Hildegard of Bingen

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

God is the Living Light who speaks, creates and loves the creation

A personal GodStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen writes within twelfth-century Benedictine theology and presents her visions as dictated by a heavenly voice that commands her to write what she sees. In Scivias, God appears as a most serene light and burning fire, and in the second vision of Book II the Trinity is shown to her as a sapphire-coloured human figure surrounded by light and flame: three in one, Father, Son and Spirit. In the Liber divinorum operum the first vision presents divine Love as a fiery power that sustains and quickens all creation. Her God is creator, judge and lover of the creation; He speaks and answers. The vital force she calls viriditas, greenness, is not an autonomous impersonal principle but the continuous action of that personal God in the world.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The soul is a fiery sphere that God sends into the body

A created, immortal soulStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen treats the soul in detail in the fourth vision of Book I of Scivias: she sees a fiery sphere descend into the body of the child in the womb and quicken it, and then that pilgrim soul besieged by temptations, asking about its origin and exile. The soul is created by God, immortal and rational; the body is its tabernacle, and between them there is both cooperation and tension. In Causae et curae she adds a medical anthropology: the soul acts in the body as sap in a tree, and health depends on its harmony with the humours. The human being is for her a microcosm, an image of the universe, and its identity is that of a singular creature, distinct from God, called to recover in Christ the harmony lost in the Fall.

Why do we suffer?

Sin broke the harmony of body and cosmos; hence illness

Social and moral disorderStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen places the origin of suffering in Adam's fall, but describes it as a rupture of harmony affecting body, soul and the whole world. In Causae et curae she explains that when Adam disobeyed, melancholy curdled in his blood, and since then human humours have been unbalanced: hence sadness, despair and many illnesses. In her cosmic vision the human being is bound to the elements and the stars, so that moral disorder affects nature, and nature in turn affects the person. In the Liber vitae meritorum the vices appear as misshapen figures and the virtues answer them, each with its remedy and penance. Suffering arises from the loss of measure and greenness (viriditas); healing means restoring the lost order, in body and in soul.

What happens after death?

Bodies will rise and the whole cosmos will be renewed on the last day

Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen shares the Christian eschatology of her time, but sets it out in visions of great cosmic scope. The last vision of the Scivias shows the end of time: the elements are stirred, the dead rise with their bodies whole, Christ judges and, after the judgement, the world is transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, without night or corruption. For her the person is not dissolved: the soul, which quickens the body as sap quickens a tree, survives death and recovers its glorified body. In the Liber vitae meritorum she describes in detail the purgatorial pains that correspond to each vice and the joy of the blessed, so that the life to come prolongs and completes the moral measure of this one. Death is a passage: the final destiny is the restored harmony of body, soul and cosmos before God.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Salvation through Christ and the Church, with an active struggle of virtues against vices

Through grace and loveStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen thinks of salvation within Christian sacred history: Adam's fall broke the harmony of creation and Christ's incarnation restores it. The second book of Scivias traces that redemptive work and its continuation in the Church and the sacraments, the ordinary channel of grace. Yet Hildegard does not conceive the believer as a passive recipient. In the Book of the Rewards of Life she stages thirty-five pairs of vices and virtues in dialogue, and in the Ordo Virtutum the straying soul returns through penance. Salvation is God's gift and, at the same time, a moral combat: the person must recover her spiritual «greenness» (viriditas) by cooperating with grace through penance and the virtues.

Is a teacher necessary?

Teaching comes through the Church and the rule; her own light, without human teacher

Community and traditionStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen was formed in Benedictine life, alongside the recluse Jutta of Sponheim, and always lived within a community governed by the Rule of Saint Benedict, in which the abbot or abbess teaches and the Church's tradition is the norm. She herself was magistra of her community. Yet in the declaration that opens Scivias she states that she understood the meaning of the psalms, the gospels and the other books without having received human instruction in interpreting them, through the light that visited her. She did not thereby dispense with authority: she sought the approval of Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugene III. Her position combines direct illumination and submission to the community that validates it.

Is the world real?

An ordered, greening cosmos, God's work, mirrored in the human being

A good and real creationStated explicitly

For Hildegard of Bingen the world is God's creation and is pervaded by His life force, which she calls viriditas, the greenness that makes all creatures germinate and sustains them. In Scivias she describes the universe in the shape of an egg with layers of fire, air and water, and in the Book of Divine Works she presents it as a wheel at whose centre stands the human being, a microcosm reproducing the structure of the macrocosm. In the first vision of this work Charity speaks as the supreme and fiery force that kindles all living sparks. The world is neither illusion nor divinity: it is a real, ordered and good work, whose harmony sin disturbs and Christ restores.

What is love?

Charity is the fiery power that kindles and orders all creation

Love of God and neighbourStated explicitly

Hildegard of Bingen conceives love above all as Caritas, a divine power that sustains the universe. In the first vision of the Liber divinorum operum a figure of fire appears and presents itself as the supreme power that kindled every living spark; the tradition and the work itself identify it with divine Charity, the origin and bond of what is created. In the antiphon Caritas abundat in omnia she sings that Charity abounds in all things, from the depths to beyond the stars, and gave the supreme King the kiss of peace. That love is not a feeling but the living order uniting God, cosmos and human being. On the moral plane it takes the form of the virtues that the Liber vitae meritorum sets against the vices, and in community life, the concrete charity of the Benedictine rule.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

The rational creature chooses between vices and virtues and answers for it

Real free willStated explicitly

For Hildegard the human being is the rational creature par excellence, and rationality includes the capacity to choose good or evil. The *Liber vitae meritorum* is built as a debate: thirty-five vices speak and thirty-five virtues answer them, and the soul must decide which to heed; then the penalties and purification belonging to each fault are described. In *Scivias* Adam's fall appears as a real choice that disorders the whole cosmos. Divine foreknowledge, which she celebrates in the *Symphonia*, does not abolish that choice: God knows every creature beforehand, yet merit and guilt remain human. Hers is the position of twelfth-century monastic theology, expressed in visions rather than scholastic argument.

Why meditate or pray?

Singing the divine office restores the voice humanity had in paradise

Ritual and self-cultivationStated explicitly

Hildegard's prayer is first of all that of a Benedictine nun: the divine office sung seven times a day and the mass. Her most explicit reflection on the meaning of that practice is in the letter she wrote around 1178 to the prelates of Mainz, when her community was placed under an interdict forbidding it to sing. There she holds that Adam, before the fall, had a voice like that of the angels, that the prophets devised chants and instruments to recall that lost harmony, and that whoever silences praise in the Church deprives God of his glory. Her musical work, the *Symphonia* and the *Ordo Virtutum*, springs from that conviction: liturgy is not ornament but human participation in the harmony of the cosmos.

Can reason know the ultimate?

The living light teaches what study cannot; reason sets it in order

Faith and reason help each otherStated explicitly

In the declaration that opens *Scivias*, Hildegard recounts that in 1141 a fiery light pierced her brain and that suddenly she understood the meaning of the psalms, the gospels and the other books of Scripture, without being able to analyse their words or grammar. In the letter to Guibert of Gembloux she describes that light as not local, brighter than a cloud carrying the sun, and calls it the shadow of the living light. Her knowledge of the ultimate thus comes from revelation, not study. But she does not set the two against each other: in her work the human being is a rational creature, *rationalitas* is a divine gift, and her visions are set out and explained in rigorous doctrinal order, which she herself submitted to ecclesiastical approval.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

A visionary abbess who preached, healed and admonished popes and emperors

Contemplation in actionInferred from their doctrine

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine nun from childhood and lived by a rule that unites prayer and work. Her life, however, overflows the cloister. She founded two communities, Rupertsberg and Eibingen, defending their autonomy against the monks of Disibodenberg; she kept up a correspondence of several hundred letters with popes, emperors such as Frederick Barbarossa, bishops, abbots and lay people, whom she advised and rebuked; and in her maturity she made several preaching tours through the Rhineland, something exceptional for a woman of her time, in which she denounced the corruption of the clergy. She also wrote treatises on medicine and natural science intended for healing. For her, vision does not remove one from the world: it obliges one to speak within it. What is contemplated must be translated into reform of the Church, care of the body and the order of Christian society.

Odernheim am Glan, Renania-Palatinado · Alemania

Disibodenberg: Hildegard's first monastery

Disibodenberger Scivias-Stiftung

On the Disibodenberg, above the confluence of the Nahe and the Glan, stand the ruins of the monastery Hildegard entered as a child and where she lived until she founded her own community on the Rupertsberg near Bingen. It was there that she began to write down her visions. A foundation cares for the ruins, open all year, and a small museum, and organises pilgrimage walks. The site is one of the stages of the Hildegard von Bingen Pilgerwanderweg, the trail of about 137 kilometres through the Nahe valley between Idar-Oberstein and Bingen, with meditation panels on her work.

Rüdesheim am Rhein (Eibingen), Hesse · Alemania

Abbey of St. Hildegard, Eibingen

Benediktinerinnenabtei St. Hildegard

The Benedictine Abbey of St. Hildegard, above the vineyards of the Rheingau, is the direct heir of the community the saint founded at Eibingen in the twelfth century. A community of nuns lives by the Rule of St. Benedict, with five times of prayer a day, and keeps its patroness's tradition alive. The abbey has a guest house and organises courses, lectures, concerts and seminars, along with a Hildegard study circle and training for speakers on her work. Its church, decorated in the Beuronese style, can be visited on guided tours, and its music recordings carry her chants.

Bingen am Rhein, Renania-Palatinado · Alemania

Hildegard Forum, Rochusberg (Bingen)

Hildegard Forum der Kreuzschwestern (St. Hildegardishaus gGmbH)

The Hildegard Forum stands on the Rochusberg in Bingen, beside the mother house of the Sisters of the Cross, overlooking the Rhine and the area where Hildegard had her Rupertsberg monastery. It describes itself as a place committed to conveying Hildegard's message: it brings together a medicinal herb garden inspired by her writings on nature, a restaurant, a shop, meeting rooms and guest rooms. Since 2004 it has been run by a non-profit social organisation as an inclusive employment enterprise. It is a good starting point for visiting the Hildegard sites of the region along the Rhine and the Nahe.