Carmen Acevedo Butcher - Hildegard of Bingen: A Reader

HILDEGARDof Bingen

a spiritual reader

CARMEN ACEVEDO BUTCHER

Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader

2007 First Printing

Copyright 2007 by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

ISBN 13: 978-155725-490-0

Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Butcher, Carmen Acevedo.

Hildegard of Bingen: a spiritual reader / Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55725-490-0
1. Hildegard, Saint, 1098-1179. 2. MysticismGermanyHistoryMiddle Ages, 600-1500Sources. 3. MysticismEarly works to 1800. 4. Christian women saintsReligious life. I. Hildegard, Saint, 1098-1179. II. Title.
BX4700.H5B88 2007
282.092dc22 2006033729

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press
Brewster, Massachusetts
www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the late

Frau Sophie Buschbeck, ne Schott

Mother Buschbeck was born in Geischen, Silesia, in 1905, and left earth eighty-seven years later, aus einem reich erfllten Leben in die Ewigkeit abgerufen (called from a rich, full life into eternity). Her spirit was cut from the same cloth as Hildegards. One strangely cold November, she made me apple-scrap tea and gave me a relatives thick wool turtleneck to replace my acrylic one. I was the homesick twenty-two-year-old student for whom she cooked a hot American-style lunch every Friday. She continued showing me si vere Deum quaerit (sincerity in seeking God) when she answered every question sent from Georgia in cramped black ink on the thinnest paper in a decade-high stack of blue airmail envelopes. For each of these gifts, Mutti, danke schn.

Let your eye live and grow in God,
and your soul will never shrivel.
You can count on it to keep you alive... awake... tender.
Hildegard, Letter to Archbishop Arnold of Mainz

Humanity, take a good look at yourself.
Inside, youve got heaven and earth, and all of creation.
Youre a worldeverything is hidden in you.
Hildegard, Causes and Cures

When a person does something wrong and the soul realizes this, the deed is like poison in the soul. Conversely, a good deed is as sweet to the soul as delicious food is to the body. The soul circulates through the body like sap through a tree, maturing a person the way sap helps a tree turn green and grow flowers and fruit.
Hildegard, Scivias

Dont let yourself forget that Gods grace rewards not only those who never slip, but also those who bend and fall. So sing! The song of rejoicing softens hard hearts. It makes tears of godly sorrow flow from them. Singing summons the Holy Spirit. Happy praises offered in simplicity and love lead the faithful to complete harmony, without discord. Dont stop singing.
Hildegard, Scivias

She is a remarkable woman in an age of remarkable men.
Christopher Page, in an interview

WHY PAUL MCCARTNEY AND STEVIE WONDER, John Mellencamp, the Steve Miller Band, and Chicago didnt drown it out is anybodys guess. What could possibly be heard over Ebony and Ivory, Jack and Diane, Abracadabra, and Hard for Me to Say Im Sorry? And who could have known that an unlooked-for debut recording of unknown pre-classical music by an obscure medieval nun would conquer the Billboard classical charts and start a Hildegard revolution?

But thats just what happened twenty-five years ago when Christopher Page and his Gothic Voices group recorded A Feather on the Breath of God, winning a Gramophone award and selling a quarter of a million copies. More people than ever before began to find their way to Hildegard. Today, her music and her books have an international audience, hundreds of websites are devoted to her, videos have been made about her, a publishing company is named after her, and people gather all over the world to discuss her work. The only downside to Hildegards modern celebrity is that her original-yet-orthodox self has been appropriated by many camps. New Age reformers invoke her name over crystals, and feminists see her as their Mother. What is it about Hildegards work that invites us all in? And who is she really?

This book tries to answer those questions, or at least to suggest that Hildegard is a complex woman with a unique voice, and also very much a product of her time. The words that fill these pages are not literal translations that skewer art with their precise woodenness. Instead, I tried to let Hildegards poems sing with double and triple meanings as they do in the Latin, and to let her sometimes strange prose hint at otherworldly messages so weighty that they crush mere words and make them buckle as you read them. Writing this book has been a year-long lectio divina for me, nourishing and challenging my soul, and I hope the result will guide you to the essential in hersomething like a Hildegard 101, because, if my own reaction is anything to go by, the world is ripe for an authentic word from this tenacious Benedictine nun.

In this endeavor, I have read and worked with the vast scholarly literature available on Hildegard, and my debt to those who have gone before me is both immense and inspiring. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are my own, and they show that Hildegard is indeed the best example of the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. As such, she deserves the gritty, vibrant, and sinewy contemporary voice you will find in these pages. Her most representative, most stunning ideas are offered here in a language that we can all understand. Whoever you are, first-time Hildegard reader or long-time Hildegard friendI hope that discovering her works distilled in this book will stir and awaken your soul, as it did mine, in profoundly gentle ways.

I started this reader, asking: How can I get a handle on Hildegard? Trying to answer that question proved as challenging as trying to move thirteen large-to-bursting suitcases through a packed airport en route to a foreign land, with two small children in towan experience my husband, Sean, and I chose when we wanted to get better acquainted with our Korean sons birth country. Likewise, as I grappled with Hildegards profound writings on a journey into the mystery of God, they revealed their resistance to easy organization and facile lifting. Her descriptions of and engagement with the divine living Light required idea-bursting, ever-shifting paradoxes and an awareness that embracing lifes heft (whether spiritual or Samsonite) is possible only in community.