Excerpt from
Hildegard of Bingen
An Integrated Vision
by Anne H. King-Lenzmeier
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the written permission of The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.

CONTENTS
Chronology of Hildegard's Life
Three Phases of Hildegard's Life and Works
Figures and Illustrations

Introduction
Exploring the Method: Mysticism, Spirituality, and Polyphony

I Shaping Forces

A Sense of Place: Society and Surroundings
Natural Surrounding and Religious Inspiration
Liturgy and Learning
Music and Light: The Meeting Place of the Human and the Divine
The World Outside
Shaping Forces and Hildegard's Personality

II Mystical Polyphony in the Visionary Works

The Calling of God: The Preface to the Scivias
From the Preface to the Content of the Scivias
Part One: Creation and Fall
Part Two: Incarnation and Salvation
Part Three: Tribulations and the Coming Kingdom of God
Scivias: Observations and Remarks
The Liber Vitae Meritorum
Contents of the Liber Vitae Meritorum
Specific Examples from the Liber Vitaae Meritorum
The De Operatione Dei
The Structure and Contents of the De Operatione Dei
Specific Examples from the De Operatione Dei
The De Operatione Dei: Observations and Remarks
The Theological-Visionary Treatises and the Mystical Polyphony of Hildegard

III Bringing the Strands Together: The Gift of Music

Hildegard's Musical Style and the Creation of the Symphonia
Music, Poetry, and Style
Structure, Organization, and Number of Songs in the Cycle
Examples from the Symphonia
O Ecclesia
O Viridissima Virga
O Virtus Sapientiae
The Ordo Virtutum: The First Morality Play
The Musical and Poetic Structure of the Ordo Virtutum
The Significance of the Ordo Virtutum
Mystical Polyphony in Hildegard's Music

IV Earth and Heaven in Dialogue

The Lingua Ignota
The Lives of the Saints, the Rule of Benedict, and the Athanasian Creed
Hildegard and the World of Creation
Physica
Causae et Curae

V From Mystical Vision to Prophetic Witness

The Prophetic Calling
Prophetic Authority and the Ecclesial and Secular Authorities
The Prophetess and Politics: Worldly Ties
The Letters as Prophetic Witness
The Popes
Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor (1152–1190)
Philip of Heinsberg
Conflict with the Prelates of Mainz
Responsibilities of Office
Care and Cure of Souls
Theological Issues
The Preaching Tours and the Content of Her Preaching
First Preaching Tour
Second Preaching Tour
Third Preaching Tour
Fourth Preaching Tour
Polyphonic Mysticism and Prophetic Witness

VI Concluding Remarks
Notes

Bibliography Select Disconography
Index of Names
Figures and Illustrations

Introduction
Hildegard von Bingen, once an obscure figure in twelfth-century history and theology, has today captured the imagination of scholars and the general reading public alike. What is the reason behind this newfound celebrity? What makes this German Benedictine nun, the "Sibyl of the Rhine," such an attractive figure for people at this time?

First, Hildegard's impressive array of talents contributes both to her rediscovery by scholars and to her broader appeal. Her range is impressive: she is a musician, a theologian, a prophetess, an artist, a biologist, an herbalist, a healer, a correspondent, a playwright, a preacher, a cosmologist, an interpreter of the feminine in the human and the divine, and a leader of her religious community.

Second, although Hildegard lived in a world whose assumptions were radically removed from our own, she speaks to us today through the centuries as an important voice for concerns we share. These include seeing both the particular and the universal in creation, rediscovering the complementarity of gender imagery, and showing that the feminine can be used creatively in relationship to the divine and the human. She is eminently practical, yet passionate in her concern for what her visions tell her is the right course to follow. In short, she appeals to us on a variety of levels. As we shall see, some of this appeal is as much implicit as explicit, since her life and works are so much a part of a complex whole that the pull toward her we feel may be both a conscious and an unconscious process.

Third, her works are now becoming ever more available to us. Hildegard literally disappears from history and the record until the nineteenth century; although her feast day was still kept and celebrated in Germany, no systematic effort had been made to hear her voice in the intervening centuries. Her rediscovery was almost accidental, occurring when scholars came across fragments of and references to parts of her work.

Scholars first rediscovered Hildegard through differing avenues of her achievements. Musicologists began to analyze her unique use of melismatic chant forms; from specific interests in her musical compositions, commentaries on the unique structure of her body of work, the Symphonia, emerged. Linguists rediscovered her as perhaps the first playwright of the age: her work dramatizes the virtues and the history of salvation in the Ordo virtutum. Although this play is set to music, it dramatizes the struggle of virtue against the Devil and is anticipatory of many of the medieval morality plays. Both the artistic and the theological communities, their imaginations fired by her theological-visionary works, have explored and debated their import. Having experienced visions since she was a child, she felt God calling her to depict and to reflect upon a set of visions she received after the age of forty-two. These visions are depicted and explicated in the Scivias (Know the ways of God), the Liber vitae meritorum (Book of the merits of life), and the De operatione Dei (The works of God). They are dramatically and at times disturbingly portrayed in both art and text. While there is general agreement that Hildegard did indeed closely oversee the drawing of the visions, several conflicting sources are available that portray the visionary pictures as Hildegard dictated them, so there is continual debate concerning their content, origin, and meaning. Furthermore, the manuscript that was most likely illustrated under her direct supervision was lost in Dresden in 1945. Theologians have seen her from a variety of standpoints: as a twelfth-century feminist foundress, as a holistic healer and representative of creation spirituality, as a Benedictine steeped in the liturgy, as a prophetic preacher and teacher, as a mystic whose works are both theological and spiritual. Those interested in medicine have been curious about her theories of biology and the cosmos, her use of herbs, and the possibility of migraine as a source of her extraordinary visions. There is continuing fascination with her images of the feminine divine and with all of her feminine language and imagery. Often these images contrast with her notions of the male and female person as noted in her biological works and correspondence. Her vision of the feminine is a unique contribution, and it is a startling one for her time; for many, it is one of the most important facets of Hildegard of Bingen, perhaps the central idea of her work.

Hildegard has not been discovered in technical journals alone, however. Her wide-ranging talents, her versatility in adapting to circumstances, her spiritual insights, and especially her visionary paintings, her music, and her cosmic approach to creation have given her an appeal to a much wider audience. Her visionary paintings appear in several works, the most popular of which is the Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, a work in which Matthew Fox has popularized Hildegard as the holistic "wise woman" who recognizes the surpassing goodness of all creation, using her paintings to illustrate the possibilities of meditating with her thoughts in a contemporary setting. Various musical groups have recorded her music, beginning with classical ensembles and emerging recently as a popular figure in the album Vision. In this recent work, promoted by Angel Records, she has been made the heiress to the rediscovery of Gregorian chant; her original settings are intertwined with and interpreted by the work of a contemporary composer and arranger, Richard Souther. Many authors have written books guiding people to pray in Hildegard's words and to meditate on her reflections. Some have written fictionalized accounts of her life, such as an autobiography or a diary. Many have seen her as a champion of the feminine, particularly the feminine as envisioned in God; they have found her phrases and her illustrations liberating in an androcentric culture, both in her own time and in ours. Particularly in Europe, there are those who are seriously reconsidering her methods of healing and understanding the human body, following her precepts as a guide to natural, holistic health. As we can clearly see, she appeals to a wide range of interests and audiences. Some of those audiences are quite separate from one another, which lead us naturally into the structure and concerns of this book.

With her growing popularity among both scholars and the general public, it has become essential to look at Hildegard as a whole. She is penultimately someone who responds to her own personal setting and place in time. In technical examinations of the facets of Hildegard's work and personality, this can render the talents she offers us virtually impenetrable to the non-specialist; some of the articles directed toward literary criticism of her work and musicological concerns are only read by a Hildegard specialist from another scholarly discipline with the greatest of care. Nevertheless, there have been accessible scholarly works that have seen Hildegard as a whole and have been read by many interested in this striking woman's life. Among these are books such as Barbara Newman's Sister of Wisdom and Sabina Flanagan's Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life. At this time new source materials are being made available rapidly, enhancing our understanding of Hildegard. There is an ongoing and recent translation of her letters into English, previously only available piecemeal in German and Latin. There are new translations of her musical texts and poetry, considering the relationship of text to composition, and many recordings of her music with fresh and differing interpretations. Publications of her visionary and non-visionary works in English, translated from either the original Latin or the German, are now being made more widely available—the English-speaking audience has relied primarily on her writings in the Scivias until recently, of which there are now several versions available in print. In this veritable renaissance of Hildegard studies and sources it is all too easy to lose our way in the maze. It is necessary to build on the solid work of other scholars and writers who have contextualized Hildegard for us, but we do well to try to preserve both the foreign qualities of her world and her time in history while simultaneously making her as accessible to modern sensibilities as possible without compromising who she truly is. This is our pivotal concern and the primary methodological approach of this book.

This book intends to explore Hildegard von Bingen with the intent of integrating her life with her personality, thus introducing her to the reader interested in the "big picture." Because of her array of abilities and the considerable written record of her works that we possess, it has been all too easy to choose the "part" or "interpretation" of Hildegard that appeals to either the individual scholar or member of the general public. Because she has much to offer it is only within the context of a balanced and integrated approach to Hildegard as a person who lived a complex and varied life that we can begin to understand her. It is the purpose of this work to consider Hildegard as a whole person, not just the sum of her parts, and to place her within her own century and context. Only then will her contributions for the contemporary world be discussed. It is essential to attempt to create a framework for discerning who Hildegard was from who different people might want her to be. Claims to know the "authentic Hildegard" come from both scholars and popularizers, writers and readers alike. Each of these claims has its own degree of validity and must be judged on its own merits.

Why is this so crucial? To be true to Hildegard the historical person we must insist that what is said about her is factual, even though interpretation is necessary. Many excellent books and articles have been written about Hildegard that claim a particular voice for her, fascinating and accurate in their use of the sources at their command; one such work is Barbara Newman's excellent Sister of Wisdom. These types of books have made great contributions to our understanding of this multifaceted woman and her talents. However, there are others who claim Hildegard as their own, without having the support of the source herself in a consistent fashion. A prime example of this are the works of Matthew Fox, who chooses his texts from Hildegard with an eye to how he himself wishes to think of her, as a representative of creation spirituality. She does indeed have a knowledge and love of creation, but it is much more complex and far more pessimistic about human nature than Fox's works would lead the reader to believe.1 How are most people to discern the difference, especially when it is this type of book that is easiest to grasp and to popularize? What will lead them to realize they are being led in the direction a contemporary author prefers to go, even if it misrepresents Hildegard's own intricate and compelling personality?

This book intends to gather together the many strands of data we have about Hildegard, accenting what makes her such a compelling figure for the modern reader while retaining the integrity of her own peerless voice, yet making it accessible to readers without scholarly background. Hopefully, it can serve as both an introduction to Hildegard and a corrective for simplistic interpretations of a sometimes maddeningly complex and gifted woman whose legacy is a multitude of works.

What is it that is so singular about Hildegard? We need to look at what her contemporaries considered to be her unsurpassable gifts; therefore, the metaphor I will employ throughout emerges from the circumstances of her life. Like musical polyphony, where one line of music connects, harmonizes, and prefaces the next strand, Hildegard's life is polyphonic. To cut her apart from the totality of her life and work is not only to put the part before the whole but to actually misrepresent who she is as a person. For Hildegard, each activity flowed into another and yet another. Her ability to bring coherence to all these talents and activities is her special genius. Her experience of contemplative life and Benedictine prayer is pivotal for understanding the woman, the theologian, the musician, the healer. For Hildegard, all life is lived in the constant presence of the Living Light, of God. The Living Light speaks in prophecy and in visions; is praised and experienced in liturgical music, both created and sung; is served in the needs of the human heart and the human body as they are ministered to by the community. Hildegard claims that her work is given to her, shown and revealed by that Living Light that has been her constant support and companion.

Her life exudes a "mystical polyphony." By this phrase I mean to imply that while, ironically, she does not compose polyphonic music, she lives a life in which overlapping and interwoven strands make the piece a whole. In the non-technical sense her experiences are polyphonic, which is to say they possess a dense texture and a multivalent sense of meaning. This metaphor of mystical polyphony will be the method by which this book integrates Hildegard's life and work. After all, even though her own music is not polyphonic in the musical sense of the term, polyphony actually did begin in the twelfth century and was used by other composers. She might not mind this characterization; she lived rather than composed polyphonically, with many strands coming together to make the whole tapestry of who she was in her lifetime and who she is for us today.

Exploring the Method: Mysticism, Spirituality, and Polyphony
One cannot merely characterize Hildegard as living a "mystical polyphony" without giving equal weight to both terms. She is a talented, multilayered figure whose integration stems from her spiritual life. The interwoven strands that make polyphony such an apt metaphor with which to approach the figure of Hildegard are thus conditioned by her spiritual development. In order to understand clearly what this means, we have to explain the concept of spiritual journey as it relates to the theme, and to examine what makes Hildegard a mystic rather than just a spiritual leader.

In spiritual formation and development it has long been taken as a given that one begins with a simple desire for God, and that then this simple desire, fulfilled by God, takes the shape of an ever increasingly complex spiritual path. Over the course of a lifetime, a mature simplicity is grasped, at first in glimpses and then more consistently. To return to simplicity it is necessary to go through the tangled and at times perplexing phases of spiritual life; the simplicity to which one returns is not the original simplicity but one refined by fire and depth. This is also what we mean when we describe God as "simple," as Aquinas does: it is not that God cannot and does not encompass all that exists or might exist; instead one comes to realize simply that God IS. Hence, God is simplicity itself, but one we can only come to understand gradually (if at all) through exploring all the complexities of God's creation and revelation, the mysteries of incarnation and salvation, of beginning and ending. This spiritual progression is our journey toward God, or in Hildegard's terms, toward the Living Light. In this life, she notes, we experience the shadows of the Living Light; when we complete our journey we shall be bathed in the Light Itself.

Hildegard's works and her life are intensely incarnational and revolve around the scope of salvation history as it is located in the cosmos, which is encompassed by and ultimately identified with God's light. The metaphor of spiritual journey from the simple through the complex and returning to simplicity is one that is mirrored in Hildegard's life. This fits well with the polyphonic character of that life, for ultimately it is in the nexus of the strands she weaves that Hildegard becomes a human representative of what mature Christian simplicity looks like. By concentrating on these images and metaphors it will be possible to do justice to the wide variety of talents and experiences Hildegard possessed without losing the center: the melodic line, the simplicity around which the complex harmonies develop. For this reason the approach here is thematic rather than purely biographical. Many good biographical sources are already available, and while it is important to tell the story of her life, it will unfold here polyphonically, although we must separate the strands and knit them back together as we proceed. It is also an investigation of her unique contribution to our growing awareness of what "mysticism" can mean in different times and settings. Yet Hildegard cannot be understood as having a mystical corpus that can be separated from her life and other works. Because they claim "visionary" status, three of her theological-mystical books are usually set apart: the Scivias, the Liber vitae meritorum, and the De operatione Dei. Yet they are set within what I call the "polyphonic" character of Hildegard's mysticism. For taken from the context of her life as a whole and the rest of her works, they are almost impenetrable. How are we to understand the complex visions, the voice of God, the implicit exegesis of these works without considering why they overlap one another, adding to the central theme or melody of each vision? It is helpful to take into account what else was going on as she was writing these books. There were many other things going on simultaneously with the writing of the theological-mystical visionary works, and there is a mutual impact. For Hildegard there is a kind of "double vision": even when she was receiving visions and revelations from God, she insists that she remained aware of her surroundings and the everyday tasks that occupied her. She rejects the notion of her visions as "ecstatic," thinking that this means being taken out of herself and out of time. At all times she remains awake to both the cosmic and the daily dimensions of life as she is living it. This is why her background and history will be discussed in the first chapter: to give the reader a feel for the person in her historical time and respecting the cycles of her life, which provide a context for her ideas.

Because of Hildegard's insistence that she is awake and aware while receiving the visions, we need to consider what could be an awkward question: can we rightly call Hildegard a mystic? What do we mean by mysticism in her case? Many would say that Hildegard is a visionary rather than a mystic per se, one who lived a spiritual and holy life, receiving visions from God yet not having specifically a "mystical" relationship with God. Such a claim presupposes a certain definition of a mystical relationship with God. Yet it remains a legitimate question nonetheless. Hildegard, while talented and diverse, does not seem to fit some of the frameworks of spiritual development common to others called "mystics." Her adamant refusal of the ecstatic is one example: many would classify mystics as having a characteristic union with God that draws them up out of the everyday experience of time and space. Even someone who meets these criteria, however, is suspicious of this as the primary criterion. Teresa of Avila, for example, saw her own raptures as a preface to the more advanced and calm stage of union with God, where she remained constantly aware of God's presence by her side at all times (intellectual union). Another distinction often made is that of the "visionary" versus the "mystic"—this is judged by the fact that visionaries in and of themselves do not necessarily pursue the quest for interiority and an inner life with God that progresses through characteristic stages. In Hildegard's case, I think it is legitimate to respond that although her life is an active one, her constant awareness of the presence of God in creation bespeaks both an interiority and an exteriority characteristic of both mature spirituality and mystical insight and experience. It is true she does not dialogue with her visions in the way we have come to expect of many mystics in their quest for union with God. Perhaps part of the reason is that for Hildegard, from her earliest years, she has not known a time without these visions of the lux vivendi, the "Living Light." Her whole growth and formation have been a form of dialogue with her visions about the meaning of her life and mission. While we experience her insistence upon the words of her visions as the voice of God directly, Hildegard's many expressions of the Living Light as working in and through her are also intertwined with her own voice. She is not as introspective as other mystics appear to be, but the very confluence and separation of the two voices, hers and God's, indicate an inner awareness and sensitivity to her interior journey as it relates to the Voice that prophesies through her speech. While we will return to this subject in greater detail, it seems sufficient to state at this point that Hildegard can legitimately be called a mystic in the narrower sense of the word—avoiding the idea that everyone is a mystic—because of the interiority that must precede and be constantly involved in the discernment of her exterior writings and pronouncements. She was not as interested in writing about her interior life as she was in conveying what that interior life meant for the community of Christians as a whole. Hildegard would probably regard self-exploration in the middle of dangerous spiritual times as a luxury she, above all others, could not afford. Moreover, when she became fearful, afraid, or dwelt too much upon what she was receiving in authentic visions, she would collapse from ill health and suffer constantly as a result. So she is a mystic of a different stripe: like others, she has both the interior life with God and the expression outwardly in charity; unlike others, the outward expression is not just in charity but in prophecy, sharing her inner exploration as it unfolded during her lifetime. This is all the more reason to see her as living a polyphonic life and for the term "mystical polyphony" to capture the essence of what Hildegard is all about.

In summary, Hildegard's mystical polyphony will enable us to see the great diversity and unity in her works and in her life as she lived it. Central to her mystical polyphony is the setting of her life, which gives the parameters—metaphorically and musically, the key—within which the compositions of her life were constructed. It is here that we need to note the importance of bipolar tensions in Hildegard, which are often overlooked by modern authors. This tension of opposite extremes are typical of the understanding of the history of salvation in a twelfth-century context, bipolarities that for Hildegard nonetheless remain securely incarnational in the many senses of the term. One of the most profound misunderstandings of Hildegard today is to see her only as an affirmative cosmological prophetess; she concerns herself equally with the forces of darkness and evil that surround and threaten humankind, moving people to sin and damnation rather than to grace and salvation. This tension between the praise and affirmation of that which is created and yet the dangers lurking in the created world and in time is one of the crucial bipolarities in Hildegard's overall scheme of reality. Another would be the bipolarity and conjunction of the masculine and the feminine, as differing but essentially complementary forces that make up the true image of God when they are found in the correct balance.

To enhance and clarify the theme of mystical polyphony as the metaphor guiding us through an exploration of Hildegard of Bingen, see the two charts appended here. The first chart is a schematic chart of some significant dates in her life, overlapping one another so it is possible to see the density of her activity at certain times of her life. It also resembles the concept of polyphony by showing more clearly the different lines of melody harmonizing to make the one sound at a given time. The second chart is divided into three sections, representative of the three major phases of Hildegard's life and work: the early years, the productive middle years, and the synthetic-prophetic final years. This, for the sake of metaphor, corresponds to the themes of a musical composition: (a) (b) (c) in melodic structure, with a figured bass note of vision tying the piece together throughout. A visual representation of the overlapping strands of her life shows how they are intertwined, even when we are considering them separately throughout the chapters of the book.

The first chapter will take up Hildegard's mystical polyphony by exploring the forces that shaped Hildegard's development throughout her life, stressing her historical context, her personal history, and the setting in which she lived and wrote. This will provide indispensable background for seeing how her many talents are interwoven within the confines and demands of her lifetime. In this chapter we will also include a more traditional listing of dates and events of significance, entering into them in greater detail than possible in either of the charts.

In the second chapter we will move on to consider the specifically visionary treatises. These are the theological trilogy mentioned previously: the Scivias, the Liber vitae meritorum, and the De operatione Dei. This is an exploration of her mystical polyphony in the explicitly visionary theological works. Yet her approach goes beyond writing theological tomes; included will be a discussion of these works as they fit into an integrated view of Hildegard, considering them with and not separately from the other occurrences in her life while she was composing them. Like the musical score, however, these three works do come full circle to present a complete account of Hildegard's revelations as she communicates them to the reader or listener: the Word revealed, the Word embodied, the Word at work toward final completion.

Then it will be time in the third chapter to consider her musical vision in depth, for Hildegard uses music in a deeply mystical way. For her, music is a reflection of the heavenly sphere and a way in which we can be a part of it in this life. Yet the music she writes and sings in praise of the Living Light is not meant to stand alone or to be her creation alone. It is the fruit of her union with God and her vision of Christian life. It is significant that her musical compositions were written throughout her life and are well-known even before her prophetic abilities; music is the core of her expression of the incarnational form of human life and our link, through the incarnate Jesus Christ, with the divine. The bulk of her musical compositions is gathered together in a body of work called the Symphonia, a symphonic series of praises of God that were given to her and expressed through her, as were the visions. This revelatory character is also apparent in the musical and literary work Ordo virtutum, which we will examine in detail as an expression of Hildegard's eschatological and cosmic vision of Christian life and destiny. The Ordo virtutum has the distinction of being part of Hildegard's musical vision set in combination with her dramatic and literary gifts.

In the fourth chapter we will consider the vast array of her non-visionary works, including the "unknown language," the lingua ignota, which she created for reasons as yet unclear to us; her lives of the saints and founders; her commentaries and theories about the natural world, linked to her cosmology (the microcosm and the macrocosm introduced in the visionary works). All these together form a part of her mystical vision as it expresses itself in reflection and in action.

The fifth chapter will look at Hildegard's prophetic gifts and voice. She is called the "Sibyl of the Rhine" because of her voice as a prophetess, one who speaks of and for God. Here we will examine her relationships with others: in the communities in which she lived and governed, "in the world" by correspondence or encounter, in her encounters with authority, and in her claim to be an authority in her own right. Her authority always depended on her prophetic voice; it is characteristic of Hildegard to insist on distinguishing the voice of the Living Light given to her directly and her own voice in interpreting to others the significance of her visions or pronouncements. Hildegard is astonishing in her calling as a twelfth-century prophet: a sickly, enclosed, contemplative Benedictine woman who proclaims in the strongest imagery and language the failings of her "effeminate age"!

The conclusion will try to draw what has gone before it into an integrated vision of the mystical polyphony that Hildegard represents. What makes her unique as a mystic, and what does she share with others? How is Hildegard's mystical journey a paradigm for other mystical journeys? I will argue that her progression from a certain simplicity to a complex polyphonic vision and back to a mature, integrated simplicity represents the spiritual journey of the Christian in a very classic sense. In this way, the pattern as well as the content of her life and work demonstrate why she is a powerful figure for spiritual seekers today and not just in the twelfth century. Because of its polyphonic character, Hildegard's mystical life involves more than just herself and her talents. I will attempt to draw forth the major elements that integrate her life and work, to summarize and interweave what has gone before in previous chapters, and to indicate in what way she is a mystic paradigmatic for other mystics who share her polyphonic temperament and spiritual path. This concluding chapter will demonstrate Hildegard's uniqueness among the mystics while presenting the universal appeal of her mysticism. We will see that her opus shows balance, unity, complementarity, and a stress on the gospel, a life and an opus that served as an inspiration and a challenge for the twelfth century and now for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century