Hildegard of Bingen: A Woman for our Time*

June Boyce-Tillman

What is it that makes the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen

so significant in the twentieth century? Why has her music reached
the top of both classical and popular charts? The substance of this
article is that Hildegard reminds us of a way of knowing that has
been lost, or rather reduced to the status of a subjugated culture,
struggling to survive a dominant culture where power is inextricably
linked with the distribution of capital. My thesis is that the post-
Enlightenment values of advanced capitalism need balancing with the
’hidden’ values-of connection, intuition, expressivity, process, the
arts as healing, collaboration and passionate and committed learn-
1
ing―with which they need to be in relationship.
Life is ultimately about balance. This balance is not the precarious
balance of trying to keep the peace but the ability to explore the
extremes with safety. This was certainly what Hildegard did, and
because of the varied nature of musical experience I claim that within
the broadest definition of musical activity there lies a means of doing
this.
Our society continues to validate only one pole of human experi-
ence. Individual freedom is valued above community, reason above

emotion, product above process, order above chaos, conformity above

diversity. Though many post-Enlightenment thinkers have called for
exploration of both these apparent polarities, Western society shows
no sign of relaxing its validation of one of these polarities and its

marginalization of the other. Hildegard recalls an age before the dom-

ination of this mode of thinking and opens up the possibility of new
ways of understanding. As a historical figure she presents this not as

*
Keynote Lecture at The Mystery of Hildegard Conference, Sarum College
1998. Edited for this article.
1. Some would call this the lost feminine/female. Much of the thinking here is
taken from Belenky
et al . (1986).
26 Feminist Theology
a contemporary revolution but as the recovery of a lost tradition from
the past.

Connected Knowing
The first area is that of human relationship-the concept of related-
ness.2
For Hildegard relationship was central, and grows from her funda-
mental view of the cosmos. From her Hymn to the Spirit (0 ignis
Spiritus) comes the following verse:
0 most reliable path,
That finds its way through every place;
In the most high hills, and in the flat plains,
And in all the deep abysses,
You bring all together and unite all.
(Boyce-Tillman 1994)
In the Book of Divine Works she writes:
The Godhead is like a wheel, a whole. In no way is it to be divided...
Every creature is linked to another and every essence is constrained by
another (Fox 1987: 90).

It is most clearly reflected in her paintings of her visions, where

circular and oval shapes are common and circles of earth, air, fire and
water hold all together with the winds blowing at four points.

Figure 1. Joanna Graham’s cover lllustratwn for CD ’Smgmg the Mystery-Htldegard

ReVlslted’ BML 022.

2. Based onBelenky’s concept of connected knowing and developed theolog-

ically by Mary Grey (1993).
 Boyce-Tillman Hildegard of Bingen 27

Music is seen as an essential part of this unity. In her music this is true
both of the internal relationships within the music and the way in
which music is perceived in relation to human beings and society.
Inside the pieces, the texts of her songs are characterized by the con-
junction of connected ideas, which is reflected in the free flowing
nature of the musical setting.

0 wound flowing with blood

That cries aloud to the highest
When all elemental forces
Are themselves entangled
And crying with lamenting voice
Bringing terror,
Because this is the blood of creation itself
touching them,
Anoint us
So that our wounds may be healed.
(Boyee-Tillman 1994)
In this single sentence the ideas pour forth in a stream that adds to the
song’s immediacy and reveals the connectedness of the thought
behind it. Here this is crucial to the theology: our wounds are intrin-
sically bound up with the cosmic cataclysm that has produced the
’wound flowing with blood’. Indeed, for Hildegard, the notion of sin
was that of a break in this relationship, as can be seen in the second
Vision:
This vision reveals not only the nature of Lucifer’scrime but also the
way in which it initiated the process of evil, bringing about imbalance
on earth, the disruption of its natural wholeness... The process of
salvation will involve... the restoration of this lost harmony, so that the
creation will once again perfectedly reflect its Creator (Beer 1992: 38).

Hildegard’s view of the dualisms that characterized the theology of

her time was that the apparent oppositions (dark/light, evil/good,
body/soul) were in close, almost indivisible relationship. For her, the
negative was always in relationship with the positive. She writes:
Human beings fly with two wings: the right wing is the knowledge of
good and the left is the knowledge of evil. The knowledge of evil serves
the good insofar as the good is sharpened and highlighted through the
knowledge of evil; and so through this knowledge human beings
become wise in all things (Fox 1987: 350).

A similar relationship is worked out between the soul and the body
and her work reflects a redeeming of the negative role of the body as
seen in the tradition of the Church Fathers:
28 Feminist Theology

No matter how eager the soul may be to do as much good as possible

within the body, it cannot go further than divine grace permits it to
go...
The soul rejoices at being able to achieve things with the body. The soul
cannot achieve more than the limits our bodily elements allow... Thus
the soul says ’0 my flesh and limbs, in which I have my dwelling, how
much do I rejoice that I have been sent to you who are in agreement
with me’ (Fox 1987:95-96).

This last phrase with the notion of soul and body being in agreement
is crucial for our world. The developing area of Body Theology is
challenging ideas of perfection in bodily shape that have in a quite
insidious way been bound up with theological views of perfection.3
Our bodies are made holy by a baptism that necessarily includes all
shapes, sizes and conditions of human beings, and are made holy not
in some form hereafter, but in their present states. This is the only
logical position that a theology based on incarnation can take. Those
whose bodies do not conform to the dominant notions of beauty
represent a constant challenge to the dominant theology.4
Hildegard wrestles with embodiment even after death when she
describes how the souls of the holy desire their own bodies in this
passage from Liber Vitae Meritorum:
...
according to the will of God, they proclaim that they had just dwelt
in their bodies that, although they have already turned to dust, they
want to fetch back so they can rejoice more fully (Hozeski 1994: 32).

Normally for us the act of breathing is an unconscious one. Singing is

one of the few activities in which we have to control the flow of breath
through our bodies, to be aware of it. Hildegard prized the act of
singing very highly as a way of entering a deeper understanding of
the flow of the Spirit within us. Brendan Doyle, who works with the
music at Matthew Fox’s Institute for Creation Studies writes:

Hildegard’s compositions are incredibly physical... When she writes

about the Spirit, you know she understands the Spirit as wind, as
breath, because you become the wind. When she writes about Divine

3. For an introduction to this area I would recommend Isherwood and Stuart

(1998).
4. ’The corporeal is for people with disabilities the most real. Unwilling and
unable to take our bodies for granted, we attend to the kinesis of knowledge. That
is, we become keenly aware that our physical selves determine our perceptions of
the physical and social worlds. These perceptions, like our bodies, are often non-
conforming and disclose new categories and models of thinking and being
(Eisland 1994: 31). See also Orbach (1978).
 Boyce-Tillman Hildegard of Bingen 29

Mysteries, you sing out of the deepest space of your physical being from
the comfort of the normal range to the extremes of your potential (Doyle
1987~ 364).

For her, the theory of music is inextricably bound up with the cosmic
order. There have been in Western music theory two views of the
nature of music. One looks at the internal structures of the music,
often using mathematical formulae to express them. These are autono-
mous theories. The other view sees music as inextricably bound up
with society, having effects in such areas as politics, healing, religious
ritual and so on. These are non-autonomous theories. Pozzi Escot
points out that there are examples of mathematical patterns in Hilde-
gard’s work; but the origins of these are not in the theories of the
autonomous nature of musical structures as found in the mathe-
matical theories of contemporary music theorists, but a reflection of
something beyond the music-the order and pattern of the universe
which reflects that of the Godhead. She can thus be placed among the
non-autonomous theoreticians of music.
Feminist musicologists such as Rose Rosengard Subotnik would
locate themselves similarly. Subotnik stresses the relationship of music
to human processes, and opens up the possibility of different ways of
perceiving the ’meaning’ of music-ways characterized by looking .
not only within the structure of music itself but also in its relationship
to the world (Subotnik 1996: xxiv-xxv). It validates other ways of lis-
J
tening than the somewhat narrow view of traditional academics, and
allows music contextual, cultural and emotional meanings.
Contextualization is part of the concept of relatedness; as we listen
to Hildegard’s music today it is impossible for us to ascribe to it the
meanings that it would have had in her convent. Shifts of context
mean shifts of meaning. For Hildegard the liturgical context would
have been inseparable from the music’s meaning. Sabina Flanagan
writes:
To speak of Hildegard’s works as songs (L. carmina, G. Lieder) may give
the wrong impression, for all her compositions were conceived of in a
strictly religious mode. Perhaps a better description might be ’liturgical
songs’, since they were almost all composed in forms-antiphons,
responsories, sequences, hymns-which were used in the performance
of the Opus Dei or the celebration of the Mass (Flanagan 1989: 107).

The essentially decontextualized phenomenon of performance for

recording and concert would be beyond her comprehension.5

5. I have a wonderful vision of Hildegard transported to the front of a

30 Feminist Theology

Closely allied with the notion of contextualization is that of

ephemerality. Many pieces of church music are produced for partic-
ular occasions and then are not preserved, illustrating a tradition of
change and renewal, identifiable with the ebb and flow and flux that
characterize the natural world, a process that has traditionally been
allied with women because of our understanding of the cycle of birth,
growth, decay and death. A concern for the preservation of eternal
values represents the opposite pole and can lead to inflexibility.
The collection of songs entitled Symphonia armoniae celestium revela-
tionum (The Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations) was
almost certainly not written down by Hildegard or even by Volmar:
this may have happened only at the end of her life when an unknown
patron paid the considerable sum necessary to employ the services of
a musical scribe. The material would have been held in the memory of
the people at the convent, and some may have been lost, as were later
women’s songs like those of the beguine Mechtild of Hackeborn. The
pieces have the character of having been created for particular fes-
tivals with no grand scheme in mind, following the themes that she
loved and considered underrepresented in the music of the church. It
is likely that the Symphony was not conceived as a grand cycle but
was an ordering by Hildegard of diverse material created for different
occasions.
Another area is her connection with tradition. There is no doubt
that whatever Hildegard touched she made her own, whether it was
the use of triads and mode changes in her music, the colours of her
paintings or the divine female figures of her visions. Yet the under-
lying motivation is not individualistic; she stresses throughout her
striving for authenticity within the tradition, rather than innovation.
For Hildegard was steeped in the tradition of the Bible and Benedic-
tine spirituality: her task was to express her unique spirituality in
music which she believed to come direct from God in the context of
the religion that was her root.
Her rediscovery of the female aspects of the Divine within the tradi-
tion was crucial to her search for an authentic voice. The feminine fig-
ures in her thinking are based on the figure of Wisdom-a feminine

figure in the Old Testament.

Hildegard’s ’Sophia’ is certainly the creatrix, the consort of God, the one
present at the dawn of the world, the ruler of the world, the most
exalted of the feminine ’personae’ the divine energy who sustains and

Mercedes speeding down the Ml with the CD Feather on the Breath of God playing
and her saying ’But I wrote it for my nuns for the feast of St Ursula’.
 Boyce-Tillman Hildegard of Bingen 31

creates the cosmos and who is also at work deep within the human soul.
Cross (1995: 24).

Hildegard also draws on the surrounding nature traditions that can

be seen in the faces of the green person on the pillars of the monastery
of Disibodenberg where she spent much of her youth. She tried to
contain these ideas within orthodox theology, as in 0 viridissima virga
in which she likens the Virgin Mary to a greening branch.

Intuitive Knowing
The validating of the material world above the mystical world is
everywhere evident in contemporary society. The approach to
conclusions by means of reasoned steps is valued above the intuitive
insight based on experience. But the sense of the mystical values the
non-verbal, and Hildegard used all her creative powers to the full. In
the Book of Divine Works she wrote: ’All arts are derived from the
breath that God sent into the human body’ (Fox 1987: 359).

And there were few art forms that she did not explore.
Colour, sound, movement, poetry, drama, painting, music, singing were
all used to enhance books, letters and public speaking. The paintings
which accompany her visions in Scivias reveal her interest in colours
and symbolic imagery. They show how vivid were her visions, and how
she was compelled to pass them on to others. They must have exercised
her senses all over again in their production, and contributed to her
ability to articulate her visions in writing (Conn 1995: 43).
She had an appreciation of the symbolic value of clothes, and allowed
her nuns considerable freedom in wearing white veils, tiaras with
gems and rings on their rings to celebrate holy days.
It is clear that she had a sensuous delight in words for their sound
as much as for their meaning; this may explain the lingua ignota, a

language of 900 nouns referring to clothes worn by the nuns, garden

herbs and a range of mystical beings. The texts of her songs delight in
’assonance, annominatio and an occasional rhyme’. Newman gives the
following section from 0 Ierusalem as an example
Unde vos o ornati Hence, 0 you adorned ones and
et o coronati succurite nobis 0 you crowned ones help us,
famulantibus et exilio serving and labouring in exile.
laborantibus
(Newman 1988:44)
32 Feminist Theology

Hildegard described the language in which she received her visions

as ‘an unknown language yet to be heard, not in the ordinary human
form of expression’ (Nash 1997: xix). From this it was dictated to
Volmar in a mixture of German and Latin.
The obscurity of some of her writing may be due not so much to
this complex process or an inadequate grasp of Latin as much as a
desire to belong. Like other subjugated groups who wanted to exist
within the established order, she invented a system of ‘double-speak’
that could be interpreted in a variety of ways.6 Our culture has real
problems with the visionary experience-far more than that of Hilde-
gard. Hers at least had a religious frame into which such experiences
would fit; ours pushes them at best into the realm of the eccentric, at
worst, to the realm of the mad. Hildegard had a profound trust in the
content and significance of her visions and the visions themselves are
filled with exotic imagery. Large female figures abound: Sapientia/
Wisdom; Synagoga/Mother of the Word of God; Ecclesia/The
Church. These are symbolic figures but are seen as explicitly female,
endowed with breasts and wombs, performing particularly female
functions such as cradling offspring or giving birth (Beer 1997: 7) (see
p. 90 fig. 2).
Sceptical contemporary commentators on the visions have grasped
gratefully at Oliver Sacks’s hypothesis that the visions may have been
caused by migraines, identifying such features as the bright stars as
part of the migraine experience.7 What is often not mentioned is that
he adds that this does not invalidate what she was given as part of the
experience. If we believe in a God capable of speaking through
human suffering, it is possible that the visions are both part of a
migraine experience and a manifestation of divine truths.

6.This was part of the song tradition of the black slaves in the USA. Take for
example the phrase ’We will gather by the river’, which for the Christian masters
referred to baptism—for the slaves, the celebration of their own African rituals.
7. ’Our literal interpretation would be that she experienced a shower of
phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their passage being succeeded by a
negative scotoma Invested with this sense of ecstasy, burning with profound
...

theophorous and philosophical significance, Hildegard’s visions were instrumental

in directing her towards a life of holiness and mysticism. They provide a unique
example of the manner in which a physiological event, banal, hateful or
meaningless to the vast majority of people, can become, in a privileged conscious-
ness, the substrate of a supreme ecstatic inspiration. One must go to Dostoievski,
who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momen-
tous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel’ (Sacks 1985: 158-62).
 Boyce-Tillman Hildegard of Bingen 33

Figure 2a. Ecclesia with Virginitas and her companions. Monks and virgins occupy the
place of honor in Ecdesia’s flaming heart. Scivias 11.5, Eibingen ms.

Figure 2b. Synagoga as Mother of the Incarnation. Moses sits in her bosom and the
expectant prophets in her womb. Scivias 1.5, Eibingen ms.
34 Feminist Theology

Her approach to healing reflected a trust in the power of the arts to

heal. Her confidence in the power of drama and ritual is seen when
she was asked for advice on the exorcism of the possessed woman
Sigewize. An unsuccessful ritual involving seven priests of good
repute was carried out, followed by one created in the context of her
own community at which Hildegard herself was present. Hildegard’s

liturgical drama bears resemblance to the rituals being created by

people today8 to mark significant events such as divorce and the heal-
ing of abuse.

Expressivity
Hildegard clearly favoured and prioritized the expressive elements of
music. The interrelationship between text and music in her songs
illustrates this well (see p. 92 Fig. 3). In her antiphon 0 virtus Sapien-
tiae the melody rises upwards in one of her characteristic ecstatic
openings at the announcement of the power of Wisdom. In line 2 con-
cerned with circling, it circles round B. As she sings of embracing the
earth in a way that brings life into being, the line sweeps down from
the top E to root the life into the earth. As the first of the three wings
reaches highest heaven the line sweeps up to its highest note, while
for the wing sweating in earth it goes down nearly to its lowest note.
The third flying everywhere uses the whole octave. The doxology
leans downwards in a gesture of reverence.
Hildegard welds tune and text in the tradition of the woman
singer/song-writer for whom the song represents an intensification of
her own feelings and beliefs. Barbara Newman compares her with
male hymn writers:
As a verbal artist, Hildegard did not have the craftsmanship of a Notker
or a Peter Abelard. But neither was she the inept, negligible figure that
the standard histories of hymnography would have us believe. Often
conventional in her subjects, she was wholly original in her treatment
and style... What she lacked in fluency, Hildegard made up in sheer
immediacy (Newman1988:15).
She goes on to compare her with Bernard of Clairvaux and sees
how Hildegard’s style compresses meaning:
Unity is intuitive rather than logical... Where Bernard’s syntax
discriminates, Hildegard’s unites, creating possibilities both for confu-
sion and for extraordinary richness (1988: 42).

8. The encapsulating of grief at Diana’s death into rituals involving flowers

and prayers shows a reclaiming by the people of the sense and the power of ritual
for themselves. See also Ward and Wild (eds.) 1995.
Boyce-TiUman Hildegard of Bingen 35

Figure 3. Extract from 0 Virtus Sapientiae.

36 Feminist Theology
Contemporary performances of her work do not always reflect such
expressive writing in the chosen singing style. Newman continues:
Given her visionary conception of the music it is hard to believe the
rhapsodic quality of her lyrics did not call forth a similarly rapt unin-
hibited performance style. She praises the sweet, clear, ringing tone
(dulcissi11la, clara, semans) (1988:30).
In a letter to Elisabeth of Schonau she compared her own voice to a
trumpet resounding by the breath of God (Newman 1988: 31). Her
vibrant vocal style seems to be allied to her concept of viriditas-
usually translated as ’greening power’ but including the vibrancy and
energy of all creation. She certainly believed that singing is power; so
did the bishop who silenced her voice in the last year of her life for
failing to obey his instructions and for pursuing her own view of
justice. (Thanks to a letter warning the bishop that those who silence
the music of God on earth will have no part in the music of Heaven
the ban was raised before she died.)

Process

Some schools of spirituality and psychotherapy ask people to accom-

modate themselves to a system, when it is the system itself that needs
to be challenged. A radical rethinking is needed, that puts human
beings and human experience rather than capital and its demands at
the centre of the organization of society. If the role of process in the
arts is to be valued, not merely the product, (assessed, bought and
sold like a commodity), chaos must be embraced instead of being
demonized by linear thinkers. Most accounts of the creative process
include a measure of chaos, indeed require it as a prerequisite for
creativity. For Hildegard, process was deeply embedded in the prod-
uct. The way Hildegard received her music as part of the visionary
experience illustrates this. Having received it direct from God she
resisted revising it in any way. Her visionary experiences started at
three years old and continued into old age:
The illustrations accompanying Scivias and The Book of Divine Works give
us an inkling of what Hildegard saw in her visions, although they
remain static, unable fully to portray the great dramas of colour, move-
ment and sound resonant with symbolic significance, which her writ-
ings describe (Bowie and Davies 1990: 20).
The result of this is that the music is improvisatory in character.
Hildegard drew on a relatively small number of motifs which she
repeated, with ingenious variation, in every piece composed in that
 Boyce-Tillman Hildegard of Bingen 37

mode. This quality of repetition restores some of the musical stability

that she sacrificed in abandoning strophic construction (Newman 1988:
29).
The songs were given to her as part of her visions. This gives them an
improvisatory character that could result in a new way of listening,
one common to non-notated traditions. It is a more cyclical way of

perception, one of returning to certain ideas and motifs rather than a

linear progression from one end of a score to the other. The music is
perceived as rotating round a central axis rather than as a linear
development of ideas.
We do not have a continuous women’s classical music tradition in
Europe: if we had, this improvisatory approach to formal structures
may well have been better represented. It may have been consciously
chosen by women, and not be simply the result of a lack of musical
education, as some have suggested (McClary 1991 : 61).
In this improvisatory style Hildegard introduces changes of
mode-out of keeping with the usage of her day. The prevailing Euro-
pean tradition had been that of closure, by return to the opening key
of a piece, but Hildegard ends The Hymn to the Spirit in a different
mode from the one she started in by the introduction of a B~. She is at
the same time challenging church modal tradition and setting up a
different model more akin to the helix, where the same point is never
returned to exactly. She also exploits the forbidden augmented fourth
in the Lydian mode in portraying the cosmic cataclysm of 0 cruor
sanguinis.

Healing
In several areas today there is a growth in favouring a holistic
approach to life and the relationship of music to healing is stressed. In
founding the Hildegard Network, bringing together people interested
in exploring the links between spirituality, the arts and healing, I
wanted to encourage this relationship. For Hildegard all aspects of life
were interconnected:
She was the first to write maturely of the qualities of herbs and ele-
ments, of the physiological connections within the human body, and the
remedies that could be used to bridge the two (Nash 1997: 41).

The connection between disease and the cosmos is present in all her
medical writings. She saw laughing, crying, singing and dancing as
linked with the health of the body, particularly in relation to the
immune system which she saw as central to health. As such she
38 Feminist Theology
sounds very contemporary.9 Some healers are using her music to
effect the order in the elements that she desired (Gentile 1997).

Collaboration
The classical traditions of music, especially since the Enlightenment,
have stressed individual ownership of works of art, and the model of
the isolated artist has become the paradigm. Other traditions have
been characterized by collaborative ways of working and a desire for
community. The notion of communality was central to the Bene-
dictine Rule by which Hildegard lived. In her creative work she
worked in collaboration with both Richardis of Stade and Volmar, as
an illustration from the Lucca MS of The Book of Divine Works shows.

Musically, Hildegard favoured inclusivity; and such thinking pre-

sents a challenge to an increasingly elitist society. Hildegard would
have to have trained and nurtured young women who had been
selected because of their vocation and not for their musical talent. The
notion of the experienced artist as primarily the enabler of others is
for many preferable to that of the solo artist developing his singular
talent by means of competition with others.l0

Committing Knowing
In her committed knowing Hildegard learned to speak with an
authority unusual for women in the Middle Ages where they were
considered incapable of high level thinking. She describes herself as
indocta and lays herself in the hands of God to be carried as a feather
is carried. The vision of blinding light, accompanied by heat inside
her chest and temporary paralysis that struck her at the age of 43,
gave her the sense that the authority she desired was given to her. She
wrote:

But when I had passed out of childhood and had reached the age of full
maturity above, I heard a voice from Heaven saying ’I am the Living

9. ’Her vision On Human Nature describes how the various organs of the body
are connected to each other and to different emotions and illnesses. These in turn
are closely connected with the qualities of the external "winds and air"’ (Conn
1995: 41-42).
10. The saying ’Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach’ shows clearly
the low esteem in which those who regard the process of nurturing others as the
more important role are held. Organizations in the UK encouraging the meeting of
amateurs and professionals like COMA and Community Music Making associa-
tions are starting to challenge this notion.
 Boyce-Tillman Hildegard of Bingen 39

Light, Who illuminates the darkness. The person whom I have chosen
and who I have miraculously stricken as I willed, I have placed among
great wonders’ (Furlong 1996: 88).
In this moment she became confident in her ability to draw from that
source, as other creative women who, after a mid-life crisis, have
found an inner strength. Contemporary feminist theological thinking
may have a problem with the notion of consecrated virginity, but it
did give Hildegard the separateness to realize her own potential, and
she valued her own virginity and that of her nuns very highly. The
authority she gained in the second half of her life came from a
mixture of trust in God and freedom from the demands of husband
and children. Through her music and her writings we hear her voice
across the centuries-the connected, related, contextual, communal,
visionary, collaborative, improvisatory, integrative, committed,
authoritative sound of the mature woman. Maybe in the next
millennium we will be able to recover some of the ways of knowing
that Hildegard reminds us of, and continue our challenge to the
dominant culture with her voice in our ears.

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Beer, Frances
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Bowie, Fiona, and Oliver Davies (eds.)
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Boyce-Tillman, J.
1987 ’Towards a Model of the Development of Musical Creativity: A
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—
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40 Feminist Theology

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—

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