice of the Living Light (Berkeley, 1998), extend the work.

The question that has dogged the modern reception of Hildegard — whether the visions are best understood as genuine mystical experience, as a religious imagination of unusual force, or as the auras of migraine — turns, as Foxhall’s study makes plain, on the assumptions a reader brings to the texts more than on anything the texts decide. The seeing reports itself with great precision; the diagnosis is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century overlay; and the scholarship that matters has largely set the cause to one side in favor of what Hildegard made of the light she saw.

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