Hildegard of Bingen's Visions and Our Own

Yesterday I was listening to the songs of U2; this morning it's Hildegard of Bingen.  I was listening to this YouTube recording, but one has plenty to choose from.  More of her music still exists than any other medieval composer.

Here is the frontispiece from Scivias, a work that she wrote that describes 25 religious visions she received.  There is debate about whether or not she created the illuminations that I'm including in this blog post, but I love them.  Here she is shown dictating the vision and sketching:

I continue to be astonished each year, as her feast day approaches, when I consider her life and how much she accomplished.  I usually end that sentence with these words:  "for a woman in the 12th century."  But truly, she accomplished an astonishing amount for a human alive in any century:  she was an abbess, and because being in charge of one cloistered community isn't enough, she founded another. She wrote music and poems and a morality play and along the way, a multitude of theological meditations. She wrote to kings, emperors and popes to encourage them to pursue peace and justice.   She was an early naturalist, writing down her observations about the natural world and her theories about how the natural world heals us.

It's interesting to think about the different types of groups who have claimed her as their own. Feminists claim her importance, even though she didn't openly advocate equality. Musicians note that more of her compositions survive than almost any other medieval composer. Her musical works go in different directions than many of the choral pieces of the day, with their soaring notes. New Age types love her views of the body and the healing properties of plants, animals, and even minerals. Though her theology seems distinctly medieval, and thus not as important to modern Christians, it's hard to dismiss her importance as a figure from church history.

I like to think of Hildegard of Bingen smiling at the many ways we've seized her legacy and taken up her mantle. Some of us do that by writing, the way that she did. Some of us have seized her mantle by singing the music that she left us. Some of us tend our gardens, the ones we grow for food, the ones we grow for herbs, the ones we grow for the beauty of the flowers, the interior gardens that we may or may not share. Some of us take on the Hildegard's mantle when we scold bishops and legislators and remind them of the obligation of creating a more just society. We wear Hildegard's mantle as we care for the next generations, some of whom we're related to biologically, some of whom we will never meet.