Hildegarde von Bingen (circa 1098 - 1179)

Hildegarde of Bingen was a preacher at a time when canon law forbade women to preach, a named composer when most music was anonymous, a visionary, a theologian, a writer, an artist, a hagiographer, a prolific letter-writer and an early scientist, botanist, herbalist, physician and healer - she even invented her own coded language. This German Benedictine anchorite who lived in the twelfth century was in the fullest sense a polymath. Yet she was an enclosed nun, until mid-life her only contact with the outside world being through a single window.

Hildegarde was born into an aristocratic family of the Rhineland valley in 1098. Her parents, in an exceptionally literal interpretation of the custom of tithing (turning over one-tenth of ones wealth to the Church), presented her as a tithe - the youngest of their ten children - for full-time service to the Church at the age of eight. She was sent to live with a holy hermit woman, Jutta of Sponheim, in a small cottage next to the monastery of St. Disibod. Here she survived on only two meals a day (served at three in the morning and three in the afternoon), with her only contacts being Jutta (who provided some minimal education) and their confessor. As a young woman, Hildegarde was plagued with ill health - probably migraine headaches and asthma. From her youth she experienced apocalyptic visions, though when she realized that others did not see similar things, she became reticent until instructed to record them with the assistance of monk Volmar, who became her friend and amanuensis.

The hermitage at St. Disibod attracted so many women that it eventually became a Benedictine community of nuns with Jutta as the superior. Sometime during her teenage years, Hildegarde took religious vows as a Benedictine herself and lived a quiet convent life for the next twenty years. When Jutta died, Hildegarde, then thirty-eight, became her successor as superior. The year was 1136, three years before the Second Lateran Council would enact a series of reforms, including a ban on usury and the marriage of clerics.

In 1141 she received a prophetic call which led to the composition of her most famous work, known as Scivias, from Scito Vias Domini, Latin, "Know the ways of the Lord". It was this prophetic call which enabled Hildegarde to understand the visions she received over many years as instruments of divine revelation. Pope Eugene III, a disciple of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, acquired through him a copy of Scivias and read it publicly at the Synod of Trier (1147-1148). For this reason, Hildegarde and her vision received the seal of papal approval, which was to enable a positive reception by theologians and bishops throughout Europe.

She continually struggled with doubts about her worthiness and with regular bouts of illness. Her writings and correspondence brought fame to the abbey as well as a swarm of new voices. In 1150, after a titanic tussle with the abbot at St. Disibod, who wanted to keep her there, Hildegarde moved on, establishing a new foundation at Rupertsberg, near Bingen. She brought with her some fifty nuns. As the population of that abbey swelled too, she founded in 1165 a sister house in Eibingen, some eight miles away.

The new convent at Rupertsburg became a center of pilgrimage as a result of Hildegarde's growing fame. During this period, she was to write two scientific works and maintain a voluminous correspondence with clergy and rulers in addition to correspondence with ordinary men and women. Her last visionary writing, Book of Divine Love, is marked by a powerful sense of Divine Love, and sets out her understanding of salvation and history and the end times.

At Rupertsburg and Eibingen, Hildegarde attempted to inculcate on a day-to-day basis the exalted sense of the feminine she had seen in her visions. Both convents were built according to her instructions, with large workshops and rooms that had the unheard-of luxury of piped-in water. The nuns were provided opportunity to develop their spiritual, intellectual and artistic talents. They copied and illustrated manuscripts, wove, learned to sing and play musical instruments and heard lectures on theology. The nuns also made use of Hildegarde's health tips, including warm baths and regular exercise. She promoted the drinking of beer because, she said, it was better than the local water and gave the nuns "rosy cheeks".

Hildegarde was a forthright woman who was not going to allow the church to place women in a subservient place to men; not was she going to concede, as many leading thinkers and theologians of her age taught, that woman was evil, seductress, and not created in the image and likeness of God. Hildegarde's writings on women were deeply rooted in her insights on the feminine in God. She was especially fascinated with a woman's role in the incarnation and saw it as a kind of template for the call of all women to bring God into the world. And since Jesus was formed, as it were, in the image of Mary (with no male involvement), it seemed to Hildegarde that woman is a far more appropriate model than man for redeemed human nature. She did not carry this idea to its logical conclusion, and consider who may lead liturgy and other rituals, man or woman; nor did she put these ideas in overt, unambiguous language. Such candor would surely have aroused great alarm in her era.

Hildegarde went to special lengths to relieve Eve of the enormous guilt laid upon her by medieval interpreters - and by extension on all the daughters of Eve. No, she insisted, Satan did not approach the woman first because she was intellectually and morally inferior to her husband, as Augustine taught; he approached Eve out of envy for her potential for motherhood. She may have been vulnerable, admitted Hildegarde, because women are more open and trusting by nature, but the true villain in Paradise was the devil, who poured his poison on the fruit. When Adam and Eve ate of it equally, they both caught the devil's disease.

At no time during the bulk of her public career was Hildegarde reprimanded by clerics or theologians for her distinctively radical ideas. At one point her writings were examined by representatives of Pope Eugenius III and found acceptable. She was, after all, a seer. The implications of her teachings could be neither grasped easily nor, in the view of Church authorities, need they be taken too seriously. That equanimity would be instantly dissipated when Hildegarde - apparently for the first time in her life - openly defied legitimate Church authority. The year was 1178 and she was eighty years old. A young man who had been excommunicated for his alleged involvement in revolutionary activity had died, and Hildegarde gave permission for him to be buried in the cemetery at the Rupertsberg abbey. In the absence of the bishop of Mainz, who had jurisdiction over the abbey, the canons at the cathedral ordered Hildegarde to exhume the body from the consecrated ground. She protested that she had it on the highest authority that the sins of the young man had been absolved, and she even traveled to Mainz to make her case.

The canons rejected her argument and authorized local civil authorities to go to the cemetery and dig up the offending body. The evening before their arrival, Hildegarde, vested in her formal attire as abbess and with her staff in hand, went to the grave and solemnly blessed it. She then quietly removed cemetery markers and gravestones, so the plot of the man could not be identified.

The irate canons placed the abbey under interdict, which meant that Mass and the sacraments could not be celebrated there, nor could the nuns sing the divine office. The ban on music was especially painful to Hildegarde, and she wrote strong words to the canons and still-absent bishop, reminding them that those who silence God's praises in this life will most assuredly be relegated in the afterlife to "the place of no music." The problem dragged on for many months, until the interdict was finally lifted in March of 1179. Hildegarde died peacefully six months later.

Veneration of the abbess began almost immediately, with a stream of pilgrims arriving at Bingen, seeking her intercession for cures and other favors. The throng grew so large that the nuns at the abbey, according to legend, eventually asked the bishop to order Hildegard under obedience to cease working miracles. It is not recorded whether he did so, but the pilgrim crowds finally thinned out in the thirteenth century. The process of her beatification begun some sixty years after her death, was never completed in Rome, and the reasons are not clear. Nevertheless, her local cult remained strong in the Rhineland area. In 1940 the Vatican officially recognized her sanctity as established by long-term popular acclamation and provided a feast day for her in the liturgy (September 17). She is "Blessed Hildegarde". Pope John Paul II once made reference to her as a doctor of the Church.

Hildegarde has recently enjoyed a new bout of popularity. Matthew Fox, the founder of creation spirituality, examined her writings and began to explore some of her teachings through a series of meditations. Though accused of using her for his own purposes, Fox established her as a strong, feminine figure, revered by the New Age, who are attracted by her theology, with its emphasis on the harmony of the created world and its relation to God. At about the same time musicologists and historians of science and religion began to study her and the past 10 years have seen a proliferation of societies, colloquia and conferences in her name. She is also taken seriously as a musician, and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives her nearly six pages.