This week’s libation comes to us from Hildegard of Bingen — abbess, anchorite, composer, mystic, artist, and Benedictine badass. (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 home.
Part of the terror is to take back our own listening.
To use our own voice.
To see our own light.”
About a decade ago, I discovered this quote.
It’s widely attributed to Hildegard of Bingen (though it’s actually a paraphrase from an article by Elaine Bellezza about Hildegard in Gnosis magazine, vol 21, 1991).
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.
Tell us what to do.
There’s a sense of safety and relief in surrendering that part of ourselves.
Especially if we’re promised salvation.
Especially if we’re told doing otherwise is a sin.
Self-actualization is hard-won 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 wrenching 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 same 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.
This is a block print of Hildegard by the incredible artist Kreg Yingst. (I also own his Psalms in 150 Block Prints.) You can follow him on Instagram and find his art for sale on Etsy at PsalmPrayers.)
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)
Hildegard was born in Bermersheim, Germany, the tenth child of a noble family and was offered to the Church as a tithe. This was a common practice called oblation, though to our modern sensibilities it seems like abdication. 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 a growing community of women there.
At the age of 42, Hildegard received what she described as a divine command to write and speak her visions publicly. Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugenius III gave her permission, which she needed of course, because, well, she was a woman.
At the age of 52 (Shout-out to every middle-aged woman embarking on a new adventure!) she navigated the monied politics of the day to found her own independent monastery at Rupertsberg (1150) and a second one at Eibingen (1165).
Self Portrait. Hildegard von Bingen receives a divine inspiration and passes it on to her scribe. Public Domain.
Hildegard Shares Her Visions
Hildegard composed an extraordinary body of sacred music. She wrote over seventy chants (which I listen to on the regular), their lines soaring far beyond the measured restraint of Gregorian convention. She also wrote Ordo Virtutum, a musical morality play dramatizing the battle for the human soul, which is one of the earliest works of music theater with a named composer!
Her music is experiencing a revival today. Shout-out to Sequentia for bringing Hildegard’s music to the modern world!
While I’m partial to Hildegard’s angelic music, her writings are her most celebrated legacy. Her first and greatest work, Scivias (Know the Ways), was a decade in the making, recording 26 of her visions.
The theology we find in her work is cosmological, centered on the concept of viriditas—the greening power or vitality—a divine life-force she saw flowing through all of creation. She was deeply incarnational and sensory in her spirituality, which was, like so many things about her, unusual for her time.
She said her visions were not trances or ecstatic states. That she was fully conscious and awake, through what she called the living light and the reflection of the living light. She described it as a kind of wakefulness. Many scholars today note that her descriptions of shimmering lights and geometric forms sound a lot like the auras associated with severe migraines, which she 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 do not get written, monasteries do not get founded, and music does not get composed by migraines or seizures.)
Her art is pretty trippy too. We’ve got manuscripts full of her visions laid out in vivid cosmological images.
Universal Man illumination from Hildegard's Liber Divinorum Operum, I.2. Lucca, MS 1942, early 13th-century copy. Public Domain.
As if that weren’t enough, Hildegard was also a natural philosopher! Her two scientific works—Physica and Causae et Curae—catalogued plants, animals, stones, and metals alongside their medicinal properties. Her approach to the human body was holistic, attentive to diet, environment, and spiritual wellbeing together.
As mentioned earlier, she received permission to preach. Late in life, she undertook four preaching tours throughout Germany. On top of that, she kept up an enormous correspondence with popes, emperors, abbots, abbesses, and ordinary people. (I’m not sure when she slept.) Her correspondence frequently contained blunt rebukes to those in power.
But it came back to bite her, as these things tend to do.
Conscientious Objector
Toward the end of her life, Hildegard permitted the burial of a nobleman in her monastery’s cemetery that the Church had excommunicated. When they ordered her to exhume the body, she refused, arguing that he had died reconciled to God.
The Church’s response was severe.
Her monastery was placed under interdict, and her community of nuns was forbidden from singing the Divine Office. I can’t imagine what this must have been like for Hildegard and her nuns, as music was so central to their daily lives.
Hildegard wrote a fierce letter to the Church defending sacred music as essential to the soul’s communion with God. To silence it, she argued, was to silence heaven.
Finally, a few months before her death, the interdict was lifted.
She’d held her ground for nearly a year.
It only took a millennium for the Church to canonize her and declare her a Doctor of the Church.
The fourth woman ever to receive that title.
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. ”
Further Libations
Live with a Full Moon in Each Eye — "Admit Something," the best poem I have read on love — and the question of who actually wrote it.
The World Is a Vale of Soul-Making — Keats, the Romantics, and the Existentialists in one Venn diagram.
How to Navigate a Liminal State — practices for the interior work, for when muscling through stops working.
