May 16, 2012
Illumination from the Liber Scivias showing Hildegard receiving a vision and dictating to her scribe and secretary
On May 10, Pope Benedict XVI extended the liturgical cult of St. Hildegarde von Bingen (1098-1179) to the universal Church. Later this year he may include her in the list of Doctors of the Church.
I first became acquainted with St. Hildegard when I belonged to the now defunct BMG Classical Music Service back in the ’90s and early 2000s. I ordered Hildegard von Bingen: Ordo Virtutum,
St. Hildegard was never tutored in music, yet her compositions are of the highest level and unique among all music handed down over the ages. Her genius was expressed in a perfectly integral relationship of text and music, containing a highly poetic use of imagery and freedom of melodic formula. Not Gregorian chant and not Palestrina’s polyphony, but still exquisitely ethereal when performed as they were written to be: in a church where reverberation allows the tones of voices and instruments to sound in space as if in eternity. So how did she accomplish this? The answer is: God.
At the age of 43 while at prayer she saw a vision of tongues of flame and received an inner conviction that she should write down and share her spiritual experiences. This was the beginning of her work as a writer, poet, composer, and philosopher. St. Hildegard faithfully recorded everything that God gave her in prayer and thus left for us a large body of writings beneficial to mankind, including a vast knowledge of herbs and medicine as well as lives of the saints and other topics. You can browse her music and writings here at Amazon.
After the age of sixty St. Hildegard traveled and preached throughout Germany. Benedictine reformer St. Bernard of Clairvaux was her friend. Both he and Pope Eugenius III affirmed her gifts of prophesy and mysticism. Attempts to have her canonized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were unsuccessful, but this past week, Pope Benedict declared her a saint by “equivalent canonization.” L’Osservatore Romano explains equivalent canonization:
An “equivalent canonization” usually occurs—as in the case of St. Hildegard of Bingen—when veneration the saint is already well established in Church traditions, but for various reasons the formal process of canonization has not been completed.
Interesting facts about St. Hildegard
- She was the tenth child of a noble family and given to the Church as a “tithe.” That is, as was the custom since the early monastic traditions of the Church, she was given to the monastery some time between the age of 8 and fourteen as an oblate, or offering to God.
- She founded two monasteries on either side of the Rhine.
- St. Hildegard began having visions at age three. Later, she explained that she saw all things in the light of God through the five senses.
Like many of the great saints, she was reluctant to write about her experiences in prayer. From Wikipedia:
In her first theological text, Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias (Classics of Western Spirituality)
(“Know the Ways”), Hildegard describes her struggle within:
But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubbornness but in the exercise of humility, until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, and by the witness of a certain noble maiden of good conduct [the nun Richardis von Stade] and of that man whom I had secretly sought and found, as mentioned above, I set my hand to the writing. While I was doing it, I sensed, as I mentioned before, the deep profundity of scriptural exposition; and, raising myself from illness by the strength I received, I brought this work to a close – though just barely – in ten years. [...] And I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out therefore, and write thus!’
(“Know the Ways”), Hildegard describes her struggle within:Radical feminists have attempted to co-opt St. Hildegard as one of themselves, but nothing could be farther from the truth. She knew that everything she had and did was from God, not by her own power, and that she was to glorify Him in all that she did. It’s good that her theological writings and her works on natural medicine are gaining wider acclaim, but they must be understood in the rightly ordered context of Creator and creature. She is a gift from God for the 21st century who lived nearly 1000 years ago.
Here is Karen Clark singing “O virtus sapientiae”, a hymn found on Symphoniae by Sequentia.
This post is linked to Saints and Scripture Sunday at The Kennedy Adventures.
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R. Now and forever!
(Click on the link above to read why I end my posts this way.)
