September 2021 Print

By Dr. Andrew Childs, D.M.A.

Self-portrait by St. Hildegard.

Holy Mother Church: the name our Faith gives the Church serves as the point of departure in considering the current theme of women and the Church. Enemies of the Bride of Christ have always accused Her of misogyny, abuse, intimidation, and oppression, and never more gleefully than in the cultural climate du jour, hell-bent on havocking all things Holy and natural. Far from suppressing or undervaluing women, however, the Church not only submits to the absolute queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary but defines Herself by two sublime feminine attributes—holiness and maternity.

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), the “Sybil of the Rhine,” was a visionary, author, composer, artist, naturalist, healer, abbess, correspondent and counselor to political and religious leaders, preacher, Saint, and Doctor of the Church. She was not a feminist.¹ Since the early 20th century, Hildegard has become the unlikely darling of a variety of progressive causes. For the New Age theologians, her visions—both the often-obscure allegorical written descriptions and mildly psychedelic Medieval visual depictions—have a cosmic appeal. Secular medical historians apply a retrospective diagnosis of migraine suffering to explain the nature of these images, dismissing the possibility of Divine inspiration. Adherents of homeopathy and naturopathy posit that her writings on herbal cures and disease qualify her as a pioneer in natural healing and suggest a “Green” sensibility. For social revolutionaries, her position of authority as advisor and religious leader—and her perceived history of feisty opposition to the patriarchy—secure her standing as a proto-feminist. Worse yet, but certainly predictably, this last bunch speculate about her sexuality, given her intimate friendships with her consoeurs. The Saints do not suffer in Heaven after death, but their reputations can certainly take a beating here below.

The brief portrait that follows will likely not convince Hildegard’s secular admirers that her life and work inherently and magnificently oppose their progressive ideology. I do hope, however, that for Catholic readers unfamiliar with the real Hildegard, they might sympathize with the attempt to separate her from the naturalists’ usurpation of her life and work and will find in her a genuine source of artistic wonder and spiritual inspiration.

Hildegard the feminine

Early biographers identify Hildegard’s parents as Hildebert and Mechtilda and classify them as belonging to the noble class, though record no family name. Hildebert served as a soldier under Meginhard, Count of Spanheim in Rhenish Franconia. Born the last of 10 children in 1098, every reference to Hildegard as a child describes her as “weak and sickly.” Due in large part to this frailty, she received little formal education as a child, and her parents promised her to God, assigning her at the age of eight to the service of the anchoress Jutta of Spanheim, sister of Count Meginhard. Jutta had rejected all offers of marriage and lived as a recluse in a cell constructed by her father attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. As an anchoress, she took a vow never to leave her cell, but she assisted the monks through prayer and domestic tasks. She could converse with visitors, and developed a following large enough to require the construction of additional cells adjoining the monastery. She would take certain of these followers to live in her cell as assistants, the case with Hildegard. Hildegard learned to read Latin and to chant the Psalter, though no sure proof exists that she ever learned to write. In 1113 she took the veil, and when Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard became the superior of the small community.²

Against the wishes of the abbot, Hildegard left the monastery at Disibodenberg and founded a monastery near Bingen in Rupertsberg. Built between 1147 and 1150, Hildegard oversaw construction, and the more zealous of her admirers claim she acted as architect. She founded a sister house in Eibingen in 1165, and by 1163, letters of protection written for her by Frederick Barbarossa refer to her as abbess.³

Hildegard the mystical

Christ by St. Hildegard.

In 1912, British physician Charles Singer moved to Wiesbaden. Married to a medievalist, Singer had developed a keen interest in history, and through academic connections, gained access to the manuscript of Hildegard’s Scivias, the three-volume set of twenty-six prophetic visions with illumination written between 1141-1150. Intrigued by what he saw in the illustrations, he “recognized at once that the figures…resembled descriptions by patients of what they had seem during attacks of migraine.”⁴ Seven hundred-fifty years after her death, Singer pronounced a retrospective diagnosis de-mystifying the mystic. Historian Katherine Foxhall keenly and succinctly finds motive, writing,

Using his medical knowledge to render the unusual patterns in Hildegard’s religious imagery as the manifestation of a neurological disorder was important because it enabled Singer to sideline Hildegard’s theology and replace it with “science” as the basis for her philosophy of the world.⁵

From an early age, Hildegard had visionary episodes, which often came on in spectacular fashion, accompanied by blinding light, and rendered her motionless. She would initially describe these occurrences to Jutta and others as a simple matter of fact, but as people became more uneasy with the often highly involved and disturbingly detailed nature of her visions, she became more reluctant to share them. “Up to my fifteenth year,” she wrote, “I saw much, and related some of the things seen to others, who would inquire with astonishment, whence such things might come. I also wondered and during my sickness I asked one of my nurses whether she also saw similar things. When she answered no, a great fear befell me. Frequently, in my conversations, I would relate future things, which I saw as if present, but noticing the amazement of my listeners, I become more reticent.”⁶ She had always considered the illness accompanying her visions as God’s displeasure, but in one particularly intense episode she experienced at the age of forty, she heard the voice of God commanding her to write and put down what she heard and saw. With the approval of the Archbishop of Mainz, the encouragement of St. Bernard, and ultimately a directive from Pope Eugene III, she set about the ten years’ work of the Scivias. Visions include “God, the Light-Giver and Humanity,” “The Fall,” “The Choirs of Angels,” “The Triune God,” “The Sacrifice of Christ and the Church,” “The Zeal of God,” and “The End of Time.” The text is “an extraordinary production and hard to understand, prophetic throughout and admonitory after the manner of Ezechiel and the Apocalypse.”⁷ Hildegard filled the paintings, though brilliant and bold, with easily recognizable Christian imagery. One reads and sees in the Scivias coherent orthodoxy rather than a migraineur’s hallucination.

Hildegard the artistic

Cosmos by St. Hildegard.

In Canto XI of the Inferno, Dante states “Art is the grandchild of God.”⁸ Attribution to Hildegard of her writings, artistic images, and music provokes no controversy, yet many scholars agree that other individuals did the physical work of making the art—painting pictures, writing texts, notating music. Though not uncommon in medieval times (when artists assumed anonymity), this also represents a beautiful metaphoric reminder of the relationship between artistic inspiration and expression: as God guides the hand of the artist, Hildegard directed specifically talented artists to bring her impulses to life.

Hildegard’s collected output in literature (prose, poetry, and technical writings), painting, correspondence, and music remains one of the most impressive and important bodies of work by an individual in the medieval era. Beyond the Scivias, writings on spirituality and theology include Liber Vitae Meritum (Book of Life’s Merits, 1158-1163), and the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works, 1163-1172). Writings on science and medicine include Physica which describes characteristics and properties of animals, plants, and minerals; and Causae et Curae which exhaustively (in 530 chapters) considers the human being, physically and functionally, in health and sickness, in the context of the created order. The latest scholarship numbers her letters—to Popes (4 of them), Kings (2), Archbishops (10), Bishops (9), Abbots (49), Abbesses (23), Priests, Religious, and lay people (including excommunicants)—at 353. She wrote fifty homilies and developed her own language, the “Lingua Ignota,” complete with its own alphabet.

Her visual style exhibits standard medieval characteristics—iconographic Christian symbolism, bright colors, bold shapes and figures—but remains remarkable for its allegorical concision, frequently capturing in single panels the essence of highly complicated theological constructs and relationships. Whether disturbing—Vision of the Last Days—or hauntingly lovely—The Universe, The true Trinity in true Unity—the images at once occupy a place in and out of stylistic time.

For Hildegard, poetry and music unite. Of her poetic style Barbara Newman writes, “Hidegard’s poetic world is like the Sybil’s cave; difficult to access, reverberating with cryptic echoes. The oracle’s message, once interpreted, may or may not hold surprises… No formal poetry written in the twelfth century, and none that Hildegard might have known, is very much like hers. For models one must look, rather, to the rich corpus of liturgical prayer.”⁹ Just as her pictures illuminated her visions, her music gives soul to her poetic lyrics. Her output includes some seventy compositions—hymns, sequences, and antiphons, all on religious themes—and the Ordo Virtutum (The Order of the Virtues, 1151), a morality play set to music that could qualify as the first fully-conceived opera, nearly five centuries before Monteverdi. In the Ordo, Hildegard presents the dramatic struggle between the Virtues and the Devil for a soul. Seventeen individual virtues, the soul, a women’s chorus of souls, a men’s chorus of Prophets and Patriarchs, and the character of Hildegard sing the score; the male character of the Devil—who according to Hildegard, “cannot produce divine harmony”—yells or grunts.

If her art outpaces stylistic characterization, her music flies away. The overwhelming majority of medieval music remains locked in time and stylistic space, often severe and angular. Hildegard’s music, constructed almost entirely of motivic melodic formulae, employs a stunningly wide melodic range, and implies mysterious harmonies, timeless and hypnotically beautiful. From the majestic and mysterious O vis aeternitatis to the rhapsodic O spendissima Gemma and the playfully joyous O virdissima Virga, the music and words not only support each other, but seem to frolic together. In her music, Hildegard expresses mystical orthodoxy with astonishing freshness.

Hildegard the Saint

Vision of the Angelic Hierarchy by St. Hildegard.

The cultus of Hildegard developed before her death, and firmly established itself immediately after. Six months before she died, however, she and her community languished under interdict. The bishop of Mainz had demanded the exhumation of the body of a previously excommunicated young nobleman from the cemetery adjacent her convent. Arguing that the man had received last rites before burial, thus proving his reconciliation with the Church, Hildegard refused. The bishop pronounced the sentence, with the specific indication forbidding the singing of the Office: deprived of their voices—barred from producing “divine harmony”—they could only whisper. Hildegard and her community submitted to the punishment, but she began an intense series of correspondence, and the bishop lifted the sentence in March of 1179. Hildegard died on September 17, 1179.

Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) opened her cause for canonization, which Innocent IV (r. 1243-54) continued, and Clement V (1305-14) and John XXII (1316-34) repeated. Listed in the Martyrology, and having remained on regional liturgical calendars for centuries, Benedict XVI declared her a Saint on May 10, 2012, and on October 7, 2012, a Doctor of the Church. The Church places her Feast on September 17, the anniversary of her death.

“She would have been extraordinary,” writes Barbara Newman, “in any age. But for a woman of the 12th century, hedged by the constraints of a misogynist world, her achievements baffle thought, marking her as a figure so exceptional that posterity has found it hard to take her measure.”¹⁰ The things of eternity defy measure. Her secular admirers, hedged by the constraints of a worldview willfully ignorant of supernatural reality, see Hildegard as an extraordinary woman who created an artistic ethos in defiance of the order imposed on her by men. We, who believe as she believed, venerate her as a Saint inspired and liberated by God, whose vision and expression of supernatural beauty open on to the divine.

St. Hildegard, Feather on the Breath of God, ora pro nobis.

Endnotes:

¹ And I do not refer lightly to the canonical feminist work noted in the second half of this article’s title [Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963)], which shows a clear distaste for both the feminine and the mystical.

² The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton, 1910); Volume 7, 351-353.

³ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1995); Volume 8, 553-556.

⁴ Charles Singer, From Magic to Science (New York: Dover, 1958); viii.

⁵ Katherin Foxhall, “Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis,” Cambridge Journal of Medical History (58/3, July 2014); 354-372.

⁶ The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton, 1910); Volume 7, 351-353

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Dante Alighieri, Mark Musa, editor and translator, The Portable Dante (New York: Penguin, 2003); 60.

⁹ Barbara Newman, Vision: the Life and Music of Hildegard von Bingen (New York: Penguin, 1995); 69.

¹⁰ Barbara Newman, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard von Bingen and her World (Berkeley: UC Press, 1998); 1.