Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World

Church History, Dec, 1999 by Nicholas Watson

Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Edited by Barbara Newman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. x 278 pp. $48.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

This collection of essays on aspects of the life and writings of the German visionary nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), published to coincide with the ninth centenary of her birth, offers a lucid and learned introduction to its subject, and will quickly become a standard guide to Hildegard for English-speaking readers. Eight leading specialists (Barbara Newman, John van Engen, Constant Mews, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Joan Ferrante, Madeline Caviness, Florence Eliza Glaze, and Margot Fassler) offer closely integrated discussions of nine topics: Hildegard's life, her role as an abbess, religious thought, prophecies, letters, art, medical writings, musical and dramatic compositions, and poetry (Newman's second chapter in the book). The book also includes extensive notes, a good bibliography, a discography, and an index.

All the chapters are eminently accessible and provide sound overviews of their topic, while almost all find something new to say at the same time. Mews's account of Hildegard's theology focuses on her notion of viriditas (the greenness that pulses through God and creation), but also sets her thinking in a framework that includes Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard, and (more surprisingly) Anselm. Kerby-Fulton presents Hildegard's prophecies and apocalyptic writings within a similarly broad framework of earlier and later apocalyptic thought, but also advances a more specific argument about the deep daring of Hildegard's vision of the future, in its rejection of both emperor and pope as instruments of redemption, and in its perception that the Antichrist will arise not from outside but from within the heart of the church. Caviness speculates brilliantly on Hildegard's role in creating the pictures that accompany her Scivias and Book of Divine Works, interpreting them as responses to her visions as fundamental as the texts themselves, and giving detailed readings of several pictures as visionary experiences, while Glaze is equally suggestive in describing Hildegard's reformulations of contemporary medical and biological thought. Fassler and Newman both testify to the stylistic quirkiness of Hildegard's music and poetry, movingly evoking its place in the liturgical life of her abbey at Mount St. Rupert, while Ferrante gives tantalizing glimpses of Hildegard's febrile correspondence with an array of women and men, and of the deep excitement her prophetic presence in the world evoked in her contemporaries. Several contributors (especially Newman, in her finely tuned biographical first chapter, and van Engen, in his thoughtful reconstruction of Hildegard in what is to most of us the unfamiliar practical and symbolic role of abbess) make use of the recently edited vita of Jutta, Hildegard's fiercely ascetic mentor, whose life provided both a model and, even more, a point of departure for her own.

As with most centenary volumes and most work on Hildegard, the tone of the book is celebratory, as almost all the contributors are caught in the force field generated by Hildegard's belief in her own importance and her superb capacity for making the world see her as she saw herself--a capacity closely related to her ability to show the world itself too, both in its corrupted actual form and its viridescent ideal one. There is very much to celebrate, but it is this heady tone that is perhaps the closest thing to a limitation of this fine book. Like all twelfth-century reformers, Hildegard was controversial, and some of the criticisms leveled against her--for example, that her determination to have only nuns from the aristocracy at Mount St. Rupert was contrary to the spirit of the gospel--were cogent. Moreover, a serious analysis of such criticisms is one of the best ways to think through Hildegard's place in the larger European reformist movement in which she participated, which gave birth to other visions of life as rich, compassionate, and fierce as hers, some of them formed around the deconstruction of that same aristocratic sense of privilege and entitlement that is close to the heart of her thinking. It is a pity that the opportunity to reflect on such issues was not taken here, in a book that is likely to be read widely outside the academy by Hildegard enthusiasts who know of her through writers such as Matthew Fox. In so far as Hildegard is becoming a force again in today's world, through her music and poetry but also through her visionary writings, it matters that she not be assigned a simple place on a Christian-feminist pedestal. Like any truly important figure, she is too complex, and sometimes too troubling, for that. Nonetheless, this book represents much the best introduction to Hildegard and her oeuvre in English--both a summing-up of much of what is presently known and thought about her, and a significant contribution to the study of her--and can be recommended to general readers and undergraduates as well as to specialists in the field.