St. Hildegard of Bingen

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098 to 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, visionary, composer, natural scientist and correspondent of popes and emperors, who founded her own monastery on the Rupertsberg above the Rhine and wrote three books of theology, two of medicine and natural history, a morality play and around seventy-seven liturgical songs. She began writing at forty-two, after a vision she described as a command, and Pope Eugene III authorised her work at the Synod of Trier in the 1140s. Pope Benedict XVI declared her a saint of the universal Church and a Doctor of the Church in 2012, the fourth woman to be given that title.

Hildegard is unusually well documented for a twelfth century figure. Her books survive, her letters survive, her music survives with its notation, and a life of her was written by monks who knew her. Her feast is 17 September.

Who Hildegard Was

Hildegard was born in 1098 at Bermersheim in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a family of the lower nobility. She was given to the Church as a child, around the age of eight, and placed with Jutta of Sponheim, a young noblewoman living as an anchoress attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. She spent her childhood and youth enclosed there, learned the Latin psalter and the chant, and took the Benedictine habit.

Other women joined, and the anchorage grew into a small community. When Jutta died in 1136 the women chose Hildegard as their magistra. She was thirty-eight and had told almost nobody about the visions she had experienced since early childhood.

Around 1150 she moved her community out of Disibodenberg to a site of her own choosing on the Rupertsberg near Bingen, over the objections of the monks, who stood to lose the endowments and the prestige. She got her way, and later founded a daughter house across the river at Eibingen. Running two houses, managing land, and defending her independence took up as much of her life as writing did.

The Sibyl of the Rhine

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a "Renaissance woman" long before the Renaissance. She was a visionary mystic, a theologian, a composer, a doctor, and a naturalist. She basically did everything, and did it better than most men of her time. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI declared her a Doctor of the Church.

The nickname Sibyl of the Rhine attached to her because people wrote to her from across Europe asking what God thought about their situation, and she answered. Around four hundred of her letters survive. Her correspondents included Bernard of Clairvaux, four popes, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, bishops, abbots, abbesses, and ordinary people with ordinary troubles.

She was careful about the title, and about herself. She described herself repeatedly as a poor little figure of a woman, unlearned, a feather on the breath of God. That language is a rhetorical position as well as a genuine conviction, and it did useful work: a woman claiming authority in the twelfth century was safer claiming that God supplied it and she supplied nothing.

Scivias: Know the Ways

From childhood, Hildegard experienced visions of God, which she called the "Living Light." For years she kept them hidden, but eventually, God commanded her to "write what you see and hear." Her major theological work, Scivias ("Know the Ways of the Lord"), describes her visions of salvation history and the cosmos, illustrated with vibrant, almost psychedelic illuminations.

The command came in 1141, when she was forty-two. She resisted, fell ill, and began writing when she gave in, which is a pattern she reports more than once. Scivias took about ten years and was finished around 1151. It contains twenty-six visions, each described and then interpreted at length, and it ends with the texts of songs and with the Ordo Virtutum.

Two more books of visions followed. The Liber Vitae Meritorum, the Book of Life's Merits, sets the virtues against the vices in a series of confrontations. The Liber Divinorum Operum, the Book of Divine Works, presents the human being as a microcosm bound into the whole created order.

She was specific about how the visions came. She said she saw them awake, with her eyes open, without ecstasy or trance and without loss of her senses, and that she perceived the images and their meaning together. She called the source the Living Light, and what she usually saw its reflection or shadow.

How the Church Tested Her Visions

Hildegard did not publish on her own authority. She wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, the most respected churchman in Europe, describing what was happening and asking whether she should speak. He replied cautiously and encouraged her.

The matter then went to Pope Eugene III, who was at Trier for a synod in the late 1140s. A commission was sent to Disibodenberg to examine her, part of Scivias was read aloud to the pope and the assembled bishops, and Eugene wrote to Hildegard authorising her to continue writing what she received. Bernard of Clairvaux supported her at that point.

The approval is the reason she could work in public for the next thirty years. Catholic teaching treats private revelations, however impressive, as belonging to a different order from the deposit of faith, which was completed in Christ. A private revelation does not add to revelation, and the faithful are not bound to accept any of them. What the Church's approval says is that nothing in the content is contrary to faith and morals. Hildegard submitted her writing to that judgment before she circulated it, which is what distinguishes her from a visionary running a private franchise.

Music and Medicine

Hildegard believed music captured the harmony of Paradise. She composed soaring chants that sound like angels singing. She also wrote about medicine and nature, calling the life-force "Viriditas" (greening power). She was the original organic enthusiast.

The music

Around seventy-seven of her compositions survive with notation, collected as the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum. They are monophonic chant, written for her own sisters to sing in the Office, and they are recognisable at once: very wide melodic range, long soaring lines, and texts she wrote herself in dense, image-heavy Latin. She also wrote the Ordo Virtutum, a sung morality play in which the Virtues and the Soul contend for a human life while the Devil, who cannot sing, can only shout. It is among the earliest surviving works of its kind.

The medicine and natural history

Two works are attributed to her in this field, usually called Physica and Causae et Curae. They catalogue plants, animals, stones and elements and their properties, and describe the human body, its humours, its ailments and their remedies. The framework is the standard medieval one inherited from the ancient world, combined with local herbal practice and her own observation. She writes about women's health with a directness that is unusual for the period.

Viriditas

Viriditas, greenness or greening power, is her own word and it runs through all of her work. It names the freshness and vital force that God pours into creation, in plants, in bodies and in souls, and its opposite is a drying up that is at once physical and spiritual. It is the key to reading her.

A Strong Voice

Despite being a woman in the 12th century, Hildegard went on preaching tours at age 60, rebuking clergy and laity alike. She corresponded with emperors and popes, telling them the truth whether they liked it or not. She had zero fear.

The preaching tours are documented and were remarkable. She travelled the Rhine and the Main, to Cologne, Trier, Bamberg, Wurzburg and elsewhere, preaching in monasteries, chapter houses and cathedrals to clergy and to the public. She was in her sixties and seventies. She preached against clerical negligence and corruption in the plainest terms, to the faces of the men responsible.

She also opposed the Cathars, a dualist movement spreading in the Rhineland, and argued that a clergy which had stopped taking its own vocation seriously was the reason people were listening to them. That is an uncomfortable argument and she made it repeatedly, including to Barbarossa during his conflicts with the papacy, where she wrote to warn him plainly.

The Interdict of 1178

The last episode of her life is the one that shows what she was made of. In 1178 her community buried a man in the monastery cemetery who had at some point been excommunicated. Hildegard held that he had been reconciled to the Church and had received the sacraments before he died, so the burial was lawful.

The prelates of Mainz ordered the body exhumed and removed. She refused, and reportedly obscured the grave so it could not be identified. The chapter placed her community under interdict, which meant no Mass and, for a house of nuns, no singing of the Divine Office.

Her response was a letter defending music as belonging to the worship of God and to the harmony of creation, and arguing that the silencing of praise did spiritual damage. She was around eighty and under sanction, and she argued the theology rather than pleading. The interdict was lifted in 1179, shortly before she died on 17 September of that year.

Saint and Doctor of the Church

Hildegard's canonisation took a long time and then happened quickly. Proceedings were begun in the thirteenth century and never completed, which was common at a period when the formal process was still developing. Her cult continued locally without interruption, and her name was carried in the Roman Martyrology, so she was called a saint for centuries without a formal decree.

Pope Benedict XVI regularised it. In May 2012 he extended her cult to the universal Church, the procedure known as equivalent canonisation, which recognises an ancient and continuous veneration rather than requiring the usual miracles. In October 2012 he declared her a Doctor of the Church.

The title Doctor of the Church is given for teaching of lasting value to the whole Church, and it has been conferred on fewer than forty people. Hildegard was the fourth woman to receive it, after Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena, both named in 1970, and Therese of Lisieux in 1997.

Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

Her feast is 17 September, the day she died in 1179. Her relics are venerated at the parish church at Eibingen, near Rudesheim on the Rhine, and the Abbey of St. Hildegard above Eibingen is a working Benedictine community of women today.

She is invoked as a patron of musicians and writers, and by people working in herbal medicine and natural science. Recordings of her chant have sold in numbers no twelfth century composer could have anticipated, and her music is performed regularly in concert as well as in liturgy.

Modern Claims and What the Record Supports

Hildegard attracts modern enthusiasm that runs ahead of the sources, and it is worth separating.

Hildegard medicine

A substantial commercial industry sells teas, spelt products, supplements and regimens under her name, especially in German-speaking countries. Her medical writings are real and are a valuable historical source. They are twelfth century texts working within the humoral medicine of their time, and the Church has never proposed them as health advice. Treating them as a treatment protocol asks something of them that they cannot supply.

The migraine hypothesis

Modern writers, most influentially the neurologist Oliver Sacks, have suggested that some of the visual phenomena Hildegard describes resemble migraine aura. It is a hypothesis about a person who died more than eight hundred years ago and it cannot be tested. It is also worth noting that a physical occasion for an experience would say nothing either way about its meaning, which is a distinction Catholic theology has always been comfortable making.

The invented language

Hildegard did compose a Lingua Ignota, an unknown language, with around a thousand invented words and an alphabet, recorded in glossaries. Its purpose is not explained in the sources and modern proposals about it are conjecture.

What a Reader Can Take From Her

Submit the extraordinary to ordinary authority

Hildegard had visions from childhood and told almost no one for thirty-five years, then wrote to the most sober churchman in Europe and asked for a judgment. Anyone convinced God is telling them something should copy the sequence.

Start late

She began writing at forty-two and started preaching in her sixties. The idea that a vocation has to be identified young is not supported by her life.

Take the body seriously

She wrote about plants, digestion, illness and greenness with the same seriousness she gave to the Trinity, because she held that one God made both. A faith that despises the physical world is not the Catholic one.

Sing

When they took the Office away from her sisters she treated it as a real injury and argued back. Music in worship is not decoration.

Quotable Wisdom

"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."

Hildegard's voice captures the immanence of the Holy Spirit in all creation.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is St. Hildegard of Bingen's feast day?

Her feast day is 17 September, the day she died in 1179 at the age of eighty-one. Her relics are venerated at the parish church in Eibingen on the Rhine, and the Abbey of St. Hildegard above the village is a working Benedictine community of women today.

Why is Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Church?

Pope Benedict XVI declared her a Doctor of the Church in October 2012, for theological teaching of lasting value to the whole Church across her three books of visions, her letters, her preaching and her liturgical poetry. He had extended her cult to the universal Church five months earlier by equivalent canonisation, which recognises long and continuous veneration rather than requiring the usual miracles. She was the fourth woman given the title, after Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena and Therese of Lisieux.

What did Hildegard of Bingen write?

Three books of visions: Scivias, the Liber Vitae Meritorum and the Liber Divinorum Operum. Two works of natural history and medicine, usually called Physica and Causae et Curae. Around seventy-seven liturgical songs collected as the Symphonia, and the Ordo Virtutum, a sung morality play. Around four hundred letters survive, along with saints' lives, commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, and the glossaries of her invented Lingua Ignota.

Did the Church approve Hildegard's visions?

Yes. She wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux for a judgment, and the matter went to Pope Eugene III at the Synod of Trier in the late 1140s. A commission examined her, part of Scivias was read aloud to the pope and the bishops, and Eugene wrote authorising her to continue. Approval of a private revelation means the Church finds nothing in it contrary to faith and morals. It does not add to the deposit of faith, and no Catholic is bound to accept it.

What is viriditas?

Viriditas is Hildegard's own word, meaning greenness or greening power. It names the freshness and vital force that God pours into creation, present in plants, in bodies and in souls alike, and its opposite is a drying up that she treats as both physical and spiritual at once. The idea runs through her theology, her music and her medical writing, and it is the key to reading her.

Is Hildegard medicine real medicine?

Her medical writings are genuine twelfth century texts and a valuable historical source, working within the humoral framework inherited from the ancient world alongside local herbal practice and her own observation. The modern commercial industry that sells teas, spelt products and regimens under her name is asking those texts to do something they cannot do. The Church has never proposed them as health advice, and nothing in Catholic devotion to her depends on them.