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St. Hildegard on the Frail
Sex
by Barbara Newman.
'Peace Weavers, Medieval
Religious Women', vol 2 ed JA Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank, Cistercian
Publications 1987.
BARBARA NEWMAN (Ph.D. Yale) is known for her work on medieval
religious culture and women's spirituality. She has been a Fellow of the
Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alice
Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern.
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the
wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what
is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing
things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the presence of God. St
Paul to the Church of Corinth (1 Co 1:27-29)
But I—a poor woman, weak and frail from my infancy—have
been compelled in a true and mysterious vision to write this letter. And lying
in bed with a serious illness, I have written it by the command and assistance
of God to present it to the prelates and masters who are sealed for God’s
service, that in it they might see who and what they are ... And I heard a
voice from heaven saying: Let no one despise these words, lest if anyone
despise them, the vengeance of God fall upon him. St Hildegard to the Monks
of Eberbach.(2)
When the Church of Corinth compelled St Paul to defend his
apostolic claims, he took his stand on the unlikely grounds of foolishness and
weakness, setting a precedent that has challenged Church leaders ever since. In
two millennia of history, few have been able to echo his words more justly than
St Hildegard, abbess of Bingen (1098-1179). But the boast is doubly
paradoxical, for this famed visionary was richly endowed with what medievals
called gifts of nature and fortune as well as grace. Born of a noble family at
Bermersheim bei Alzey, she was offered to God as an oblate at the age of eight,
grew up in the hermitage of Jutta of Sponheim near the flourishing monastery of
St Disibod, and took her monastic vows ca. 1112-1115. (3)
The hermitage meanwhile was growing into a full-fledged convent
observing the benedictine Rule, and when Jutta died in 1136, the nuns elected
Hildegard as abbess (magistra) in her place. Five years later, she
received her prophetic call and embarked on the momentous public and literary
career which was to continue for nearly four decades. By her death at the age
of eighty-one, she had found time and energy to found two monasteries,
undertake four extensive preaching tours,(4) and
counsel an endless stream of visitors and pilgrims, as well as compose three
major theological works, a scientific and medical encyclopedia, a liturgical
song cycle, two saints’ lives, the first european morality play, and a
vast correspondence. It is not easy to take her self-image as ‘a poor
woman, weak and frail from infancy’ at face value.
Mindful of Paul’s example and of the need to be (or at
any rate to seem) humble, monastic writers throughout the Middle Ages
advertised their defects, whether of wisdom or holiness, learning or style.
Thus, when St Hildegard’s prefaces remind readers of her physical frailty,
her scanty education, and her unpolished Latin, she is taking her place in a
long line of rhetorically humble monks.(5) Yet her
protestations involve more than a mere ‘humility topos’. For one
thing, she is telling the truth: her health was precarious, her
schooling (though not her learning) meager, her prose untutored and rough. More
to the point, however, Hildegard could lay claim to a more authentic
‘weakness’ than any of her fellow theologians, for a very simple
reason. To be a woman in the twelfth-century Church was, among other things, to
be foolish, weak, low, and despised in the world. To be a travelling female
preacher, as Hildegard was, could indicate only one of two things: heretical
folly, or else divine power made perfect in weakness.
An Effeminate Age
One of Hildegard's favorite self-designations is ego
paupercula feminea forma: ‘I, a poor little figure of a woman’.
Other self-deprecating labels—wretched, ignorant, feeble—slip in and
out of this catch phrase.(6) Whenever she introduces
herself with this formula, Hildegard will ascribe the work that follows not to
herself but to God, ‘the living Light’, for obviously she—mere
female that she is!—could not be expected to know anything herself. In
this way the apologetic tag humbles the writer at the same time that it exalts
her authority, while challenging the reader to transcend worldly standards and
glorify God in his prophet.(7)Hildegard’s sex thus
becomes her personal claim to that divine foolishness and weakness which is
stronger and wiser than men.. And in this case, ‘men’ means not
homines but viri, for Hildegard was keenly aware of her anomalous
role as a woman. In fact, she saw her gender as an essential condition of her
prophetic call which, like the Old Testament prophets, she interpreted in
broadly historical terms.
The seer’s understanding of her mission rested not
only on her spiritual experience, but also on the conviction that hers was a
muliebre tempus, an ‘effeminate age’ in which men have grown
so womanish that God must call women to do men’s work. Thus her first
prophetic book, the Scivias (begun in 1141), opens with a divine
injunction to the visionary. Although she is but a weak mortal, ‘ashes
from ashes’, she is to proclaim the word of salvation, for the masters and
doctors to whom it was entrusted have grown slack.
Let those who see the inner meaning of Scripture, yet do
not wish to proclaim or preach it, take instruction, for they are lukewarm and
sluggish in preserving the justice of God.... Therefore pour out a fountain of
abundance, overflow with mysterious learning, so that those who want you to be
despicable on account of Eve’s transgression may be overwhelmed by the
flood of your profusion.(8)
Later in the same work, God speaking through the prophet
again castigates priests for refusing either to preach or to practise what is
right. But alongside the divine voice, we can hear the prophet’s anger at
the misogynist attacks she must face: God tells her to declare his fiery work
even though she is ‘trampled underfoot’ by the male sex ‘because
of Eve’s transgression’.(9) While admitting
the generic frailty of her sex, Hildegard refused to let men use either
Eve’s feminine weakness or her own as an excuse to ignore their own moral
and spiritual weakness. Time and again, she ascribed her prophetic calling to
the laxity of male teachers and prelates. At one time, she complains,
theologians used to expound the Bible with great zeal, but today their books
are greeted with indifference: ‘nowadays the Catholic faith wavers and the
Gospel limps among the peoples . . . and the food of life—the divine
Scripture—has grown tepid’. Hence God must now reveal his mysteries
through a chosen vessel who has never been taught by man.
In her autobiography, Hildegard even observes that her
birth took place around 1100 in an age when Christian fervor had grown cool,
clearly hinting that if the times were out of joint, it was she who had been
born to set them right. (11) Ever since the reign of
Henry IV, she writes elsewhere, society had been plunged ‘into feminine
levity ... so that now to the scandal of men, women prophesy’.(12) (The seer’s plural may refer to herself and her
protegée, Elisabeth of Schönau.) Only the scandal of female
prophets will shock the Church into recognizing the greater scandal of men who
can and should proclaim the Word, but will not. So to shame them into
repentance, God has transformed a frail virgo into a thundering
virago. One of Hildegard’s correspondents likened her to the
ancient prophetess Deborah, who rose up to fill a similar vacuum: The strong
men in Israel ceased and held their peace, until Deborah arose—arose as a
mother in Israel’ (Jg 5-7 Vulg).(13)
In historical terms, then, Hildegard saw herself as a
remedy divinely appointed for the ills of her times. An effeminate age calls
for a feminine prophet, and an epoch of weakness for the weaker sex. When
speaking of this muliebre tempus, Hildegard applies the epithet
‘female’ in a purely pejorative sense. By her showing, the Church of
her day had grown soft, sensual, cowardly, and worldly—full of the vices
misogynists would impute to women. Yet when she looked at her own feminine
‘weakness,’ this trait became ambivalent, for she found her physical,
mental, and moral failings as a woman offset by a peculiar openness to God.
Thus her reflections on womanhood and weakness, initially spurred by her
prophetic call and the circumstances of her mission, gradually led her to
deeper spiritual insights. The pauline paradox, with its special relevance to
the feminine, sheds a new and sometimes surprising light on her own human
shortcomings, the mystery of sexual difference, the ‘feminine’
qualities of inspiration and priesthood, and the saving weakness of the
Incarnation itself. Some of her discoveries, though shaped by medieval notions
of masculine and feminine which many would now question,(14)can still point the way for women who seek God in and
through their own womanhood, instead of pursuing ‘equality’ through
the attempted denial or obliteration of difference.
Thorns in the Flesh
Like St Paul, Hildegard had to admit that even the richest
grace had yet to extirpate her own thorns in the flesh. Although her
illumination had conferred a knowledge of divine mysteries, together with an
awesome task, her limitations remained. The fire from heaven did not grant her
miraculous healing, or proficiency in grammar, or cheery self-confidence. But
while she could accept her ill health and her ignorance of letters as
providential, she remained troubled by the diffidence, fear, and insecurity
which she perceived as typically female faults. In a letter to Bernard of
Clairvaux (1147), the first of her several hundred epistles, Hildegard called
herself ‘wretched and more than wretched in the name of woman’ and
contrasted her own fear with the abbot’s audacity: Two years ago I saw you
in this vision as a man looking into the sun, not frightened but greatly
daring; and I wept because I only blush and am timid’.(15)
The seer’s second book, Liber vitae meritorum, portrays the
vices of Desperatio and Tristitia saeculi (or in current
parlance, depression and despondency) in feminine form (16)
On the other hand, Hildegard tried to correlate the timiditas she
attributed to women with the biblical virtue of timor Domini, ‘fear of the
Lord’:
God created woman so that she might hold him in fear and
fear her husband as well. Hence it is right for a woman always to be fearful
(timida). For she is a house of wisdom, because things earthly and
heavenly are perfected in her. On the one hand mankind is born through her, and
on the other, good works appear in her with chaste modesty.... The reverent
(timorata) woman gathers all the riches of good works and holy virtues
into her bosom, never ceasing until she has fulfilled all that is good.(17)
Hildegard’s culture, of course, strongly encouraged
women to behave timidly toward God and their husbands, so it is not surprising
that she ascribed this proclivity in her sex to natural law. Moreover, her
cloistered childhood and her precocious visions, which exposed her to ridicule
as a girl, may help to account for her own fearful character.(18) Yet, after due allowance for psychology and culture,
Hildegard maintained that the Creator gave woman a fearful nature not merely
because she is subject to man, but because her own dignity deserves a respect
which borders on awe. Woman is called to be a ‘house of wisdom’ (Pr
9:1) whether she elects the vocation of motherhood or of ‘chaste
modesty’ (monasticism), hence she must venerate the one—divine or
human—who fulfills and exalts her. What then is the difference between the
timorata mulier whom the seer praises, and her own fears which she
deplores? In modern terms, we might say that she faced the task of transforming
neurotic or self-regarding fear into the reverent fear that becomes one in whom
‘heavenly things are perfected’. Her correspondent at Clairvaux would
contrast the servile fear which is cast out by love with the chaste and filial
fear which remains forever.(19)
Another of Hildegard’s frailties, according to her
self-diagnosis as a physician, stemmed from her peculiar temperament. In
medieval medicine, the four physical and psychological types known as
complexions or temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic)
were normally correlated with the elements of fire, air, water, and earth.(20) In addition, the ‘warm’ elements of fire and
air were commonly regarded as masculine, the ‘cold’ pair of water and
earth as feminine.(21) In her medical treatise Causae
et curae, however, Hildegard presented a theory of humors and temperaments
which differed considerably from the standard views. (22)
For instance, she found a special affinity between the airy temperament
and the nature of woman. God created Adam from the earth, earthy, for he was to
till the earth and subdue it; ‘but Eve, taken from his marrow, was soft
and possessed an airy mind and a keen, delicate life, for the weight of the
earth did not oppress her’.(23) The female body
needs to be airy—permeable and spacious—to accommodate children in
the womb. (24) Eve, the first mother, ‘was made
like the purest air, for as aether enfolds the inviolate stars, so
she—inviolate, incorrupt, without pain—held the human race within
her’.(25) Since the Fall, however, woman’s
airy nature has caused problems. Hildegard writes that women are fenestrales
et ventosae: their bodies are like windows which freely admit the stormy
elements raging without.(26) In consequence, women are
especially vulnerable to ailments provoked by the weather, making their health
more fragile than that of men.
This theory would now be only an episode in the history of
medicine, were it not for the subtle way Hildegard applied it to her spiritual
life. She regarded her own nature as even more airy than most women’s, and
to this defect of her constitution she ascribed the illness which had plagued
her from childhood on.(27) Late in her life, however,
she came to see a link between her troublesome temperament and her spiritual
gifts. Her last great work, the Liber divinorum operum (completed in
1173), ends with an autobiographic passage in which the seer speaks of herself
in the third person. The Holy Spirit has deigned to anoint her—a
paupercula feminea forma— with the oil of his mercy, unlearned and
feeble though she is. From infancy she has suffered constant pain, as if
enmeshed in a net, and her visions themselves cause her great weariness.
Moreover her ways are not those of other men; she is like an infant whose veins
are not yet full of blood.
For she is a minister (officialis) inspired by the
Holy Spirit, and she has a complexion of air. Therefore infirmity is driven
into her from the air itself, the rain, the wind, and from every tempest, so
that she can by no means enjoy any security of the flesh. Otherwise the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit would not be able to dwell in her.(28)
In her old age, Hildegard speculated on the meaning of
afflictions that hitherto she could only bear with patience. If the airy
make-up of her body and spirit left her exposed to rheumatic fever, the
Föhn, the demonic powers of the air,(29) and every
other malaise, she knew that it also opened her to that heavenly breath which,
like the wind, blows where it will. Her insight rose beyond the abstract
recognition that ‘suffering builds character’ to a full and concrete
self-knowledge which embraced body and spirit, human weakness and divine power
at once. But eight centuries later, it is not easy to reconstruct—much
less to explain—what she meant by certain physical expressions. In a
celebrated letter to Guibert of Gembloux (1175), she remarked that her soul
‘rises up high in the vault of heaven and in the changing weather’
(in vicissititdinem diversi aeris) and spreads itself out over faraway
peoples ‘according to the shifting clouds’.(30)
Although her visions were far from ethereal, she hinted that her
soul—like Eve’s body—somehow expanded to become as capacious as
the heavens. Whatever Hildegard’s precise meaning, it is clear that the
‘airiness’ which gives other women the capacity for motherhood had in
her become a capacity for God. Physical weakness was but the price that she,
like any other fallen woman, had to pay.
Passivity and Prophecy
One of Hildegard’s most striking images for
woman’s constitution occurs in the Causae et curae, where she
compares a woman’s body to the frame of a lyre which is pierced to make
room for the strings.(31) This same image, like the
aeolian harp of the Romantics, served her as an emblem of prophetic
inspiration. In another of her third-person epilogues she presents God speaking
of his prophet as just such an instrument:
The person who has seen and revealed these things in
writing lives and does not live; a woman of ashes, she perceives and does not
perceive; and she reveals the marvels of God not by herself hut as one touched
by them, just as a string touched by the harper sounds not by itself but by his
touch.(32)
Using a comparable image, Hildegard reminded Elisabeth of
Schönau that God’s elect are like wind instruments which remain mute
until the divine musician sounds them. A trumpet does not sing with its own
voice, but with the breath of Another: even so the prophet.(33)In several letters, Hildegard compared herself to a little
feather (penna) soaring on the wings of the wind: she is nothing in
herself but, uplifted by the Spirit, the penna is mightier than the
sword!
What man can strive against that voice that thundered,
mounting up on wings, and vanquished the abyss, resounding under cover of
maternal freshness? And what wings of the wind can outrun that voice by their
swiftness? Cannot this voice make a little feather fly so that no sword can
prevail against that feather? (34)
The prophet felt herself to be essentially passive,
sounding or soaring only when the divine breath touched her. Her sense of this
irresistible, overpowering voice bears comparison with Abraham Heschel’s
similar, though more synergistic view of the prophetic stance as ‘sympathy
with God’.(35)
Hildegard was neither the first nor the last to see an analogy between
this state and the attitude of a wife to her husband—though, to be sure,
the analogy came easier to medieval minds than it does to modern. The common
prejudice which views the passive role as demeaning and undignified, or at any
rate inferior to the active, assumes the absence of this divine point of
reference. If human activity seems so far superior to the passive and receptive
state, it may be because the creature’s essential stance vis-à-vis
the Creator is forgotten. But for Hildegard there was nothing shameful in a
woman’s passivity, any more than it was shameful for the prophet to remain
empty and still until the divine word resounded through her. Moreover, we tend
nowadays to apply terms like active and passive—or strong and weak—to
the human personality as a whole, so that it seems not only demeaning but
downright false to characterize a woman’s entire being as weak and
passive. But Hildegard and her contemporaries used such labels in a far
earthier and more limited sense. When she wrote that ‘God joined man and
woman, that is the strong and the weak, together in marriage’,(36) she was thinking primarily of sexual relations in which
the roles are simply not reversible. What she envisioned was not a static
hierarchy which relegates woman to the inferior place, but a dynamic union in
which the woman’s potential for giving life will be actualized by the man.
Woman’s emptiness and frailty are inseparable from her fertility and
depth: ‘Although man has greater strength than woman, yet woman is a
fountain of wisdom and a wellspring of deep joy, which man draws out to
perfection.(37) When Eve was created, Hildegard writes,
she gazed at Adam, ‘as a soul which longs for heavenly things stretches
upward, for she set her hope in the man’.(38)
Erotic love in women, as Hildegard saw it, is by nature aspiring and
even adoring. We must also bear in mind that for medieval theologians, the
natural outcome of every sexual union, were it not for the Fall, would have
been conception. According to Hildegard’s physiology, woman’s
physical weakness enhances her ability to conceive. Her fragility, to borrow
aristotelian terms, is not sheer impotence but potency vis-à-vis
act.
Overshadowed by the Most High
The
woman who renounces marriage does not thereby renounce her feminine nature. The
nun, in Hildegard’s eyes, is one who re-orients not only her affections
but all the capacities of her being toward the heavenly Bridegroom.(39) In the process, she becomes spiritually what the Mother
of God was physically—a woman so ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy
Spirit that she becomes a vessel of the Word of God. One vision of the
Scivias records an intimate dialogue between God and the seer—a
device common in other prophetic books but rare in Hildegard’s—in
which she expresses her own sense of unworthiness and terror. God reassures the
prophet by reminding her of the Virgin’s childbearing: Mary too was a
humble maiden, a paupercula, yet he made her the slayer of death.(40) She was indeed so humble that, despite the grace of her
virginity, she meekly submitted to Joseph, ‘for if Mary had had no one to
care for her, pride would easily have snatched her, as if she had not needed a
husband to provide for her’.(41) Outward submission
and obedience, even for the one woman without sin, were necessary to safeguard
the humility which made her capable of bearing Christ. How much more, Hildegard
implied, should a sinful woman let herself be overshadowed by her
husband’s authority! (42) Far more important,
however, was Mary’s poverty of spirit before God. When she received the
angel’s message ‘that the High King wished to dwell in her chamber,
she looked at the earth from which she was created and called herself the
handmaid of God’,(43) and the power of the Most
High overshadowed her.
Mary’s gesture, admitting her own earthiness at the
moment of her election, is one which can and must be imitated by all of
God’s chosen. Hildegard consciously thought of herself, and of all the
prophets, as ‘overshadowed ones’ whose own darkness was both exposed
and illumined by the divine light. A revealing text from the Liber divinorum
operum plays richly on the word ‘shadow’ (umbra), which
can also denote reflections in a mirror. For the same heavenly light which
overshadowed the prophets (and the Virgin) is metaphysically the light of
divine Wisdom, which in Hildegard’s vision appeared as a luminous fountain
reflecting and foreshadowing all creation. In it the archetypes of all
creatures—their platonic ideas, as it were—shine resplendent in the
mind of God. (44) In a different metaphor, this light
becomes the divine creative voice which utters forth the whole world, as well
as the specific oracles revealed through the prophets—of whom Hildegard is
one. Thus the divine voice proclaims:
My
glory overshadowed the prophets, who by holy inspiration predicted things to
come, as all that God wished to make was foreshadowed in him before it came to
he. When reason utters its voice, the sound is like thought and the word like a
work. From this ‘shadow’ issued the book Scivias, through the form of
a woman who was but a shadow of strength and health, for these vital forces
were not active in her. (45)
The bright shadow of revelation—what Hildegard would
later call ‘the reflection of the living Light’—fell on the
prophet’s own shadowy figure as the voice of divine reason empowered her
weakness. And like Mary in her vignette of the annunciation, she paused for a
metaphorical glance at the earth from which she was made. Thus the seer
deliberately imitated the Virgin Mother, for the new prophetic book revealed
‘through the form of a woman’ embodied an utterance of the divine
voice, a lesser incarnation of the Word. Unlike Mary, however, the prophet must
acknowledge the imperfection of what she has conceived, even though the
conception is from God. In one of her unpublished letters, she warned that even
when the living Light inspires some human soul, the prophet may fall into pride
or vainglory and thence into delusion, ‘so let what proceeds from truth be
heard, and what from lying be removed’.(46) In
practice, Hildegard vehemently resisted any attempt to tamper with her
visions.(47) But in theory, she admitted that even in
the inspired words of prophets the stamp of human weakness remains.
Woman and the Humanity of Christ
The
mystery of divine power perfected in weakness, with the feminine coloring that
Hildegard gave it, enabled her to relate the fact of sexual difference to the
Incarnation in unexpected ways. While discussing the creation of man and woman,
she explains how Eve was both complementary and subordinate to Adam, observing
that neither sex could exist without the other, and then adds: ‘Man also
signifies the divinity of the Son of God, and woman his
humanity’.(48) At first glance, this analogy
seems either misogynist or absurd. Christ was, after all, male, so how can his
humanity be specifically symbolized by woman? Or was Hildegard using this
comparison as yet another excuse to belabor woman’s inferiority? But to
notice only the hierarchical ranking of the sexes would be to miss the truly
radical anthropology that her statement implies. If woman truly signifies the
humanity of God, then the female—not the male—is representative Man:
femina capax Dei. But given the priority of Adam and the masculinity of
Christ, what can this mean? Several answers are possible. In the first place,
Christ received his humanity from a woman without the help of man; in the
second place, he remains humanly present and incarnate in the Church, which is
signified under a feminine form as the Bride of Christ. It is more likely,
however, that when Hildegard spoke of the humanity of Christ she referred
primarily to his weak, suffering flesh; and she could not help but associate
this weakness with the feminine.(49) But this is a
weakness which redeems that of the first woman, for ‘God himself had
created man strong and woman weak, and her weakness gave rise to her fault.
Likewise divinity is strong, but the flesh of the Son of God is weak, yet
through it the world is restored to its former life.’(50)
Hildegard is here replacing the traditional contrast of two women—
Eve and Mary—with a contrast between two kinds of frailty. The weakness of
Eve put the strong man Adam to shame, but the weakness of Mary’s Son
confounded the ‘strong man’ Satan. Death came through the frailty of
a woman, and life through the frailty of God—but even in this case, the
name of frailty is Woman.
What
is more, Hildegard wanted to see the weakness of Eve not only as the cause of
her fall, but also as a providential circumstance which lightened her guilt.
She even speculated that if Adam had fallen before Eve, the man’s stronger
character would have hardened him in sin so far that repentance and forgiveness
would have been out of the question. But Eve, being softer and weaker, could
more easily repent just as she was more easily seduced in the first
place.(51) Just as the seer’s own airy
complexion made her more vulnerable both to illness and to inspiration,
Eve’s weakness made her more susceptible to sin as well as to grace. Once
more, the pauline paradox illumines the ambiguous mystery of the feminine. It
is this ambiguity, this frailty at once so perilous and tender, that Hildegard
wanted in the last analysis to identify with human (and sometimes all too
human) nature.
The Feminine Divine
Insofar as woman signifies the humanity of Christ, she also signifies
the Incarnation itself as a theological mystery—in Hildegard’s terms,
the ‘eternal counsel’ by which God willed to become man (Ps 33:11).
Like several twelfth-century theologians, she believed in the absolute
predestination of Christ, a doctrine which asserts that God created the world
and man because it pleased him to be incarnate, regardless of Adam’s
sin.(52) In Hildegard’s visions,
Christ’s predestined coming in the flesh is represented by radiant female
figures—Sapientia, Caritas, Ecclesia—inspired at several
removes by the feminine persona of Wisdom in the Old Testament.(53) Such visionary forms signify the incarnate Word not as an
historical fact, but as the eternal plan of God’s loving providence. In
these theophanies, the feminine form still signifies the humanity of God, but
now as ‘the mystery hidden for ages in God ... as a plan for the fulness
of time’ (Eph 3:9, 1:10). Here there is no longer any place for human
weakness, except insofar as God has foreseen and provided for it. Yet the
visions still reveal that weakness of God which is stronger than men:
God’s weakness is his tender mercy, his forbearance, his love for men
restraining his dread judgment.
In Hildegard’s first vision of the feminine Divine,
she beheld a radiant woman adored by suppliant angels. A voice from heaven
identified her as Scientia Dei, the Knowledge of God:
She
is awesome in terror as the Thunderer’s lightning, and gentle in goodness
as the sunshine. In her terror and her gentleness, she is incomprehensible to
men, because of the dread radiance of divinity in her face and the brightness
which dwells in her as the robe of her beauty.... For she iswith all and in
all, and of beauty so great in her mystery that none could comprehend how
sweetly she bears with men, and how she spares them with inscrutable
mercy.(54)
To
‘see’ the figure of Scientia Dei, as Hildegard did in this
vision, meant also to see how she is known by God, for it is this operation of
grace which mediates self-knowledge to sinners. The frightened visionary, who
was at first overcome by fear and trembling, found herself able to endure the
revelation only when it was mitigated by feminine sweetness. For to her
sensibility, the form of woman conveyed both the awesome beauty of divine
things and the saving restraint—the 'veiled’ quality—that makes
epiphanies bearable. In a later vision, she saw divine Wisdom as a female
figure of dazzling yet tempered splendor, ‘for divinity is terrible and
mild to every creature’.(55) The figure
stands with hands folded reverently before her breast to signify that Wisdom
prudently reined in her power, as if ‘ordering all things mightily and
sweetly’ (Ws 8:1), and her feet lie hidden from view because her secrets
are manifest to God alone. Out of consideration for human frailty, the Majesty
of heaven shows itself discreet and reserved in feminea forma, yet even
so the vision ‘is radiant with such brightness that it bedazzles the gaze
of mortal minds’.
In
one of her most lyrical visions, Hildegard witnesses to a kind of annunciation
in heaven as divine Caritas—the eternal archetype of the Mother of
God—proclaims the Incarnation to come. She appears as a virgin arrayed in
cosmic glory:
And
I saw one like a lovely maiden, her face gleaming with such radiant splendor
that I could not perfectly behold her. Whiter than snow was her mantle and more
shining than the stars, and her shoes were of the finest gold. In her right
hand she held the sun and the moon and tenderly embraced them. On her breast
was an ivory tablet in which there appeared the form of a man, the color of
sapphire; and all creation called this maiden Lady. But she spoke to the form
which appeared in her bosom, saying: ‘With you is the beginning in the day
of your power, in the splendor of the holy ones; I bore you from the womb
before the morning star.’ (Ps 109:3 Vulgate)
And I heard a voice saying to me: ‘This maiden whom
you see is Love, who has her dwelling place in eternity. When God wished to
create the world, he leaned down in the tenderest love and provided all that
was needful, as a father prepares an inheritance for his son.(56)
Allusions to fatherhood and motherhood blend as Caritas, a
female persona, utters a psalm verse often used to invoke the Father’s
eternal generation of the Son.(57) This same verse,
however, had acquired marian connotations through the liturgy; in the Office it
occurs as an antiphon for Christmas and Candlemas, celebrating Christ’s
birth in time.(58) Thus the virgin mother Caritas
mediates between the eternal and the temporal birth of the Son. Reminiscent of
both God the Father and the Virgin Mary, she is identical with neither, for she
is an epiphany of that primordial humanity of God predestined ‘from before
the foundation of the world’.
Priesthood and the Mother of Mercy
Another aspect of God’s humaneness—or as
Hildegard would have it, femininity—emerges when she speaks of penance and
mercy. The virtue of Misericordia, or divine grace redeeming sinners,
appeared to the seer dressed in a white veil (like Hildegard’s nuns)
because:
>Mercy, in the person of a woman, is a most fruitful
mother of souls snatched from perdition. For as a woman covers her head, so
Mercy subdues the death of souls. And as woman is sweeter than man, so Mercy is
sweeter than the fury of crimes raging in a sinner’s madness before his
heart has been visited by God. This same virtue appears in the form of a woman
because the sweetest Mercy arose in feminine chastity, in the body of
Mary.(59)
The beloved marian title Mater misericordiae led
Hildegard to reflect on the maternal tenderness of God. Like a merciful woman
he will soften and sweeten, instead of condemning, the heart embittered by sin;
and this yielding quality evokes a similar response in the soul. For when God
created male and female in his image, Hildegard remarks, he extended this dual
likeness to the soul as well as the body. The male designates strength,
courage, and justice in the inward man, while the female denotes mercy,
penance, and grace.(60)
Obviously, both men and women seek active virtue as well as repentance
and forgiveness, so this notion of a bisexual imago Dei in the soul
anticipates our current interest in counter-sexual elements of the psyche
(61) While Hildegard was not recommending androgyny, she
did strongly urge each sex to cultivate the spiritual gifts of the other. She
was herself praised for possessing ‘a masculine mind in a female
body’—a familiar topos of praise for women, although her own opinion
of herself was quite different.(62) Yet she too exhorted
women to strive for the masculine virtues of constancy, vigor in pursuing the
good and valor in resisting evil. On the other hand, she insisted no less that
men, and especially priests, must imitate the feminine grace of God.(63) In a letter to Pope Eugenius III (1153), she
begged the pontiff to judge an erring bishop ‘in keeping with the motherly
heart (viscera) of God’s mercy’, because ‘God desires
mercy rather than sacrifice’ (Mt 9:13).(64)
Alardus, abbot of St Martin in Cologne, was advised to teach his monks
with maternal tenderness instead of strident words, that they may open their
mouths to receive bread instead of thistles.(65) And
pastors were to realize that their flocks will be spiritually weakened unless
they are allowed to suck ‘the breasts of maternal mercy’.(66) Although Hildegard would have been the last to encourage
tolerance of sin, she wanted confessors to show the feminine
‘weakness’ not of laxity but of compassion, as St Paul demanded:
‘who is weak, and I am not weak?’ (2 Co 11:29). In this way too they
will reveal the humanity of the Son of God.
Even at the altar, Hildegard would have the priest assume a
feminine role vis-à-vis God. It is striking that, in an age which
witnessed a growing emphasis on the priest’s unique power to ‘confect
the sacrament’, Hildegard offered primarily feminine role models for the
celebrant. Like Ecclesia in medieval paintings of the Crucifixion, the priest
stands beside the cross to catch Christ’s blood in a chalice and proffer
it to the faithful.(67) Or like the handmaid of God, he
offers his humble consent to the miracle:
When the priest repeats the words of God, the body of
the incarnate Word of God is again confected. Through that Word all creatures,
which formerly had not appeared, came into being; and the same Word was
incarnate of the Virgin Mary as in the twinkling of an eye, when she said with
humility: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’. And the flesh of the
selfsame Word of God blossoms forth at the words of the priest.(68)
Thus every Eucharist re-presents not only Christ’s
passion and resurrection, but also the incarnation of the Word, with the priest
as it were impersonating the Mother of God. Hildegard even used the same
metaphor of ‘overshadowing’ for the Virgin Annunciate and the
consecrated gifts. As the Holy Spirit once brooded over the Virgin’s womb,
like a great mother bird, so; now it spreads its wings over the offering until
the chick hatches and flies to heaven, leaving only a shell (the visible forms
of bread and wine) beneath.(69) But why should Hildegard
compare the words of institution, which are Christ’s own, with Mary’s
Ecce ancilla domini? Parallels between the annunciation and the
Eucharist remind the faithful sharply that it is not human power which commands
God to descend, but human weakness which receives his coming. The priest is no
miracle-worker, but only a servant like Mary consenting to the miracles of
God.(70) At the most sacred moments of her life, the
Bride of Christ is most feminine, and Hildegard would not let even the
gregorian reform obscure this knowledge.
Women in Love
Nowhere is divine power perfected in weakness more plainly
than in the martyrs. Not surprisingly, Hildegard showed a special reverence for
those women who had offered God the double sacrifice of virginity and
martyrdom. Together with Elisabeth of Schönau, she honored the legendary
St Ursula whose ‘relics’, along with those of the eleven thousand
virgins supposedly martyred with her, had recently been unearthed near
Cologne.(71) In all likelihood this saint never
existed, but in any case Hildegard cared less for the ostensible facts of her
life than for her role as a type of the heroic virgin Ecclesia. One of the
seer’s most carefully crafted hymns, addressed to Ursula, begins by
juxtaposing Ecclesia as the Bride of Solomon—a figure of more-than-human
stature—with the sainted virgin. Ursula herself is portrayed as an
innocent girl who (much like Hildegard) fell in love with Christ upon seeing
him in a vision and forthwith renounced marriage and the world, desiring to
join her Beloved at the heavenly wedding feast.
In a vision of true faith
Ursula fell in love with
the Son of God
and renounced her betrothed along with this world,
and
gazed into the sun, and called to the loveliest youth, saying:
In great desire I have desired to come to you and sit
with you
at the heavenly wedding feast,
running to you by a strange
path
as a cloud streams like sapphire in the purest air.’
And after Ursula had so spoken,
the report of it
spread through all nations
and they said,
How naive the girl is!
She does not know what she is saying.’ (72)
Thereupon the devil and his chorus of scoffers begin to mock the girl,
until at last the ‘fiery burden’ of martyrdom falls upon her. But as
she and her companions perish, their blood cries out to heaven and all the
elements join with the.angels in a symphony of praise:
Let all the heavens hear this
and praise God’s
Lamb in lofty chorus—
for the throat of the ancient serpent
is
choked by these pearls strung upon the Word of God. (73)
In a
startling metamorphosis, the host of virgins have become a necklace of pearls
to choke the devil: the seed of the woman crushes the serpent’s head (Gn
3:15). Thus the cosmic victory of the Church has been entrusted to a troupe of
fragile girls who appear in the world’s eyes as so many lovesick
adolescents. This triumphant hymn, honoring the power of weakness and the
wisdom of folly, brings us full circle to Hildegard’s own self-image; for
surely in Ursula’s faithfulness to her visionary Bridegroom, despite her
‘girlish ignorance’ and despite mockery and murder, the seer of
Bingen found a model for her own unlikely mission.
On
balance, Hildegard’s theology of the feminine—as expressed in her own
spiritual life as well as her teaching—is both radical and conservative.
Her assumptions about the nature of man and woman, whether we choose to call
them stereotypes or archetypes, belong to the conventional wisdom of her age
(and of other ages before and after). Yet the conclusions she drew from them
were by no means commonplace, especially when she turned to the mysteries of
Christ and the eternal Wisdom. She was the first theologian to reflect at
length on the meaning of womanhood, considered not abstractly but from the
incomparable depth of her experience. But great as her achievement was, in this
respect her influence was slight; centuries were to pass before the Church
would resume the task she had begun. Her activity in the public sphere, on the
other hand, would be emulated by scores of charismatic women in the later
Middle Ages. Yet here too, Hildegard reveals this same blend of respect for
tradition and radical novelty. Perhaps no one has summed up her
attitude—reserved, ever mindful of her frailty, yet finally and
triumphantly free—better than the friend and secretary of her last years,
Guibert of Gembloux. To justify the seer in view of her inevitable detractors,
the Flemish monk writes:
The
Apostle does not permit a woman to teach in the Church. But this woman is
exempt from this condition because she has received the Spirit, and with a
heart instructed in wisdom by his teaching, she has learned through her own
experience what is written: ‘Blessed is the man whom you have instructed,
O Lord, and out of your law you have taught him’ (Ps 94:12). And she may
be unskilled in speaking, yet not in knowledge, for by her wholesome teaching
she instructs many, pouring forth abundantly as if from two breasts the milk of
consolation for the young and the wine of correction for those who are
stronger.
But
although the anointing of the Spirit, like a school-mistress, teaches her all
things inwardly and bids her, as it is told in her writings, to offer
confidently in public what it has taught her in secret so as to instruct her
hearers, she is nonetheless mindful of her own sex and condition, and
especially of the aforesaid prohibition. Yet she obeys the Spirit, not him whom
the Spirit sends. . .
Likewise the Apostle commands women to veil their heads, partly for
decency’s sake and partly to commend a certain just submission. But this
woman is free, not indeed from every law, but at least from the one which
orders brides to wear veils. For she has transcended female subjection by a
lofty height and is equal to the eminence, not of just any men, but of the very
highest. Beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, she is being
transformed into the selfsame image as by the Spirit of the Lord, from glory
into glory.(74)
NOTES
1. The
themes of this essay are treated more fully, in their historical context, in
the author’s Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the
Feminine (Berkeley, 1987).
2. Ep.
51; PL 197:268C. All translations are mine.
3. The
chief source for Hildegard’s life is her Vita by the monks Gottfried of St
Disibod and Dieter of Echternach (PL 197:91-130), trans. Adelgundis Fuhrkotter,
Das Leben der hi. Hildegard van Bingen (Dusseldorf, 1968). A useful short
biography is Kent Kraft, ‘Hildegard of Bingen’, in Katharina Wilson,
ed., Medieval Women Writ-ers (Athens, Georgia, 1984) 109-23.
4.
Between 1158 and 1159 Hildegard travelled along the Main, preaching at monastic
communities in Mainz, Wertheim, Wurzburg, Kitzingen, Ebrach, and Bamberg. Her
second trip in 1160 took her to Metz, Krauftal, ana Trier, where she preached
publicly. Within the next three years she visited Boppard, Andernach, Siegburg,
and Werden, addressing clergy and people together at Cologne. After 1170 she
undertook her fourth and final journey in Swabia, preaching at Roden-kirchen,
Maulbronn, Hirsau, Kirchheim, and Zwiefalten.
5. See
Ernst Curtius, ‘Devotional Formula and Humility’, in European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953)
407-13.
6. For
examples see Ep. 1 (PL 197:145C), Ep. 7 (159A), En. 51 (264D); Regulae S.
Benedicti Explanatio (1055A); Explanatio Symboli Sancti Athanasii (1078Q; Liber
divinorum operum Prol. (742A) and III. 10.38 (1037C); VitaeS. Disibodi
Prooemium 8, ed. J.-B. Pitra, Analecta Sacra 8 (Monte Cassino, 1882) 357. This
edition will henceforth be designated ‘Pitra’.
7.
Such inversion of standards is a commonplace of biblical prophecy; cf. Jr
1:6-7, Dn 10:16, Am 7:14-15.
8.
Scivias I.I; ed. A. Fuhrkotter, CCcm 43-43A (Turnhout: 1978) 8.
9.
Scivias II. 1; Fuhrkotter, p. 112.
10.
Scivias III. 11.18; Fuhrkotter, p. 586.
11.
Vita 11.16; PL 197:102CD. Portions of the Vita, narrated in the first person,
comprise Hildegard’s memoirs as dictated to her secretary and biographer,
Gottfried.
12.
‘Ein unveroffentlichtes Hildegard Fragment’, IV.28; ed. Heinnch
Schipperges, Sudboffs Arcbiv fur Geschicte der Medizin 40 (1956) 71. Cf. Ep.
49; PL 197:254CD. 13 Ep. 75; PL 197:297C. Cf. Vita 11.24; PL
197:108C.
14.
Conventional views of male and female character are encapsulated in the oft
repeated derivations of vir from virtus or vis (strength) and mulier from
mollities (softness); see Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae XI.2.17-18 (PL
82:417A). Two concise reviews of sexual stereotyping in the Middle Ages are
Marie-Therese d’Alverny, ‘Comment les theologiens et les philosophies
voient la femme’, in La Femme dans les civilisations da Xe-XIIP siecles
(Poitiers: 1977), 15-40; and Vern Bullough, ‘Medieval Medical and
Scientific Views of Women’, Viator 4 (1973) 485-501.
15.
Ep. 29; PL 197:190AB. For a corrected text of this letter see M. Schrader and
A. Fuhrkotter, Die Ecbtbeit des Schrifttums der bl. Hildegard van Bingen
(Cologne-Graz: 1956) 105-108.
16.
Uber vitae meritorum III.50, V.48; Pitra, pp. 125, 202.
17.
Liber vitae meritorum 1.96; Pitra, p. 44.
18.
Vita 11.16; PL 197:103AB.
19.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de diligendo Deo XIV.38 (ET The Book on Loving God,
CF 13:130).
20. A
standard humoral chart can be found in Isidore of Seville, De natura rerum 11;
PL 83:981-82.
21.
‘Scientists call these two elements [fire and air] masculine, hut water
and earth feminine. For the former lie above, the latter below; the former are
active, the latter passive.’ Alberic of London (‘Third Vatican
Mythographer’), ed. G. H. Bode, Scrip-tores rerum mytbicarum latini tres,
I (Cellae, 1834) 163. Cf Thierry of Chartres, De sex dierum operibus, ed. N. M.
Haring, Commentaries on Boetbius (Toronto, 1971) 562; and William of Conches,
De philosophia mundi 1.23 (PL 172:56): ‘the warmest woman is colder than
the coldest man’.
22.
See R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London, 1964)
110-11; H. Schipperges, ‘Menschenkunde und Heikunst bei Hildegard von
Bingen’, in Anton Bruck, ed., Hildegard von Bingen, 1179-1979. Festschrift
zum 800. Todestag der Heiligen (Mainz, 1979) 295-310.
23.
Causae et curae, ed. Paul Kaiser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903) 46. On this general
subject see Bernhard Scholz, ‘Hildegard von Bingen on the Nature of
Woman’, American Benedictine Review 31 (1980) 361-83.
24.
Causae et curae, p. 59.
25.
Ibid., p. 104.
26.
Ibid., p. 105.
27.
For the alternative theory that Hildegard saw herself as a melancholic woman,
see Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts
from Perpetua (+203) to Marguerite Porete (+1310), (Cambridge, 1984) 181-82.
Although the airy temperament was normally regarded as sanguine rather than
melancholic, such an anomaly will not surprise readers familiar with
Hildegard’s originality.
28.
Liber divinorum operum III.10.38; PL 197:1038A; Gent Universiteitsbiblio-thek
Ms Cod. 241, ff. 391-92.
29.
Vita 11.27; PL 197:109-10. For evil spirits as ‘powers of the air’,
cf. Eph 2.2.
30.
Ep 2; Pitra, p. 332
31.
Causae et curae, p. 105.
32.
Liber vitae meritorum VI.68; Pitra, p. 244. For the textual correction vivit
for vidit, I am indebted to Dronke, Medieval Women Writers, p. 308, no. 38.
33.Ep45; PL 197:217D.
34. Ep
34; Pitra, p. 520. Cf. Ep 77 (Pitra p. 540), Ep 1 (PL 197:1468), Ep 58 (PL
197:277BC).
35. A.
Heschel, The Prophets (New York, 1962).
36.
Scivias II.6.78; Fuhrkotter, pp. 291-92.
37. Ep
13; PL 197:1678.
38.
Causae et curae, p. 136.
39. Ep
141 (PL 197:372B): ‘For she must remain such as Eve was before God
presented her to Adam, because then she looked not to Adam but to God’.
Cf. Ep 116 (PL 197:337D-338A): The virgin ‘stands in the simplicity and
the beautiful wholeness of Paradise which will never fade, but remain forever
green . . . Virgins are wedded in the Holy Spirit to holiness and the dawn of
virginity; therefore it befits them to come to the High Priest as a whole burnt
offering consecrated to God.’
40.
Scivias III. 1; Fuhrkotter, p. 330. Cf. Scivias I. 2.33, p. 37.
41. In
vigilia nativitatis Domini, Expositiones Evangeliorum 1; Pitra, p. 245. The
notion that virginity without humility is of little worth was a commonplace:
cf. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmos 75.16 (CCSL 39: 1049); Bernard of
Clairvaux, Homilia super Missus est 1.8, (SBOp 4:20); Rupert of Deutz,
Commentariorum in Apocalypsim 2.3 (PL 169:900D).
42.
Nonetheless, the prophet herself had no qualms about obeying God in defiance of
her superiors. She successfully fought her abbot’s resistance to her move
from St Disibod to Bingen (1150), and at the end of her life defied a
bishop’s interdict (1178) in order to avoid desecrating a grave.
43.
Liber divinorum operum 1.1.17; PL 197:750CD.
44.
Ibid. III.8.2 (PL 197:981A): ‘The purity of the living God is indeed a
leaping fountain, resplendent with his glory. In that splendor, God with great
love embraces all things whose reflections appeared in the leaping fountain
before he bade them come forth in their own forms.’ For instances of this
widespread Christian Platonism cf. Augustine, Tractatus in Joannem 2.1.16 (PL
35:1387); Eriugena, De divisione naturae 3.16 (PL 122: 667A); Honorius, Liber
XII Quaestionum 1 (PL 172:1178C); Rupert of Deutz, De Sanaa Trinitate, In
Genesim 1.5 (CCcm 21:132-33).
45.
Liber divinorum operum III 8.2; PI. 197:979D-980B.
46.
Berlin MS Lat. qu. 674, ed. and trans. Dronke, Women Writers, pp. 185 and
256-57.
47.
See Ep 29.25-27 (Pitra pp. 431-33) for Hildegard’s heated argument with
her secretary Guibert of Gembloux over his desire to rewrite her works in a
more urbane and elegant Latin.
48.
Liber Divinorum operum 1.4.100; PL 197:885C. On this theme, see Caroline Bynum,
‘". . .And Woman His Humanity": Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of
the Later Middle Ages’, Gender and Religion. On The Complexity of Symbols,
edd. Caroline Bynum, Steven Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston, 1986).
49.
Cf. Elisabeth of Schonau’s vision of a sorrowing woman clothed with the
sun, identified as ‘the sacred humanity of the Lord Jesus’. Liber
visionum III.4; ed. F. W. E. Roth, Die Visionen der hl. Elisabeth (Brunn, 1884)
60-62
50.
Liber vitae meritorum IV.32; Pitra, p. 158.
51.
Causae et curae, p. 47. Cf. Scivias 1.2.10; Fuhrkotter, p. 19.
52.
For this doctrine cf. Honorius, Libellus VIII quaestionum (PL 172: 1187C),
Rupert of Deutz, De gloria et honore Filii hominis, super Mattaeum 13 (CCcm
29:415), Glossa Ordinaria, Si 24:14 (PL 113:1208D).
53.
See especially Pr 8:1-9:6, Si 24, and Ws 6:24-8:1. A fine study of these texts
is Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (London, 1972) Ch. 9.
54.
Scivias III.4.15; Fuhrkotter, p. 401.
55.
Ibid. III.9.25; Fuhrkotter, p. 538-39. Hildegard anticipates Rudolf Otto’s
famous definition of the Holy as tremendum et fascinosum.
56. Ep
30; PL 197:192D-193A.
57.
Ambrose, De fide 4.8 (PL 16:634) is one example among many.
58.
Georges Frenaud, ‘Le Culte de Notre Dame dans I’ancienrie Liturgie
latine’, in Maria, VI, ed. Hubert du Manoir (Paris, 1961) 193, 198.
59.
Scivias III.3.8; Fuhrkotter, p. 380.
60.
Liber divinorum operum II.5.46; PL 197:952A
61.
For a recent Jungian treatment of this theme, sensitive to the nuances of
spiritual life, see Ann Belford Ulanov, Receiving Woman: Studies in the
Psychology and Theology of the Feminine (Philadelphia: 1981).
62. Ep
136; PL 197:363D. Cf. Ep 84; PL 197:305CD.
63.
This theme is also extremely common in cistercian writers. See Caroline Bynum,
Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley:
1982) Part IV.
122
Notes: Barbara Newman
64. Ep
1; PL 197:148B. For a corrected text see Schrader and Fuhrkotter. Ecbtbeit. p.
114.
65.
Ep41; PL 197:208D.
66. Ep
83; ed. Francis Haug, ‘Epistolae S. Hildegardis secundum codicem
Stutt-gartensem’, Revue benedictine 43 (1931) 67.
67.
Cf. the lost Rupertsberg MS illustration of Scivias II.6, repr. in Fuhrkotter,
plate 15.
68. Ep
47; PL 197:225B. Cf. Scivias II.6.15; Fuhrkdtter, p. 244.
69.
Scivias II.6.36; Fuhrkotter, pp. 264-65. Cf. Ep 47; PL 197:238B. Parallels
between the annunciation and the Eucharistic consecration are common in Eastern
liturgies; see John of Damascus, De orthodoxa fide IV. 13 (PG 94:1141 A,
1145A). For Western analogues cf. Ambrose, De mysteriis 9.53 (CSEL 73:112);
Paschasius Rad-bertus, De corpore et sanguine Domini 3 (CCcm 16:27).
70.
For Mary as priest cf. Ernaldus of Bonneval, De laudibus beatae Mariae, PL
189:1727A; Elisabeth of Schonau, Liber visionum 1.5, ed. Roth, p. 6.
71.
Cf. Liber revelationum Elisabeth de sacro exercitu virginum Coloniensium, ed.
Roth, pp. 123-38; Guy de Tervarent, La Iegende de Ste. Ursule dans la
litterature et /’art du Moyen- age (Paris: 1931).
72.
‘De Undecim Milibus Virginibus’, ed. P. Barth, M.-I. Ritscher, and J.
Schmidt-Gorg, Hildegard van Bingen: Lieder (Salzburg, 1969), No. 54, pp.
270-72.
73.
Ibid. ‘Hoc audiant omnes caeli/ et in summa symphonia laudent Agnum Dei,/
quia guttur serpentis antiqui in istis margaritis/ materiae Verbi Dei
suffocatum est.’
74.
Guibert of Gembloux, Ep 16; ed. Pitra, p. 386.
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