HUU Sermon Archives

Hildegard of Bingen: A Medieval Mystic for the Modern Age

by Elizabeth L. Ihle
March 28, 2004

It would be far too much of a stretch to convince you that Hildegard of Bingen was the twelfth century Britney Spears, so I won't try, but they do have several things in common. They are both musicians and CDs of their music have been produced. Here are some of Hildegard's. (Hold up CDs.) Both women are known internationally and have influenced a lot of people. While Britney's influence is mainly through her music and her image, Hildegard's immense following runs much deeper. Hildegard wasn't exactly a sexpot; in fact, she was a nun but never an official saint. It was through her music that I learned about Hildegard, and as you've noticed by now, she's even made her way—at least in an adapted form — into our UU hymnal. As I have collected some of her CDs over the past few years and read the enclosed flyers, I was just stunned to learn how much more there was to her life.

In addition to her music, Hildegard was a writer, a healer, and a visionary, a voice for justice. Theologians have written books about her visions, scientists have studied her works on natural history, and musicians have had a field day with her opera and songs. She corresponded with the high and mighty in the church and state, with abbots, simple nuns, and laypeople. Her visionary words and images challenged her listeners and readers with a consciousness that called them beyond the cultural and religious traditions of the era and still reach out to us today. She counseled many individuals and involved herself in the political struggles of both church and empire. I volunteered to discuss this topic because I wanted to learn more about her, but in researching her life I got more than I bargained for. This morning we are going to explore her life that offers some lessons for us UUs today and I'll leave a future sermon up to Byrd on a more in-depth analysis of her theology.

All but forgotten for eight hundred years, Hildegard's relational worldview and theology have been rediscovered in the past century. Learned Benedictine nuns in Germany have been influential in researching, translating, and publishing Hildegard's works. She emerges as a woman of amazing achievements in a variety of fields and relates to spiritual searchers of many persuasions. Her popularity in the English speaking world is slowly catching up to that in the German-speaking world where books, symposia, television shows, pharmacies selling her remedies, and Jubilee years celebrating her have long publicized her importance to our age. ¹

Hildegard of Bingen was born to noble parents in the small village of Bermershein near Mainz, Germany, in the year 1098, the tenth and last child of local nobility. From early childhood on, Hildegard had visionary experiences that we would now describe as mystical, clairvoyant, or paranormal. Assuming that everybody saw as she did, she confided in a nurse and found out that others this not share these experiences. She then concealed the power and mystery of her visions for about thirty years.

When Hildegard was eight, in the tradition of many noble families of the time, she was tithed to the church since she was the tenth child, and was turned over to a small community of nuns attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenburg, about twenty-five miles southwest of Mainz. Since it was an age when healing powers and direct access to God were questioned, the role of wise women, midwives, healers, and counselors could be dangerous business. Some speculate her parents knew that a convent life would give her some protection if anyone questioned her visionary gifts. The abbess recognized her gifts and arranged that she be instructed by Volmar, a monk in the neighboring abbey. Volmar eventually became a loyal confident and spiritual advisor. When Hildegard was sixteen, she officially joined the abbey and lived a quiet, secluded life for the next thirty years. Her days were punctuated with eight periods of prayer and the chanting of the Divine Office. Her identity was shaped by the Bible and probably touched by the emotional honesty of the Psalms that she recited daily. Her psyche was shaped and nourished by the texts of Scripture, by the concreteness and vitality of the Rule of St. Benedict, by life in community, and, last but certainly not least, by her own response to her visionary gifts. The Benedictine spirituality she lived calls for listening, balance, force, and ongoing conversion until one's life itself becomes a sacred poem, which are not bad goals for any of us. These were the realities of most of Hildegard's life.

In 1136 she was elected to become the abbess, or spiritual mother, of her community. Soon after she experienced a prophetic call and was awakened to a profoundly new sense of her identity as a woman whom God had called. Later she described her vision this way:

It happened in the year 1141 at the incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, when I was forty-two years and seven months of age. A fiery light flashed from the open vault of heaven. It permeated my brain and enflamed by heart and the entire breast not like a burning, but like a warming flame as the sun warms everything its rays touch. And suddenly I was given insight into the meaning of Scripture, namely the Psalter. The Gospels, and the other catholic volumes of both the Old and New Testaments. But I was not given knowledge of the literal sense of their texts, nor of the division of syllables and the cases or tenses. I have known the power and the mystery of secret and marvelous visions in wonderful ways since my childhood, from my fifth year one, just as I still do today. I revealed this to no one but a few God-fearing people who were living in the same manner as I. Up to the time, when God through his grace wished it to be revealed, I covered everything with utter silence. The visions which I saw I did not perceive in dreams, or sleep, or delirium, or with bodily eyes and the external human ears, not in remote places. I received them while I was awake and of a clear mind, with the eyes and ears of the inner self, in open places, according to the will of God. This vision was accompanied by a command from God that she heard three times: "O fragile one, ash of ash and corruption of corruption, say and write what you see and hear." Nonetheless, Hildegard initially did nothing and became very ill. Interpreting her illness as a sign of God's displeasure, Hildegard finally told her teacher and friend Volmar about her difficulty. With his encouragement, she wrote to Abbot Kuno of Disibodenberg:

I have not dared to tell these things, since there are so many heresies abroad in the land. Good and gentle father, I have great anxiety about how much I should speak about what I have seen and heard. Please give me your opinion in this matter because I am untaught and untrained in exterior material, but am only taught inwardly, in my spirit.

The abbot told her to begin writing down the visions that formed the basis of her first book, Scivias, which means "know the ways of the Lord." Immediately her illness lifted. Now here's a lesson for us Unitarian-Universalists: pay attention when a clear message comes, and take action on it.

Hildegard, of course, lived in a patriarchal society where it was truly unsafe to speak out as a woman. News about her visions traveled to the Archbishop of Mainz and finally to the pope, and a commission was sent to find out more about Hildegard and her writings. Satisfied that her visions were authentic, the pope himself read a portion of her manuscript and approved its completion, a process that took ten years. The Scivias text, which fortunately had been photocopied in 1927, was taken for safekeeping to Dresden in 1945 and has never been seen since.

During the ten years that it took to write Scivias , Hildegard was busy doing other things as well. In 1150 she received another vision telling her to found a new convent on the Rupertsberg mountain near the village of Bingen. The monks of Disibodenberg, realizing that Hildegard was becoming an attraction and her convent was enriching their abbey, objected vigorously, but after another illness Hildegard won out. A few years later, she got complete fiscal autonomy from the monastery and ran her new abbey well. She opened a hospice, installed running water and a sewage system, counseled many people, and maintained a wide correspondence.

Her vision of God was a joyful one, and she concentrated on the abundance of the world and mother earth rather than on the sorrowful and self-sacrificing Christ. One of her most famous visions describing her relationship to God goes like this:

Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus I am . . .
A feather on the breath of God.

One of her best-known images is the fiery force. She tells us that she saw tongues of flames descend from the heavens and settle upon her:

And the image I saw spoke: "I, the highest blazing power, enkindle all sparks of life. I breathe forth nothing deadly. With my wings I fly around the circle of the earth. I blaze above the beauty of the field, shine in the waters, and burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. I, the fiery power, remain hidden in all these things; they burn in me. For I am life."

Hildegard was not one of those Christians who concentrated so hard on being miserable sinners that they wanted to eat worms. She believed in a joyful religion. She let her nuns adorn themselves. They had veils in bright colors and crowns that they were permitted to wear with precious jewels and crosses. When asked to justify such dress and reminded that Paul in Corinthians said that women should dress modestly, Hildegard made a distinction between married women and the nuns. Since nuns are subservient to no man and report directly to God, they did not have to observe Paul's admonition. In fact, as brides of God and Jesus, they were obligated to dress up and wear jewels and appear in an appropriate manner. ²

 In Hildegard's time monasteries were the place people went for treatment when they were sick. It was nuns and monks who copied and studied ancient texts and also had knowledge of plants and their medical use. Cloisters had herb gardens and dispensaries where medicines were prepared. Part of the job of running an abbey was taking care of the health needs of her own nuns and of others needing medical help, and Hildegard gathered and wrote down the medical properties she observed of plants. After Scivias was completed, Hildegard next wrote two medical and scientific books whose titles in English might be Natural History and Causes and Cures. Although they contain no visions at all and it's not certain how much of the information was a simple compendium of what was known about science at the time and how much was her original research, it is known that Hildegard was a careful observer of the natural world and was well known for the cures that she performed at her new abbey at Rupertsburg. Plants and fish were of particular interest to her. Indeed on a herbal website today, you can still find Hildegard quoted:
Fennel, eaten raw, will not harm a person. It makes people glad, giving them a mild glow and a pleasant smell. It makes for good digestion and eliminates bad breath and makes the eyes see clearly.

Hildegard offered a salve for curing "dimness of the eyes" made from apple leaves taken in spring when they are fresh and healthy "like young girls before they have children." As for the fruit, apples are good eaten raw by the healthy but should be cooked for the sick. Her book also contained chapters on vines, the healing powers of jewels, fish, insects, metals, mammals, reptiles, and birds.

Feeling a little horny? Hildegard has a cure for you using a kestrel, which she called a sparrowhawk.
Take a sparrowhawk, pluck it, then having discarded the head and entrails, put the rest of the body in a new pot perforated with small holes and put it on the fire without water and put another pot under it to catch the drippings. Pound some calandria and a little camphor and mix with the drippings and heat it on the fire again and thus make an ointment, and a man should anoint his genitals with this for five days and then his libidinous cravings will be gone in a month. The woman should put it around her waist and in the navel, and her ardour will cease in a month.

   Hildegard's next two books, both books of visions and theology, The Book of Life's Merits and The Book of Divine Works , were completed respectively in 1163 and 1173. (You can't say published because printing presses had not been invented.) The books continue many of the same themes that first arose in Scivias and contain various forms of natural images that arose in her books on natural history and healing. Listen, for example, to her description of the soul:

The soul is like a wind that waves over herbs,
Is like the dew that moistens the grass
Is like the rain-soaked air that lets things grown.
In the same way you should radiate kindness
To all who are filled with longing.

Be a wind, helping those in need.
Be a dew, consoling the abandoned.
Be the rain-soaked air, giving heart to the weary.
Filling their hunger with instruction
By giving them your soul. (HK 306)

Here's another statement showing how much she honored the world around us:

Who thus trusts God will also honor the existing world, the course of sun and moon, the winds and air, the earth and water, everything that God created for the glory of human beings and for their protection. Human beings have no other ground to stand on. If they abandon this world, it will result in destruction by demons and dismissal from the protection of the angels. (WM II, 22)

She believed strongly that the creation of people and the world was a gift from God and, in a major UU fashion today, that people have a responsibility to structure the world in a humane way. Notice these ideas in this garden image:

You have a garden of people in which you seek to plant many wholesome desires and good works. God pours his dynamic good will upon those desires and those works and causes the garden to grow green though the dew and the rain from the living fountain.

What are the lessons for us UUs from Hildegard's interest in nature? Pay attention to the world around us and realize that that it offers us lessons in spirituality if we will only notice.

Another aspect of Hildegard's spirituality that has been rediscovered these days is that idea of the divine feminine. As Hildegard scholar Renata Craine notes, "As a woman graced by God and called to speak out, Hildegard gives us new and very feminine images of the God-reality, like the visionary image of the “cosmos resting in the womb of God. She expanded woman's capacity to nourish new life in her womb into the great all-embracing depth of a theological truth that we came from the heart of God and that the earth is the womb of our becoming whole, of and with each other in god." ³ Hildegard also saw the church as an Earth Mother and Mary as the reincarnated Eve.

I saw a form surrounded by fire. I saw a splendor clear as crystal around the image of a woman.

I saw a certain brightness white as snow and like transparent crystal light up the image of a woman. She was shining with a reddish gleam like the dawn from her throat to her breasts . . . And I heard a voice from heaven saying: 'This is the flowering on the celestial Sion, the mother and flower of roses and of lilies of the valley. O flowering, you will be betrothed to the son of the most powerful king. You will bear him the most celebrated offspring when you will be comforted in time." ( Scivias)

At another point she writes:

God brought forth the form of woman which he made the mirror of all his beauty. O Mary, from your womb a new sun has come forth cleansing all the guilt of Eve. Mary, Savior, you bore the new light for humankind.
Hildegard was also something of an untaught musician:

I also brought forth songs with their melody, in praise of God and the saints, without being taught by anyone, and I sang them too, even though I had never learned either musical notation or any kind of singing.

She composed 77 songs and a religious musical play, that some musicologists consider to be the first passion play. "The Symphony of the Harmony of the Celestial Revelations." The songs celebrate the themes we have already elaborated — God in nature, the divine feminine, a joyous religion and were written for the daily Divine Office. While the common Gregorian chant of her day usually had a range of less than an octave, Hildegard's vocal lines could cover two octaves and more.

Over the next thirty years Hildegard continued a very productive life. She wrote more books and undertook four preaching journeys through Europe. She founded another convent. She became caught up in the political struggles between the pope and the emperor of the time over who should nominate bishops and select popes. Finally she wrote to Emperor Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa "red beard), "O King, it is of utmost necessity that you take care how you act. In the mysterious vision, I see you acting life a child. You live an insane, absurd life before God. There is still time." Although the emperor did not reply, Hildegard continued to challenge him. Her words sound unusual to modern ears, but they witness to an extraordinary fact. A "simple" nun in the twelfth century confronted an emperor and became involved in politics because she was so keenly aware of what was right. It's an example of social justice.

  When you judge Hildegard by today's standards, she occasionally falls short. She believed in an immutable caste system and allowed only women of noble birth to enter her convent. Despite having had an intense friendship with a young nun named Ricardis von Stade, who died as a fairly young woman, Hildegard strongly condemned homosexual relationships for both women and men. The Roman Catholic Church never canonized her nor made her a saint; the last try for her canonization was in 1978. One must suspect that even nine hundred years later the church was having no part of uppity women.

  Toward the end of her life, Hildegard took one final stand for social justice. Her convent at Rupertsburg had a burial ground for the rich and noble inhabitants of the surrounding district. When a certain man was buried there that the supervising church in Mainz thought had been excommunicated, the church ordered that his body be disinterred. Hildegard replied that the man had been reconciled to the church at the time of his death and refused to dig him up. In fact, she leveled all the graves in the cemetery so that his remains would be impossible to find. The church responded by pronouncing an Interdict that prohibited all liturgical services at the convent, a hard and bitter punishment for Hildegard and her nuns, since it meant no absolution if they were to die. She confronted the pope and prelates, complaining about the enforced silence and the injustices to the deceased. About three years later and shortly before her death, her assessment of the situation was accepted, and proof of the nobleman's absolution was established through the testimony of trustworthy men. The Interdict was revoked, just months before Hildegard died in 1179, at the age of eighty-one.

  As best I can tell, Hildegard was largely forgotten until the 1850s when her grave was reopened and then re-interred. The nuns at her convent began translating her work and her fame spread until she became internationally known. Just yesterday morning the vocalists, the Anonymous Four, casually mentioned her on NPR as "Hildegard." In some people's world today, you don't even have to add "of Bingen" for people to know who she was.

  Hildegard may be far more Christian than some of us here today are, but still there's a lot we can learn from her. Listen when you get serious calls, respect nature and its spirituality, speak out against injustice. We'll finish this morning with some dialogue and then sing hymn #27 "I Am That Great and Fiery Force" with Hildegard's words.
Blessed be.
 

¹ Renate Craine, Hildegard: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997), p. 22.

² In the Symphony of the World: A Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen (videorecording), Flare Productions, 1999.

³ Renate Craine, Hildegard: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997), p. 64.

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