Hildegard of Bingen

The teaching

Taught from her books of visions, above all Scivias and The Book of Divine Works, with her letters, her songs and the Physica.

The shade of the living light

Hildegard teaches as one who sees. Her visions, she writes to the monk Guibert of Gembloux, do not come in sleep, in dreams or in a frenzy, nor through the outer eyes and ears, but in the soul, while she is awake and her senses are her own. What she sees she calls the shade of the living light, and in it she sees, hears and knows at once, as in a moment. Within it, rarely, she sees another light, which she calls the Living Light itself, and while she sees it every sadness and pain leaves her. The voice that explains her visions tells her to say and write what she sees and hears, not in her own way but as it is given to her.

Know the ways

Scivias, Know the Ways, lays out the whole of salvation in three books: the Creator, creation and the fall; the Redeemer, and the Church with her sacraments; and the building of salvation by the virtues until the end of time. Each vision is first described as she saw it, image by image, and then explained, phrase by phrase, by the voice from heaven.

In one vision the universe appears as a vast egg, with a bright fire at its outer skin and a dark fire beneath it, then pure air and watery air, and the earth in the middle, with winds blowing through it all; every layer is God's power holding the elements in their measure. In another a woman carries a child in her womb, and a ball of fire comes down from the Creator, takes hold of its heart and spreads through all its limbs: the soul given to the body.

The human being at the centre

In The Book of Divine Works she sees a human figure standing within the great wheel of the cosmos, its arms stretched out to the circle's edge, with the winds blowing toward it from every quarter and the elements turning around it. The world is made for the human being, and the human being is made after the pattern of the world: the measures of the body answer to the measures of creation, and the soul answers to God, who holds the whole wheel.

So the human being is the meeting place of everything God made, and what a person does touches the whole of creation. In The Book of Life's Merits the elements themselves cry out to their Maker that the evil deeds of humankind overturn them, as in a mill, and keep them from running the course he set them.

Greenness

Her word for the life of things is viriditas, greenness: the sap by which a plant grows and bears fruit, and the freshness by which a soul grows in virtue. The Holy Spirit is its source. It is the green of the earth in spring and the vigour of a body in health, and its opposite is the drying out of a life cut off from God.

In her songs the Virgin is the greenest branch, in whom the flower bloomed that gave its scent to all the spices that had dried; in a song for the virgins she hails the most noble greenness, rooted in the sun. A soul that dries up has not lost its nature, and the greening can come back to it, as it comes back to the land.

The song that was lost

Music, for Hildegard, is a memory of paradise. Before the fall, she writes to the prelates of Mainz, Adam's voice sounded in harmony with the praise of the angels, and by the fall he lost it. The prophets, taught by the Spirit, made psalms and canticles, and then instruments of many kinds, to call that song back to mind, and when the soul hears music it remembers its first home. The devil, who hates the praise of God, works to silence it, and those who silence the singing of a church without just cause, she warns, will themselves lack the company of the angels' praise in heaven.

Her Play of the Virtues teaches the same. Every part in it is sung except the devil's: he can only shout and speak, because he has no part in the harmony of heaven. The soul who leaves the Virtues for him comes back wounded and ashamed, and Humility, the queen of the Virtues, has them take her back.

Virtues and vices

The Book of Life's Merits gives the moral life its full map. A vast figure stands over the world, and the vices appear one after another, each in a strange shape, each speaking in its own voice the reasons by which it tempts; then the virtue opposed to it answers. Love of the world speaks first and heavenly love replies, and so on through thirty-five pairs.

After each pair she sees the purgings that wash that vice from souls after death, and the penance by which a living person may undo it now. Every fault has its remedy, and the remedy is better taken in this life than in the next.

Measure

Her counsel to monks and nuns is measure, the discretion that the Rule of Benedict calls the mother of the virtues. The body is the soul's dwelling and its helper, not its enemy, and an abstinence that breaks it serves pride rather than God. She warns those who come to her against fasts and vigils beyond their strength, for a soul made dry and sick by them bears no fruit.

The natures of things

In the Physica she goes through plants, trees, stones, fish, birds and animals one by one, giving each its nature, warm or cold, moist or dry, and its uses. Spelt is to her the best of grains, warm and rich, making good flesh and blood and a cheerful mind; fennel, however it is eaten, makes a person glad and helps the digestion. Causes and Cures sets the body in the same scheme, with four humours whose balance is health and whose disorder is illness, and with temperaments of men and women drawn from them.

Food, sleep and waking, work and rest all act on the humours, so health is kept by the measure of daily life more than by remedies. These books are taught here as what they say: they are the medicine of a twelfth-century abbess, not a guide to treatment, and anyone who is ill sees a doctor.