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