Hildegard of Bingen
Holy Women: Remembering their Words; Celebrating their Wisdom
Mercy Center
Summer, 2006
I think anytime we take a look at an extraordinary woman, especially one like Hildegard, we have to ask ourselves: what is it about her life and her spirituality that I can integrate for myself? What does Hildegard, a German mystic of the 12th century, have to teach me about who God is and who I am? If we were just to take Hildegard at face value, so to speak, and see her simply as a woman who had visions of God and the universe, it might be pretty easy to dismiss her. We might be tempted to ask ourselves in the face of Hildegard’s mysticism: “How can I possibly relate to a woman who spoke of having powerful, beautiful visions of God starting at the age of 5?
Because that’s when Hildegard first started reporting being able to see things that others couldn’t. Being a child, at first this didn’t upset her too much. Anybody who’s been around young children knows that sometimes the extraordinary is accepted much more routinely by a child than an adult. But when Hildegard finally realized that what some people today might term her “extrasensory perception” was not universally shared by all people, she clammed up. She stopped talking about the light that she saw that others couldn’t see, and the premonitions she experienced. It was just too scary for her!
How many of us hide some of the unique qualities that make us us? Is it scary for some of us to be who we truly are?
Most biographies of Hildegard report that because she was the 10th child of her parents, she was “tithed” to God as a special offering. What this meant was that at the age of 8, Hildegard was sent to live with a woman named Jutta who was an anchoress at a nearby Benedictine monastery called Disibodenberg. Now what does it mean to be an anchoress, you might ask? In those days, to be an anchoress basically meant to shut yourself off from the world in order to be one with God. And when I read about the ritual involved in becoming an anchoress, it is downright spooky because the ritual was much like a funeral rite of the day. A woman who chose to become an anchoress, was said to be burying herself for the sake of Christ. And supposedly Hildegard did this herself at the tender age of 14 or 15.
We do not know much about Hildegard’s methods of prayer, other than her days followed the Rule of St. Benedict where attention was given to both work and prayer. Unlike Teresa of Avila, who wrote detailed descriptions of how she prayed, Hildegard’s writings focus mainly on the results of her prayer. It seems to me that, as part of God’s mysterious plan, Hildegard was a woman set apart by God, a woman chosen by God to bring light to a Church that was too often enveloped in darkness. How fascinating that God would choose, as part of God’s purpose, this little nun who lived in the confines of a cloister for most of her life, yet whose life flowered with wisdom and creativity.
After living in community with Hildegard for many years, Jutta died, and by this time, there were more nuns who lived with them in the cloister. These women elected Hildegard abbess of their community. She was about 38 years old, a great time in women’s lives to begin a new venture, don’t you think? And a few years later, when Hildegard was about 42, she was told in one of her visions to report the details of her visions, to write what she saw and heard. Now we have to remember that for her whole life, Hildegard had been stifling these visions, only telling them to her confessor, a monk named Volmar who lived in the monastery next door. So you can imagine how frightening it was for her to feel led to make public what she saw and heard. What do you think happened? Like so many of us who feel called to stick our necks out, Hildegard initially refused to write her visions down, and the result was that she got sick, really, really sick, where she took to her bed and couldn’t get up. I would love to know what helped Hildegard change her mind to decide to go ahead and write down her visions, but we don’t know. I suppose that through the grace of God, she gained the courage she needed to overcome her self-doubt and lack of self-confidence, and she began writing her first book, entitled Scivias, or Know the Ways of the Lord. It took her 10 years to write this first book.
How many of us initially resist beginning new ventures in our lives, either because we lack self-confidence or because we think we’re too old or some other excuse?
So what were these visions about, we might ask? Hildegard said that she saw her visions when she was awake; she saw them interiorly with her eyes and ears. In her visions God refers to her as a prophet, a mouth of God – she maintained that she only repeated what “the living Light” said to her. The beauty of creation is one of the primary facets of Hildegard’s spirituality, and we see this over and over in her description of her visions. Accompanying her visions was what she interpreted as a voice from heaven which she experienced intuitively in her consciousness.
Another really extraordinary aspect of Hildegard’s life is that despite of her vow of stability as a Benedictine nun, she went on four preaching tours during her lifetime, the first one at the age of 62. The first words of her first sermon at Trier in 1160 are, “I am a poor little figure, and in myself I have neither health, nor power, now courage, nor knowledge.” During her second preaching trip to Cologne in 1163 she spoke, as was her style, quite frankly. She said to the group which was entirely made up of clergy, “You should be day, but you are night; for you will be either night or day; choose then on which side you want to stand.” It is amazing to me that she got away with what she said – not only did she get away with it, but always after one of her sermons, she was asked for a transcript of her talk from the people to whom she had spoken!
Despite her claims that she was a “poor little figure”and even though initially she lacked self-confidence, Hildegard went on to fully celebrate her femininity. In one of her letters, Hildegard writes, “O woman, what a splendid thing you are! For you have set your foundation in the sun, and have conquered the world.” And this from a woman who, at one time, saw her gender as inferior and acted accordingly. By the end of her life Hildegard had changed quite a bit in her views on the status of women, and this was reflected in the ways that she and her community dressed. It was not uncommon for them to wear beautiful clothes made of fine material – Hildegard was especially fond of her nuns wearing crowns – and when she was criticized for this, Hildegard responded that the rules of physical propriety only applied to married women! I’m amused by these little displays of her humanness; in fact, she was not above quoting a vision of hers to prove her point if somebody disagreed with her on something!
So we have seen that all in all, Hildegard was quite an extraordinary woman. The question might be asked, “Is she a saint?” and the answer to that is, not officially. In the 13th century, several attempts were made to have her canonized, and one application was rejected by Pope Gregory IX in 1237 because of incomplete information. For some reason, the matter seems to have been dropped at that time, but people in Germany refer to Hildegard as blessed, and Pope John Paul II called her “St. Hildegard” in 1979. Whatever her official status is, we know her as an exceptional woman with an especially intimate relationship with God. It was this relationship with her Creator that gave her the courage of her convictions and the strength to speak her mind, even though she was a woman who lived during a time when women were considered inferior to men, and even though she spent most of her life in a cloister shut off from the rest of the world.