Hildegard of Bingen

The story

The girl who saw the light

Hildegard was born in 1098 at Bermersheim, in Germany, into a noble family. She was the tenth child, and in those days, when a family had many children, the last was sometimes offered to the Church as a kind of “tithe”: a gift to God. A frail child, often ill, Hildegard later said that from early childhood she had seen a special light, which she called “the living light”, and which showed her pictures and gave her ideas.

At eight years old, or perhaps fourteen, according to the sources, she was entrusted to a young nun, Jutta, who lived with a group of women near the men's monastery of Disibodenberg, on the river Nahe. There she learned to read, to pray, to sing the psalms in Latin and had a first education, slight but essential. When Jutta died, in 1136, the other nuns elected Hildegard as their leader (“magistra”).

“Write what you see”

In 1141, at about forty-three, Hildegard said she had heard a voice from heaven telling her to write down what she saw and heard. At first she was afraid: she thought she had no right to, being a woman and little educated. She fell ill. When she made up her mind, she worked for ten years on her first book, the “Scivias” (perhaps from “Sci vias Domini”, that is, “Know the ways of the Lord”), which describes twenty-six visions, with explanations of the mysteries of the faith. The pictures, coloured miniatures, show circles of fire, columns, men and animals.

To be sure that her writing would be accepted, Hildegard asked for an opinion from Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential monk of that time, and Pope Eugenius III, gathered in a synod at Trier in 1147-1148, had the text read and approved it. From that moment her name became famous throughout Europe.

The convent on the Rhine

Around 1150 Hildegard moved her nuns to a new monastery, at Rupertsberg, near Bingen on the Rhine, despite the protests of the monks of Disibodenberg, who did not want to lose the most prestigious abbey. There she organised a life of study, prayer and work. In 1165 she founded a second monastery, at Eibingen, on the other side of the river.

Hildegard wrote a great deal: books of theology, two treatises on natural science and medicine, the “Physica” and the “Causae et curae”, in which she speaks of plants, animals, stones and illnesses, mixing true observations with ideas of the time that we now know to be wrong. She composed about seventy songs and a small musical drama, the “Ordo Virtutum”, in which the Virtues struggle against the Devil, who is the only character who does not sing but speaks. She also invented a secret language, the “lingua ignota”, with about a thousand words.

On great feast days her nuns sang wearing long white silk veils and crowns on their heads, and this drew criticism from some churchmen, who found such luxury unsuitable for nuns. Hildegard replied firmly that beauty is a way of praising God.

She kept up a busy correspondence: almost four hundred of her letters have survived, addressed to popes, emperors, bishops and simple nuns. She even wrote to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to scold him when he behaved badly. In the years between 1158 and 1171 she made four preaching journeys along the Rhine and in Germany, something very rare for a woman of her time.

A saint and Doctor of the Church

Hildegard died at the monastery of Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179, aged eighty-one. For many she was considered a saint at once; for the Church, official recognition came much later, in 2012, when Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed her a saint for the whole Church and a “Doctor of the Church”, a title given to very few people, among them few women.