SOURCE: Peter Dronke, "Hildegard of Bingen," in Women Writers of the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 144-201.

[In the following excerpt, Dronke draws upon "the twelve principal autobiographic passages that are still preserved in Hildegard's Vita in the form in which she set them down, " in order to discuss the genesis of Hildegard's visionary capacities, the gradual public acceptance of her prophetic voice, and her political sensibility as an abess.]

I

Hildegard of Bingen still confronts us, after eight centuries, as an overpowering, electrifying presence—and in many ways an enigmatic one. Compared with what earlier and later women writers have left us, the volume of her work is vast. In its range that work is unique. In the Middle Ages only Avicenna is in some ways comparable: cosmology, ethics, medicine and mystical poetry were among the fields conquered by both the eleventh-century Persian master and the twelfth-century 'Rhenish sibyl'.¹ In more recent centuries, Goethe—who saw and was astonished by the illuminated Scivias manuscript in Wiesbaden²—shows perhaps most affinity to that combination of poetic, scientific and mystic impulses, that freedom with images and ideas, which characterized Hildegard.

To sketch the ways in which Hildegard understood herself and the world around her, we have in a sense too many materials, and of too diverse kinds, at our disposal. The finest studies of her work in the past have given primacy to her trilogy of allegorical visions.³ Here instead I shall focus first on the twelve principal autobiographic passages that are still preserved in Hildegard's Vita in the form in which she set them down. To complement these, certain moments in which Hildegard's personality emerges vividly in her letters will be chosen, with special stress on letters that are not yet published. At the same time, to convey something of Hildegard's wider outlook, I shall turn to the work known as Causae et curae. Even though this (surviving imperfectly in a unique manuscript) is only a fragment of what was conceived as a larger synthesis, a book of 'the subtleties of the natures of diverse creatures',⁴ it can reveal certain things about Hildegard's way of looking with more immediacy than can the visionary works. Historians of science (Thorndike, Singer and others)⁵ have quarried in Causae et curae for curious physical notions; the 'autobiographic' element in the work has never been discussed or even surmised.

Born in the Rhineland in 1098, Hildegard was the last of ten children of a noble family. The first extensive autobiographic note cited in the Vita tells something of her childhood, and of the way she found her vocation and won through to recognition:⁶

Wisdom teaches in the light of love, and bids me tell how I was brought into this my gift of vision … 'Hear these words, human creature, and tell them not according to yourself but according to me, and, taught by me, speak of yourself like this.—In my first formation, when in my mother's womb God raised me up with the breath of life, he fixed this vision in my soul. For, in the eleven hundredth year after Christ's incarnation, the teaching of the apostles and the burning justice which he had set in Christians and spiritual people began to grow sluggish and irresolute. In that period I was born, and my parents, amid sighs, vowed me to God. And in the third year of my life I saw so great a brightness that my soul trembled; yet because of my infant condition I could express nothing of it. But in my eighth year I was offered to God, given over to a spiritual way of life, and till my fifteenth I saw many things, speaking of a number of them in a simple way, so that those who heard me wondered from where they might have come or from whom they might be.

Then I too grew amazed at myself, that whenever I saw these things deep in my soul I still retained outer sight, and that I heard this said of no other human being. And, as best I could, I concealed the vision I saw in my soul. I was ignorant of much in the outer world, because of the frequent illness that I suffered, from the time of my mother's milk right up to now: it wore my body out and made my powers fail.

Exhausted by all this, I asked a nurse of mine if she saw anything save external objects. 'Nothing', she answered, for she saw none of those others. Then, seized with great fear, I did not dare reveal it to anyone; yet nonetheless, speaking or composing, I used to make many affirmations about future events, and when I was fully perfused by this vision I would say many things that were unfathomable (aliena) to whose who listened. But if the force of the vision— in which I made an exhibition of myself more childish than befitted my age—subsided a little, I blushed profusely and often wept, and many times I should gladly have kept silent, had I been allowed. And still, because of the fear I had of other people, I did not tell anyone how I saw. But a certain high-born woman, to whom I had been entrusted for education, noted this and disclosed it to a monk whom she knew.

… After her death, I kept seeing in this way till my fortieth year. Then in that same vision I was forced by a great pressure (pressura) of pains to manifest what I had seen and heard. But I was very much afraid, and blushed to utter what I had so long kept silent. However, at that time my veins and marrow became full of that strength which I had always lacked in my infancy and youth.

I intimated this to a monk who was my magister … Astonished, he bade me write these things down secretly, till he could see what they were and what their source might be. Then, realizing that they came from God, he indicated this to his abbot, and from that time on he worked at this [writing down] with me, with great eagerness.

In that same [experience of] vision I understood the writings of the prophets, the Gospels, the works of other holy men, and those of certain philosophers, without any human instruction, and I expounded certain things based on these, though I scarcely had literary understanding, inasmuch as a woman who was not learned had been my teacher. But I also brought forth songs with their melody, in praise of God and the saints, without being taught by anyone, and I sang them too, even though I had never learnt either musical notation or any kind of singing.

When these occurrences were brought up and discussed at an audience in Mainz Cathedral, everyone said they stemmed from God, and from that gift of prophecy which the prophets of old had proclaimed. Then my writings were brought to Pope Eugene, when he was in Trier. With joy he had them read out in the presence of many people, and read them for himself, and, with great trust in God's grace, sending me his blessing with a letter, he bade me commit whatever I saw or heard in my vision to writing, more comprehensively than hitherto.'

Because of her abnormal gift, Hildegard saw herself as called—notwithstanding all her inner fears and uncertainties—to the rôle of prophet. That, late in life, she felt impelled to tell of herself and her visionary experience, she sees as a summons made to her by Sapientia—the beautiful womanly divine emanation celebrated in the 'Sapiential' books in the Old Testament.⁷ She senses that it is not merely her own personal testimony, but Sapientia speaking through her. The prophet sees herself as timid in her own right, daring insofar as she is Sapientia's mouthpiece. This, more than anything else, underlies the blend of diffidence and assurance in Hildegard's account of her rôle. She was born providentially, at a critical moment of Christian world-history. This could easily sound over-weening, yet Hildegard is convinced that Sapientia bids her affirm it. She had been aware of her 'talent', her visio, from earliest childhood, and it remained with her for the whole of her life.

Hildegard uses visio to designate three related things: her peculiar faculty or capacity of vision; her experience of this faculty; and the content of her experience, all that she sees in her visio. Her mode of vision is most unusual: she sees 'in the soul' while still fully exercising, and remaining aware, of, the powers of normal perception.

Richard of St Victor, the mystic from Scotland who was Hildegard's contemporary, in his commentary on the Apocalypse of John distinguished four kinds of vision:⁸ two outer and two inner, the first two being physical, the others spiritual. The least of the four, physical sight (1), contains no hidden significance; but a second kind of bodily vision, though physical, also contains a force of hidden meaning (2). It was in this mode, for instance, that Moses beheld the burning bush (Exodus 3: 2-4). Of the two modes of spiritual vision, one is that of the eyes of the heart, when the human spirit, illuminated by the Holy Ghost, is led through the likenesses of visible things, and through images presented as figures and signs, to the knowledge of invisible ones (3). This is what Dionysius had called symbolic vision. The second, which Dionysius had called anagogic vision, occurs when the human spirit, through inner aspiration, is raised to the contemplation of the celestial without the mediation of any visible figures (4).

Hildegard's visio is clearly of Richard's third kind rather than his fourth. Throughout her visionary trilogy she sees, with an inner eye, images presented as figures and signs. And these lead her to understanding of a spiritual kind: mostly in that she is enlightened by the divine voice she hears in her visio, which explains to her the figurai or allegoric meaning of the images she beholds. What is exceptional in Hildegard, and what she herself felt to be unique, is that this mode of vision was for her absolutely concurrent with physical sight. There was not the least suspension of her normal faculties: her insights had nothing to do with dream or daydream or trance or hallucination or extasis (a word that she, like a number of twelfth-century writers, uses only in a pejorative sense). What Hildegard wants to stress is that, with all that she saw in her soul, she remained physically lucid throughout.

At the same time her visio was, she felt, linked in a mysterious way with her recurrent bodily afflictions. When, after describing both her visio and her ravaging illness, Hildegard begins the next sentence 'Exhausted by all this … (His valde fatigata …)', it is not clear whether she means, exhausted by illness or exhausted by her visio. The ambiguity may even be deliberate: the gift or blessing of visio may also have been so great a strain that it was at the same time the chief source of her sickness. (Conversely, the sickness may have been a necessary condition of the visio.) Singer, analysing various passages in which Hildegard describes both her symptoms and her mode of vision, as well as some components of the Scivias visions themselves—the falling stars, the concentric luminous circles, the many evocations of dazzling or blinding lights—concluded that Hildegard suffered from frequent migraine or 'scintillating scotoma'.⁹ A diagnosis of this kind can indeed be accepted, even if Singer in his formulation did not sufficiently distinguish between the pathological basis of the visions and the distinctive intellectual qualities of what Hildegard said about them. Hildegard did not simply suffer such disturbances: she made something imaginatively and spiritually fecund out of them.

The next lines in Hildegard's notes display something of the same mixture of fear and pride as Hrotsvitha had shown. She is aware of a gift that sets her apart, a gift that in her case even allows her to foretell future events; at the same time she is afraid of staking any claims, and of making herself seem presumptuous or ridiculous. Where with Hrotsvitha it was perhaps no more than a normal bashfulness, together with partly true, partly affected, modesty, with Hildegard it seems to have been an intense, even morbid, fear of the outer world—a world which, she acutely observes, her constant illnesses had made her less capable of coping with in the ways that ordinary people could.

Like Hrotsvitha again, Hildegard is in a kind of limbo of unease till she and her gift are approved and accepted by the 'greater', masculine world. Till then, the temptation to hide or dissemble or abandon their talent was acute in both. The first step in confidence for each of them is with a loved woman teacher, an abbess of high birth—Gerberga in Hrotsvitha's case, Jutta of Sponheim in Hildegard's. Through the teachers, a few men come to know about the young prodigies; but it is only much later that the inner pressure not to remain concealed gains the ascendant in them. Hildegard's pressura to reveal her visions was accompanied by an exultant sense of physical strength, such as she had never known in her long years of ailment. The monk in whom she confided, Volmar—after satisfying himself that here was no case of hubris or of demonic delusion—gladly became, with his abbot's permission, her helper and secretary.¹⁰

The nature and extent of Volmar's help has been much discussed. In his fundamental study Herwegen argued, with detailed reference to the sources, that while Hildegard welcomed the grammatical and syntactic improvements Volmar could furnish, she allowed no changes in vocabulary or content: however strange her wording and imagery could be, they had to remain intact, because given to her prophetically. I believe Herwegen's conclusions are still broadly valid: only with Hildegard's last major work, the Liber divinorum operum, and some of the very late writings, is the textual situation more complex.¹¹ Hildegard claimed her prophetic gift as the direct source not only of what she wrote but also of her intuitive mastery of the Scriptures and of theological and philosophic works: she could penetrate their difficulties readily, even though her schooling had been quite rudimentary, her command of Latin had remained in many ways uncertain, and she had had no specialist training in philosophy or theology. In the same way her gift of musical composition and performance was intuitive, not dependent on the study of written music or of singing.¹²

In her fortieth year, then, Hildegard felt an irresistible pressura to keep her gifts hidden no longer. We may conjecture that the fact that the previous year, 1136, the sisters on the Disibodenberg had elected Hildegard as their abbess, to succeed her beloved former teacher Jutta, filled her with greater confidence than she had known before; then for the first time she felt a surge of health. The decade 1137-47 saw her progressive acceptance in the more powerful male world around her—first in the ambience of the archbishop of Mainz, then in that of the pope himself, just as Hrotsvitha's progress was (as I argued) from writing, at first chiefly for her own satisfaction, in an aristocratic community of learned women, to finding acceptance in the more grandly aspiring world of the Ottoman court.

The synod of Trier—November 1147 to February 1148—saw the papal ratification of Hildegard's visonary writing, and implicitly of the prophetic rôle which impelled her to write. Earlier in 1147, on that same journey through northern Europe, Pope Eugene had given his approval to another profoundly original work—the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris.¹³ That both the Cosmographia and Scivias (the second still 'work in progress', not completed till 1151) were given the blessing of this pope is of special importance in terms of twelfth-century intellectual history. Two writers who showed such daring in their cosmological conceptions and formulations could so easily, had it not been for Pope Eugene, have been persecuted, the works called in question and condemned by council or synod, as happened with Abelard, William of Conches, or Gilbert of Poitiers. St Bernard, who was active in the attempts to condemn these three, had himself in 1147 been approached by Hildegard for encouragement in the completing of Scivias, and had approved her task (though in a brief, and one must admit somewhat perfunctory, letter);¹⁴ he was also among those present when Pope Eugene declared himself for Hildegard at Trier. The following year another Frenchman, Odo of Paris, who had likewise been at Trier, wrote to Hildegard praising the originality of her songs, and asking her whether, through her visio, she could pronounce on the correctness or otherwise of one of the central theses of Gilbert of Poitiers, which was about to be discussed at Gilbert's hearing at the Council of Reims: were God's 'fatherhood' and 'godhead' identical with God?¹⁵ That is, Odo credited Hildegard with a means of judging different from and superior to normal methods of metaphysical enquiry.

From 1147 onwards Hildegard, her prophetic rôle endorsed, is often appealed to for counsel, and often volunteers it, among the secular and religious leaders of her day. Her correspondents include three popes (Anastasius IV and Hadrian IV as well as Eugene III), monarchs (Conrad III, Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the Byzantine Empress Irene), as well as a host of lesser dignitaries. She undertakes preaching journeys, addressing sermons to monks in their abbeys, to bishops and clergy at their synods, as well as to the laity in towns. She attempts to exorcize. In a word, as prophet Hildegard assumed without serious opposition many high sacerdotal functions which in general the Church had seen, and continued to see, as male prerogatives. Always she distinguishes between herself in her own right, the 'poor little womanly figure (paupercula feminea forma)', and what the divine voice, or the living light, expresses through her. When she admonishes, warns, or castigates, it is always in the name of that light and that voice, not in her own.

Thus she is able to write Emperor Frederick both a letter holding up to him a mirror of princely conduct, and later (probably in 1164, when for the second time Frederick set up his own anti-pope) a ferocious warning: he is behaving 'childishly, like one whose mode of life is insane (velut parvulum et velut insane viventem)'.¹⁶ She explains the nature of the prophet's task beautifully in a letter to Elisabeth of Schönau, whose own visions were of an ecstatic kind. Here Hildegard expresses herself gently, yet her words carry a hint of reproachful admonition:

Those who long to perfect the works of God … should leave heavenly things to him who is heavenly; for they are exiles, ignorant of the celestial, only singing the hiddenness of God, in the same way as a trumpet only brings forth sounds but does not cause them: another must blow into it, for the sound to emerge. So too I, lying low in pusillanimity of fear, at times resound a little, like a small trumpet-note from the living brightness.¹⁷

The tension that this inner duality entailed showed itself physically in the ever-recurring migraines and related ailments; then, in the years 1150-1, the tension was exacerbated by two events in which Hildegard was certain she had received prophetic knowledge of God's will, but where keen human resistance was shown. In 1150 it was a question of fighting for the independence of her community—of allowing the sisters to move some 30 kilometres away from the Disibodenberg, to the Rupertsberg on the Rhine. Here, after bitter opposition from the Disibodenberg monks, on grounds of prestige and finance as well as of personal attachment, Hildegard at last had her way. The following year she was faced with the desire for independence of Richardis, the nun whom she loved best. There, despite impassioned appeals to archbishops, to members of Richardis' high-born family, and even to Pope Eugene, Hildegard failed.

II

Her own reflections on the two events, which survive in the Vita, deserve to be quoted:¹⁸

At one time, because of a dimming of my eyes, I could see no light; I was weighed down in body by such a weight that I could not get up, but lay there assailed by the most intense pains. I suffered in this way because I had not divulged the vision I had been shown, that with my girls (cum puellis meis) I should move from the Disibodenberg, where I had been vowed to God, to another place. I was afflicted till I named the place where I am now. At once I regained my sight and had things easier, though I still did not recover fully from my sickness. But my abbot, and the monks and the populace in that province, when they realized what the move implied—that we wanted to go from fertile fields and vineyards and the loveliness of that spot to parched places where there were no amenities—were all amazed. And they intrigued so that this should not come about: they were determined to oppose us. What is more, they said I was deluded by some vain fantasy. When I heard this, my heart was crushed, and my body and veins dried up. Then, lying in bed for many days, I heard a mighty voice forbidding me to utter or to write anything more in that place about my vision.

Then a noble marchioness, who was known to us, approached the archbishop of Mainz and laid all this before him and before other wise counsellors. They said that no place could be hallowed except through good deeds, so that it seemed right that we should go ahead. And thus, by the archbishop's permission, with a vast escort of our kinsfolk and of other men, in reverence of God we came to the Rupertsberg. Then the ancient deceiver put me to the ordeal of great mockery, in that many people said: 'What's all this—so many hidden truths revealed to this foolish, unlearned woman, even though there are many brave and wise men around? Surely this will come to nothing!' For many people wondered whether my revelation stemmed from God, or from the parchedness (inaquositas) of aerial spirits, that often seduced human beings.

So I. stayed in that place with twenty girls of noble and wealthy parentage, and we found no habitation or inhabitant there, save for one old man and his wife and children. Such great misfortunes and such pressure of toil befell me, it was as if a stormcloud covered the sun—so that, sighing and weeping copiously, I said: 'Oh, oh, God confounds no one who trusts in him!' Then God showed me his grace again, as when the clouds recede and the sun bursts forth, or when a mother offers her weeping child milk, restoring its joy after tears.

Then in true vision I saw that these tribulations had come to me according to the exemplar of Moses, for when he led the children of Israel from Egypt through the Red Sea into the desert, they, murmuring against God, caused great affliction to Moses too, even though God lit them on their way with wondrous signs. So God let me be oppressed in some measure by the common people, by my relatives, and by some of the women who had remained with me, when they lacked essential things (except inasmuch as, through God's grace, they were given to us as alms). For just as the children of Israel plagued Moses, so these people, shaking their heads over me, said: 'What good is it for well-born and wealthy girls to pass from a place where they lacked nothing into such penury?' But we were waiting for the grace of God, who had shown us this spot, to come to our aid.

After the pressure of such grief, he rained that bounty upon us. For many, who had previously despised us and called us a parched useless thing, came from every side to help us, filling us with blessings. And many rich people buried their dead on our land, with due honour …

Nonetheless, God did not want me to remain steadily in complete security: this he had shown me since infancy in all my concerns, sending me no carefree joy as regards this life, through which my mind could become overbearing. For when I was writing my book Scivias, I deeply cherished a nobly-born young girl, daughter of the marchioness I mentioned, just as Paul cherished Timothy. She had bound herself to me in loving friendship in every way, and showed compassion for my illnesses, till I had finished the book. But then, because of her family's distinction, she hankered after an appointment of more repute: she wanted to be named abbess of some splendid church. She pursued this not for the sake of God but for worldly honour. When she had left me, going to another region far away from us, she soon afterwards lost her life and the renown of her appointment.

Some other noble girls, too, acted in similar fashion, separating themselves from me. Some of them later lived such irresponsible lives that many people said, their actions showed that they sinned against the Holy Spirit, and against the person who spoke from out of the Spirit. But I and those who loved me wondered why such great persecution came upon me, and why God did not bring me comfort, since I did not wish to persevere in sins but longed to perfect good works with his help. Amid all this I completed my book Scivias, as God willed.

Nearly thirty years before Hildegard's move to the Rupertsberg, Abelard had confronted problems which were in many aspects similar, and which he sketches in his Historia calamitatum in ways that are often close to Hildegard's.¹⁹ Abbot Adam of Saint-Denis was as reluctant to let Abelard free himself from the great royal monastery as Abbot Kuno was to release Hildegard from the Disibodenberg. Abelard, like Hildegard, achieved release only after encountering various intrigues, by appealing to high authority—to the bishop of Meaux and the king of France—as Hildegard appealed to the archbishop of Mainz and the marchioness of Stade. The place in which he won freedom is described, like hers, as full of physical hardship: at the barren site that was to become Abelard's foundation, the Paraclete, the students who followed him, 'leaving spacious dwellings, built themselves small huts; instead of living on delicate foods, they ate wild herbs and coarse bread; instead of soft beds they used thatch and straw'. And later, when the Paraclete was made into a refuge for Heloise and her nuns, Abelard expresses the same sense as Hildegard of a miraculous change for the better, a sudden advent of wealth and plenty where before there was want:

Heloise and her nuns at first endured a life of privation there—for a time they were desolate—but in a short while the gaze of divine mercy gave them comfort … and made people all around merciful and helpful to them. And God knows, their earthly commodities were multiplied more in one year, I think, than I could have achieved in a hundred, had I stayed.²⁰

Nonetheless, neither Abelard nor Hildegard won complete inner security. He suffered the disloyalties and slanders (and even violence) of the monks at his new abbey, Saint-Gildas; Hildegard too was beset by what she took to be disloyalty among her community—those who complained of the discomforts of the new settlement, those who left it for a less demanding life; most of all she was overcome by the departure of her much-loved Richardis, a defection to which Hildegard attributes only unworthy motives. And just as Abelard tells laconically of the abbot of Saint-Denis, who had refused his plea for permanent release, 'Departing in such obstinacy, he died a few days later', so too Hildegard mentions Richardis' sudden early death as if it had been a consequence of her stubbornness. It is not crude and ferocious way in which, in the seventh century, St Valerius branded those who opposed his will to live in solitude—saying for instance of Bishop Isidore of Asturias, who tried to get the saint to assume some public responsibility at the Council of Toledo:

… through the true judgement of almighty God, he suddenly fell into the pool which he had opened as a trap for me. It left me unharmed, while endless hell swallowed him.²¹

Still, in Abelard's words as in Hildegard's, the sense that God's judgment showed itself in their favour, after their own wish had been thwarted, seems implicit.

And yet Hildegard's account has an element relating to her particular situation that is different from Abelard's. She is a woman, and she claims to have received prophetic illumination: she is disbelieved and mocked on both counts. So too in one of Hildegard's lyrical sequences for St Ursula: she pictures Ursula shouting out her longing to race through the heavens and join the divine Sun, and causing scandal by her mystical utterances—

so that men said:
'What simple, girlish ignorance!
She does not know what she is saying.'²²

This detail—which has no parallel in the hagiographic sources about Ursula—suggests that the sequence, which may indeed have been composed in the very years of the events which caused Hildegard such turmoil, contains a personal projection, that Hildegard sees this saint in a special way as figura and aspiration for herself.

Yet she is again like Abelard in that she continually applies parallels from Old Testament characters to her own destiny. She leads her little band to the Rupertsberg in the way Moses led the Israelites to the wilderness, and is grumbled at as Moses was. In the next note 'in scripto suo', the exemplars continue. Now her struggle is for administrative and financial independence for her new foundation. On account of this, she says, she suffered hostility like Joshua, she was envied like Joseph by his brothers; and as God came to Joshua's and Joseph's aid, so did he to hers. The details of the conflict are recorded not in the Vita but near the beginning of a didactic letter, explaining the Athanasian Creed to her daughters on the Rupertsberg. She fought the monks, she there tells, not only on the question of property, but on that of keeping with them the monk Volmar, who had long been her provost and secretary, and who strictly should have remained in his own cloister. The Disibodenberg monks, even after they had been made to let Hildegard and her twenty sisters move, were not happy to see the disappearance of the endowments which these women (all from prominent families) had brought with them to the monastery; nor did they wish to lose one of their ablest confrères:²³

At God's behest I made my way back to the mountain of blessed Disibodus, from where, with permission, I had seceded. And I made my petition in the presence of all those living in the cloister: that our site, and the domains donated with that site, should no longer be tied to them …

And in accordance with what I perceived in my true vision, I said to the Father Abbot: 'The serene light says: You shall be father to our provost, and father of the salvation of the souls of the daughters of my mystic garden.²⁴ But their alms do not belong to you or to your brothers—your cloister should be a refuge for these women. If you are determined to go on with your perverse proposals, raging against us, you will be like the Amalekites, and like Antiochus, of whom it was written that he despoiled the Temple of the Lord.²⁵ If some of you, unworthy ones, said to yourselves: Let's take some of their freeholds away—then I WHO AM²⁶ say: You are the worst of robbers. And if you try to take away the shepherd of spiritual medicine [i.e. Provost Volmar], then again I say, you are sons of Belial, and in this do not look to the justice of God. So that same justice will destroy you.'

And when I, poor little creature (paupercula forma), had with these words petitioned the abbot and his confrères for the freehold of the site and domains of my daughters, they all granted it to me, entering the transfer in a codex.

In the same way as the Rupertsberg, Abelard's Paraclete, when it was made over to women through his gift, had to have its independence officially secured: a papal Privilegium (1131) confirmed in perpetuity for Heloise and her nuns the possession of all property connected with the foundation.

III

On the Disibodenberg, Hildegard launched not so much a petition (though she calls it that) as a fulmination. Even more in her other ordeal at this time, the loss of Richardis, where in the end she did not get her way, we sense that Hildegard could use her prophetic persona savagely and overbearingly. In her first letter about this, where she appeals to the marchioness, mother of Richardis and grandmother of Adelheid (who likewise wanted to leave the Rupertsberg and accept a more prominent appointment as an abbess), there is as yet no attempt to legislate in the name of the God of Moses, only a sense of human anguish—quickly followed, however, by a vehement conviction of being in the right:²⁷

I beseech you and urge you not to trouble my soul so deeply that you bring bitter tears to my eyes and wound my heart with dire wounds, on account of my most loving daughters Richardis and Adelheid. I see them now glowing in the dawn and graced with pearls of virtues. So take care lest by your will, your advice and connivance, their senses and their souls be moved away from the sublimity of that grace. For the position of abbess, that you desire for them, is surely, surely, surely not compatible with God (certe, certe, certe non est cum deo), or with the salvation of their souls.

Nonetheless, the two girls accepted nomination as abbesses. With Adelheid, there is no record of further resistance by Hildegard; but she did not give Richardis leave to take up her new task. When the archbishop of Mainz wrote to Hildegard demanding (with even a hint of threat) that she now yield and release Richardis, she answered, claiming to speak with the voice of God, in unbridled denunciation of the archbishop himself. By insisting on this office for Richardis, he shows he is nothing but a simoniac:

The lucid fountain who is not deceitful but is just says: the reasons that have been alleged for the appointment of this girl are unavailing in the sight of God, because I, the high and deep and encompassing one, who am a piercing light, did not lay down or choose those reasons: they were perpetrated in the conniving audacity of ignorant hearts … The spirit of God, full of zeal, says: pastors, lament and mourn at this time, because you do not know what you do, when you squander offices, whose source is God, for financial gain and to please the foolishness of wicked men, who have no fear of God. Then your malicious curses and threatening words must not be heeded …

Arise, because your days are short, and remember that Nebuchadnezzar fell and that his crown perished. And many others fell who rashly raised themselves up to heaven. Ah, you ember, why do you not grow red with shame at flying up when you should be fading?²⁸

For Hildegard, losing Richardis meant losing her close collaborator and losing the disciple whom she admired most and to whom she was most deeply attached. Was it simply arrogant possessiveness that impelled her to speak as prophet here, so as to try and overthrow the archbishop's decision? Her broader invective, against clergy motivated by financial gain, implies that there had been something irregular about Richardis' election. This could perhaps be corroborated by considering that the marchioness' grand-daughter, Adelheid, was at almost the same date (1152) elected abbess of the illustrious foundation Gandersheim, making this move at a time when she was probably still of school-girl age and certainly too young to have taken her monastic vows on the Rupertsberg. This suggests that those who elected Adelheid—and possibly those who elected Richardis, too—may have been influenced less by the suitability of the two girls than by a hope of rich endowments from the von Stade family in return for these elections. (Adelheid's mother had married exaltedly three times, and had been Queen of Denmark.)

With Richardis, however, the matter is more complex: Hildegard in the Vita passage intimates that Richardis herself was eager for a position that she felt befitted her high worldly rank. Possibly the primitive conditions on the Rupertsberg, in the first year after the move, irked her, possibly she came to feel oppressed by Hildegard's dominance—many contributing elements can be surmised, though none proved.

Hildegard's conviction, which comes out so strongly in the letter to the marchioness, that any acceptance of such dignities for reasons other than idealistic ones is evil and imperils the soul, sounds wholly genuine, however much her own impassioned obduracy may have played a part in her seeing it that way. She next appealed to Richardis' brother, Archbishop Hartwig, whose diocese, Bremen, included his sister's new abbey:

Dear friend, I greatly cherish your soul, more than your family. Now hear me, prostrate in tears and misfortune before your feet, for my soul is deeply sad, because a horrible man (horribilis homo) has overthrown my advice and will.

Here Hildegard seems to accuse even her beloved Richardis of having deliberately bought her office:

If one of restless mind seeks preferment, longing to be master, striving lustfully for power rather than looking to the will of God, such a one is a marauding wolf in person … That is simony.

Yet a moment later the chief blame is laid on Abbot Kuno of the Disibodenberg:

Thus it was not necessary for our abbot to predetermine a holy soul, bedazed in sense and ignorant, into these actions and into such irresponsibility of mental blindness. If our daughter had remained at peace, God would have prepared her for the intention of his glory. So I beg you … send my beloved daughter back to me! For I shan't ignore an election that stems from God, nor contradict her, wherever it may be … I ask it, so that I may be consoled through her, and she through me. What God has commanded I do not oppose. May God give you blessing from the dew of heaven, and may all the choirs of angels bless you, if you hear me, God's handmaiden, and accomplish God's will in this issue.²⁹

Hildegard's accusations, taken together, are somewhat confusing. At times they are levelled at Richardis herself, at times against her family, at others against the abbot of the Disibodenberg or the archbishop of Mainz. In a word, Hildegard felt there was a conspiracy against her. And quite possibly this was no mere persecution-fantasy. The von Stade family clearly had a whole network of influential connections in the Church throughout Germany. Yet they would scarcely have taken advantage of these had they not been prompted by Richardis' own desire to leave. Hildegard, unwilling to accept this, in her doting attachment, made an exhibition of herself in a way she never did (though she had feared to) in her early visions.

In her letter to Hartwig, once more, Hildegard does not claim outright to be speaking as God's mouthpiece. And yet she is never less than certain that she knows the will of God; doing God's will and doing her will are seen as identical. There is a frightening hint of megalomania here. It does not seem to have escaped Pope Eugene, to whom Hildegard wrote in a last attempt to quash Richardis' abbacy. The text of her appeal to him does not survive, but Eugene's answer,³⁰ while full of praise for Hildegard, 'so kindled by the fire of divine love', also contains a hint of warning: it is those who are great who often greatly fall. 'Reflect then, my daughter, because that serpent of old who cast the first man out of paradise longs to destroy the great, such as Job …' Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, he turns to her petition, and he evades it: only if there were no adequate scope for practising the Benedictine Rule in Richardis' new abbey, Bassum, should she be returned to Hildegard. (As Bassum was at that moment a more renowned Benedictine foundation than the Rupertsberg, this was a wholly hypothetical alternative.) The archbishop of Mainz was to judge whether Bassum was monastically suitable. This was in effect to confirm his earlier decision against Hildegard.

It is a token of Hildegard's greatness that, faced with this defeat, she not only tried to resign herself to it but to find fruitful meaning in it. Thus she wrote, 'to the maiden Richardis':

1. Daughter, hear me, your mother in the spirit, saying to you: My grief rises up. Grief kills the great trust and solace that I found in a human being. From now on I shall say: 'It is good to set one's hope in the Lord, better than to set it in the world's mighty ones.' That is, man ought to look to the one on high, the living one, quite unshaded by any love or feeble trust such as the dark sublunary air offers for a brief time. One who beholds God thus raises the eyes like an eagle to the sun. And because of this one should not look to a high personage, who fails as flowers fall.
2. I fell short of this, because of love for a noble person. Now I tell you, whenever I have sinned in this way, God has made that sin clear to me in some experiences of anguish or of pain—and this has now happened on account of you, as you yourself know.
3. Now, again, I say: Woe is me, your mother, woe is me, daughter—why have you abandoned me like an orphan? I loved the nobility of your conduct, your wisdom and chastity, your soul and the whole of your life, so much that many said: What are you doing?
4. Now let all who have a sorrow like my sorrow mourn with me—all who have ever, in the love of God, had such high love in heart and mind for a human being as I for you—for one snatched away from them in a single moment, as you were from me.
5. But may the angel of God precede you, and the son of God protect you, and his mother guard you. Be mindful of your poor mother Hildegard, that your happiness may not fail.

The language Hildegard uses in this letter is both intimate and heavy with biblical echoes. These can heighten, but also modify, what she is saying; they make the letter suprapersonal as well as personal. Both aspects are vital to what is essentially a harsh confrontation between transcendent love and the love of the heart.

The opening words, 'Daughter, hear me (Audi me, filia)', echo a verse in Psalm 44 that, by its continuation—which will have been present to Richardis' mind as to Hildegard's—suggests an implicit claim greater than Hildegard spells out:

Daughter, hear me and see, and incline your
  ear,
and forget your people and your father's
  house—
then the King will desire your glorious beauty
  …

That is, Hildegard by her choice of opening suggests it is only by heeding her and turning her back on the world of her own family that Richardis will become a bride of the heavenly King. So too she does not address Richardis as an equal, an abbess like herself: she is still 'the maiden', the spiritual daughter, who must listen to her mother. Yet what the mother now brings forth is not a command but a planctus. She expresses her sense of betrayal citing the words of Psalm 117:9 ('Bonum est sperare in Domino quam sperare in principibus'), which contrast the steadfastness of God's love with the fickleness of human hopes. All human attachments, Hildegard concludes, are by their nature mutable, and should be surmounted in singleminded contemplation of the changeless one. Isaiah (40: 7-8) contrasts the human lot—to wither like a flower—with the word of God, which remains forever. Yet the echo from the Epistle of James (1:11) is perhaps even more pertinent here, James who says of a rich person, 'the flower falls, the beauty of its aspect has perished'.

From meditation on the two kinds of attachment (1), Hildegard passes to introspection (2). All that drew her to Richardis was of necessity transitory, and her clinging to that transitoriness was the source of her suffering: it carried its own nemesis within. And yet this second 'movement', of changed awareness (anagnorisis), is also parallel with the third, which is outbreak of renewed lament. The closeness of the two impulses is reflected in the parallelism of wording ('Nunc tibi dico … Nunc iterum dico'). In the complaint that follows (3), bibical echoes again evoke the love of God in contrast to human love. But the connotations pull in two directions: the words 'why have you abandoned me (quare me dereliquisti)' are the Psalmist's anguished reproach of God (Psalm 21:2), yet here they are capped by the words 'like an orphan (sicut orphanam)', recalling the moment in John (13:18) when Christ promises his disciples that, after leaving them to go back to the Father, 'I shall not abandon you like orphans—I shall come to you.'

Amid her grieving Hildegard claims the human loftiness of the love she felt—and a moment later acknowledges that, long before herself, others had perceived this was a hopeless attachment. This leads into a final threnody (4), summoning fellow-mourners, in the words of Jeremiah's lamentation (1: 12):

Oh all of you who pass by the wayside,
take heed and see if there is a sorrow like my
  sorrow …

In Jeremiah the words are spoken by a feminine projection, Jerusalem. The context there has many reverberations that enrich the letter: the domina of peoples has become like a widow … there is none to solace her among all her dear ones … she has sinned and therefore has become unstable … moaning and turning away … she has been cast down violently, having no comforter'. And yet there is perhaps an even greater audacity in Hildegard's echo of Jeremiah, for in the medieval Good Friday liturgy the words were seen as spoken not by Jerusalem but figurally by Christ in the Passion.

At the close (5), lament resolves itself in calm and loving valediction. Here Hildegard brings together the thought of Christ's mother and of herself, the 'wretched mother' of Richardis. Now, parted from her unhappy former spiritual mother, Richardis shall have a greater, heavenly mother to watch over her. Yet (again the term that springs to mind is from the Aristoelian dynamic of tragedy) a peripeteia has been accomplished: Hildegard has moved from the confident opening summons, 'hear me, your mother in the spirit (matrem tuam in spiritu)', to a dejected close— 'be mindful of your poor mother (esto memor misere matris tue)'. At the same time the last words—'that your happiness may not fail (ut non deficiat felicitas tua)'—suggest that, even if no human attachment can or should endure, this should not exempt anyone from lovingly remembering one's fellow-being 'in the love of God'.

After Richardis' sudden death her brother Hartwig wrote again to Hildegard, telling her that at the end, weeping, with all her heart she longed to return:

So I ask you with all my power, if I am worthy to ask, that you love her as much as she loved you. And if she seems to have failed in any way—since this was due to me, not to her—that at least you consider the tears she shed for having left your convent, tears that many people witnessed. And if death had not prevented her, she would have come to you—the permission had only just been given.³¹

Hildegard answers this letter with a superb flight of magnanimity, sublimation and forgiveness:

Full divine love (plena Caritas) was in my soul towards her, for in the mightiest vision the living light taught me to love her (ipsam amare). Listen: God kept her so jealously that worldly delight could not embrace her: she fought against it, even though she rose like a flower in the beauty and glory and symphony of this world …

So my soul has great confidence in her, though the world loved her beautiful looks and her prudence, while she lived in the body. But God loved her more. Thus God did not wish to give his beloved to a rival lover, that is, to the world …

So I also expel from my heart that pain you caused me regarding this my daughter.³²

Hildegard here uses of Richardis a kind of hyperbole more familiar in the love-poetry of the following century. Thus in the Vita Nuova, after Beatrice's death, Dante claims 'it was only her great benignity' that took her from the world: 'a sweet desire came to [God] to summon so great a perfection: he made her come to him, from here below, because he saw that this wretched life was unworthy of so noble a creature'.³³ So too, even before her death, an angel in the divine intellect cries out to have Beatrice in 'heaven, which has no defect save for not having her: heaven begs her of its Lord'.³⁴ Dante also, like Hildegard, echoed Jeremiah's lamenting words to express grief in the dimension of human love: 'Oh you who pass along the road of Love, attend There is and see if there is any sorrow heavy as mine.'³⁵ There is a touching incongruity in Hildegard's allusion to Richardis' prudence—she who in life had accused Richardis so vehemently of mental blindness (obcecatio mentis), in her longing for independence. Yet if this letter suggests that, at however great an inner cost, Hildegard had arrived at a comprehending acceptance of the young woman who had wanted to carve out her own life rather than remain a disciple, there is the troubling consideration that the succinct and unsympathetic note preserved in the Vita represents Hildegard's later reflections. She made these notes probably after the Liber divinorum operum (completed 1173/4), which is their last point of reference. Even if some notes had been complied intermittently in earlier years, it is unlikely that any were set down as early as Richardis' death (29 October 1152). It seems as though, later in her life, it was what had rankled then with Hildegard that came once more to plague her thoughts.

IV

In the next autobiographic note in the Vita, Hildegard, describing her recurring illnesses, speaks of 'aerial torments' that pervaded her body, drying up the veins with their blood, the flesh with its humoral juice (livor), the marrow with the bones. An 'aerial fire' was burning in her womb. She lay motionless on a coarse cloth (cilicium) on the ground, and all gathered round her, convinced she was about to die. Hildegard believed it was 'aerial spirits' who were causing these afflictions. At the same time she heard a good angel, one of Michael's host, inviting her to die and so regain heaven. He summons her in language akin to that of the invitations in the Song of Songs; yet whilst there the beloved bride is called dove (columba), Hildegard (who dares to gaze at the divine Sun, like the eagle in the bestiary tradition) is called—or sees herself as—aquila: 'Ah, ah my eagle, why do you sleep in knowledge? Rise from your doubt, you are known! Oh gem full of splendour, every eagle shall behold you. The world shall mourn, but heavenly life shall rejoice. And so, in the dawn, fly up to the sun! Rise, rise, come eat and drink!' Again the closest parallel in imaginative situation is the one already cited from the Vita Nuova— the angel calling to Beatrice to join the heavenly throng. And just as God answers in Dante's canzone, so here the angelic host answers the first angel, declaring that heaven has not yet sanctioned this hope.

Malignant aerial spirits, Hildegard saw in this visio, also attacked some of her noble daughters in the convent, and meshed them in a net of vanities. When she tried to recall them to a holier life, some, who looked at her with fierce eyes (torvis luminibus me aspicientes),³⁶ also slandered her in secret, saying that the form of monastic life she wanted to impose was intolerable. Other sisters took Hildegard's part, she relates, as Daniel took Susanna's, and in the midst of these conflicts God revealed her second visionary work, the Liber vitae meritorum, and allowed her to complete it (1158-63).

At the close of this Liber, Hildegard not only sets forth once more, with eloquent images, her awareness of her prophetic task, but she adds a curse on any future person who might add to or cut away any word she has written—a curse that, in Christian Latin, Gregory of Tours had been the first to call down upon later generations.³⁷ As with Gregory, the integrity and inviolability of her written text is of supreme importance to Hildegard—but with her this is grounded specifically in her sense that throughout writing she has been God's instrument: of herself she writes:

She lives and does not live, she perceives the things formed of dust and does not perceive them, and utters God's miracles not of herself but being touched by them, even as a string touched by a lutanist emits a sound not of itself but by his touch … Therefore, if anyone of his own accord perversely add anything to these writings that goes beyond their clear intent, he deserves to be exposed to the punishments here described; or if anyone perversely remove any passage from them, he deserves to be banned from the joys that are here shown.³⁸

Then, in the elaborate, mysterious vision that next follows in the Vita, this awareness of her own work as an entity with its unique claims extends (I would argue) to an intimation of the qualities of her life and work as a whole.—

In vision I saw three towers, by means of which Wisdom opened certain hidden things up for me. The first tower had three rooms. In the first room were nobly-born girls together with some others, who in burning love listened to God's words coming from my mouth—they had a kind of ceaseless hunger for that. In the second were some steadfast and wise women, who embraced God's truth in their hearts and words, saying 'Oh, how long will this remain with us?' They never wearied of that. In the third room were brave armed men from the common people, who, advancing ardently towards us, were led to marvel at the miracles of the first two rooms, and loved them with great longing. They came forward frequently, in the way that common people seek the protection of a prince, to guard them against their enemies, in a firm and mighty tower.

In the second tower there were also three rooms. Two of them had become arid in dryness, and that dryness took the form of a dense fog. And those who were in these rooms said with one voice: 'What are these things, and from where, which that woman utters as if they were from God? It's hard for us to live differently from our forefathers or the people of our time. So let's turn to those who know us, since we cannot persevere in anything else.' Thus they turned back to the common people—they were of no use in this tower, or in the first … But in the third room of this tower were common people who, with many kinds of love, cherished the words of God that I brought forth from my true vision, and supported me in my tribulations, even as the publicans clung to Christ.

The third tower had three ramparts. The first was wooden, the second decked with flashing stones, the third was a hedge. But a further building was hidden from me in my vision, so that I learnt nothing about it at the time. Yet in the true light I heard that the future writing which will be set down concerning it will be mightier and more excellent than the preceding ones.

The structuring of a vision by telling of diverse buildings and parts of buildings, of people who welcome a divine message in diverse ways and others who reject it, was something Hildegard had learnt from the second-century prophetic treatise Pastor Hermas.³⁹ But where Hermas explains most details in allegoric terms, and Hildegard often follows him in this technique, here she makes no attempt at interpreting her vision: all is left enigmatic. And yet her meticulous differentiation of details is unlikely to be arbitrary invention. The whole mode of presentation suggests that an allegorical meaning was intended, but is missing (at least among the autobiographic notes that have survived), though it is also possible that Hildegard at the time of receiving this visio was not yet fully conscious of its precise further significance. No interpretation, to my knowledge, has ever been proposed. The one I would suggest—though very tentatively—takes its cue from the close of the vision. The building which is still hidden from Hildegard, but which—she hears—will stimulate writing mightier and more excellent than the others, would seem to be a glimmering intuition of her last major work, Liber divinorum operum. This is indeed grander in design than her other visionary writings and could be called her masterpiece. If this hypothesis is correct, it indicates some possible interpretations for the earlier part of the vision of the towers. The first tower, with its three rooms, could then stand symbolically for Scivias, with its three books. Her words reach her fellow-nuns, younger and older, in the first two rooms, but also go out to the populace, to those among them who acknowledge Hildegard as prophet and are ready to see her as their princeps. Does the linking of the common people with the third room perhaps imply that it was especially the third book of Scivias, in particular the lyrical and dialogued parts near the close, which ordinary people could come to love (even without knowing Latin), in the form of songs in the Symphonia and of dramatic action in the Ordo Virtutum?—that it was principally these which brought the unlearned to admire Hildegard and all she stood for?

The next tower would presumably refer in some way to the Liber vitae meritorum. That two of its three rooms are arid and filled with fog could then perhaps reflect that in this work, with its wide-ranging images of vices and virtues, the chief emphasis—till near the close—is on evil and sin, and the penalties for these, rather than on the joyous rewards. Yet here there is no exact correspondence of rooms with books: the Liber vitae meritorum, at least in the form in which it survives in all the earliest manuscripts, is divided into six books, not three, hence the specific interpretation must remain open. The same holds of the third tower, with its three ramparts. Yet this tower could well be an image for Hildegard's scientific treatise, the Subtilitates naturarum diversarum creaturarum. This comprehended both the so-called Causae et curae and Physica—texts that originally belonged to a work which, according to Hildegard's explicit testimony, formed a single, larger whole.⁴⁰ In particular, three parts of the Physica—the books on trees, on precious stones, and on plants—might correspond to the triple rampart—wooden, gemmed, and hedged—of this tower.

The conviction that her greatest work was still to come increases in the next 'showing' preserved in Hildegard's Vita. This is remarkable in being the only time she describes a vision accompanied by loss of normal consciousness. Her note about the three towers, and the fourth, still unfinished, edifice, continues:

At last in the time that followed I saw a mystic and wondrous vision, such that all my womb was convulsed and my body's sensory powers were extinguished, because my knowledge was transmuted into another mode, as if I no longer knew myself. And from God's inspiration as it were drops of gentle rain splashed into the knowledge of my soul.

She compares this moment to the one in which St John received the inspiration 'In the beginning was the Word …' Reflecting on the nature of that Word, 'sucking its revelation' as John had done ('revelationem suxit'), leads her to see the complementarity of human and divine:

Man, with every creature, is a handiwork of God. But man is also the worker (operarius) of divinity, and the shading (obumbratio) of the mysteries of divine being.

The vision showed Hildegard how to explain the Prologue of John: 'And I saw that this explanation had to be the beginning of another piece of writing, which had not yet been manifested, in which many investigations of the creations of the divine mystery would have to be pursued.' This is now an unequivocal forward reference to the Liber divinorum operum, where the first book has as its climax an interpretation of the Prologue of John.⁴¹

V

The visionary insight into how to interpret John's Prologue, which came to Hildegard about 1167, was followed by another half-year of mortal sickness, first brought on—she writes—by the blowing of the south wind (de flatu australis venti), that 'Föhn' which even in present-day Germany is still seen as a source of malaises of every kind, physical and psychological. It is during this sickness that she hears of Sigewize, a young noblewoman living on the lower Rhine, who is being assailed by a demon. Hildegard was reflecting on and longing to know (cogitante et scire volente) the exact way in which a demon can affect human beings. In her vision she sees that it cannot 'enter' a person (non intrat); yet she believes it can envelop and shadow humans 'with a smoke of darkness (fumo nigredinis)'. That is, it can besiege or 'obsess' a person (obsidere), though there is no question of demonic 'possession (possessio)'.⁴² God tolerates the demons' causing various disasters in the world: they can vomit up a plague (pestilentiam evomunt), they can cause floods and wars and hostilities and evils among mankind. Their effects, in short, can be material and immaterial: their dark smoke, it would seem, has baleful results very similar to those widely attributed to the 'Föhn'.

Hildegard is asked to help Sigewize, because the demon (speaking, the context suggests, with the young woman's voice), had cried out that only a certain vetula on the upper Rhine could do so. The ironic reference is elaborated by Theodoric, author of the third book of the Vita, which also includes Hildegard's own notes on the episode: according to Theodoric, the vetula is named, derisively, not Hildegardis but Scrumpilgardis ('Wrinklegard'). It seems prudent, however, to discount any details given by Theodoric that are not corroborated in Hildegard's own words, for he, concerned to attribute miraculous powers to her, such as she herself never claimed, embellishes his account with many details that patently derive from a less-than-scrupulous hagiographic tradition. What emerges from Hildegard's account is that, after her initial refusal, on grounds of being too unwell, she tried to cure the young woman by devising an elaborate mimetic scenario for her—an ordo in many ways comparable to her play, Ordo Virtutum—to drive the demon away. A good part of the text of this eloquent and ingenious attempt at shock-therapy survives.⁴³ Nonetheless, Hildegard makes clear that it had only a passing effect on the patient, not a durable one. So the abbot of Brauweiler, where the scenario had been performed, pleaded with Hildegard to receive Sigewize and try to help her in person.⁴⁴ Though she and the Rupertsberg nuns were the prospect ('multum exterrite fuimus'), they accepted her, and weeks of communal prayer and ascetic practices resulted, first in a physical spasm, then in Sigewize's gradual convalescence ('de die in diem', P.L. 197, 183 A). It is noteworthy that, though Theodoric's part of the Vita is packed with fantasizing miracle-tales, Hildegard herself pretends to nothing beyond having assisted the woman's cure by means of prayer, and by letting the demon 'express himself through her: we might say, she helped Sigewize's recovery by allowing her to voice openly all her religious fixations and woes, and even her 'demonic' rage, when Hildegard argued against some of her utterances.

The last two autobiographic notes preserved in the Vita take us to the period 1170-4. Another grievous illness followed the liberation (liberatio) of Sigewize. In it, Hildegard sees 'evil spirits mocking my sickness, cackling at it, saying "Hah, she will die, and her friends will weep, those with whom she confounds us!" Yet I did not see the departure of my soul towards being. I suffered this sickness more than forty days and nights.'

In her vision it was shown to her that she was obliged to undertake another voyage as preacher. 'As long as I neglected these journeys that God commanded me to make, for fear of people, the pains in my body increased. They did not cease till I obeyed—as happened to Jonah, who was fiercely afflicted till he bent himself to obedience.'

For her assent, she was rewarded in her visio with the consolation of 'the fairest and most loving man' (pulcherrimus et amantissimus vir—the identification with Christ is not made explicit),

… such that the look of him perfused all my womb with a balmlike perfume. Then I exulted with great and immeasurable joy, and longed to go on gazing forever. And he commanded those who afflicted me to depart from me, saying: 'Away, I do not want you to torment her any more!' They, departing with great howls, cried out: 'Woe that we ever came here, as we leave confounded!' At once, at the man's words, the sickness that had troubled me, like waters stirred to a flood by tempestuous winds, left me, and I recovered strength.

Hildegard was now well enough, too, to fulfil a request of her former monastery, that she write the life of Disibodus, its patron saint. The same renewed health, she concludes, enabled her to write—that is, complete— the Liber divinorum operum (1173/4). For personal testimonies about the last years of her life we must resort to letters.

This last pair of showings has been invested with new kinds of literary stylization. It would seem that Hildegard, refusing here as always to demarcate material and immaterial phenomena, interprets all her illnesses in retrospect as attacks from demons—just as, in early Christian tradition, the nocturnal afflictions and temptations that beset the mind had been both bad dreams and phantoms of the night (somnia / et noctium phantasmata).⁴⁵ Instinctively, when she gives her demons words, Hildegard resorts to a lower or comic register of speech, including the vernacular exclamations of disgust and disappointment, 'Wach!' and 'Ach!' (So too in Hrotsvitha's writings, evil, about to be confounded, always showed itself as comic and grotesque.) At the same time, Hildegard does not let this lowering of tone affect the central experience: implicitly, with 'forty days and nights', she compares her sickness with Christ's time in the wilderness; explicitly, her dolorous resistance and hard-won obedience to a divine command are likened to Jonah's; and the evocation of the solace of 'the most loving man' relies on the language of the Song of Songs.

VI

Tengswindis, magistra of a foundation of canonesses on the Rhine, wrote Hildegard a letter that was both an (overtly polite) enquiry and a challenge.⁴⁶ The fame of Hildegard's holy life and wondrous visionary gift, she says, had reached her; yet rumours of a more disquieting kind had also come. Was it true that on festive days Hildegard's nuns wore rings, veils, and tiaras studded with symbolic images? 'We believe you wear all these for love of the heavenly Bridegroom, even though it is right for women (mulieres) to adorn themselves modestly.'

Besides, Tengswindis is amazed that Hildegard admits into her fellowship only women who are of high birth. 'Still, we know you are doing this on some reasonable ground (rationabili causa), not unaware that in the earliest Church (in primitiva ecclesia) the Lord chose fishermen, the lowly and the poor.' She reminds Hildegard of the words of St Peter ('God is no respecter of persons') and of St Paul ('not many who are mighty, not many who are nobly born …').

The blandness with which Tengswindis supposes unimpeáchable motives behind Hildegard's two innovations becomes, I believe, more palpably ironic near the close, in a request for further illumination:

Such novelty in your practice incomparably excels the minutes measure of our littleness, and arouses no small wonderment (admiratio) in us. Thus we, so exiguous (tantillule), rejoicing inwardly at your advances, have resolved to send our letter to your holiness,⁴⁷ beseeching humbly and most devoutly—so that our religious observance may be enhanced by the authority of such a one—that your dignity do not disdain to write back to us in the near future.

In her reply,⁴⁸ Hildegard begins by distinguishing between the rôles of married woman and virgin. The first should not flaunt herself: since the Fall, woman has been exposed to danger, precisely because she is so beautiful a divine creation:

The form of woman flashed and radiated in the primordial root … both by being an artifact of the finger of God and by her own sublime beauty. Oh how wondrous a being you are, you who laid your foundations in the sun and who have conquered the earth!

Over against this hymn to womanhood Hildegard sets St Paul's notion of woman's submission to her husband in modesty and fidelity. Woman has known winter—she cannot rise proudly in the flower of perpetual spring; she must not demand the exaltation of a tiara or gold, 'except at the wish of her husband, so that, in harmonious measure, she may give him delight'.

The virgo, by contrast, can still, even after the Fall, lay claim to that never-fading spring: 'She remains in the simplicity and beautiful integrity of paradise.' It is right for her, 'by licence and by revelation in the mystic breath of God's finger', to have bridal splendour.

Hildegard's answer to the second point, the 'élitism' of her convent, deserves close attention. It is God who holds the 'scrutiny (scrutinium)' of diverse classes,⁴⁹ 'so that the lesser order does not mount above the higher, as did Satan and the first man'. What farmer would put oxen, asses, sheep and goats in a single enclosure?—they would all scatter. So there must be differentiation among people, 'lest those of diverse estates, herded into the same flock, scatter themselves in the pride of self-assertion and the ignominy of being different … tearing one another with hate, when the higher rank sets upon the lower and the lower mounts above the higher.' God ranked his angels in nine hierarchies—and he loves them all.

Hildegard is convinced that this view is based on a correct assessment of human limitations, that it is 'realistic', and that such realism on earth has its sanction in heaven: 'For it is good that man should not catch hold of a mountain, which he cannot move, but rather should stay in a valley, learning gradually what he can master. These things are said by the living brightness, not by man.'

The eleventh and twelfth centuries, as Georges Duby has shown in an admirable recent book, saw the philosophic and political elaboration of a myth of classes, of les trois ordres, in Christian Europe.⁵⁰ Yet Tengswindis in her letter was clearly, in terms of the original Christian message, right. By her allusions to the Christ of the Gospels, and to Peter and Paul, she succinctly showed that the myth of classes was not compatible with primitiva ecclesia. Hildegard's analogies, in effect, rest on a fallacy: for there are different species of animals (and, to the theologian, of angels), but not of human beings.

That Hildegard claims her fallacy, and all else she says in her reply to Tengswindis, as the word of God (the letter opens with the words, 'The living fountain says …'), is not perhaps a particular act of hubris, but the obverse of her frequent admission that in her own right, without the sense of divinity speaking to her and through her, she would not dare pronounce on anything. Here she has deluded herself into thinking that the political myth of the ruling class of her day is a divine truth: deluded in the sense that she imagines this myth to be consistent with the teachings of Christ, about which in principle she has no doubts whatever, but which she had not consulted on this point. She is here in full accord with the dominant social beliefs of her class and time (just as, from the twelfth century to the fourteenth, we know of only the fewest people who believed, or argued, that crusading was an activity irreconcilable with Christ's teachings). Is it anachronistic to say that Hildegard could and should have done better? I think not: both because of the amount that is freshly and daringly thought out in the course of her writings, and even more, because of the very existence of Tengswindis' letter.

We know almost nothing else about Tengswindis.⁵¹ What is perhaps most surprising is that her letter emanated not from a regular convent but from a foundation for canonesses—as these were almost invariably, by their statutes, aristocratic communities, founded and maintained by the greatest families of the empire. It was rare indeed for nunneries to be so exclusive. Yet Tengswindis' assured and witty, well-documented plea for human equality in a Christian society comes out of precisely such an enclave of privilege.

The highly-wrought diadems worn by the women on the Rupertsberg also aroused the curiosity of the ardent Walloon monk, Guibert of Gembloux (1124/5-1213/14), who began as Hildegard's far-off admirer and became her last intimate friend. As a complete stranger he wrote her two letters full of excited reverence and full of questions. Does she dictate her visions in Latin or in German? Does she forget them after they are written down? Does her understanding of Scripture come through literary instruction or sheer inspiration? Does she see her visions during sleep, in the form of dreams, or awake, in ecstasy (excessus mentis)? (He seems not to reckon with any other possibility.) What is the exact meaning of the title of her book, Scivias? Has she written other books as well? And what about those tiaras? Are they due to a divine revelation, rather than to a taste for finery?⁵²

After two such letters, Hildegard wrote a long answer, one that so overwhelmed Guibert that he moved heaven and earth—or better, bent every conventual regulation— to be able to emigrate to the Rupertsberg and spend the rest of his days in Hildegard's company. This he enjoyed for just over two years—from June 1177, till her death (17 September 1179). As Hildegard's and Guibert's mother-tongues were very different, all their conversations must have been in Latin.

The letter of Hildegard's that prompted Guibert to seek his life with her contains some of her most explicit and most beautiful self-revelations. It was to a stranger, though one whose devotedness she sensed in his letters, that she revealed for the first—and only—time that her vision comprised two modes, one of which was far rarer, more intense and more blissful than the other. She defines her experience in comparison with that of St Paul and St John: they 'mounted in soul and drained the cup of wisdom from God: holding themselves to be nothing, they have become heaven's pillars'. The contrast with herself seems all too apparent:

Then how could it be that I, poor little creature, should not know myself? God works where he wills—to the glory of his name, not that of earthbound man. But I am always filled with a trembling fear, as I do not know for certain of any single capacity in me. Yet I stretch out my hands to God, so that, like a feather which lacks all weight and strength and flies through the wind, I may be borne up by him. And I cannot [see] perfectly the things that I see in my bodily condition and in my invisible soul—for in these two man is defective.

Since my infancy, however, when I was not yet strong in my bones and nerves and veins, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even till now, when I am more than seventy years old. And as God wills, in this vision my spirit mounts upwards, into the height of the firmament and into changing air, and dilates itself among different nations, even though they are in far-off regions and places remote from me. And because I see these things in such a manner, for this reason I also behold them in changing forms of clouds and other created things. But I hear them not with my physical ears, nor with my heart's thoughts, nor do I perceive them by bringing any of my five senses to bear—but only in my soul, my physical eyes open, so that I never suffer their failing in loss of consciousness (extasis); no, I see these things wakefully, day and night. And I am constantly oppressed by illnesses, and so enmeshed in intense pains that they threaten to bring on my death; but so far God has stayed me.

The brightness that I see is not spatial, yet it is far, far more lucent than a cloud that envelops the sun. I cannot contemplate height or length or breadth in it;⁵³ and I call it 'the shadow of the living brightness'. And as sun, moon and stars appear [mirrored] in water, so Scriptures, discourses, virtues, and some works of men take form for me and are reflected radiant in this brightness.

Whatever I have seen or learnt in this vision, I retain the memory of it for a long time, in such a way that, because I have at some time seen and heard it, I can remember it; and I see, hear and know simultaneously, and learn what I know as if in a moment. But what I do not see I do not know, for I am not learned. And the things I write are those I see and hear through the vision, nor do I set down words other than those that I hear; I utter them in unpolished Latin, just as I hear them through the vision, for in it I am not taught to write as philosophers write. And the words I see and hear through the vision are not like words that come from human lips, but like a sparkling flame and a cloud moved in pure air. Moreover, I cannot know the form of this brightness in any way, just as I cannot gaze completely at the sphere of the sun.

And in that same brightness I sometimes, not often, see another light, which I call 'the living light'; when and how I see it, I cannot express; and for the time I do see it, all sadness and all anguish is taken from me, so that then I have the air of an innocent young girl and not of a little old woman.

Yet because of the constant illness that I suffer, I at times weary of expressing the words and the visions that are shown me; nonetheless, when my soul, tasting, sees those things, I am transformed to act so differently that, as I said, I consign all pain and affliction to oblivion. And what I see and hear in the vision then, my soul drains as from a fountain— yet the fountain stays full and never drainable.

But my soul at no time lacks the brightness called 'shadow of the living brightness'. I see it as if I were gazing at a starless firmament within a lucent cloud. And there I see the things I often declare, and those which I give as answers to the people who ask me, from out of the blaze of the living light.⁵⁴

It was in my vision, also, that I saw that my first book of visions should be called Scivias ['Know-ways'], because it was made known by way of the living brightness, not drawn from other teaching. As for [your question about] tiaras: I saw that all the ranks of the Church have bright emblems in accord with the heavenly brightness, yet virginity has no bright emblem—nothing but a black veil and an image of the cross. So I saw that this would be the emblem of virginity: that a virgin's head would be covered with a white veil, because of the radiant-white robe that human beings had in paradise, and lost. On her head would be a circlet (rota) with three colours conjoined into one—an image of the Trinity—and four roundels attached: the one on the forehead showing the lamb of God, that on the right a cherub, that on the left an angel, and on the back a human being—all these inclining towards the [figure of the] Trinity. This emblem, granted to me, will proclaim blessings to God,⁵⁵ because he had clothed the first man in radiant brightness.

As in the letter to Tengswindis, Hildegard alludes to the notion (common in early Patristic thought)⁵⁶ that virginity is a continuing image on earth of the paradisal state. But her development of this here shows that she invests the notion with high 'courtly' significance. If her community of virgins can be an image of paradise, if even on earth they are queens of the divine Bridegroom, then they must manifest joy as a permanent quality of their being. Troubadours had spoken of joy in just this way, as a necessary condition of the true chivalric lover. In Hildegard's counterpart fantasy in the divine sphere, the black veil, suggestive of the servant-girl (ancilla), is replaced by the joyous white one, and by the tiara that betokens a domina. The imagery on the tiara itself reveals that her maidenly élite displays a convergence of the human, the angelic, and the divine. It is from the standpoint of this spiritualized courtly joy, also, that the cultivation on the Rupertsberg of lyric drama, vocal and (as we shall see) instrumental music becomes fully comprehensible. In one of her last and profoundest letters Hildegard explains music as man's attempt to recapture the lost paradise.⁵⁷

The radiant, half-celestial woman, whom Hildegard longs to see incarnate in the women around her, appears also in some of the allegorical contexts that she creates. Thus for instance in a letter to Werner of Kirchheim, the head of a community whom Hildegard addressed in 1170, in the course of her last preaching journey, she makes an original fusion of feminine images from Pastor Hermas and Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae:⁵⁸

Lying long in my bed of sickness, in the 1170th year of the Lord's incarnation, I saw—awake in body and spirit—a most beautiful image of womanly form, most peerless in gentleness, most dear in her delights. Her beauty was so great that the human mind could not fathom it, and her height reached from earth as far as heaven. Her face shone with the greates radiance, and her eye gazed heavenward. She was dressed in the purest white silk, and enfolded by a cloak studded with precious gems— emerald, sapphire and pearls; her sandals were of onyx. Yet her face was covered in dust, her dress was torn on the right side, her cloak had lost its elegant beauty and her sandias were muddied. And she cried out … 'The foxes have their lairs, and the birds of the sky their nests, but I have no helper or consoler, no staff on which to lean or be supported by.'

The allegory Hildegard unfolds shows that, as in Pastor Hermas, this woman, who is both radiant with youth and (as the last words cited imply) weak with age, is Ecclesia. At the same time, like Philosophia at the opening of Boethius' Consolatio, her height reaches to heaven, and her dress is torn. Though so beautiful, Ecclesia has been maltreated and humiliated—not by false philosophers, as in Boethius, but here, as we soon learn, by unworthy priests.

Yet there is another such image in Hildegard's letters where womanly perfection and beauty, both in face and dress, remain untarnished. It is Hildegard's vision of heavenly Love (Caritas). Love, for Hildegard, is a girl (puella) with dazzling brightness streaming from her face; her cloak is whiter than snow and brighter than stars—and this cloak has no need of gems; her shoes are gold—not dark as onyx, like Ecclesia's. She holds the sun and moon, and embraces them; she has a sapphire image of a human being on her breast. 'And all creation called this girl domina'.⁵⁹

In the letter, the allegory unfolded from this vision is about creation and redemption; the details become as tradition-bound as those with Ecclesia had been. It is when we see these images in relation not only to their allegories but to that image of the bride of God which Hildegard wanted to embody in her disciples, that certain aspects of her thought cohere in an unexpected way. In paradise, the first woman was created— Hildegard tells us in Causae et curae—as the embodiment of the love that Adam felt. Eve, that is, was initially, in her paradisal state, the glorious puella whom Hildegard describes in her vision. And insofar as the virgin brides on the Rupertsberg could still re-enact that paradisal state, they could manifest something of the splendour of this puella. That, probably, is also why Hildegard (in the wake of Gregory of Nyssa, Scotus Eriugena and others⁶⁰) decided that the paradisal love was so sublime that it was free of any carnal element. She who wrote so openly about women's sexuality in the context of medicine nonetheless retained an asexual concept of love in her ideal realm. Implicitly this tended to Manichaean fantasy—for it would follow that it was the sensual aspect of love which rendered it unparadisal and tainted. I shall return to this problem below (VII).

Hildegard was the first of the women mystics who personified Love as a consummately beautiful womanly apparition. It is probably not through her direct influence that 'Lady Love' (Minne, Amour) becomes a protagonist in the writings of Mechthild, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete in the following century: there we must reckon with the convergence of diverse impulses—especially from vernacular personifications of human love, from the 'Sapiential' books of the Old Testament, and from Boethius. What Hildegard shows, however, is the extraordinary imaginative potential that was latent in a certain allegorical tradition. Even if her descriptions of Caritas and Ecclesia turn into elaborately constructed explications, they begin in something that she sees; and in telling what she sees, Hildegard informs these images with a vivacity that gives them momentarily the compelling power of myths. She does not disclose the identity of her figures at first: she captivates by infusing a sense of mystery in the descriptions. The allegoresis that nearly always (except in her lyrics) follows, roots the images again in a more conventional exegetic past. Thus in the allegorizing letters (as also in the one to Tengswindis) divergent and indeed contradictory impulses, towards unpredictable and towards predictable insights, can be traced in Hildegard's outlook.

Notes

1. This is not to suggest that Hildegard knew any of the early Latin translations of Avicenna's writings: while some might have begun to circulate before the completion of her Liber divinorum operum (1173/4), we have absolutely no evidence that she had seen them.
2. Goethes Werke (Weimar 1887-1918) XXXIV.I, 'Kunst und Alterthum am Rhein und Main', p. 102: 'Ein altes Manuscript, die Visionen der heiligen Hildegard enthaltend, ist merkwürding.' It seems less likely that Goethe was referring to the 'Riesenkodex' (Wiesbaden 2), though this also contains the whole of Hildegard's visionary writings; it has no illuminations, however, and could be called 'merkwürding' only by virtue of its size and the chain attached to it.
3. See especially H. Liebeschütz, Das allegorische Weltbild; B. Widmer, Heilsordnung.
4. This is Hildegard's title for it in her Prologue to LVM (Pitra p. 7).
5. L. Thorndike, A History II 124-54; C. Singer, From Magic pp. 199-239.

6. In this chapter, unless a footnote gives another reference, all texts are edited afresh below, pp. 231-64. The order of editing generally corresponds to that in the discussion. Surrounding passages of Latin, not translated here, are often also given.

   The unusual aspects of Hildegard's style present a translator with many problems. The translations in this chapter are intended, among other things, to show how I construe the more problematic passages, and how I gauge the tone of the writing.

7. See esp. Prov. 8: 22ff; Wisd. 7-8; Ecclus. 1. I have given further documentation in JWCI XLIII (1980) 20ff and n. 19.
8. In Apoc. I I (P. L. 196, 686ff).
9. Pp. 230-4. Other visual abnormalities connected with migraine have recently been related to Hildegard's visions by F. Clifford Rose and M. Gawel, Migraine: The Facts (Oxford 1981) pp. 2-6: in particular, they mention the interruption of the visual field 'by shiny lines, arranged like constellations, a phenomenon known as fortification spectra, because of its resemblance to a castellated fort'; with this they compare Hildegard's 'ramparts of the heavenly city' (p. 6).
10. Das Leben p. 151 n 10.

11. Herwegen, 'Collaborateurs', passim. The Gent MS of LDO, however, contains both what was completed at the time of Volmar's death (1173), and copied either by his own hand or at his supervision, and at the same time a number of additions and corrections— substantial as well as stylistic—which are in another hand, and for which (as Hildegard's Epilogue (Herwegen pp. 308-9) tells) Abbot Ludwing of Trier and Hildegard's nephew Wescelinus were in some sense responsible. This was finely analysed by A. Derolez, Essays … Lieftinck II 23-33. In a subsequent essay, however, Derolez goes further:

    Hildegarde écrivait-elle elle-même et la tâche des collaborateurs se limitait-elle, comme on l'a cru, à 'employer la lime' et à corriger les fautes d'orthographe et de grammaire dues à sa connaissance défectueuse du latin? Les conclusions de notre étude précédente nous obligent à répondre négativement, et ceci à l'encontre des affirmations de l'auteur elle-même. ('Deux notes' p. 291).

    This inference seems to go beyond the codicological evidence: it is possible to attribute stylistic changes to Ludwing and Wescelinus and still allow that all substantial changes and additions were inserted at Hildegard's dictation, or copied from notes she had made on wax tablets. Again, this does not rule out that the substantial changes and additions may also in their turn have been revised stylistically by the two clerics.

12. I have discussed this further in 'Problemata', sect. III ('Sources').
13. Ed. P. Dronke (Leiden 1978) p. 2.
14. Ed. Echtheit p. 107.
15. P.L. 197, 351f.
16. For the texts of the Barbarossa letters, and excellent historical discussion, see Echtheit pp. 124-31.
17. P.L. 197, 217f.
18. The rubrics of a number of these autobiographic passages in the Berlin MS read 'Visio secunda', 'Visio tercia', etc. Those in the Riesenkodex—in the form 'De secunda visione', 'De tercia visione …'—are mistranslated by Führkötter (Das Leben pp. 76ff): 'De secunda visione' does not mean 'Aus der zweiten Schau' but rather 'Über die zweite Schau'. That is, Hildegard is not giving extracts from visions, but giving an account of them.
19. HC 982ff (I am not, of course, suggesting that Hildegard knew Abelard's autobiographic letter).
20. Ibid. 1321ff.
21. P.L. 87, 415.
22. Text and melody in my Poetic Individuality pp. 209-19; discussion ibid. pp. 160-5.
23. P.L. 197, 1065ff.
24. The expression—'Pater … salutis animarum mysticae plantationis filiarum mearum'—shows Hildegard's characteristic fondness for constructions with several genitives dependent on one another.
25. Cf. 1 Macc. 1.
26. Cf. Exod. 3: 14.
27. This letter, and Hildegard's letter to Richardis (translated and analysed below), are admirably edited and set in historical context in Echtheit pp. 131-41. Scriptural references are given there ad loc. Cf. also Briefwechsel pp. 94ff.
28. P.L. 197, 156f ('conviventi audacia', 156 D, should probably read 'conniventi').
29. Cf. F. Haug, 'Epistolae S. Hildegardis' pp. 60f.
30. Ed. Echtheit pp. 117f.
31. P.L. 197, 162. The wording, 'venisset', probably implies a visit rather than a permanent renunciation of her position, as Führkötter's translation—'zurückgekehrt' (Briefwechsel p. 99)—might suggest.
32. Ibid 163.
33. V.N. XXXI.
34. Ibid. XIX.
35. Ibid VII.
36. Hildegard normally uses oculi, not lumina, for 'eyes'. The classical ring of her phrase here may be Boethian, or perhaps Ovidian: Philosophia addresses Boethius (Cons. 1 pr. 1) 'commota paulisper ac torvis inflammata luminibus'. In the Metamorphoses, Minerva is the 'torvi dea bellica luminis' (II 752), and Medusa has 'torva … lumina' (V 241); Hercules 'lumine torvo / spectat' (IX 27f); and Arachne looks with fierce eyes at the disguised goddess Pallas: 'aspict hanc torvis' (VI 34). While it is certain that Hildegard knew the Consolatio, and it has not hitherto been suggested that she knew Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Ovidian expressions, which include 'spectat' and 'aspicit', are suggestive; a comparison of cosmological language in Metam. 1 and in Hildegard's LDO might be rewarding and might yield further results.
37. Hist Franc. X 31.

38. R 201vb; Berlin Theol. Fol. 727 (=J) 116vab (cf. Pitra p. 244):

    … vivit et non vivit, cinerosa sentit et non sentit, ac [et J] miracula dei non per se, sed per illa tacta profert, quemadomodum chorda, per cytharedam tacta, sonum non per se, sed per tactum illius reddit.

    Et hec vera sunt, et qui verus est ea sic manifestari veraciter voluit. Quapropter si quis super eminentem mentem scripturarum, et proprietatis sue, aliquid eis in contrarietate addiderit, penis hic descriptis subiacere dignus est; aut si quis aliquid ab eis per contrarietatem abstulerit, dignus est ut a gaudiis hic ostensis deleatur.

39. On Hildegard and Hermas, see esp. Liebeschütz pp. 51-6; P. Dronke, 'Arbor Caritatis' pp. 221-31.
40. Cf. Echtheit pp. 19f.
41. On the revisions of this passage, traceable in the Gent codex, see Derolez, Essays … Lieftinck II 23-33.
42. Cf. 'Problemata' p. 118 and n 64. The annotator of Hildegard's writings in Migne (P.L. 197, 123 n 50) takes pains to stress that Hildegard's view here is unorthodox, 'not congruent with the opinion of theologians'. Her attempt at a materialist interpretation of the demonic effect was too 'modern', we might say, for nineteenth-century theology.
43. I have published it for the first time in 'Problemata' pp. 127-9 (with discussion ibid. pp. 118-22).
44. The letter is preserved with Hildegard's correspondence, P.L. 197, 280-2.
45. 'Te lucis ante terminum' st. 2 (ed. A. S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns (Cambridge 1922) p. 299). On the question of the literal or allegorical perception of these phantoms in the Middle Ages, see the acute observations of J. Huizinga, Über die Verknüpfung des Poetischen mit dem Theologischen bei Alanus de Insulis (Koninklijke Akad., Amsterdam 1932) pp. 82-91 (with special reference to Hildegard, ibid. pp. 87ff).
46. P.L. 197, 336-7.
47. Compare Erwin Panofsky's perceptive comments on the modes in which Bernard of Clairvaux and Suger of Saint-Denis addressed each other (including vestra Magnitudo and Sanctitas vestra), and on the kinds of personal tension and disagreement that underlay the use of such extravagant formulae (Abbot Suger, On the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. and tr. E. Panofsky (Princeton²1979) pp. 10f).
48. P.L. 197, 337-8.
49. The text is corrupt at this point in Migne (338 A): 'Deus etiam habet scrutinium, scrutationes in omni persona …' Corr. 'scrutinium scrutationis'?
50. Les trois ordres.
51. According to Briefwechsel p. 204, she is attested in a document of 1152. The date of her letter cannot be ascertained, but it may well be of the same period— late in Hildegard's life—as Guibert's first two letters (1175): when Hildegard describes to Guibert the way she received detailed instructions about costumes in a vision (see below, pp. 169, 253), it does not sound as though she means a vision experienced in the remote past. Thus the unusual modes of dress may have been introduced relatively late on the Rupertsberg—in the 1170s rather than the 1150s—at a time when the foundation, so poor at the start, had acquired enough wealth to afford queen-like diadems for a whole community. There is a particular aptness in these diadems: just as Hildegard herself had spiritual vision at the same time as natural vision, so her diadems are symbolic and at the same time real.
52. Guibert's two letters are printed in Pitra, pp. 328-31, 378-9. Hildegard's reply is printed, in a more complete version than Pitra's (pp. 331-4), below, pp. 250-6.
53. For earlier uses of this Pauline expression (cf. Eph. 3: 18) in medieval thought, see E. Jeauneau, RTAM 45 (1978) 118-28.
54. That is, Hildegard sees the answers in the umbra, but knows that their source is in the more rarely glimpsed blaze of light beyond the umbra.
55. 'Hoc datum signum deum benedicet': this use of acc. with benedicere has good biblical precedent—in the Vulgate, 'benedicere deum' is found particularly in the Book of Tobias.
56. See especially J. Bugge, Virginitas.
57. See Section X below.
58. P.L. 197, 269; cf. Pastor Hermas Vis. II 4; III 10-13; Boethius, Cons. 1 pr. 1. Hildegard knew Boethius' text so well that she could recreate moments from it freely; the importance of the contents of the Consolatio for her cosmological thought would also repay detailed study.
59. P.L. 197, 192 D—193 A. I have given a corrected text (based on R, fol. 343rb), with translation, in Medieval Latin I 67f.
60. Cf. E. Jeauneau, 'La division des sexes chez Grégoire de Nysse et chez Jean Scot Erigène', in Eriugena: Studien zu seinen Quellen, ed. W. Beierwaltes (Heidelberg 1980) pp. 33-54.