HILDEGARD OF Bingen, Sybil of the Rhine, has arrived in the late twentieth century in curious company. Ushered by scholars from the quiet pages of manuscripts into a wordy flurry of journals, CD covers and internet sites, Hildegard has been greeted with enthusiasm by early music lovers, feminists and proponents of the New Age alike.
Many have encountered Hildegard only through her music. Hildegard's liturgical songs, which she claimed to have heard during visions and were later transcribed, are a seamless flow of notes, little marked by the patterned structures found in Gregorian chant. Music from heaven (apparently) translated into liturgy for her convents, her music was less familiar to contemporaries than her written works. Today, in contrast, Hildegard is best known as a composer of chant.
To feminists, Hildegard is a powerful woman who articulates the misogynist sentiments of her day while disproving them by her life; to New Agers, an example of religion embracing the spiritual power of nature. Yet Hildegard can really only be regarded thus if her Catholicism is brushed aside as cultural conditioning, as cobwebs properly torn away by those seeking the person beneath. But to sweep aside Hildegard's Catholicism is to sweep away Hildegard.
Still, her Catholicism is in many ways foreign in character to modern Catholics. Although beatified, she resembles little the style of sanctity most familiar to us— that of a Teresa of Avila or a Francis de Sales. Her writings can best be described as an odd mix of St Bernard and the Apocalypse, with a faint flavour of St Francis of Assisi. She was born into a society that was Catholic in structure and thought. Europe in the twelfth century was a hotbed of spiritual fervour, upon which the Church was sitting unsteadily as she approached the historical peak of her influence.
She was, then, entirely Catholic in her formation, which, in twelfth century practice, meant strongly ecclesial. Her concerns were those of the Church. After Jutta's death, Hildegard was elected head of the community that had grown around Jutta and herself. In about 1150 she moved the community to Bingen in obedience to a vision, and later she founded a second convent at nearby Eibingen. Whilst working to establish her communities firmly, Hildegard also maintained a vehement call for the Church to reform.
The reforms she wanted give us another key to her character. They were squarely those of the Gregorian Reform begun under Pope St Gregory VII in the previous century: they targetted simony (the selling of ecclesiastical preferments), clerical celibacy, and lay investiture (the practice of secular rulers choosing bishops and abbots and granting them their spiritual authority). Hildegard considered hers an 'effeminate' age, in which the righteousness of God had grown weak on earth. She exhorted the clergy to godliness by letter, in the books describing her visions and in her preaching tours across Germany and beyond. She stressed the importance of the liturgy, whose music, she believed, restored divine harmony to the world.
Newer reforms, such as those instituted by the Cistercians - a more ascetic, eremetic life, incorporating the practice of contemplation and open to persons of any class - were not accepted by Hildegard, who held to the older Cluniac style of Benedictine life. By twelfth century standards, then, Hildegard was a traditionalist. She justified allowing only aristocratic women to enter her convents, rather than all classes as laid down by the Rule of St Benedict, by saying that, just as a farmer would not put oxen, asses, sheep and goats in a single field, so closeting up women of different classes together would lead to disputation over rank.
Again, criticised for allowing her nuns to wear jewellery and designing ceremonies in which the sisters paraded to choir clad in white gowns, silk veils and tiaras, Hildegard defended the practice by claiming that such vanities were forbidden only to women in the world; virgins, belonging already to Christ and living "in the unsullied purity of paradise", were permitted to taste their future glory while on earth. Abbesses who yearned to leave their convents for a hermit's life, wrote to Hildegard for advice. They were told to stay where they were and not to seek to shake off their onerous responsibilities. Hildegard had little time for purists — or for deserts.
Traditional, too, was her style of exegesis, shaped by a lifetime of the lectio and the liturgy. Throughout her life, Hildegard had confided her visions only to Jutta and a monk, Volmar, her teacher and confidant. In a vision experienced at the age of 43, however, she was granted an infused understanding of the Scriptures and ordered to write. With Volmar as secretary, she dictated the revelations and, with papal approval, released them publicly.
These visionary works are all similar in style. Unlike many mystics she focussed not on her own mystical experiences nor on her relationship with God, but simply on the meaning of the visions. The symbolism and allegory employed to this end were as far removed from the new rational style of the scholastics as any Church Father's sermon. Scivias (meaning 'Know ye' or 'May you know'), the major work detailing her visions, follows a standard format: first a description of what she saw, then an explanation, replete with scriptural quotations.
Her exegesis reveals an historical understanding that was broad in scope, surveying the sweep of salvation history from Creation to the Last Judgment, and christological, seeing all as preparation for, and development in, Christ. Her major works thus formed an early summa, the sort of overarching perspective on the Christian faith that had its exemplar in that of Aquinas.
Hildegard's writings were also prophetic in character, something foreign to the mystical propensities of Catholicism since the fourteenth century. Where the mystic seeks, obtains and passes on to others the secrets of personal union with God, Hildegard presented herself as the voice of God calling to His people — threatening retribution, enlightening, instructing and cajoling in the finest tradition of the Old Testament prophets.
Hildegard was clearly conscious of her role. Historians have noted her constant invocation of the "Living Light" as her authority and also her tendency to shift between her own voice and God's without any clear divide between the two. She did not see herself, then, as a mere recipient of divine messages but as a voice formed by God, who uttered His mind and spoke with His authority, whether she passed on her own thoughts or God's. She repeatedly emphasized her lack of education as evidence for the divine origin of her writings. Although she used the language of Apocalypse — vivid colours, precious stones and dramatic imagery — Hildegard was less interested in the end of time than in the problems of her own time, framed by the whole history of salvation. She had no gloomy sense of continual decline, but rather assessed her age as just one down curve in a series of rises and falls destined to continue until the Antichrist. Her tone was apocalyptic but not her message.
Hildegard's Catholicism was, then, ecclesial, traditional, liturgical, christological, exegetical in the style of the Church Fathers and prophetic in an Old Testament fashion. These characteristics, while not inevitable, were not inconsistent with the twelfth century. Others diverged quite distinctly from the twelfth century norm. It is these, of course, which most appeal to the modern world. Her bejewelled ceremonies suggest a positive view of the natural world markedly out of place in an age that revered asceticism. Throughout Hildegard's lifetime, the Cathars, who rejected the goodness of the material world, grew ever more popular. Yet Hildegard spoke of nature in glowing terms, reminiscent of St Francis' Canticle. A favoured term in her writings was 'viriditas' literally meaning 'greenness' but used by Hildegard to represent spiritual life or energy: the same 'viriditas' that filled the Virgin and overpowered spiritual weariness also freshened the world each spring.
The concept of light also pervaded her writings: heavenly brightness, clarity, radiance, brilliance, luminosity, fire and flame, "flashing gems" and "shining colours". God appeared to her as "the Living Light" or, more often, "the reflection of the Living Light". To her eyes, then, the natural world was a reflection of God, abounding with divine light, colour and a viridity sadly lacking in its human inhabitants.
Her attitude to marriage was positive, although she maintained, in traditional Catholic fashion, the first place for consecrated virginity. She described the physical details of the sexual act with a disconcertingly scientific interest. Despite her acceptance of women as the weaker sex, she had what would today be regarded as a very modern appreciation of women: "O woman, what a splendid being you are! For you have set your foundation in the sun, and you have conquered the world", she cried in one letter. Woman was not simply made for man, she thought, adjusting St Paul, but woman for man and man for woman.
These attitudes and ideas radiate a fearless scientific curiosity and a readiness to posit new ideas. She put forward not only theories of her own about music and relations between the sexes but new theological propositions, for example, that knowledge of good and evil was God's gift to mankind rather than Satan's temptation. In addition, she wrote several treatises on the medicine (still practised by Hildegard devotees in Germany) and natural science of her time, probably compiling the information largely for her own use. She even invented a new language for her nuns, with a vocabulary of about nine hundred words. Hildegard had evidently an observant eye, a curious mind, and a bent for wide horizons that led her to link up information into theories, principles and histories.
Hildegard is, then, what she has been painted in so many CD covers, but more. She is too ready to accept female subordination and too firmly Catholic in her faith and morality to be of any real value to modern feminism, while simultaneously being neither subservient nor prudish. Progressive in her speculative curiosity about and rapturous embracing of the natural world, yet she is thoroughly twelfth century in her ecclesial, allegorical and christological tendencies and positively conservative in her approach to reform. An apocalyptic prophet with no special interest in the Apocalypse; a visionary with none of the customary preoccupations of the mystic; a lover of liturgy and sacred music who devised liturgical innovations to the scandal of her contemporaries; a musician, a scientist, a writer of the first known morality play, a prophetess, a renowned healer, even an exorcist.
A saint? Refused canonisation on four separate occasions, Hildegard is somehow not easy to line up in the ranks of the saints. Through the veil of the written word, she appears closer in character to the magnificent but uncanonised popes who led the Church a century later through the period of its greatest power. But this vivid, determined character, doomed to either caricature or half-hearted applause by the modern world, deserves a fuller appreciation as a daughter of the Church that perhaps only traditional Catholics, whose lives mirror many of the same commitments and concerns, can offer.
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