The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, vol 1

Commonweal, May 19, 1995 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, $ 39.95, 227 pp.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is one of the most extraordinary people in the history of the church. She was a contemplative, author, encyclopedist, composer of music, musician, and confidante of a range of people from popes on down. We have been well served by excellent studies of her life and work (especially by Barbara Newman and Sabina Flanagan) and good editions of her works are now available in English translation. Unfortunately, the only collection of her letters was in a tendentiously execrable translation issued some years ago by the publishing house associated with Matthew Fox's Creation Spirituality movement.

Two scholars have now undertaken to give us careful translations of her letters; this first volume includes roughly fifty of her letters along with copies (where available) of the letters of respondents. This volume represents the first of what, one presumes and hopes, will be a complete English translation of the over four hundred letters available.

Each letter has a very brief introduction, a few helpful explanatory notes, and, not infrequently, the original Latin text to help us to see how the translators worked on what is, at places, a convoluted and eccentric Latin style. The entire volume is prefaced by a very helpful essay on Hildegard's life and her significance. The order of the letters is curious in that it follows a pattern not uncommon in medieval times: the first letters are ranked according to the dignity of the person (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, followed by popes, cardinals, etc.); the second part of the letters lists alphabetically the place of destination and includes letters from the lower clergy and religious.

Here is what I loved about these letters: Hildegard's tough-minded demand for reform in the church; her widely acknowledged authority as a spiritual counselor of the first rank; that even archbishops wrote her for copies of her sermons preached in their home dioceses urging reform and peace; that professional theologians (scholastic, which is to say, dialectical theology was now aborning) wrote her for advice about theological conundrums or to strengthen their faith in new formulations (for example, transubstantiation); her creative approach to biblical exegesis.

The letters also reveal a tough-minded fighter who stood her ground against prelates and, lest we think her an "advanced" thinker, a conservative (she did not like the new religious orders coming into existence in the wake of the Gregorian reform) and a bit of a snob (she admitted only aristocrats to her community, arguing that nobody hitches in tandem an ox and an ass to do plowing). One must also wonder at her theatricality: her community, on feast days, dressed in long white robes with golden crowns on heads of free flowing (unwimpled?) hair.

Finally, contemporary readers will find much to ponder in her original vocabulary (Hildegard loves the noun viriditas, literally "greenness," which for her is an attribute of the world and of graced-people). Readers will also love her concept of symphonia as an overarching concept to think of a cosmos alive with the Spirit of God.

I've carted this volume around for weeks in my bookbag, dipping into these letters with admiration and delight.