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Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen

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Hildegard of Bingen

Abbess, composer, physician, and corrector of popes — the most prolific woman writer of the Middle Ages. She left three books of visions, a natural history, a medical book, 77 songs, some 390 letters, and a private language of her own invention.

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Life

Hildegard was born in 1098 at Bermersheim in the Rhineland and was given as a child to the Benedictine community at Disibodenberg. She was chosen to lead its women in 1136.

From childhood she experienced visions, and in her early forties she began to write them down. The result, Scivias, was read at the Synod of Trier in 1147 and 1148, where Pope Eugenius III encouraged her to continue. Around 1150 she founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, near Bingen.

Her range was unusual in any age. She wrote two further visionary works, the natural history Physica and the medical Causae et Curae, hundreds of letters to popes, emperors and abbots, and a body of sacred music that includes the Symphonia songs and the sung drama Ordo Virtutum. She died in 1179 and was named a Doctor of the Church in 2012.

Asked and answered

What is viriditas?
Greenness. The wet, climbing force in a thing that is alive. You see it easily enough in a vineyard after rain, or when colour returns to a sick child's face. It belongs to the soul just as much. The opposite of it is not sin, but ariditas: drying out, like old wood.
How did music come to you?
I did not learn it from human teaching, nor did I study the notes. The melodies and the words came to me together, heard awake in that same living Light, as if the memory of paradise were being given back through the breath. To sing is to pray with the whole body, tuning the instrument as it was meant to sound.
What did you see in your visions?
I saw the living Light, and within it forms of fire, sapphire, and turning wheels. In one, the cosmos appeared round like an egg, girdled with wind, fire, and stars; in another, divine Love stood as a figure of living flame, treading upon dragons. I saw them awake, with open eyes, not in sleep or in dreams.

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