Editor’s note: Hildegard

On the last day of our vacation, my husband and I stood on the big rock that overlooks the Maine lake where the old family cabin resides. A steady breeze stirred the usually mirrorlike surface into playful waves. We watched them break into a fine, cold spray against the rocky shore, enjoying the view and the September sunlight just warm enough to stave off a growing autumnal chill. Already some trees around and beyond us had begun to don the reds and yellows of fall—pops of color in a mountainous swell of evergreens.

This, I thought, is just as close to perfect as it gets. This is a place where God lives and speaks, and that, I hope, he’ll re-create in eternity to come. A place where this quotation by the twelfth-century Benedictine nun, Hildegard of Bingen, certainly applies: “Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the earth’s greenings. Now, think.” 

RENAISSANCE WOMAN

If anyone could make us think of God’s life as “verdant greening” and of creativity as “manifest . . . in every creature,” it would be Hildegard. You might know little of this medieval nun, but she is worth knowing.

Often historians refer to her as a “Renaissance” woman (despite preceding the actual Renaissance by several hundred years) because she was a polymath—that is, an individual whose knowledge was both wide and deep in various subjects. Being a polymath is impressive for anyone, but in the twelfth-century world in which literacy and knowledge were much harder to come by (especially for women), Hildegard’s skill and expertise in multiple disciplines are particularly remarkable. 

This issue will walk you through the main roles of the gifted polymath: the prophetic monastic who admonished kings and popes; the thoughtful creative who composed beautiful sacred music and the first-known morality play; the natural philosopher who carefully cataloged the natural world and studied and practiced healing; and finally, the visionary theologian whose focus on the Incarnation and God’s love suffusing the cosmos painted anew the beauty of creation and redemption for generations to come. 

HILDEGARD FOR TODAY

In the 1920s Benedictine nuns carefully re-created a copy of Hildegard’s Rupertsberg Scivias, an illuminated manuscript that recorded one of her major visions. The copy providentially preserved her words when the original manuscript was lost during World War II. In the decades after the war, a revival of interest in Hildegard’s visions and theology took place—thanks in part to this preservation—all of which led to her being recognized as a doctor of the church (see “Did you know?”). As you enter into this latest issue of CH, get to know the woman who spoke presciently to a medieval church stuck in patterns of spiritual laxity—patterns that in many ways mirror our own.

Indeed her voice remains a clarion call for believers today. When the world is not as it should be, says Hildegard, our response can never be to sink deeper into resigned stupor and lazy spirituality. Instead she urges us: return to your first love, shake yourselves awake, taste and see how alive, interconnected, and unmeasurably awesome God’s cosmos truly is, and worship him. As one of our authors, Nathaniel Campbell, was inspired to write on Hildegard’s September 17 feast day: 

O clear-eyed voice,

Speak to us sluggish sinners

Of the origin of pure salvation,

That from the outpouring of your vision’s watering

The fount of the water of life

Might rise up and overflow

In our dried up, torpid hearts.    

CH