Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  Near the middle of the century, Hildegard was inspired to leave Disibodenberg with Volmar and her nuns to establish a new foundation. Though it was true that her increasing fame had attracted more female postulants than Disibodenberg could appropriately house, not everyone was pleased. Kuno, the abbot of Disibodenberg, knew she had no right to leave without his blessing, which he steadfastly refused to bestow. After all, Hildegard and her nuns had attracted a steady stream of pilgrims; her departure would surely entail a drop in revenues. Quite a few of the nuns fought Hildegard’s plan tooth and nail: they did not look forward to taking leave of Disibodenberg’s comfortable cloisters or hazarding the sometimes perilous crossing of a great river and the subsequent rigors of homesteading in the desolate wilds of Bingen, whither their untried abbess meant to convey them. But Hildegard saw clearly the necessity of separating her nuns—financially and spiritually but also, most important, juridically—from the monks. In their new convent the sisters would be independent of male rule, and their abbess would no longer report to anyone. (Well, maybe technically she would still be under obedience to Kuno, but he would be so very far away.)

  Hildegard’s plan was ridiculed by the local nobility, without whose patronage no monastic foundation could expect to succeed. Her favorite young nun, the beautiful Richardis von Stade—for whom Hildegard confessed she “bore a deep love”—took herself off to another convent to serve as its abbess, an embarrassment and lasting suffering to Hildegard. But her iron will to have things her way—or, rather, as the voice within her wished—showed itself nakedly for the first (but hardly for the last) time. She lay on her sickbed and would not rise, claiming a “charismatic illness” sent from God, till the irritated abbot found himself trumped by womanly wiles and at last gave in. Leaving their most obdurate sisters behind to live as shadowy handmaids to the monks, the nuns crossed the river and set about establishing themselves on the hill of Rupertsberg in the ruins of a Carolingian monastery, from which Hildegard’s abbatial church of Saint Rupert rose in record time—thanks in part to Hildegard’s family connections—to be consecrated in 1152.

  In little more than a decade, a surfeit of new followers would force Hildegard to found a satellite convent on the pleasant, vine-covered hill of Eibingen overlooking the bustling riverside settlement of Bingen-on-Rhine. It is this convent, today the Abbey of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, that has survived and prospered, now as a women’s retreat house and healing center, where superhealthy cuisine, prepared to Hildegardian recipes, is served to visitors at strictly specified hours.e Rupertsberg was razed in the seventeenth century during the religious hatreds of the Thirty Years’ War; and Disibodenberg was long ago reduced to just another Celtic ruin.

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  In her falling out with Richardis, Hildegard appears at her least likable. She refused to accept the reality of Richardis’s election to the abbacy of Bassum, which lay many miles north in the neighborhood of Bremen. As Richardis set off Bassumward to take up her new duties, Hildegard wasted no time in imploring male ecclesiastical authority to declare the election invalid. Though bishops had, by the twelfth century, managed to trim back the loopier, more lawless aspects of monasticism, it could hardly be said that they had achieved firm control over the communities of monks and nuns established within their bounds. A bishop could of course find a particular community abuzz with heresy and shut it down, but his power hardly extended to the monastery’s internal discipline—which was by ancient custom the monastery’s, not the bishop’s, business.

  Relentless Hildegard pushed her losing suit through local episcopal courts, working her way through various levels of ecclesiastical machinery till her case reached the pope, who routinely returned the petition to the archbishop of Mainz for judgment. The archbishop ruled in Richardis’s favor and received in consequence a scorching letter from Hildegard. What Hildegard planned to do next no one knows, but she had no intention of giving up and was stopped only by the untimely death of Richardis (though it is nearly anachronistic to term any medieval death “untimely”). In her last moments, Richardis wept to be reunited with Hildegard and her old community. That, even Hildegard had to concede, was that.

  In 1141, more than ten years before the erection of the Rupertsberg abbey, Hildegard had received at Disibodenberg a call that would shape the rest of her life and the lives of countless others, a call to “cry out and write” what she saw. From earliest childhood, she tells us, she saw things that others did not see: human and animal forms, sometimes those of angels or demons, enclosed within symbolic landcapes or within elaborate, if schematic, architectonics. All these figures—and in fact the whole of Hildegard’s constant vision—were bathed in uncanny light, a luminosity that she came to call “the reflection of the living Light.” At the same time, she seems to have had no difficulty separating these visions, which superimposed themselves on everyday scenes, from the ordinary realities that everyone else could see. For her, the visions were of the deeper truths within and beyond everyday experience.

  (Photo Credit 1.2)

  In childhood she had not immediately grasped that others did not see what she saw. At five, for instance, as she and her nursemaid observed a cow, she could see the fetus inside the cow’s belly and predicted—accurately, to the nurse’s subsequent astonishment—the color of the calf-to-be. She soon learned to keep her visions to herself, confiding them only to Jutta, who confided them to Volmar. She felt no impulse to share them further till she was called to do so in her early forties, when she’d already been abbess for six years. The form her revelations took was characteristic of Hildegard—not the sloppy, spontaneous babblings of the typical illiterate seer but a lengthy convoluted text, Scivias, composed by Hildegard with excruciating exactitude over ten years and copyedited with bulldog tenacity by Volmar, whose Latin was better than hers. It’s not so surprising that the result resembles at times a tightly wound cord.

  Scivias is a medieval elision of Scito vias, which is itself an abbreviation of Scito vias Domini (Know the Ways of the Lord). The idea of papal infallibility would not gain currency for many centuries, but in Hildegard we already have a presumption of personal infallibility: she cannot be mistaken; she knows, she sees the ways of the Lord, for he has shown them to her, and she will expound them to us. To treat her ideas fairly and with any hope of completeness would take volumes, for after completing Scivias, Hildegard went on to write at least eight more books, none of them brief, on subjects as diverse as theology and science, medicine and music, pharmacology and biblical commentary. Besides these, we own a large collection of her poems and liturgical songs, a series of more than thirty illuminations (which may not have been painted by her but were surely made at her bidding), and her musical play, Ordo Virtutum (literally The Order of Virtues, but more appositely The Hierarchy of Courage), which could qualify as the West’s first opera. Once she started, there was no stopping her. All that can be done here is to point out a few of her main themes, especially as they relate to her life and times.

  The Abbess Hildegard, inspired by fire from above, as her amanuensis Volmar waits attentively in the wings. From an illuminated manuscript overseen (and perhaps illustrated) by Hildegard. (Photo Credit 1.4)

  Hildegard’s method of writing is certainly unusual. She gives us word-pictures, a long succession of tableau-like images, described in taut, sometimes prickly phrases, often accompanied (in the original manuscripts) by illustrative illuminations. The images are static and could almost be intended for a series of elaborate stained-glass windows, but in their visual complexity and dense symbolism they cry out for an artist of the prowess of a Hieronymus Bosch to give them life and movement. Here is the First Vision of Scivias:

  I saw a great mountain the color of iron, and enthroned on it One of such great glory that it blinded my sight. On each side of him there extended a soft shadow, like a wing of wondrous breadth and length. Before him, at the foot of the mountain, stood an image full of eyes on all sides, in
which, because of those eyes, I could discern no human form. In front of this image stood another, a child wearing a tunic of subdued color but white shoes, upon whose head such glory descended from the One enthroned upon that mountain that I could not look at its face. But from the One who sat enthroned upon that mountain many living sparks sprang forth, which flew very sweetly around the images. Also, I perceived in this mountain many little windows, in which appeared human heads, some of subdued colors and some white.

  It is obvious that “the One” is God, but the further meanings of this tableau (and of all her subsequent visions) would be forever obscure did Hildegard not unlock them for us. The mountain, she tells us, “symbolizes the strength and stability of the eternal Kingdom of God.” The shadow-wings show “that both in admonition and in punishment ineffable justice displays sweet and gentle protection and perseveres in true equity.” The image full of eyes is Fear of the Lord, which “stands in God’s presence with humility and gazes on the Kingdom of God.” The child represents the Poor in Spirit who are always to be found in proximity to Fear of the Lord. The tunic of subdued color may be taken to indicate the figure’s poverty, the white shoes its admirable spiritual direction. The scenes in the windows embody the idea that in “the most high and profound and perspicuous knowledge of God the aims of human acts cannot be concealed or hidden”—God’s own Rear Window. Those in subdued colors are lukewarm Christians, those in white are pure. Hildegard concludes the First Vision by quoting from the Book of Proverbs—by Solomon, she says—on human acts: “The slothful hand has brought about poverty, but the hand of the industrious man prepares riches.”

  Despite the contemporary celebrity of Hildegard, it must be admitted that there is not so very much here of either theological or spiritual sustenance. The visions run on, chapter by chapter, book by book, seldom offering anything more arresting than stultifying orthodoxy and, as in the Solomon reference, something not far distant from pious drivel. Without the intensely colorful illustrations—the supposedly “mystical mandalas” that have lured so many in our day—I doubt that Hildegard would ever have become the toast of spiritual seekers. But we must do a little spadework to search out the secret of her celebrity even in her own day.

  Illustration of Hildegard’s First Vision in Scivias. (Photo Credit 1.5)

  There is a clue at the very outset of her commentary on her First Vision:

  And behold, He Who was enthroned upon that mountain cried out in a strong, loud voice saying, “O human, who are fragile dust of the earth and ashes of ashes! Cry out and speak of the origin of pure salvation until those people are instructed, who, though they see the inmost contents of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them or preach them, because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice. Unlock for them the enclosure of mysteries that they, timid as they are, conceal in a hidden and fruitless field. Burst forth into a fountain of abundance and overflow with mystical knowledge, until they who now think you contemptible because of Eve’s transgression are stirred up by the flood of your irrigation.

  It is only in passages like this, where Hildegard evidences her—or, rather, God’s—withering contempt for lukewarm and timid churchmen, however learned, and exalts her own female fecundity, that the reader is zapped into full wakefulness.

  Between the time of Gregory the Great and that of Hildegard, the church had gone from apocalyptic terror to settled prosperity. The barbarians had morphed into knights and their ladies, monks and nuns, artisans and burghers. Europe had become Christian, its bishops no longer endangered but in charge. The temptation—at least among clergy—was not to despair, as might have been the case in Gregory’s day, but to laxity, self-indulgence, aggrandizement. The twelfth-century renaissance in thought and the arts was built on the new prosperity—and prosperity always brings new temptations in its wake. In the very first page of Scivias, Hildegard demonstrates that she is both numbingly orthodox and on the side of the reformers who want to toughen up their slack, temptation-prone church. She is also happy to admit the weakness of her sex (always a plus with self-adoring males who lack self-knowledge), even to glory in it; and at the same time she folds a frisson of suggestiveness into her rhetoric—all that abundance, overflow, and irrigation.

  Man at the center of the cosmos with Hildegard as observer (in the lower left corner): a Hildegardian mandala. Leonardo da Vinci’s later nude figure, the so-called Vitruvian Man, his arms extended within a circle, is in the same tradition, but Hildegard’s figure, lacking visible genitals, is the nonsexist homo of her writings. (Photo Credit 1.6)

  Throughout Hildegard’s writings, the good people are always bursting with viriditas—greenness or greening or springtime (“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”)—the bad people cracked and desertlike in their aridity. There can be no question that from childhood viriditas had poured from the forested ridges and clear waterways of the wild Rhineland, impressing itself on the sensorium of a lonely child. Her scientific works are replete with what can only be personal observations of local animals, fish, and plants. For the local rivers—the Glan, the Nahe, and the Rhine—she catalogues thirty-seven species of fish, giving us evidence that, if she didn’t do a lot of fishing herself, this nominally cloistered nun must have talked at length to an awful lot of fishermen. Viriditas, a Latin feminine noun, is in Hildegard’s fertile imagination especially associated with women, in particular with her virgin sisters. “The enclosure of mysteries” is Christian revelation, but it is also the cloister with its healing herb gardens and nourishing orchards, tended by flowering virgins, each of whom is in human form what the cloister is in architectural terms, an enclosed garden. “She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride; a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain,” sings the author of the Song of Songs, one of Hildegard’s favorite books of the Bible (also believed in her day to have been written by Solomon). Dryness, brittleness, inability to reproduce—these are qualities associated in Hildegard’s works with sinners in general but especially with the lax, unreformed churchmen of her day.

  There is no reason to doubt Hildegard’s sincerity, her belief in her visions. But no human motives are unmixed, and it is not difficult to identify the many passages in which she so sides with the reform party as to call out for their recognition of her as a prominent ally. And recognition is what she got.

  In 1147, prior to her move across the river, she sent her incomplete Scivias to Bernard of Clairvaux, a Frenchmanf of the Cistercians, a monastic order of strictly observant Benedictines who were spearheading ecclesiastical reform. He was the most famous religious figure of his day, and Hildegard was looking for confirmation. In her covering letter she abases herself in the approved manner (“Wretched, and indeed more than wretched in my womanly condition”) and hallows Bernard (“Steadfast and gentle father”); she even recounts her vision of Bernard as “a man looking into the sun, bold and unafraid.” Bernard was, in fact, one of the most aggressive players of his time, always on the hunt for heretics, allowing no quarter to anyone who disagreed with him, preacher of the disastrous Second Crusade. No admirer of women, he was famous for his bons mots: “It is more difficult to live with a woman without [moral] danger than to raise the dead to life.”

  Bernard was also mentor to the current pope, Eugene III, who (as luck would have it) was himself in receipt of a copy of the incomplete Scivias. Kuno, abbot of Disibodenberg, had sent this copy to his own archbishop, Heinrich of Mainz, humbly begging Heinrich to judge its orthodoxy. Heinrich handed the work to Eugene, who was just then presiding over a synod at nearby Trier, the old Romano-Germanic hub, still graced with impressive Roman stoneworks as well as elegant new medieval buildings, bankrolled by the synod’s hosts, the increasingly prosperous merchants of Trier.

  Eugene read out passages from the lionized local abbess’s work to the assembled bishops. (Theirs was an age for reading aloud to others, not alone in silence.) One can only imagine the supercilious expressions on the well-fed faces of the
costumed hierophants—till a gaunt, starkly robed monk, Bernard, attending the synod as papal theologian, stepped forward meekly to one-up them all, explaining that he had already been sent his copy, had read it diligently, and approved of every word the woman wrote. Hildegard, approaching fifty, became instantly famous, receiving papal approbation as a genuinely orthodox but prophetic seer. Suddenly, no one could praise her highly enough, one attendee, Abbot Bertolf, writing her a breathless fan letter: “Indeed, you have far exceeded your sex by having surpassed with manly spirit that which we were afraid even to approach!”

  Viriditas, or the abundance of nature, both cultivated and wild: a Hildegardian mandala. (Photo Credit 1.7)

  Town houses of wealthy merchants in the main square of medieval Trier. (Photo Credit 1.8)

  Hildegard was launched on a new career as preacher to the people of her time, the only woman allowed to break the supposedly absolute New Testament proscription, contained in the First Letter to Timothy, that “no woman [is] to teach or to have authority over a man.”g The exception made for Hildegard is evidence not only of her universal celebrity but of the quirky singularities of medieval life. It is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they always did one thing and never another; they were marvelously inconsistent. Not only does a woman preach; a cloistered nun, once offered to God as a solitary, travels from town to town—by boat, by horse, on foot, probably by litter—talking to everyone.