Saint Hildegard - Selected Writings

In 1146, an unknown and unpublished author, abbess of a small convent of nuns attached to the larger monastery of Disibodenberg in the Rhineland, sent a letter to the great churchman of her day, Bernard of Clairvaux. In her opening words, she emphasized Bernards fame and her own unworthiness, before moving to her reason for writing. Despite her lack of education, the writer of the letter claimed she was filled with sophisticated and far-reaching theological visions and interpretations of the Bible. At the same time she also revealed that she was composing elaborate songs and music for use in church, again without having had any specific training. But worried about pride and presumption she was plagued with afflictions and doubts. Should she, a mere nun and uneducated woman, continue in such potentially reckless and inappropriate activities? The concluding request of her letter is couched in language and rhetoric the like of which Bernard had almost certainly never seen or heard before. Hildegard appeals to him in a series of injunctions, some conventional, others highly original. She entreats him not only by the brightness of the Father, by his wonderful Word, a familiar idea, but also by the sacred sound through which all creation resounds, a more unusual concept; and perhaps even more startling, by the Word from which all the world was created, by the height of the Father who through the sweet power of green vigour sent the Word to the Virgins womb where it took on flesh like the honey in the honeycomb.

What does she mean by some of these unusual ideas? The sacred sound implies an idea of music as the essential fabric of the cosmos. There is a whole world of ideas behind this one phrase. The expression green vigour, or viriditas in the Latin of the original text, is similarly rich in connotations. For Hildegard, greenness means the force which gives life to the body and renewal in nature; in a religious sense it signifies both the power of the Spirit at work in the world and the moral force that gives life and fruitfulness to human actions.

With hindsight, we can see the significance of such metaphors and concepts; they are the first expressions in writing of a new religious thinker who already at the time of writing has her own theology. Behind the final phrases of the letter to Bernard we detect a musician with her own philosophy of music, and an artist who though no classical stylist was a maker of fresh and startling images and ideas. Moreover, all this was expressed in a rough, unpolished Latin which Hildegard had acquired without formal study while singing the psalms and prayers of the monastic services in the daily life of her convent. Bernard was evidently impressed, for his short reply was positive. Which is somewhat surprising, given that he was a churchman of the twelfth century, a period in which anything new and strange in religion was probed carefully for heresy. And Bernard was no liberal in such matters: he had secured the prohibition of the teachings of the great Paris philosopher Peter Abelard and his supporter Arnold of Brescia, and at the time of Hildegards letter he was also agitating (unsuccessfully in this case) for the condemnation of the doctrines of Gilbert of Poitiers, a theologian who had made some unorthodox statements on the unity of the godhead. But at the Synod of Trier in the winter of 11478, Hildegards work in progress (possibly some sections of part II of her Scivias) was read out with interest by Pope Eugenius III and others. Bernard spoke in her favour, and papal approval was given for its publication.

Within a few years, Hildegard of Bingen had become a religious, moral and political adviser to half of Europe, as her voluminous correspondence shows. Credited with prophetic insights, the Sibyl of the Rhine was frequently consulted, and on the basis of her authority as a prophet, undertook what for a woman was almost unheard of: four In true Gregorian reformist manner, she called for the clerics to end their neglect of the Church, to lead celibate lives and to stop chasing after preferments.