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Hildegard of Bingen

Looking back at the Middle Ages with the scholarly perspective of several hundred years, we may reasonably call Hildegard of Bingen—abbess, mystic, physician, poet, musician, exorcist, political activist, and devoted servant of God and humanity–one of the foremost intellectuals of her time. Her abilities and influence touched popes and kings, and the work that she left us shows heart and soul mingled with vision, keen observation, knowledge of theology and natural history, and simple hard work.

Hildegard was born in 1098 in Bermersheim, not far from Mainz, in western Germany, the tenth child of a noble family. At eight years of age she was “tithed” to God by her parents, that is, given as the tenth of their possessions owed the Church. She entered a cloister that was attached to a monastery at nearby Disibodenberg, where she trained under an accomplished anchoress named Jutta. When Jutta died, Hildegard became abbess of the growing community of nuns. She eventually moved her charges to a new convent at nearby Rupertsberg, on a hill above the Rhine (ca. 1150). Later, she founded a second convent at Eibingen. Though she had visions even as a child, not until her forty-third year, during an illness, when she received a vision commanding her to write what she had been seeing and hearing, did she begin to record her mystical experiences. Her first book, Scivias (“Know the Ways [of the Lord])” details those visions, and its approval by Pope Eugenius (ca. 1148) assured Hildegard the opportunity to continue and expand her efforts in preaching and healing as well as her right to preserve her visions with impunity. Her later writings include the Ordo Virtutum, a kind of medieval opera in praise of the cardinal virtues, books on medicine and natural philosophy, two other visionary works, plus some poetry, biography, commentary, and a substantial correspondence.

Accompanying her mystical works are marvelous illuminations, probably not made by Hildegard herself, but certainly done according to her direction. The originality and power of these textual illustrations represent a contribution to the history of art as well as to mysticism and theology. In addition to several preaching tours, Hildegard undertook regularly to meet with and treat a great number of pilgrims who came to her for advice, medicine, or simply to share prayer. Legend has it that “two streams of light crossed over the room” (Fox, Introduction to Scivias, 11) in which she died in 1179; she had lived quite a long and influential life for someone of that time. Although the Church has never officially canonized her, she was beatified, and so she is known to most readers and scholars as St. Hildegard. Within the past twenty years Hildegard scholarship has become a small but productive industry, and books and web pages have sprung up providing access particularly to her illuminated writings and music. Scholarly organizations, such as the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies, meet regularly to discuss her accomplishments and advance understanding of her spiritual, artistic, and intellectual contributions. Her gifts to our age increase as our appreciation and familiarity grow.

The Novella

A Living Light compacts several major events in Hildegard’s life during the twelfth century into a brief span of time appropriate to dramatic presentation. Those events include the approval of her work by the Trier Synod, her forming a new convent at Rupertsberg, the death of her secretary and friend Volmar, the departure and subsequent death of her friend and colleague Richardis, and the disputed burial of an accused criminal on convent grounds, followed by the subsequent interdiction (denial of the sacraments) imposed briefly on her convent. Despite a long and what must have been for a medieval nun eventful life, Hildegard’s story requires some editing and some enhancing for fictionalization. I have allowed myself freedom to choose and telescope events and condense time so as to show the essential character of the protagonist and give readers a sense of her personality and struggles, rather than sticking exactly to the time line of her life. I have varied events where I thought dramatically necessary: for instance, I have no reason to believe that Abbot Kuno was the choleric antagonist that I portray, and scholars suggest that Richardis, one of Hildegard’s nuns, left by her choice to found her own convent, rather than compelled by her family as I have depicted. What you are about to read is thoroughly fiction, not a scholarly disquisition, though I owe considerable debt to the work of several excellent scholars, particularly Profs. Bruce Hozeski and Sabina Flanagan. Their books I have noted in a brief bibliography, along with others that have especially helped me, following the text of the novel: without the work of those and many other scholars, I could not have written this book.

The purpose of the story is to show Hildegard’s (and her world’s) struggle with her visions and their power and to get a sense of what they may mean to us in our own lives. It focuses on the doubt and the religious, social, and physical difficulties a medieval visionary would have suffered. I aimed foremost to consider her personality and how she may have dealt with the doubts that any of us in her position might face. She represents, allegorically, a point I find important to any age, the individual’s engagement with personal spirituality. Other characters, while most represent actual historical persons, dramatically represent aspects of Hildegard’s personality or some resistance she would have met to following her calling in an age in which some men weren’t willing to admit even that women have souls. Some characters I have simplified, some amplified, and some created. Sister Keunegard, for instance, is not an actual person: she crept into the story as I wrote it, and she illustrates how many men may have seen Hildegard or what Hildegard might have done had she been mentally ill rather than a true mystic. The rustics should look familiar to all readers of Greek or Elizabethan drama as enactors of or commentators on the situations of the story and the time in which the story occurs. As for Hildegard’s visions, some scholars have suggested that they may have come more from migraine headaches rather than from actual mystical experience; I have based my novel on the premise that, whatever the cause, Hildegard’s visions display a mystical truth valid for us as it was for her believing contemporaries. I have structured chapters and scenes also so that they reflect and balance one another, so that one may comment on another, much after the fashion of a Shakespeare play. The progress of the story shows the mystic’s difficulties in balancing heavenly vision with the hard work of daily, earthly duties. The visions related in the story come, with slight variations, from the texts that record Hildegard’s recitations of them. My greatest hope for this story is that it will spur additional interest in Hildegard, in her times, and in many like her who have not always received accolades but who have contributed to our spiritual, social, and intellectual growth.

I tried to write this story not only as an exploration of character, but also as an expedition into the twelfth century mindset. The reader may at first find the dialogue a bit heightened and distant, but my experience suggests that such problems can turn to pleasure if one gets caught up in the world of the text. The language itself becomes a character, and I intend it to suggest a world rather different from ours in belief structure as well as time and place, but exhibiting many of our hopes and worries: a thoroughly spiritual world more tightly circumscribed. The action of the story takes place over perhaps several weeks; I hope my adjustment of historical timing will help the reader follow a psychological necessity with respect to where the action is taking place and how events connect to those past and those to come. The project began as a stage play. The premier of the play at St. Norbert College in November of 1992 was done, as I had hoped, in a very classical or Shakespearean fashion, with the focus on character interaction. A small theater with unusual capacity for effects allowed for some interesting experiments with lighting and staging and with projecting images similar to the illuminations from Hildegard’s texts on backdrops or parts of the stage either between acts or during the actual performance, so as to throw more symbolic weight on characters’ entrances and exits. The performance of the first production took about two and a half hours, including two brief intermissions between acts. To turn the play into a novella I have added connective matter and description, but have cut little dialogue and have largely kept the dialogue-based format; I have added a couple more of Hildegard’s visions, but have tried to keep the hypotactic movement characteristic of drama. I have kept the story short so that one may read it in a period of time not far beyond the length of a typical play or movie, aiming for intensity rather than breadth and for a focus on character rather than on description–the preference of many if not most readers of our time.

Historical Context

The eleventh and twelfth Centuries saw a great deal of change in the relationship between Church and lay authorities. In the mid-eleventh century the Holy Roman Empire and its German king controlled the papacy and most Church appointments, and churchmen often served in secular administrative capacities. Simony, the buying and selling of Church offices, occurred commonly. In the second half of the century a reform movement began, first to eliminate clerical abuses, but later to reverse the governmental order, so that secular governors fell subject to the Church and even kings subordinate to the Pope. Signs suggested that internal strife within the empire might break it up into separate kingdoms, until the excommunicated emperor Henry IV, in a difficult if politically astute move, submitted to Pope Gregory VII and begged forgiveness for having tried to wrest authority from his hands. Having thus restored his political position amidst a pious nobility, Henry set about to re-establish his influence and ultimately brought about Gregory’s fall from the papacy. Pope Urban II restored lost political clout to the papacy not only by calling for the First Crusade, but also by gradually undermining Henry’s authority. With the succession of Henry IV’s son, Henry V, an unstable balance developed between Church and state that would continue until, and even after, the dissolution of the empire. A generation later Frederick Barbarossa set about to restore imperial power, and after a back-and-forth struggle with Pope Alexander III, ultimately managed a firm-handed rule of Germany until his death while leading an army during the Third Crusade, in 1190. One must wonder if the continual struggle between ecclesiastical and secular authority did not provide the perfect opportunity for Hildegard to gain influence both among the powerful and among the common, since all were searching for means to understand, deal with, and even perhaps master the constantly changing circumstances. Hildegard’s voice rises above the confusion as one of piety, sanity, and even, somewhat oddly for her time and place, individuality.

Intellectually the twelfth century experienced a pre-renaissance, largely because of the circulation of Classical learning that the West had lost long before, but that it rediscovered through the Crusades and the Christian Reconquest of Spain: the Arabs had preserved Greek manuscripts and had added considerably to what the Greeks had accomplished. Expanded knowledge especially of the works of Aristotle led in the next century to Scholasticism, but already the Twelfth had begun to rely more on reason and empirical discovery than had the West since before the Fall of Rome. Arabic scholars had made particular advancements in mathematics, science, and medicine, and though the Europeans discarded neither all of their old vernacular learning nor their attachment to “magic,” they did benefit from the influx of knowledge and the expanding sense of the world that came with it. Such a climate would not have delivered Hildegard or others in similar walks of life to absolutely free expression, but it would at least have encouraged a greater number of her contemporaries to read, write, think, and communicate their thoughts to others, and it would have given them a rather larger understanding of the world.

While women had nominally little power, they would have had a greater likelihood in Hildegard’s time of gaining some education, and some noblewomen would have directed estates when their lords were off fighting in Crusades. By the end of the century we see the emergence of at least one important female literary figure, Marie de France, who, though she wrote secular tales, showed what a woman could accomplish given her opportunity to explore her voice. We find in Hildegard’s work nothing of secular Romance or commerce, but we do find, once she frees herself from a reluctance to speak, eagerness to share her visions, knowledge, artistic output, medical wisdom, and political opinion.

While Hildegard lived a century and a half before the first stirrings of the Renaissance proper, artistically and intellectually her age saw the building of the great Gothic cathedrals such as that at Chartres and the opening of the first universities, and it knew characters who have left lasting impressions on the world: Thomas á Beckett, St. Bernard, Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, and Chretien de Troyes.