Viewing Hildegard of Bingen In the Rearview Mirror
On 7 October 2012, a rare thing occurred: Pope Benedict XVI named Hildegard of Bingen (and John of Avila) a Doctor of the Church. This is a title given by the Roman Catholic Church to those of particular theological importance. In fact, only 35 persons have been given this distinct honor. Among them are Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Bernard of Clairvaux—rarefied company to say the least.
Hildegard of Bingen first piqued my interest after stumbling across a book of her writings and learning about her promotion to Doctor. And like you perhaps, I wondered: Who is Hildegard of Bingen? Why did the Pope promote her to Doctor? And what am I, as a modern Free Will Baptist, to do with her alleged significance? It is these questions that we will now address.
Who Is Hildegard of Bingen?
In AD 1098 Hildegard was born into a noble family of Bermersheim in modern-day Germany. At eight-years-old, however, her family gave her to the monastic life. By 1136, Hildegard had become the head of the Disbodenburg convent.
Though she claimed to have seen visions since early childhood, it was 1141 before Hilgedard began to record them. Five years later she wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux to seek his counsel on her work. And after his encouraging response, and further prodding by several of her peers, she presented a portion of her writings for papal review at the Synod of Trier (1147-48). Bernard of Clairvaux spoke in her favor, and Pope Eugenius III, intrigued by her writing (titled Scivias), gave approval for its publication.
After its publication, Hildegard was dubbed the “Sybil of the Rhine” for what many considered her prophetic insights. She was soon a coveted advisor to much of Europe. During this time she left Disbodenburg to start another convent in Rupertsburg. Along with her theological writings, she also composed music for daily use in the monastery and in the weekly mass.
In 1158 Hildegard began what would be an unprecedented public career for a woman in the Middle Ages. At the age of sixty she began the first of four preaching tours. She used these opportunities to preach against heresy, to call clergy to repentance from immorality, and to remind believers to treat the church as the unblemished Bride of Christ.
Arriving home in Rupertsberg, Hildegard did not rest on her laurels. She began working on the second and third volumes of her theological survey trilogy, The Book of Life’s Merits (1163) and The Book of Divine Works (1173). At the time of her death in 1179 she had not only completed her encyclopedic survey of theology, but had written many works on herbs, music, and healing.
Why Did the Roman Catholic Church Promote Her to Doctor?
The Pope has stated that Hildegard is being made a Doctor of the Church in recognition of her theological writings and profound scholarship of natural science and music [1]. Though both her scientific and musical exploits are intriguing, we will focus on her theological writings. But first, a note on Christian mystics:
Christian mystics claimed to have received visions from God, often while in an altered state of mind (seizures, dreams, and the like—though Hildegard always maintained that she received her visions while awake and cognizant). Roman Catholics judge some of these visions to be God’s revelation and give them equal weight as Scripture. Such visions were often filled with symbolism, representing deeper spiritual meanings. Hildegard’s theological writings were written in this fashion.
For each portion of her vision there is a detailed analysis and spiritual explanation. Often Hildegard references Scripture and uses it in conjunction with the vision to provide her interpretation. What eventually emerges is a mildly complex mixture of theological thoughts. However, much of the complexity for the modern reader arises from the unfamiliar presentation.
However, if mysticism comes from the Middle Ages and the Roman Catholic tradition, why is Hildegard relevant to a Free Will Baptist audience?
Viewing Hildegard in the Rearview Mirror
Historical figures are like objects in the rearview mirror. The further we get from them, the more indistinct and apt to caricature they become. As Protestants, it would be easy for us to simply relegate Hildegard to the ranks of discarded Roman Catholic theologians. But this fails to account for how she ended up in that elite company of church heroes (such as Athanasius and Aquinas), who we are often quick to venerate.
To understand Hildegard, we must begin by viewing her in her culture. In the twelfth century almost no one read, in part because there were very few books. Instead, the church taught its illiterate congregants through images. Though Hildegard could read and knew God’s Word very well, she was also conditioned to think in interpretive images.
Some believe she actually did receive direct visions from God. However, I find a different hypothesis more plausible: Her exposure to visual pedagogy combined with her knowledge of theology resulted in a robust, religious imagination [4]. Whatever the case, the only way to judge the value of her visions is to hold them up to Scripture.
Viewing Hildegard Through the Lens of Scripture
When we view Hildegard’s visions through Scripture’s lens, what we find is pleasantly surprising. In most cases she ties Scripture directly to her interpretations of her visions. And her doctrinal stances are very orthodox (if a bit twelfth century Roman Catholic).
For example, Hildegard had a strong stance on the Trinity. She held that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct, yet also completely inseparable: “These three persons exist as one God in one integral divinity and majesty, and the unity of divinity thrives inseparable in the three persons, because divinity cannot be separated, since it remains always unchanged without any mutability” [5].
This definition of the Trinity in no way subverts Scripture and is wholly orthodox.
Her views of sin and salvation were also biblical. She believed that mankind fell into sin by the serpent’s cunning persuasions. And she believed that salvation from such sin originated in God:
The salvation of love did not originate in us, for we neither knew nor were able to love God for our salvation; rather, it came from our Creator and Lord, who loved his people so much that he sent his Son for our salvation, as leader and Saviour of the faithful, who washed all our wounds [6].
And again we find that this is Scriptural and orthodox.
However, several points of contention arise as well. Our departures with Hildegard mostly lie in the usual places—the semi-deification of Mary, praying to saints, and the exaltation of the Pope. However there are other points of digression too. For instance, the odd turns of phrase that she uses are sometimes quite thought-provoking and helpful, yet at other times they seem to slip back behind the curtain of the Middle Ages.
Hildegard was a medieval scholar of nature as well. Her writings on the mechanics of nature sometimes smack of superstitions, and occasionally this bleeds over into her theological wording. A perfect example lies in an 1146 letter to Bernard of Clairvaux, where she says that it was by the “sweet power of green vigour” that the Holy Spirit caused Mary to conceive [7]. Her doctrinal missteps here seem to be the result of ignorance rather than poor logic. While we will obviously diverge from Hildegard on these points, she was no heretic. So where does this leave us?
Conclusion
When reading the works of church antiquity, we must remember that it is akin to eavesdropping on someone else’s private conversation. As Peter Brown put it, we are “dealing with a Christianity whose back is firmly turned toward us, untroubled by our own most urgent, and legitimate, questions” [8]. However, since each age has its blind spots, we are better able to understand our own unseen dilemmas by reading these ancient works [9].
Although Hildegard of Bingen may appear out of place in twenty-first century Free Will Baptist circles, much of her theological and doctrinal contributions are relevant and accessible. And undoubtedly, they warrant some of our attention, as she (alongside Augustine, John Chrysostom, and Bernard of Clairvaux) is now a Doctor of the Church.
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[1] Jimmy Akin, National Catholic Register, “Newest Doctor of the Church: Her Visions, Her Writings, and Her Secret Language; accessible at: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/newest-doctor-of-the-church-her-visions-her-writings-and-her-secret-languag?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register#When:2012-10-2#ixzz2FpvSGEL0; accessed on December 22, 2012.
[2] Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings trans. Mark Atherton (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2001), 15.
[3] Ibid., 11.
[4] Even modern Christian thinkers will often paint visual images to illustrate a deep theological concept, though they would refrain from calling them visions from God.
[5] Ibid., 24.
[6] Ibid., 25-26.
[7] Ibid., 5.
[8] Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Tenunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xvii; quoted in Calvin Stapert, A New Song For an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 8.
[9] C. S. Lewis, Introduction to St. Athanasius on the Incarnation (London: A. R. Mowbray and Co., 1963), 4-5.
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