HILDEGARD OF BINGEN (1098-1179)

The monasteries and convents were as important to the intellectual life of twelfth-century Europe as were the developing universities. In those religious houses could be found both scholars seeking the reconciliation of faith and reason and contemplatives who emphasized the nonrational and mystical elements of Christianity. For example, both the academic Peter Abelard and the mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux, his adversary, were monks. The cloister was also one of the few places where women could get an education, write, and assume positions of intellectual leadership. Among the leading nuns who wrote during this period was the mystic, Hildegard of Bingen.

BIOGRAPHY

Hildegard was born in Bermersheim, near Mainz, Germany. As the tenth and last child, her parents gave her as a "tithe" (literally a "tenth") to the church when she was eight years old. At about fifteen she took the vows of the Order of St. Benedict and spent her next two decades as a devoted Benedictine nun at Disibodenberg. In 1137 Hildegard became the abbess of her convent and soon thereafter began her writing career. Over the next forty-two years Hildegard not only wrote, she also founded two new convents, worked for social and church reform, and preached throughout the Rhine River basin. Sought out for advice by kings and popes as well as by common people, she wrote numerous letters of counsel and warning. In these letters Hildegard was fearlessly direct, as the opening lines of her letter to Pope Anastasius IV indicate:

So it is, O man, that you who sit in the chief seat of the Lord, hold him in contempt when you embrace evil, since you do not reject [evil] but kiss it, by silently tolerating it in depraved men. . . . Beware, therefore, of wanting to associate yourself with the ways of the pagans, lest you fall.⁽¹⁾

WRITINGS

In addition to letters, Hildegard's works include an explication of the Rule of St. Benedict (a list of rules used to govern monastic life), commentaries on the Gospels, scientific and medical treatises, poetry, songs, and the earliest known morality play. But Hildegard is best known for her visionary trilogy, Scivias.

Perhaps from as early as age three, Hildegard had visions, and she continued to have them throughout her life. As she explained in her preface to the Scivias, these visions did not come to her while sleeping or in a trance, "but by God's will [I] beheld them wide awake and clearly, with the mind, eyes, and ears of the inner person."

ENDNOTES:

¹Hildegard of Bingen, Mystical Writings, edited by Fiona Bowie and Oliver Davies, translated by Robert Carver (New York: Crossroads, 1990), p. 134. Portentously, Pope Athanasius died soon after this letter was sent.