“Know the ways”

O human, who are fragile dust of the earth and ashes of ashes! Cry out and speak of the origin of pure salvation until those people are instructed, who, though they see the inmost contents of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them or preach them, because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice. Unlock for them the enclosure of mysteries that they, timid as they are, conceal in a hidden and fruitless field. Burst forth into a fountain of abundance and overflow with mystical knowledge, until they who now think you contemptible because of Eve’s transgression are stirred up by the flood of your irrigation.—Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias

In 1141, at the age of 42, Hildegard heard these words from God in the first vision of what would become her first book, Scivias. She experienced such visions while fully awake but with her inner eyes and ears, and they had been with her since childhood. Early on she felt as much fear as wonder in “the shadow of the Living Light.” As a child she was met with confusion when she tried to share what she saw, and so she learned to keep it to herself. But now, in the second half of her life, things changed; her mind was opened to know the meaning of the Scriptures. And she wasn’t supposed to keep it to herself anymore.

For many later medieval women, their experience of mysticism centered on union with the Godhead, whether as ecstasy or as annihilation. But Hildegard’s mystical experiences were missions. God had something to say to his people, and he had chosen Hildegard to relay the message as a prophet and a teacher. The Christian world was experiencing an extreme drought of holiness, and Hildegard’s visions could provide life-saving irrigation. She had work to do.

VISIONS AND REVISIONS

In her visions Hildegard saw images with exotic features and elaborate costumes. She saw landscapes and buildings through which her soul would fly, a feather blown on the breath of God. She saw cosmic spheres, circles of fire, and the powerful female representations of the church, Wisdom, and Love (Caritas). And then came the words. A voice from heaven explained every detail. Each color had a meaning, each figure was a symbol, each room in each building, each circle of the cosmic wheel. Out of these visions, Hildegard recast the full message of Christianity. She was not inventing it out of her own heart, however. Instead she was clothing God’s eternal story with new images to awaken the dry hearts and sluggish minds of her contemporaries.

Hildegard’s theology is quite traditional, but the language in which she writes about God is lively and fresh. For example, in her vision of creation in Scivias, she sees the Trinity as “a blazing fire” (the Father), “with a flame in it the color of the sky” (the Son), “which burned ardently with a gentle breath” (the Spirit). In Genesis God’s breath moves across the waters and the Word speaks to create. In Hildegard’s vision the Word’s flame beats on the dark atmosphere like a blacksmith, striking sparks and shaping it “until each creature was radiant with the loveliness of perfection.” Nothing Hildegard says contradicts the scriptural creation story—but her images flash with vibrant imagination.

Later she sees the trinitarian fire “offer to the [first] human a white flower, which hangs in that flame as dew hangs on the grass. Its scent comes to the human’s nostrils, but he does not taste it with his mouth or touch it with his hands, and thus he turns away and falls into the thickest darkness.” 

This is Adam’s fall, but the traditional image has been turned upside down. In Genesis 3, Adam sinned when he plucked and ate the forbidden fruit. In Hildegard’s reimagining Adam has instead been offered “the sweet precept of obedience,” but though “he tried to know the wisdom of the law with his intelligence, as if with his nose, he did not perfectly digest it by putting it in his mouth, or fulfill it in full blessedness by the works of his hands.”

Hildegard casts Adam’s disobedience in a new light. Instead of a fall from perfection, she sees it as a failure to live out God’s mission for him. Thus Hildegard seeks to help us acknowledge and fulfill our human mission, made in God’s image and likeness and predestined to be what she calls “workers of the Divinity.”

Hildegard organized her teaching visions into three major works. The first, Scivias (composed 1141–1151), summarizes Christian theology from creation to the end of time. Its first part tells the story of creation and fall—what the world was supposed to be and how the world is. The second part starts again from creation and fall but pushes forward to the Redeemer and the church he established to set aright the fall’s disorder. The third part retells the whole story, imagined as a grand edifice whose walls and ramparts represent the history of salvation. The actors on its stage are personified virtues who guide us on the way to God, fulfilling the meaning of the book’s title, Know the Ways.

Hildegard’s next visionary volume was the Liber vitae meritorum (composed 1158–1163). This book is about sin and its consequences. It includes alluring speeches from grotesque personified vices and sensational scenes of punishments meted out after death to those who fail to repent. But the virtues from Scivias answer each misguided enticement with truth’s corrective. The effects of sin are not just personal—they are cosmic. In the book’s third vision, the elements of the world lament the harm done to creation by the chaos of human sin. Order is restored through Christ alone, both for each person’s soul and for the whole universe.

The third volume, the Liber divinorum operum (composed 1163–1174), was triggered by a mystical experience related to the prologue of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…” Its visions explore the full range of the created cosmos, the human person, and the spiritual realities connecting them. The volume opens and closes with the figure of Divine Love holding the world and its spiritual history. The first part of the work culminates in Hildegard’s exegesis of John 1:1–14, while the second part is dominated by her lengthy exegesis of the creation story in Genesis 1. The Word links them together—the Word that creates and the Word that becomes human.

INCARNATION AND THE MICROCOSM

Hildegard’s theology began from the everyday world and worked its way up to eternity. But she was only able to do that because eternity had already beamed its way down into everyday life in the incarnate Word. Her visionary perspective constantly moved up and down that ladder, and her most arresting images connected the top and bottom rungs. We see this dynamic in one of her chants, “O vis eternitatis”:

O power of Eternity:
All things you held in order in your heart,
and through your Word were all created
according to your will.
And then your very Word
was clothed within
that form of flesh
from Adam born. . . .
And so his garments
were washed
from greatest suffering.

This piece starts in eternity and zooms down to the “garments” of the human body. The connection? The Word. The key is what theologians call the eternal predestination of the Word, or the idea that God willed from eternity that he would enter into time; his Son would become a human being.

Glimpses of this idea appear in Scripture—for example, God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world,” Paul writes in Ephesians 1:4. But the phrase that Hildegard latched onto came from the Psalter: “the counsel of the Lord stands forever” (Psalm 33:11). As she prayed in the vision of Scivias 3.1:

Grant me to make known the divine counsel, which was ordained of old . . . how You willed Your Son to become incarnate and become a human being within Time; which you willed before all creation in Your rectitude and the fire of the Dove, the Holy Spirit, so that Your Son might rise from the Virgin the splendid beauty of the sun and be clothed with true humanity, a man’s form assumed for Man’s sake.

Because Hildegard saw the Incarnation woven into the very fabric of history, she focused on the process by which that fabric unfolded. Every detail of the physical world is a sign, pointing us to see the reality that God became human. Every stage in sacred history is a prophetic light, shining through shadow to reveal that destined day of Incarnation.

“But man is also said to be the worker of Divinity and a shadow of his mysteries,” Hildegard wrote in an autobiographical passage later included in the Life of St. Hildegard, “and should in all things reveal the Holy Trinity, for God made him in his image and likeness.” When God created humankind (Genesis 1:26), he did it because the Son would eventually become human too. Human nature is built with this purpose in mind.

For Hildegard the image of God in which we are made is the “garment” of our flesh, the very same put on by the incarnate Christ. To be made in God’s likeness, meanwhile, means to share in the rationality of the Word by which God created the world. Those two things work together: we are rational souls who must use our wisdom and knowledge to act through the physical body to fulfill God’s will. God’s acts of creation are a model for us. The work of God is, therefore, both humankind and all of creation—and Hildegard sometimes says that “humankind is all of creation.” What does that mean?

In the first part of her third volume, Hildegard sees the whole universe, with Earth spinning amid the swirling spheres of atmosphere, ether (outer space), and fire. Standing astride the cosmos is a human figure, arms and legs outstretched, connecting every level of the physical world. Because humans are “the complete work of God, divine by soul and earthly by earth,” they contain every level of creation, from the most concrete piece of the physical world straight up to the angels in heaven.

This is the idea that humans are microcosms, or “mini-universes,” of the macrocosm (the universe at full scale). It also means that every physical element of the world is interconnected and has a spiritual significance. For example, Hildegard sees a network of winds circling the globe, moving the atmosphere and entering into the human body to sustain and connect us to the rest of the world. But those winds are also virtues, spiritual forces that enter into our souls to uphold and guide us on our journey to holiness.

VIRIDITY AND VIRTUES 

When the physical elements of the world are in balance, the world is healthy. Hildegard calls this viriditas, which literally means “greenness” but also connotes freshness, vitality, and even fecundity. Viridity isn’t just a physical concept for Hildegard. It is also a spiritual concept—the soul is fresh and healthy when it has viridity too. She even made viridity a characteristic of God. In one of her analogies for the Trinity in Scivias, the moist viriditas of a stone represents the Father (while its concreteness represents the Son and its ability to strike fire represents the Holy Spirit), and she often spoke of the Holy Spirit’s viridity distilling upon the world like dew upon the grass.

But what happens when the elements of the world are out of balance? Viridity dries up, the freshness withers. And because Hildegard always sees the physical and spiritual as intertwined, spiritual aridity (i.e., sin) could often be the cause for that physical imbalance. As she explains in Causae et curae:

For the elements were made subject to humankind, and they usually exercise their functions in accordance with how they are impacted by human deeds. For when humans are entangled in fighting and terror, in hatred and envy, and in other contrary sins, [the elements] are overturned into another, contrary mode, whether of heat or cold or great downpours and floods. . . . But when humans keep to the right path and act with moderation in good and evil, then the elements exercise their functions by God’s grace according to human need. 

So how do we stay on the right path that keeps both us and the world in balance? The Virtues. The Latin term virtus means both “virtue” and “power.” Hildegard sees the Virtues much like the Eastern Orthodox idea of divine energeia, or energies that flow from divinity into the world. She speaks of them the way many theologians speak of sanctifying grace. They bring God’s power into action in our lives and “lead God’s elect to the heavenly places.” 

When God declared Hildegard’s mission in the opening vision of Scivias, she saw him enthroned upon a mountain, with two figures standing at its base. The first figure is Fear of the Lord. This watchful Virtue keeps us pointed in the right direction toward holiness, for “she counters all forgetfulness of God’s justice.” The second figure appears like a child irradiated by God’s glory. She is Poverty of Spirit, “for when the Fear of the Lord leads, they who are poor in spirit follow.” 

These are just two of the panoply of Virtues that Hildegard sees surrounding us, helping us turn back from pride and sin and tread the hard path of salvation. She wrote a musical play to dramatize this, the Ordo virtutum (Play of the Virtues). The story follows Anima, a soul who has strayed from the path and must be guided back by the Virtues. When at last she returns triumphant, they sing the final chorus together. It sums up Hildegard’s theology, from a world that began in viridity to the purpose of the Incarnation. The Warrior (a biblical figure from Isaiah 42:13) is the Incarnate Son, pleading to God the Father for the salvation of humanity:

In the beginning all creation was verdant,
flowers blossomed in the midst of it;
later, greenness sank away,
and the Warrior saw this and said:
“I know it, but the golden number is not yet full.
You then, behold me, mirror of your Fatherhood:
in my body I am suffering exhaustion,
even my little ones faint.
Now remember that the fullness which was made in the beginning
need not have grown dry,
and that then you resolved
that your eye would never fail
until you saw my body full of jewels.
For it wearies me that all my limbs are exposed to mockery:
Father, behold, I am showing you my wounds.”
So now, all you people,
bend your knees to the Father,
that he may reach you his hand.  

CH