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. 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.

She was placed in religious life as a child, given as an oblate to an anchorage attached to the monastery of Disibodenberg, and later became magistra of the community of women that grew up there. 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 called the “reflection of the living Light.” For decades she told no one. Around the age of forty-two she underwent what she described as a divine command to write down what she saw, and, with the approval of her abbot and eventually of the pope, she did. The result was Scivias (“Know the Ways”), the first of three long visionary works setting out a vast symbolic theology of creation, redemption, and the end of things.

What distinguishes Hildegard is the sheer range of what she produced. Alongside the visionary books she composed a substantial body of liturgical music — soaring, wide-ranging melodies that have found a large modern audience — and a sung morality play, the Ordo Virtutum. She wrote two treatises on natural science and medicine, cataloguing plants, animals, stones, and remedies with a practical attention quite separate from the visions. She corresponded with popes, emperors, abbots, and ordinary petitioners, preached publicly in an era when women rarely did, and founded her own convent at Rupertsberg after a hard struggle to move her nuns there.

Her thought turns on viriditas — “greenness,” a word she used for the moist, growing, life-giving power she saw running through creation and through the soul, its drying-up a figure for sin and despair. Whether her visions are read as genuine mystical experience, as a religious imagination of unusual force, or, in one much-discussed modern proposal, as bound up with migraine, depends entirely on the assumptions a reader brings; the texts themselves report a seeing, and the scholarship has largely set aside the question of its cause in favor of what she made of it. Later esoteric and feminist-spiritual movements have claimed her in various ways, 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.

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