St Hildegard of Bingen was not made a saint in the usual way – but then, nothing about Hildegard could be described as usual. Born around 1098, Hildegard belonged, for much of her 81 years of life, to the extraordinary 12th century, when developments in canon law, theology, philosophy and the arts swirled through a Europe that was beginning to settle into a shared identity based on deep Christian insights into our place in the cosmos.
Hildegard predated the Renaissance by about 200 years, and yet, if ever there were someone who could be dubbed a ‘Renaissance woman’, it would be she.
Benedictine abbess, visionary, theologian, mystic, poet, composer-lyricist, agriculturalist, medical author and healer, preacher, biblical exegete, inveterate letter writer – she was all of these and more.
LIVING LIGHT
From a young age Hildegard experienced visions, which became the basis of much of her authorship. Her work invites the reader and listener into her experiences, a communion of flesh and spirit. Hildegard’s work came from what she called the umbra viventis lucis, the earthly shade of the living light.
The sound of her music, for example, unquestionably touches the senses, but also elevates the spirit. It is both visceral and soulful. The purity of the sound is from the style of the time, monophonic plainchant – which, although sung by voices that all stay on the same melody line without accompaniment (or very little), nevertheless leaves one thinking one has heard harmony.
One of her late texts, Liber Divinorum Operum (The Book of Divine Works), is an extended meditation on some of the first words of the Gospel of John: ‘the Word was with God and the Word was God’.
Hildegard knew the mystery of that statement and all it implied. Just as Jesus had left the spiritual realm and contained himself for a time in fleshly form, so too her musical and lyrical compositions are a perfection of the verbal, which contains meaning, and the melodic, which enables meaning to soar.
THEOLOGY FOR THE MIND
Her lyrics capture perfect theology for the mind; the melismatic extension of them suggests the infinite divinity which is the truth of that theology.
In her musical morality play Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard has the human soul describe itself as being ‘dressed’ in flesh, and therefore quintessentially unsatisfied:
‘Woe is me! I can never perfect this dress that I have put on. / Indeed, I want to cast it off!’
Even as the words capture the condition of humanity with precision, the melismatic singing, in which syllables are carried over several notes, suggests a desire wanting to burst free into eternal light, to return to spiritual nakedness entirely at home with God.
At a time when the Cistercian Order made it its business to try to ban all music that was either too melismatic or wider than an octave in range, the final Latin word of Ordo Virtutum, ‘porrigat’ (‘stretch out’), is set to 39 notes, the longest melisma in the piece, meant to illustrate God reaching out his hand to humanity in boundless love. Hildegard, too, was boundless.
Towards the end of her life, Hildegard’s belief that music is the language of God saw her protest, successfully, when her convent was banned from singing because it had permitted the burial in its grounds of a man who had been excommunicated but who had repented of his sins. Only the Devil, she said, would forbid music. Singing was permitted to resume.
EQUIVALENT CANONISATION
Hildegard was given an ‘equivalent canonisation’ by Benedict XVI – not the usual process – in 2012, because she had already been listed for so many centuries on regional calendars of saints. The same year, he also declared her a Doctor of the Church.
But what title could possibly contain all that Hildegard was, and is?
Peter Fleming is a writer and teacher. He doesn’t own a mobile phone and thinks ‘Facebook’ is something you should do after taking one off the shelf to read.
St Hildegard of Bingen
Theologian, mystic, composer-lyricist
1098–1179
Feast Day: 17 September