St Hildegard an Antidote to the Religion of Nice

In two letters to the clergy of Cologne and Trier she rates the carelessness and avarice of so many priests, and foretells, in what are for her unusually clear terms, the scourges that will follow

St Hildegard, Virgin (A.D. 1179)

St Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg, called in her own day the “Sibyl of the Rhine”, was one of the great figures of the twelfth century and one of the most remarkable of women. She was the first of the great German mystics, a poet and a prophet, a physician and a political moralist, who rebuked popes and princes, bishops and lay-folk, with complete fearlessness and unerring justice.

She was born in the year 1098 at Böckelheim, on the Nahe, and when she was eight years old her parents confided her to the care of Bd Jutta, sister to Count Meginhard of Spanheim, who was living as a recluse in a cottage adjoining the church of the abbey founded by St Disibod on the Diessenberg close by her home. The child was sickly, but she continued her education, learning to read and sing Latin and the things appertaining to a nun, as well as those domestic accomplishments which adorned all medieval women, from queens to peasants. By the time Hildegard was old enough to receive the veil of a nun the hermitage of Bd Jutta had received several recruits so that it had become a community, following the Rule of St Benedict. She was clothed when she was fifteen, and continued for another seventeen years to lead an uneventful life; exteriorly uneventful only, for she grew in the grace of God, unusual experiences which she had known from very early years continued, and;

“it became habitual with me to foretell the future in the course of conversations. And when I was completely absorbed in what I saw I used to say many things that seemed strange to those who heard me. This made me blush and cry, and often enough I would have killed myself had that been possible. I was too frightened to tell anyone what I saw, except the noble woman to whom I was entrusted, and she told a little to a monk whom she knew.”

In 1136 Bd Jutta died, and Hildegard became prioress in her place. Her revelations and visions pressed more and more upon her. There was a continual interior urging that she should write them down, but she feared what people would say, their mockery, and her own inadequate Latin. But the voice of God seemed to say to her: “I am the living and inaccessible Light, and I enlighten whomever I will. According to my pleasure I show forth through any man marvels greater than those of my servants in times past.” At last she opened her heart fully to her confessor, the monk Godfrey, and authorized him to refer the matter to his abbot, Conon, who after careful consideration ordered Hildegard to write down some of the things she said God had made known to her. They dealt with such matters as the charity of Christ and the continuance of the kingdom of God, the holy angels, the Devil and Hell. These writings Conon submitted to the archbishop of Mainz, who examined them with his theologians and gave a favourable verdict: “These visions come from God.” The abbot then appointed a monk named Volmar to act as secretary to Hildegard, and she at once began the dictation of her principal work, which she called Scivias, for Nosce vias [Domini].

In the year 1141, she tells us, “a shaft of light of dazzling brilliancy came from the opened heavens and pierced my mind and my heart like a flame that warms without burning, as the sun heats by its rays. And suddenly I knew and understood the explanation of the psalms, the gospels, and the other Catholic books of the Old and New Testaments, but not the interpretation of the text of the words or the completion of the syllables or the cases and tenses.” This book took ten years to write and consists of twenty-six visions dealing with the relations between God and man by the Creation, the Redemption and the Church, mixed with apocalyptic prophecies, warnings, and praises expressed in symbolical fashion. She reiterated time and again that she saw these things in vision, and they were the inspiration of God.

In 1147 the pope, Bd Eugenius III, came to Trier and examined all her active work. In 1147 St Hildegard’s writings to him. Eugenius approved the archbishop of Mainz referred them to St Bernard of Clairvaux, who wished him to approve the visions as genuine. The pope then wrote to Hildegard expressing wonder and happiness at the favours granted her by Heaven, and warning her against pride; authorizing her to publish, with prudence, whatever the Holy Ghost told her to publish; and exhorting her to live with her sisters in the place she had seen in vision in faithful observance of the Rule of St Benedict. St Hildegard wrote a long letter in reply, full of parabolic allusions to the troubles of the times and warning Eugenius against the ambitions of his own household.

The place to which Bd Eugenius referred was the new home which Hildegard had chosen for her community, which had outgrown its accommodation at the Diessenberg. The migration was stoutly opposed by the monks of St Disibod’s, whose abbey owed much of its importance to the neighbouring convent, with its relics of Bd Jutta and the growing reputation of Hildegard. The abbot accused her of acting from pride, but she claimed that God had revealed to her that she should move her nuns and the place to which they should go. This was the Rupertsberg, an exposed and unfertile hill above the Rhine, near Bingen. During the dispute with the monks of St Disibod’s Hildegard was reduced to a very bad state of weakness and ill-health. Abbot Conon, perhaps doubting the reality of her illness, visited her and, when he saw she was not “putting it on”, he told her to get up and prepare to visit the Rupertsberg. Immediately she was cured and got ready to obey. This was enough for Conon, who withdrew his objections; but the strong feeling of his monks in the matter was by no means allayed, though the leader of the opposition, one Arnold, was won to Hildegard’s side by being cured of a painful malady in her church. The move was made some time between 1147 and 1150, the nuns exchanging their convenient house on the vine-clad Diessenberg for a dilapidated church and unfinished buildings in a deserted spot.

The energy of St Hildegard was responsible for the building of a large and convenient monastery, “with water piped to all the offices”, we are told, which housed a community of fifty nuns. For the recreation of these the versatility of Hildegard provided a large number of new hymns, canticles and anthems, of which she wrote both the words and the music, and a sort of morality play, or sacred cantata, called Ordo Virtutum, and for reading in the chapter-house and refectory she composed fifty allegorical homilies. Her Lives of St Disibod and St Rupert were claimed to be revelations (in common with a good deal else that was probably a purely natural production), gratuitously, for they bear the marks of local traditions.

Among the diversions of her leisure hours—though it is hard to believe that St Hildegard ever had any leisure—is the so-called “unknown language”, a sort of Esperanto, of which nine hundred words and a made-up alphabet have come down to us. These words seem to be simply assonant versions of Latin and German words with a liberal addition of final zeds. From the Rupertsberg St Hildegard conducted a voluminous correspondence, and nearly three hundred of her letters have been printed, though doubt has been thrown on the authenticity of some of them and of the letters she received. Except when writing to one or other of the numerous abbesses that consulted her, the letters are rather in the nature of homilies, prophecies and allegorical treatises. They were addressed to popes and emperors, to kings (including Henry II of England, before he had slain Becket), to bishops and abbots. She wrote once to St Bernard and received a reply, to St Eberhard of Salzburg, and frequently to the Cistercian mystic, St Elizabeth of Schönau.

In two letters to the clergy of Cologne and Trier she rates the carelessness and avarice of so many priests, and foretells, in what are for her unusually clear terms, the scourges that will follow. Her letters are very full of these prophecies and warnings, and they soon made her notorious. On the one hand people of all kinds came from all parts to consult her; on the other she was denounced as a fraud, a sorceress, a demoniac. Though her meaning was often wrapped up in difficult symbolism, she always made it quite clear when she was reproving, which she most frequently found occasion to do.

Henry, Archbishop of Mainz, wrote rather brusquely requiring St Hildegard to allow one of her nuns, Richardis, to become abbess of another monastery. She replied: “All the reasons given for the promotion of this young woman are worthless before God. The spirit of this jealous God says: Weep and cry out, ye pastors, for you know not what you do, distributing sacred offices in your own interest and wasting them on perverse and godless men…. As for yourself, arise!—for your days are numbered.” He was in fact deposed and died soon after. To the bishop of Speyer she wrote that his deeds were so evil that his soul was scarcely alive, and told the Emperor Conrad III to reform his life lest he have to blush for it. But she did not pretend to make these judgements on her own. “I am a poor earthen vessel and say these things not of myself but from the serene Light”, she writes to St Elizabeth of Schönau. Nevertheless such a disclaimer could not save her from criticism, and she had trouble even with some of her own nuns, high-born German girls in whom personal pride and vanity were still strong.

“In spite of all her work and continual sickness the activities of St Hildegard were not confined to her convent, and between 1152 and 1162 she made numerous journeys in the Rhineland. She founded a daughter-house at Eibingen, near Rüdesheim, and did not hesitate roundly to rebuke the monks and nuns of those monasteries whose discipline she saw to be relaxed; indeed, her expeditions were rather in the nature of the progress of an ‘abbess visitor’. At Cologne, Trier, and elsewhere, she addressed herself to selected representatives of the clergy, imparting to them the divine warnings she had received, and exhorted bishops and lay folk with equal ease and straightforwardness. Probably the first of these journeys was the one she made to Ingelheim to meet Frederick Barbarossa, but what took place at that interview is not known. She also visited Metz, Würzburg, Ulm, Werden, Bamberg and other places, and with all this travelling, penetrating in spite of her weakness and the bad conditions into inaccessible spots to visit remote monasteries, she continued to write.

Among other works she wrote two books of medicine and natural history. One of these treats of plants, elements, trees, minerals, fishes, birds, quadrupeds, reptiles and metals, and is distinguished by careful scientific observation; the other treats of the human body, and the causes, symptoms and treatment of its ailments. Some modern methods of diagnosis are at least adumbrated, and she came near to certain later discoveries, such as the circulation of the blood. She deals with normal and morbid psychology, refers to frenzy, insanity, dreads, obsessions and idiocy, and says that “when headache, vapours and giddiness attack a patient simultaneously they make him foolish and upset his reason. This makes many people think that he is possessed by an evil spirit, but that is not true.”

During the last year of her life St Hildegard was in great trouble on account of a young man who, having been at one time excommunicated, died and was buried in the cemetery at St Rupert’s. The vicar general of Mainz ordered that the body be removed. St Hildegard refused, on the grounds that the man had received the last sacraments and that she had been favoured with a vision justifying her action. Thereupon the church was put under an interdict; and Hildegard wrote to the chapter of Mainz a long letter about sacred music—“A half-forgotten memory of a primitive state which we have lost since Eden”—“symbol of the harmony which Satan has broken, which helps man to build a bridge of holiness between this world and the World of all Beauty and Music. Those therefore who, without a good reason, impose silence on churches in which singing in God’s honour is wont to be heard, will not deserve to hear the glorious choir of angels that praise God in Heaven.”

Apparently she was doubtful of the effect of her touching the Lord on the canons of Mainz, for at the same time she wrote very energetically to the archbishop himself who was in Italy. He thereupon removed the interdict, but, in spite of a promise, he did not fulfil Hildegard’s other request, to leave fighting and intriguing and come and govern his diocese.

St Hildegard was now broken by infirmity and mortifications, she could not stand upright and had to be carried from place to place. But the broken instrument, in the phrase of her friend and chaplain, Martin Guibert, still gave out melody; to the last she was at the disposition of everybody, giving advice to those that sought it, answering perplexing questions, writing, instructing her nuns, encouraging the sinners who came to her, never at rest. She survived her trouble with the chapter of Mainz a very little time, and died peacefully on September 17, 1179. Miracles, of which a number are recorded of her during her life, were multiplied at her tomb, and the process of her canonization was twice undertaken. It was never achieved, but she is named as a saint in the Roman Martyrology and her feast is kept on this day in several German dioceses.

The visions and revelations claimed by or for St Hildegard are among the best known in this class of phenomena, and her actualization of ideas in symbols and images has provoked comparison both with Dante and William Blake. She thus describes the fall of the angels: “I saw a great star, most splendid and beautiful, and with it a great multitude of falling sparks which followed it southward. And they looked on Him upon His throne as it were something hostile, and turning from Him they sought rather the north. And suddenly they were all annihilated and turned into black coals…and cast into the abyss, so that I could see them no more.” In the drawings which illustrate some of the manuscripts these fallen angels are shown as black stars with points of white in the centre and a gold disc surrounded by white points in one of them, while above the horizon other stars still shine in golden light. In many of them “a prominent feature is a point or a group of points of light, which shimmer and move, usually in a wave-like manner, and are most often interpreted as stars or flaming eyes…. Often the lights give that impression of working, boiling, or fermenting, described by so many visionaries from Ezekiel onwards.”

“These visions which I saw”, wrote St Hildegard, “I beheld neither in sleep nor dreaming nor in madness nor with my bodily eyes or ears, nor in hidden places; but I saw them in full view and according to God’s will, when I was wakeful and alert, with the eyes of the spirit and the inward ears. And how this was brought about is indeed hard for human flesh to search out.”

The visions recorded in the Scivias received the guarded approbation of Pope Eugenius III, but this and similar approvals of private revelations impose no obligation of belief. The Church receives them only as probable, and even those most worthy of faith may be prudently rejected by individuals.

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints