Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine nun and later abbess who lived in the Rhineland, in what is now western Germany, in the 12th century. She is sometimes called the “Sibyl of the Rhine” because people of her time regarded her as a prophet. She is remembered today for an unusually wide range of achievements: books describing and explaining her visions, a large body of music, writings on plants, animals and medicine, an invented language, and hundreds of letters.

She was born in 1098 into a family of the lower nobility, traditionally counted as the youngest of ten children. Hildegard wrote that she experienced visions from early childhood. As a girl she was dedicated to religious life and grew up in a small community of women attached to the monastery of Disibodenberg. In 1136 she became its leader, and later she founded her own convents at Rupertsberg, beside the town of Bingen, and at Eibingen across the Rhine.

Hildegard lived at a time when women had very limited roles in public life and in the Church. Yet she wrote theology, preached in public and advised popes, emperors, bishops and ordinary people. Believers see her authority as coming from God; historians study how she built and used that authority in the world of the 12th century.

Hildegard’s parents, Hildebert and Mechtild, belonged to the free lower nobility. Her birthplace is not recorded by her or her early biographers: tradition names Bermersheim near Alzey, where the family held land, while more recent research has suggested Niederhosenbach. She was traditionally counted as their tenth child, though records survive for only seven older siblings. Sickly from birth, she later said she first saw what she called “the shade of the living light” at the age of three and understood by the age of five that she was having visions.

Her parents offered her to religious life as an oblate, a child dedicated to God. She was placed with Jutta of Sponheim, a young noblewoman about six years older, who lived as an enclosed religious woman at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg on the river Nahe. The exact dates are debated. Her later Life says she was eight when she joined Jutta; Jutta’s enclosure is dated to 1112, when Hildegard would have been fourteen. Some scholars think Hildegard was placed in Jutta’s care at eight and enclosed with her six years later.

Jutta taught Hildegard to read and to sing the Psalms in Latin, and the community cared for the sick and worked in the garden. A monk named Volmar, who later became Hildegard’s secretary and lifelong friend, may have taught her simple musical notation. Hildegard always insisted that she was “unlearned,” meaning that she had not studied the formal Latin curriculum of the schools.

For most of her life Hildegard told almost no one about her visions, except Jutta and Volmar. In 1141, when she was forty-two, she experienced a vision that she understood as a command from God to “write down that which you see and hear.” She hesitated and fell seriously ill, which she took as a sign that she must obey. With the support of Volmar and the nun Richardis von Stade, she began to write.

Hildegard described her visions carefully. In a letter written in old age to the monk Guibert of Gembloux, she said that she saw them not in dreams or ecstasy but wide awake, with her eyes open, “in my soul alone.” She called the brightness she saw “the reflection of the living Light” and said it was far brighter than a cloud lit by the sun.

In 1147–48, at a church synod in Trier, Pope Eugenius III heard parts of her unfinished book read aloud and sent her a letter of blessing. This papal approval, supported by the influential abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, gave her writing great authority and made her famous.

When Jutta died in 1136, the nuns elected Hildegard as their magistra, or leader. The women still lived under the authority of the abbot of the men’s monastery at Disibodenberg. Hildegard wanted independence for her community, and she announced that a vision had shown her a new site at Rupertsberg, a crag where the Nahe meets the Rhine at Bingen. Abbot Kuno refused. Hildegard appealed over his head to the Archbishop of Mainz and fell ill again, lying paralysed until the abbot relented.

Around 1150 she moved with about twenty nuns to Rupertsberg, a poorer and less comfortable site than the well-established stone monastery they had left. The convent church was consecrated in 1152. Volmar went with them as provost and confessor. In 1165 Hildegard founded a second house at Eibingen, near Rüdesheim across the Rhine, and she led both communities.

Hildegard was a practical and sometimes controversial leader. She accepted only women of noble birth into Rupertsberg, arguing that mixing social classes would cause conflict. She fought fiercely when her beloved assistant Richardis was elected abbess of a distant convent in 1151, writing to Richardis’s family, to church officials and even to the pope to try to keep her; Richardis died soon after leaving.

Hildegard’s major theological works are three large books of visions. In each, she first describes what she saw, often in strange and vivid images, and then gives an explanation which she presents as the words of “the voice of the living Light.” Scivias (“Know the Ways [of the Lord]”), written between 1141 and 1151, contains twenty-six visions in three parts: the order of creation, the order of redemption through Christ and the Church, and the history of salvation pictured as a great building adorned with virtues. It ends with songs and an early form of her music drama.

The Liber vitae meritorum (“Book of Life’s Merits”), written 1158–1163, stages dramatic confrontations between vices and virtues. Each vice makes a seductive speech, and a virtue answers it. The book also contains one of the earliest detailed descriptions of purgatory as a place of purification after death.

The Liber divinorum operum (“Book of Divine Works”), begun about 1163 and finished around 1172–74, is her most cosmic work. Its visions show the universe as a set of spheres with a human figure at the centre, linking the human being as a small world (microcosm) with the great world of the universe (macrocosm). Much of it is an extended meditation on the opening of the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word,” and on the seven days of creation in Genesis.

Hildegard is one of the best-known composers of the Middle Ages and among the few of that era whose names are attached to both words and music. Besides the Ordo Virtutum, sixty-nine musical compositions survive, each with her own poetic text, collected in a cycle called the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum (“Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations”). They include antiphons, responsories, hymns and sequences written for worship in her convent.

Her music is monophonic: a single melodic line without harmony, like Gregorian chant. But her melodies often have an unusually wide range, with soaring leaps and long flowing passages on single syllables (melismas). Scholars such as Margot Fassler and Marianne Richert Pfau have stressed how closely her music follows the meaning of her texts.

The Ordo Virtutum (“Order of the Virtues”), composed around 1151, is a sung allegorical drama in which a human soul, Anima, is tempted away by the Devil and then returns in repentance, helped by sixteen Virtues. All the characters sing except the Devil, who can only speak or shout, cut off from divine harmony. It is often described as the earliest known morality play, and it may have been performed by her nuns, perhaps at the consecration of the Rupertsberg church in 1152.

Two works, known as Physica and Causae et curae, deal with the natural world and medicine. Unlike her visionary books, they do not claim divine inspiration. They draw on her experience in the convent garden and infirmary and on traditional Latin medical learning. Physica describes the properties and uses of plants, trees, stones, fish, birds, reptiles and other animals; it is often cited for an early reference to hops being used in beer as a preservative.

Causae et curae (“Causes and Cures”) explains the human body, the causes of disease and their treatment, including bloodletting and many home remedies. Hildegard used the ancient theory of the four humours but gave it her own shape, linking the humours to the four elements and explaining illness as an imbalance that entered humanity with the Fall of Adam and Eve.

A key idea in her thought is viriditas, “greenness” or “greening power,” the life and fruitfulness that God gives to plants and, by analogy, to human bodies and souls. For Hildegard, caring for a patient was a little like tending a garden. These books are historically valuable because they record kinds of practical medicine that were rarely written down. Whether all of the medical texts that survive under her name are entirely her own work is discussed by scholars, since they reached their present form after her death.

Nearly four hundred letters survive from Hildegard’s correspondence, one of the largest collections from the Middle Ages. She wrote to popes Eugenius III and Anastasius IV, to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to Bernard of Clairvaux, to abbots, abbesses, bishops and lay people who asked her for advice and prayers. She often wrote in the voice of the living Light, rebuking the powerful when she thought they were failing.

Remarkably for a woman of her time, she made several preaching journeys in the 1160s and 1170s, speaking to clergy and lay people in chapter houses and public places. She denounced corruption among the clergy and called for reform. The Vatican’s 2012 letter notes that she preached “in public squares and in various cathedral churches.”

Near the end of her life, she refused to let the clergy of Mainz remove from her convent cemetery the body of a man who had been excommunicated, insisting that he had been reconciled with the Church before he died. The dispute with the church authorities of Mainz over this burial overshadowed the last months of her life. She died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179.

Much of what we know about Hildegard’s life comes from the Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, compiled after her death by the monk Theoderic of Echternach. It incorporates an earlier account begun by Godfrey of Disibodenberg and material gathered by her last secretary, Guibert of Gembloux, as well as autobiographical passages attributed to Hildegard herself. Like all saints’ lives, the Vita was written to show holiness and was prepared in part to support her canonisation, so historians read it alongside her letters and other documents.

Manuscripts made during or shortly after her lifetime are unusually important. The illustrated Rupertsberg manuscript of Scivias, with its 35 miniatures, was lost after being sent to Dresden for safekeeping in 1945; its images survive through a hand-painted facsimile made by the nuns of Eibingen in 1927–1933. The huge Riesencodex (“giant codex”) in Wiesbaden, weighing about 15 kilograms, gathers most of her works and letters. Scholars debate how much the letters were edited and polished by her secretaries, though Hildegard seems to have approved the collection.

Scholars have also examined Hildegard’s repeated description of herself as a weak and “unlearned” woman. Feminist historians have argued that this language of humility worked to her advantage: by insisting that her words came not from her own learning but from God, she gained the right to speak in a Church that normally denied women authority to teach.

For the Catholic Church and many believers, Hildegard was a true prophet whose visions were a gift from God. Pope Benedict XVI, naming her a Doctor of the Church, praised “her holiness of life and the originality of her teaching.” Historians, who work with evidence open to all regardless of faith, do not try to prove or disprove divine inspiration; instead they study how the visions were described, recorded, illustrated and received.

Some modern writers have proposed medical explanations. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), argued that the patterns of light she described resembled the visual aura of migraine. Others caution that retrospective diagnosis of a medieval person is uncertain and that such an explanation does not account for the theological content and literary artistry of her work. Hildegard herself described her visions as occurring while fully awake, not in ecstasy, which distinguishes her from many other medieval mystics.

Scholars also debate how her images were created. The Scivias miniatures were probably produced under her supervision, but whether she designed them herself, and how closely they reflect her descriptions, remains unclear. Similarly, her invented Lingua ignota, a glossary of about 1,000 made-up nouns with Latin and German glosses, has been read by Barbara Newman as a way to build solidarity among her nuns and by Sarah Higley as a mystical project reflecting the whole order of creation.

Hildegard was among the first people for whom the formal Roman process of canonisation was attempted, but several attempts were never completed. Nevertheless she was venerated as a saint locally, and from the late 16th century she was listed in the Roman Martyrology with a feast on 17 September. On 10 May 2012 Pope Benedict XVI extended her cult to the whole Church by “equivalent canonisation,” and on 7 October 2012 he declared her a Doctor of the Church, one of only a handful of women to hold that title. Her relics are kept in the pilgrimage church at Eibingen.

Rupertsberg was destroyed in 1632 during the Thirty Years’ War; the Eibingen house was dissolved in 1804 and refounded as a Benedictine abbey in 1904. Modern interest in Hildegard grew rapidly from the late 20th century. Since 1979, the 800th anniversary of her death, recordings of her music have multiplied, and she has become an important figure for historians of women, of music and of medicine.

Her popularity has taken many forms, from scholarly editions in the Corpus Christianorum series to films such as Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision (2009) and the so-called “Hildegard medicine” of alternative healers. Historians caution that some of these modern uses owe more to present-day interests than to the 12th-century abbess, whose thought was rooted in Benedictine monastic life, the Bible and the liturgy.