1

Process Thought, Hildegard Of Bingen And Theological Tradition

Constant J. Mews
Faculty of Arts,
Monash University, Melbourne

Like any intellectual movement worth its salt, process thought has generated its own search for
ancestors. Charles Hartshorne (1965, ix-xi) once suggested that its earliest progenitor might be
Pharaoh Ikhenaton (1370 BCE) whose hymns speak of God `fashioning himself’ through creation.
Yet while Hartshorne considered that Wordsworth `anticipated one aspect of the kind of religious
metaphysics I believe in’, he considered that technical philosophy had only begun to develop such
arguments over the last hundred years (Hartshorne 1990, 372-79). In general, Hartshorne was
critical of classical monotheist belief, at least as it developed in the medieval period. He once
commented (Hartshorne 1965, ix): `Medieval anti-process theology may eventually be seen as but
an interlude, a detour from which religious thought has happily returned to the main highway.’ An
attentive critic of the philosophical arguments raised by St. Anselm and St. Thomas, Hartshorne
leaves the general impression that medieval theology was excessively tied to static notions of
`supreme being’ rather than more to dynamic ideas of `continuous becoming’.
This rather negative view of medieval thought as excessively influenced by Aristotelian
categories of substance and being, was one which Alfred North Whitehead took for granted.
Whitehead was unusually perceptive in his comments on the capacity of religious and philosophical
ideas to provide creative vigour, as well as to impose a deadening inertia in any civilisation
(Hartshorne 1962, 1965; Cobb and Gamwell 1984). His philosophical interest in creativity made
him open to the creative potential of any mode of thought (Whitehead 1953, 370-71). Yet his
understanding of the history of Western ideas was typical of his day. It was a story of the efforts of
a few great men, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to identify the rational order
behind the world. An admirer of Plato, he blamed Aristotelian logic and physics for stifling
subsequent scientific thought by imposing a static concept of substance on the natural world.
Whitehead was not the first philosopher to express discomfort with a static notion of matter and a
mechanistic vision. George Lucas Jr. (1989, 16-27), while doubtful about Hartshorne’s suggestion
that Ikhenaton was the founder of process thought, has argued that Whitehead inherited key themes
of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, notably of Lamarck, Goethe, Schelling and
Hegel. By implication however, Lucas still sees process thought as a fundamentally `modern’
phenomenon that has broken away from an older intellectual order.
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I do not intend to defend medieval thought as a whole against the charge that it is
fundamentally `anti-process’ in character. Rather, I would like to suggest that the history of
medieval ideas is far more complex than historians of philosophy often imagine. If we follow the
insights of Catherine Keller in From a Broken Web (1986), then the intellectual syntheses of both
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were shaped by Aristotelian notions of substance that were
profoundly gendered in nature. In this paper, I would like to look at the enormously prolific
writings of a woman identified much more often as a visionary and mystic than as a philosopher:
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). The history of medieval thought is often written about as it if it
were shaped by a small elite of celibate men, preoccupied either by Augustinian neoplatonism or
by Aristotelian logic. I would argue that the labels `visionary’ and `mystic’ can be dangerous if
they are used as a way of excluding women not trained in formal philosophy, from consideration
within the history of ideas. Process thought needs to consider concerns that it may share in
common with those who articulate ideas from outside the context of formal philosophical analysis.
Although Hildegard uses visionary images to express her thought and develops an established
prophetic tradition, her fascination with the concept of life and what is living parallels certain of
the major concerns of process philosophy. I am not saying that Hildegard is an unrecognised
process philosopher. The intellectual and mythological universe in which she was brought up is
very different from our own. I would argue, however, that as an articulate woman, much more
interested in drawing on nature than on Aristotle’s Categories, she illustrates the kind of thinking
about the `connective self’ that Keller wrote about in 1986, and that needs to be developed in both
a feminist and ecological dimension in the twenty-first century.
It is important to question some of the more wildly enthusiastic claims that have been made
about Hildegard in recent years. Although her melodic genius has become widely known over the
last decade through a spate of excellent recordings, her literary output is so diverse and strange, not
to say often downright obscure, that it rarely gets studied in any detail. While scholars can now
consult critical editions of Scivias (1978) and The Book of Divine Works (1996), some of her
writing is available to a wider English-speaking audience only through partial and unsatisfactory
translations, presented with inadequate commentary. They sometimes present her as a visionary
and mystic, at odds with a ruling patriarchal establishment, paying little attention to the actual
structure and content of her thought. In particular, I want to assess the label `creation-centered
mystic’ applied to Hildegard in 1987 by Matthew Fox, a critic of what he calls the `fall-
redemption’ theology of St Augustine. The only English translation currently available of The
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Book of Divine Works, Hildegard’s last and most important cosmological synthesis (Hildegard
1987) a woefully incomplete translation of a German translation of Hildegard’s Latin) is that
edited by Matthew Fox. In his introduction, Fox boldly asserts that Hildegard is a `creation-
centered mystic’, whose cosmology is `not a scientific head-trip but a way of seeing and affirming
and trusting in the entire universe’ (Fox 1987, xii). He makes some alarming claims that in
Hildegard `we find a healthy balance of the rational and irrational’ (Fox 1987, xv), and encourages
us to read Hildegard `both with our right brains—our hearts—as well as our left brains—our
intellects. . .so as to awaken the mystic/prophet in us’. My suspicion is that Fox wishes to displace
the rational completely. While I do not doubt that many people may find his message inspirational,
I would suggest that the ideal of developing a `creation-centered mysticism’ is inadequate to
understand Hildegard. I would also suggest that the concept of `creation’ can impede the
development of a fully ecological world view. A good deal of Hildegard’s writing is concerned not
with creation, but with moral behaviour, the character of Ecclesia and the meaning of scripture.
She would not have thought of her thought as anything other than God-centered.
Rather than invoking so-called `creation-centered’ mysticism to understand Hildegard, I
suggest that we would do better to consider her thought as based around concepts of `life’ and
`living’, and as a critique of static categories of substance as a way of classifying the world. The
word `creation’ implicitly invokes the idea of a separate Creator. Perhaps `creativity-centered
spirituality’ might be a better label. Hildegard’s contemporary appeal, I suspect, has much to do
with the fact that she expresses her thought in visual and musical modes that are organic in
character, rather than in an analytic mode. Fox’s claim that her thought is a fusion of rationality
and irrationality is particularly dangerous. She is committed to rationality, but re-defines the
concept by relating it to what is living. As a woman, technically prohibited from teaching in the
public domain, the language of visionary experience provided a legitimate way by which her voice
could be heard by those in positions of authority. While she is very interested in the natural world,
the category of vita, life or creativity, is much more important to her than that of `creation’. As
Newman (1987) argues in her study of Hildegard’s extensive use of feminine imagery, Hildegard is
fully committed to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. However, whereas the Church Fathers
invoked the notion of two natures (divine and human) to define the doctrine, she invokes the
category of dynamic fiery life (ignea vita) to re-interpret the doctrine of incarnation as about the
fusion of body and spirit in the original state of humanity, of which Christ is the exemplar (Mews
1998).
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In many ways, Hildegard’s insight into the primacy of life is devastatingly simple. But she
uses this key intuition to re-interpret a whole range of ideas, including two theological concepts,
long interpreted in a very static fashion: spiritus sanctus and salus. When we translate these Latin
words into English as `Holy Spirit’ and `salvation’ we immediately imply that they belong to a
non-material order of reality, and thus automatically remove them from the domain of experience.
The word spiritus in Latin, like the Hebrew ruah and the Greek pneuma, is properly translated not
as spirit but as breath or life-force; salus means not just spiritual well-being or salvation, but well-
being as a whole. Distancing herself from the standard Augustinian categories of substance
(themselves Aristotelian in origin), Hildegard provided a far more organic interpretation of these
core theological notions. I can think of no better way of introducing Hildegard’s understanding of
the Holy Spirit than through a simple antiphon set to an astonishingly beautiful melody (Hildegard
1990b, 140): `Spiritus sanctus, vivificans vita, movens omnia, et radix est in omni creatura, ac
omnia de immunditia abluit, tergens crimina, ac ungit vulnera, et sic est fulgens ac laudabilis vita,
suscitans et resuscitans omnia.’ [The Holy Spirit, life-giving life, moving all things, is also the root
of every creature, and cleans all things from impurity, wipes out wrongs, puts balm on wounds,
and is thus shining and praiseworthy life, wakening and reawakening all things.] Throughout her
writing Hildegard presents herself as a simplex homo, a simple human being, raised up from the
earth by the Holy Spirit, the holy breath. Another image that she uses of herself is that of a feather
on the breath of God, a way of saying that she lives totally by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
Hildegard’s fascination with the concept of life and with her self-image as a simplex homo,
a simple human being inspired totally by the Holy Spirit or holy breath, provides a fascinating
contrast to that tradition of thought about the self, which Keller identifies as both separative and
masculine in From a Broken Web (1986). By invoking the category of life, rather than of
substance, Hildegard immediately identifies herself by what she shares with the outside world,
rather than by her specific substance or identity. This is in marked contrast to the tendency of
Augustine to identify the soul as a neo-Platonic form that longs to fuse with an unchanging God
(Keller 1986, 163-68). As Keller points out, Christian orthodoxy did effectively stifle ruah or
pneuma by appropriating the Holy Spirit into a very masculine Christian Trinity (Keller 1986,
170-71). This sidelining of a holy breath was compounded by the thesis of Augustine (subsequently
absorbed into Latin, but not Greek orthodoxy) that the Holy Spirit was not primarily the breath of
God proceeding outward to creation, but the mutual love that proceeded outward from the Father
and Son (as if the rest of the world did not have to exist). Rather than simply overturning
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theological tradition, Hildegard uncovers some forgotten insights, stifled by rather too many
stultifying philosophical categories.
Hildegard’s life story is of interest because it involved her implementing a radical shift in
perspective and way of life. She was brought up as a recluse at the monastery of Disibodenberg,
under the tutelage of Jutta, herself a woman with a reputation for piety and physical austerity
(Silvas 1998). In the rhetoric of the day, Jutta and Hildegard were women who had become dead to
the world and lived a life of silent prayer, in anticipation of the life to come. Only five years after
the death of Jutta, does Hildegard first begin to emerge from a life of cloistered seclusion. In the
prologue to Scivias, her first great visionary work, she reports that it was in her forty-third year
that she experienced a flash of intuitive insight into the underlying meaning of the scriptures, even
though she was incapable of dividing up words and syllables, or of analysing the scriptures
according to the standard techniques of biblical exegesis (Hildegard 1990a, 59). When she recalls
this moment later in life, she adds that she also understood the writing of some of the philosophers
as well as the scriptures (Silvas 1999, 160). While it is impossible to be sure of exactly what
Hildegard had read, there can be little doubting that her protestations of being unlettered were a
humility topos, designed to reinforce the image of a prophet which she was fashioning for herself.
Scivias is primarily a work of moral exhortation concerned with the way those who make
up Ecclesia should live. Yet if we look at her central organizing concepts, we notice that she never
draws on those concepts of substance and accident, or matter and form that shape scholastic
analysis. The key notion which she throws like a spotlight on a range of traditional biblical and
ecclesiastical concepts is that of the lux vivens [the living light]. Since the fourth century, the
standard definition of God had become for the Latin West one substance with three personae (or
one ousia with three hypostaseis in Greek). In her preface to Scivias Hildegard (1990a, 59-60)
eschews these categories by speaking not of God but of `the Living Light who illumines what is
obscure’ and who has allowed a human being (i.e. Hildegard herself) to suffer physically `in her
marrow and veins’ so as not to set herself up in any boldness of mind. While there was a long
tradition of seeing Christ as the light of the world (an echo of John 1:4), Hildegard uses the image
of a living light, a distinctly feminine image, to describe what is traditionally described as the Word
of God.
In the fairly brief sections of Scivias in which she talks about the created world, Hildegard
draws contrasts, not between a moving world and unmoving eternity, but between a state of health
and a state of turbulence. She sees the stormy and turbulent aspect of creation as a reflection of the
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rebellious nature of humanity, and thus a very different condition from paradise, `which flowers in
the viridity of flowers and grasses and the delights of every spice, filled with the best scents, …
giving the strongest sap to the dry earth because it gives the strongest force to the earth, just as the
soul gives strength to the body…’ (Scivias 1.2.28; Hildegard 1990, 86) She employs the category
of dynamic life in a similar way when she comments on her vision of a child in the womb of a
mother, and of the trials that the child has to face in the world. She explains how a child comes out
of her mother’s womb and receives its spiritus [breath] by analogy with flowers coming out of the
earth, when the dew drops on the ground (1.4.16; 1990, 119). The waning of old age she compares
to the drying up of sap in a tree in winter, when it looses its leaves (1.4.17; 1990, 120).
Hildegard gives a fascinating twist to the relationship of the soul to the body by comparing
it to that between the sap of a tree and the tree itself (1.4.25; 1990, 123-24). The standard
understanding of the relationship of body and soul, both in Platonic and Aristotelian thought, had
always been articulated in terms of matter and form. The soul was seen as the form of humanity
that gives identity to its matter. Implicit in this matter/form distinction is a gendered hierarchy of
concepts. Materia, etymologically so close to mater or mother, is the shapeless raw material or
matrix onto which intelligent reason imposes form. Hildegard sidesteps this dualism completely by
appealing to an organic analogy. The soul of a body, that which has the potential to give it life, is
like the sap of a tree. The intellect and the will are related to the soul like arms to the body, being
powers of the soul that give life to the body.
The great part of Scivias is devoted not to a vision of humanity or the created world, but to
a vision of Ecclesia and the path of life offered by the holy Spirit. To read it as a work of creation-
centered spirituality necessarily involves a profound misreading of the work. In her first major
composition, Hildegard needed to demonstrate to the authorities that she, or rather the living light,
had something worthwhile to say about all the major themes covered in scripture and the core
subjects of Christian tradition, in particular the Incarnation. What is of interest, however, is the
way that she approaches these ideas when she considers them through the living light. Whereas
both St Augustine and St Bernard develop a very strong Christocentric focus in their writing
(perhaps an echo of that masculine hero complex, which Keller described so vividly in From a
Broken Web, 1986), Hildegard explains how the Word of God descended `on the profound viridity
of the Virgin’ so that the one born of the Virgin `could lead back those who did not know the light
of truth to the true path and restore them to well-being’ (1.4.32; 1990, 129). This image of
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viriditas [greenness or freshness], that she employs throughout her writing illustrates how she
employs an image of organic life to transform her understanding of static theological concepts.
In part she drew her understanding of viridity and organic life from her reading of Gregory
the Great (Mews 1998, 58). But the most direct influence on her ideas was her own sense that her
body was heavy and sluggish, not living as it ought to be. It is significant that the first major
composition to which she applied herself after she had moved away from Disibodenberg to
Rupertsberg, according to her Book of the Rewards of Life (Hildegard 1994, 9) was about `the
subtleties of the different natures of created things’. I suspect that Hildegard had been collecting
material relating to natural science and medicine long before she embarked upon Scivias. The exact
corpus of what Hildegard wrote on this subject is still under debate, but it seems likely that the two
surviving works, Causes and Cures and Physica, flow out of a single project relating to `the
subtleties of the natures of created things.’ Causes and Cures (Hildegard 1999) is about the
creation of the world, the human person, the causes of disease and then remedies for those
conditions), while Physica (Hildegard 1998) is an encyclopedic working listing the therapeutic and
toxic properties of different categories of creation: plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds,
animals and metals,. While it was not unusual for monastic libraries to possess the odd manuscript
containing information about medicine and natural science, it was far less common to create a
synthesis of scientific knowledge. Hildegard’s scientific writing is also characterised by an unusual
debt to German vocabulary, suggesting that she was drawing much more on oral than learned
traditions for her insights (Glaze 1998). We know that in a monastery like Disibodenberg it would
have been Hildegard’s duty to care for the sick. Her reflection on the phenomenon of life gave her
the insight for re-interpreting the great themes of scripture and Christian doctrine.
I do not want to comment on the usefulness or otherwise of specific advice that she gives,
like curing jaundice by tying a bat to a person’s skin. Much of her advice, as about the healing
properties of fennel, spelt, camomile, ginger and many other herbs, is more familiar to us. Yet
underlying a welter of folk knowledge, there is a consistent concern, not with creation as such, but
with the varying capacity of the elements to nurture life. She is strongly aware that some plants and
fruits are harmful, or at least of no benefit. She defines their nature not as substance, but as
subtlety. Disease and illness, the result of an imbalance in the humours is itself a consequence of
the fallen condition of humanity. Finding the appropriate therapy is part of the process of restoring
humanity to Paradise, where Adam had the sweetest health. At the end of the Physica, she
observes: `Just as the spirit of the Lord first made the waters flood, so it also vivified the human
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being and gave plants, trees and stones their viridity’ (Hildegard 1998, 237). Hildegard would not
have understood the modern scientific distinction between the organic and the inorganic. For her, as
for so many traditional cultures, all of creation is by its very nature alive. To try to identify when
life appeared on this planet, or to ask whether there is life outside this planet, would have struck
her as the height of absurdity.
Although Hildegard reported in 1163 that she had been revealed the subtleties of the
natures of created things through visionary insight, she does not present her scientific knowledge as
the fruit of visionary experience. It has been observed that her preference in this writing for
physiological rather than moralistic explanations for human behaviour seems to be at odds with
traditional Christian teaching about illness as something to be endured in preparation for the next
world rather than as something to be healed. Hildegard was probably nurturing these interests at
Disibodenberg, at the same time as Jutta was gaining a reputation for physical austerity that would
eventually take her life. I suggest that Hildegard’s flash of insight into the meaning of scripture
came about when she realised that scripture, far from being alien to her concern, had to be re-
interpreted by means of the living light.
It was only after 1163, after completing The Book of the Rewards of Life (a series of
visions about the differences between beneficial and destructive ways of living), that she sets about
writing The Book of Divine Works (Hildegard 1987, 1996), her great synthesis of how the life that
underpins the natural world is also the life that underpins the Incarnation. In its own way, Divine
Works is not unlike Process and Reality. Just as Whitehead began his literary career as a scientist
(in his case a mathematician), but evolved to reflect on the principles underpinning what he
observed as a scientist, so Hildegard similarly evolved her own grand synthesis relatively late in
life.
Whereas in Scivias, Hildegard’s prime concern was with Ecclesia and the type of life
which Christians should follow, in Divine Works she relates the life that underpins both creation
and the human person to the logos or reason that became incarnate in Christ, and provides the
normative life to which humanity has to return. Divine Works is certainly a strange and difficult
text that makes tough demands on its readers. I am most uneasy, however with the `creation-
centered grid’ that Matthew Fox offers as a guide to reading Hildegard: `Befriending Creation: the
Via Positiva”, “Befriending Darkness, Letting Go and Letting Be: the Via Negativa”, “Befriending
Creativity, Befriending Our Divinity: The Via Creativa’ and `Befriending New Creation:
Compassion, Celebration, erotic Justice, the Via Transformativa’ (Fox 1987, xviii-xx). This grid
 9

does not do justice either to the traditional or to the innovative aspects of Hildegard’s writing. Its
uncritical embrace of the concept of `creation’ reflects a little too much of `a feel-good spirituality’,
and insufficient awareness of the apocalyptic and sometimes dangerous dimensions of the creativity
of the universe.
Hildegard develops her ideas through commenting on visual and auditory images rather
than abstract concepts. Yet there is a profound logic to the structure of Divine Works which should
not conceal that this is a carefully worked out composition that needs to be read aloud and listened
to, to gain its full effect. Her first vision is of a sublime figure whom she interprets as the Love of
the heavenly Father, followed by three further visions relating to the physical construction of the
world, human nature, the significance of different parts of the body (conceived of as analogous to
different parts of the earth). This synthesis of understanding about the human person as a
microcosm of the cosmic macrocosm serves to introduce her commentary on the beginning of the
Gospel of John. Her thesis is that the relationship of soul to the body is that of the fiery power
which animates the body, like that of the winds to the earth, and that this life force is itself the
Logos or Reason which became incarnate. She believes strongly that there is a naturally healthy
state to the human person, and that the resurrection of body and soul prefigured by the resurrection
of Christ is the emblem of our being restored to a fully human state.
Hildegard outlines the entire theme of Divine Works in the opening discourse she presents
as delivered by the image which she sees:
I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of life, and I emit nothing that is
deadly. I decide things so that they should be. With my lofty wings, that is with wisdom, I
fly above the entire globe and order it rightly. I, the fiery life of the substance of divinity,
am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun,
moon and stars. With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything I awaken
everything to life. The air lives by turning green [in viridity] and being in bloom, the water
flow as if they are alive, the sun lives in its light. (Book of Divine Works 1.1.2 [my own
translation here, as elsewhere]; Hildegard 1987, 8-10; 1996, 47-48)
The phrase `fire of the substance of divinity’ itself suggests that she is re-defining a familiar
category with another, which she finds more helpful, that of fire to denote the life force. Hildegard
then engages in a second such shift of a familiar concept, when she goes on to explain that this life
power is also rationality.
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All things live in its essence, and are not found in death, since I am life. I am life. I am also
Rationality, which bears within itself the breath of the resounding Word, through which the
whole of creation is made. I breathe life into everything so that nothing is mortal in respect
to its genus, for I am life. I am life, whole and entire, not extracted from stones, not
blossoming from twigs, not rooted in a man’s virility. Rather all life has its roots in me.
Rationality is the root, the resounding Word blows out of it. (1.1.2; Hildegard 1987, 10;
1996, 48)
Hildegard then moves from the concept of Rationality to the Word, the familiar image of the Logos
from the beginning of St John’s Gospel. She uses Verbum, however, to speak not about the person
of Christ, but about humanity as a whole. She explains that this life has a three-fold power: eternity
which is called the Father, the Word that is the Son and the breath that binds them the Holy Spirit.
Hildegard is not particularly interested in devotion to Jesus as a person who is separate from us.
Her interest is in the life principle that is embodied in the Incarnation, and Jesus as the exemplar of
our wounded humanity.
Further into Divine Works, Hildegard develops the theme that the soul inhales the breath of
life into the body and then expels it. She also compares the relationship of soul to body like the
winds on the earth which ripen fruit. There is a physicality to Hildegard’s analysis of the soul,
which simply does not occur in standard Augustinian anthropology. It animates the body and soul.
`So the soul and flesh exist in two natures as one work. It brings to the human body air by
thinking, heat by concentration, fire by what it undertakes, water by what it inserts and viridity by
procreation; thus the human being is constituted from the very beginning. Above and below,
around and inside, the human being is everywhere a body. And such is the human person (1.4.103;
Hildegard 1987, 126-27; 1996, 247).’ To a twentieth-century reader, not used to talking about soul
and flesh, such language does seem very strange. Yet what Hildegard is doing is considering the
identity of the human being not as neutral matter, onto which a form is imposed, but as a living
organism. The soul blows through a body like wind through the house (1.4.104; 1987, 127; 1996,
247).
The crucial transition in Hildegard’s argument takes place with the last chapter of the
fourth vision (1.4.105), in which she offers her own interpretation of the great hymn to the Logos
that opens St John’s Gospel, `In the beginning was the Word’ She interprets the Word, not simply
as a disembodied Logos or Reason that becomes incarnate in Christ, but as the creative principle
that awakened everything to life. Hildegard cannot imagine God existing without creation. Even
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before creation came to be, it existed in God’s mind. `Why is He called the Word? Because He has
awakened all creation by the resonance of God’s voice and because he has called creation to
himself. . . . In humanity appears the first creation of God’s finger, which God formed in Adam.
The soul fills it with the power of life and fills it with its fullness as it grows. Without such a
spiritual soul the flesh has no motion. For the flesh is as intimate with the spiritual soul as all
creatures are with the Word. Just as we should not be human if we were without blood vessels, we
could not live if we had no connection to an outer nature (1.4.105; Hildegard 1987, 131-32; 1996,
251-52).’ We are so used to reading the beginning of John’s Gospel as introducing the person of
Christ, that it takes quite an effort of the imagination to see how Hildegard uses the hymn to talk
about the pristine state of humanity as a whole. The mission of the Incarnation is thus to restore
humanity back to its original state. The true light `that enlightens men’ is the breath which
penetrates every human being having flesh and bone’ (1.4.105; 1987, 138; 1996, 256). The
incarnation is thus explained by Hildegard as nothing other than the restitution of the original form
of humanity, as nature meant us to be. This conception of divine vitality then provides a standard
by which she makes very harsh judgements about the lack of justice in society. Her complaints
about the impending collapse of the institutional Church in Divine Works 3.5.16 are far more
outspoken than anything she says in Scivias (Hildegard 1987, 240-41; 1996, 433-34; Mews 2000).
In one way it is quite understandable why Fox should apply the label `creation-centered
spirituality’ to such thought. Hildegard’s mental process is to work towards an integration of those
insights that she wrote about in her medical writing and the moral instruction that she presented in
Scivias. Her analysis draws on her observation that the human being is an organism, which should
be one of a fully living body and soul. She looks forward to the resurrection as a state of fully
blooming physical and spiritual health. Her metaphor of life is not only about natural creation. It is
also about the character of the life that should prevail in humanity.
I have only begun to hint at the full complexity of The Book of Divine Works. I do not
want to suggest that we should apply the category of process thought to her writing. She cannot
completely escape the influence of conceptual categories forged by generations of male thinkers,
anxious to impose their own ideal vision of reality on a chaotic and disordered world. Nonetheless,
I suggest that as we struggle to forge a vision of ecological reality that takes into account the
dynamism and vitality of the universe, and seeks to transcend the gendered dualism about nature
and reason that pervades Western thought, it can be helpful to consider Hildegard’s reverence for
the concept of life and `the living light.’ It is not sufficient to say that we must adopt a `creation-
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centered spirituality’. Like Hildegard, we need to re-imagine the conceptual categories that shape
the theological tradition we inherit.

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Cobb, John B. and Franklin I. Gamwell 1984. Existence and Actuality. Conversations with
Charles Hartshorne. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press.

Fox, Matthew 1987. Introduction to Hildegard 1987.

Glaze, Florence Eliza 1998. `Medical Writer: “Behold the Human Creature” in Newman 1998,
125-48.

Hartshorne, Charles 1962. The logic of perfection, and other essays in neoclassical metaphysics
LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Pub.

---- 1965. `The Development of Process Philosophy’ in Philosophers of Process, ed. Douglas
Browning. New York: Random House.

---- 1990. The Darkness and the Light. A Philosopher Reflects upon His Fortunate Career and
Those Who Made It Possible. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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