17
September 1179 A.D. Hildegard the Visionary & Mystic Dies
Graves, Dan. “Hildegard: Sybil of the Rhine.” Christianity.com. Apr 2007. http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/901-1200/hildegard-sybil-of-the-rhine-11629806.html. Accessed 22 May 2014.
Contemporaries called her "Sybil of the
Rhine." By any measure she was an extraordinary woman, one of the few who
transcended the limitations on her sex during the Middle Ages to alter the
events of her own time and imprint her personality on the future.
At five years of age, Hildegard
of Bingen began to see visions; at eight, she joined her aunt Jutta, a recluse
(one who led a solitary life for religious purposes). When fourteen she became
a nun. Much of her life she was abbess of a Benedictine convent.
Somewhere along the way she
acquired an education. But not until she was 42 did she begin to write the
books which made her famous. Her output was prodigious and varied. She compiled
an encyclopedia of natural science and clinical medicine. Her medical works
included exorcisms along with much medieval lore. She wrote the first known
morality play and a song cycle from which this quote is taken:
It
is very hard to resist what tastes of the apple.
Set us upright Savior, Christ.... O most beautiful form!
O most sweet savor of desirable delight!
We ever sigh after you in fearful exile,
when will we see you and dwell with you?
Set us upright Savior, Christ.... O most beautiful form!
O most sweet savor of desirable delight!
We ever sigh after you in fearful exile,
when will we see you and dwell with you?
Hildegard's hundreds of letters
of advice and rebuke went out to kings and commoners alike. She wrote
biographies of two saints. This output, coming from the pen of a woman, was
extraordinary in an age when women seldom learned to read. She was considered a
prophetess. St. Bernard of Clairvaux and popes endorsed her visions. All
listened to her.
Her book of visions, Scivias, took her ten years to complete. She incorporated
26 drawings of things she had seen in her strange waking visions. Modern
medicine suggests that these shimmering lines of light were actually the auras
associated with migraines. Her own account suggests more. "...when I was
forty-two years and seven months old, heaven was opened and a fiery light of
exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole
heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but a warming flame, as the sun
warms anything its rays touch." Immediately she understood the meaning of
the scriptures.
At the age of 60, Hildegard
began to make preaching tours. The theme of her sermons was that the church was
corrupt and needed cleansing. She scathed easygoing, fat clergymen and those
who were "lukewarm and sluggish" in serving God's justice, or negligent
in expounding the depths of scripture.
Hildegard died at age 82 on this day, September 17,
1179. Although largely forgotten for many generations, awareness of
her life surged in the mid-1990s with television programs, books and music
releases devoted to her. And not without cause, for she was one of the most
talented and original women of any era.
Bibliography:
3. Durant, Will. The Age of Faith. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1950.
4. Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegarde of Bingen; a Visionary Life. London
; New York: Routledge, c1990.
5. Fuller, Thomas. "The Life of Hildegardis." The Holy
State and the Profane State Volume II. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1938; p. 44ff.
6. Hildegard of Bingen. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen.
Translated by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
7. "Life and Works of Hildegard von Bingen (1098 - 1179)."
(www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/hildegarde.html).
8. Mershman, Francis. "St. Hildegard." The Catholic
Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton, 1914.
9. Various encyclopedia and internet articles and discographies.
Last updated April,
2007.
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