Hildegard of Bingen: Voice of the Living Light

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Friday, January 27, 2012

Hildegard of Bingen: Voice of the Living Light

Hildegard of Bingen: Voice of the Living Light | Sandra Miesel | Catholic World Report

Mysterious, talented, colorful, and enigmatic woman, saint, and mystic. And Doctor?

Next October, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) will join a most select company of saints if she is proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, as reports indicate. To date, there are only 33 of these saints, whose exceptional holiness and wisdom have made significant contributions to our Faith. Hildegard would be only the fourth woman so honored, joining Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Therese of Lisieux.

Among those luminaries, Hildegard blazes in colors all her own. Medievalist Peter Dronke describes her as “an overpowering, electrifying presence—and in many ways an enigmatic one.” The breadth and variety of Hildegard’s accomplishments are unique. Her voluminous writings encompass theology, prophecy, poetry, hagiography, medicine, and natural science as well as extensive correspondence with major figures of the twelfth century including Bernard of Clairvaux, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Hildegard is also the first known female composer in the Western world and wrote Europe’s first morality play—with accompanying music. She invented her own artificial language as well as an alphabet in which to write it. An ardent supporter of Church reform, she made four long preaching tours along the river valleys of southwestern Germany. There she addressed admiring audiences of clerics, monks and laity, an unprecedented privilege for a medieval woman. She achieved all this despite chronic ill-health and while serving as a Benedictine abbess for more than forty years

Hildegard was born near Mainz in 1098, tenth child of an ancient noble family. Her parents offered her as a living “tithe” to God by placing her in the care of a holy recluse named Jutta attached to the male Benedictine abbey of Disibodenberg. Hildegard learned to read from the Psalter and immersed herself in the Bible, her lifelong font of knowledge. At fifteen, she made her profession as a nun in the community that coalesced around Jutta. In 1136, after Jutta died, Hildegard was chosen superior.

By 1150, the convent had become overcrowded. Despite grumbling from the local monks—as well as her own nuns--Hildegard built a new home for her community beside the Rhine at Rupertsberg near Bingen. A second foundation across the river at Eibingen followed fifteen years later. The later cloister still functions as the Abbey of St. Hildegard and enshrines her relics.

Nothing would have seemed extraordinary about Hildegard for the first half of her long life. She did not wish to publicize the visionary experiences she had been having since the age of three when a blaze of dazzling brightness burst into her sight. A diffuse radiance which she called her visio filled her field of vision for the rest of her life without interfering with ordinary sight. Hildegard came to understand this phenomenon as “the reflection of the living Light” which conferred the gift of prophecy and gave her an intuitive knowledge of the Divine.