We Cannot Live in a World Interpreted for Us by Others
Illumination accompanying the third vision of Part I of Scivias. Photo By Meister des Hildegardis-Codex - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org
“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others.
An interpreted world is not a hope.
Part of the terror is to take back our own listening.
To use our own voice.
To see our own light.”
—Hildegard of Bingen: abbess, anchorite, composer, mystic, artist, natural scientist, polymath, 12th century Benedictine badass
When I discovered this quote from Hildegard of Bingen about a decade ago, it was a life raft for me.
If you’ve taken your religion seriously but felt your mind and conscience usurped by a religious authority, perhaps you’ll understand.
Taking back our own listening is a long, hard journey.
It’s much easier to have someone tell us what to think and do. There’s a sense of safety and even peace in surrendering that part of ourselves—especially if we’re promised salvation.
Especially if we’re told to do otherwise is a sin.
Self-actualization is difficult no matter what our path, but I suspect it’s one of the greatest challenges for a conscientious religious person. Even more so if we’re part of a religious group that insulates itself from the world—the greater the insulation, the more difficult the journey.
At some point, though, if our inner light is at odds with our religious authorities, we have to make the hard decision about which we’re going to listen to. We have to choose between living in bad faith or living by our inner light.
Jesus, of course, had to make this choice.
And we all know how that ended for him.
Hildegard, like many other great souls who’ve gone before us, had her own run-ins with religious authorities, but she stayed true to what she knew to be right—and paid the price for it.
One of these days, I’d love to write a film script about this extraordinary woman. But for now, I’ll be content with sharing a little bit about her here. Perhaps you’ll find her as inspiring as I do.
Self Portrait. Hildegard von Bingen receives a divine inspiration and passses it on to her scribe. Public Domain.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)
Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary mystic, composer, poet, healer, naturalist, and theologian — one of the most remarkably multifaceted figures of the medieval world, and arguably the most influential woman of the 12th century. She was beatified and formally canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, and declared a Doctor of the Church — only the fourth woman ever to receive that title. She sits at a rare intersection: artist, scientist, mystic, administrator, and theologian, centuries ahead of nearly every conversation she was participating in!
She was born in Bermersheim, Germany, the tenth child of a noble family and was offered to the Church as a tithe (a common practice called oblation). She was placed in the care of the anchoress Jutta of Sponheim, with whom she lived enclosed at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. After Jutta’s death in 1136, Hildegard was elected magistra of the growing community of women there.
In 1141, at the age of 42, Hildegard received what she described as a divine command to write and speak her visions publicly, which required enormous courage for a woman of her era. She sought and received official approval from Bernard of Clairvaux and, remarkably, from Pope Eugenius III. This ecclesiastical sanction gave her a platform almost unheard of for medieval women.
At the age of 52 (Shout-out to every middle-aged woman embarking on new adventures!) navigated the monied politics of the day to found her own independent monastery at Rupertsberg (c. 1150) and a second at Eibingen (1165), establishing genuine institutional authority over her own community.
Visionary and Theologian
While I’m partial to Hildegard’s angelic music, her visionary writings are her most celebrated legacy for many. Her first and greatest work, Scivias (Know the Ways), was a decade in the making and recorded 26 visions concerning the cosmos, the fall, redemption, and the Church. It was followed by Liber Vitae Meritorum (the Book of Life’s Merits) and Liber Divinorum Operum (the Book of Divine Works).
Her theology was richly cosmological, centered on the concept of viriditas — greening power or vitality — a divine life-force she saw flowing through creation, the body, the soul, and the Church. She was deeply incarnational and sensory in her spirituality, which was unusual for her time.
She says her visions were not trances or ecstatic states. She describes them as received while fully conscious and awake, through what she called the living light and the reflection of the living light. This distinction was important to her. She claimed not prophetic seizure but a kind of illuminated wakefulness. Many scholars today note that her descriptions of shimmering lights, geometric forms, and auras are consistent with the visual phenomena of severe migraines, which she almost certainly suffered throughout her life.
(SIDE NOTE: Some may try to dismiss Hildegard’s visions because of her migraines—as they do Teresa of Avila’s because she may have had temporal lobe epilepsy—but whatever the neuro-situations of these women—they accomplished incredible things. Theological treatises don’t get written, monasteries don’t get founded, and music does not get composed by migraines or seizures.)
Illumination accompanying the third vision of Part I of Scivias. Photo By Meister des Hildegardis-Codex - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org
Universal Man illumination from Hildegard's Liber Divinorum Operum, I.2. Lucca, MS 1942, early 13th-century copy. Public Domain.
Artist
Hildegard of Bingen stands as one of the most original artists of the medieval world, working across music, poetry, visual illumination, and dramatic composition with a singular and unmistakable voice. Her music alone would secure her place in history — over seventy chants of breathtaking melodic ambition, their soaring, wide-ranging lines pushing far beyond the measured restraint of Gregorian convention, as though the form itself couldn't quite contain what she needed to say.
But she was also the guiding creative intelligence behind the luminous illuminated manuscripts of her visions, vivid cosmological images dense with symbolic color and form.
Her Ordo Virtutum — a musical morality play dramatizing the battle for the human soul — is among the earliest works of music theater with a known composer. What makes her remarkable as an artist is not just the range, but the coherence: every form she worked in served the same vision, the same theology of embodied light, of viriditas, of a cosmos radiant with divine energy pressing through matter.
Universal Man illumination from Hildegard’s Liber Divinorum Operum, I.2. Lucca, MS 1942, early 13th-century copy. Public Domain.
Composer
Hildegard composed an extraordinary body of sacred music — over 70 surviving chants — collected in her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations). Her compositions are notable for their unusual melodic range, soaring and ecstatic lines that exceed the conventions of Gregorian chant. She also wrote Ordo Virtutum, one of the earliest surviving morality plays and possibly the earliest known musical drama with a named composer.
Her music has experienced a remarkable modern revival and is now widely performed and recorded. (Shout out to Sequentia for bringing Hildegard’s music to the modern world!)
Natural Philosopher
Hildegard was a serious observer of the natural world. Her two scientific works — Physica and Causae et Curae — catalogued plants, animals, stones, and metals alongside their medicinal properties, drawing on both classical humoral theory and her own empirical knowledge. Her approach to the body was holistic, attentive to diet, environment, and spiritual wellbeing together. These texts remain fascinating documents of 12th-century natural philosophy.
Preacher
Unusual for a woman of her era, Hildegard undertook four preaching tours throughout Germany late in her life, addressing clergy and laity directly — an almost unimaginable act of public authority. She maintained an enormous correspondence with popes, emperors, abbots, abbesses, and ordinary people, frequently delivering blunt prophetic rebukes to those in power.
Conscientious Objector
Late in her life, Hildegard made a decision that brought the full weight of institutional authority down on her community. She had permitted the burial of a nobleman in her monastery's cemetery — a man the Church had declared excommunicated. When ordered to exhume the body, she refused, arguing that he had died reconciled to God, having received last rites, and that to disturb his grave would be a desecration rather than a correction.
The Church's response was severe. Her monastery was placed under interdict, and her community of nuns was forbidden from singing the Divine Office — a punishment striking at the very heart of Benedictine life and, for Hildegard, an almost cosmological wound.
She wrote a fierce and beautiful letter to the Church authorities defending sacred music as essential to the soul's communion with God, arguing that to silence it was to silence heaven itself. The interdict was lifted only months before her death. She had held her ground for nearly a year, an elderly abbess who understood, with absolute clarity, that there are moments when faithfulness to God and obedience to the institution are not the same thing.
May we all have such courage.
Illumination accompanying the second vision of Part II. Photo by Meister des Hildegardis-Codex - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155274
“I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life. ”
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