Thought

Hildegard’s first major work, Scivias, is concerned with the evolution of Ecclesia. She describes and comments on thirteen visions (subsequently illustrated in the manuscript produced under her direction). While she professed ignorance of the technical skills of exegesis, she uses visual images to highlight her reading of the great themes of creation, the fall of humanity and the redemption, and the return of Ecclesia to a godly path. Identifying herself with John the Divine, she quotes extensively from Scripture to explain that although the natural universe was created by God, humanity had been led astray (Scivias I). Her frequent theme is that natural viriditas, or greening-power, has fallen away, and that it is only through God’s love that viriditas can be restored (Mews 1998b). Hildegard gives detailed advice to different orders within the Church about how they ought to lead their life. Rather than single out Eve as the temptress of Adam, she sees the devil as having ensnared Eve, mother of creation, but Ecclesia as the reawakened Bride, mother of the faithful, destined for mystical union with Christ (Newman 1987). Much of the third part of Scivias is taken up by an account of the elevation of Ecclesia through the Virtues, to which Christians can appeal for support in their effort. It concludes with a series of mystical songs that serve to remind a sluggish soul of her true calling, expanded in her Ordo virtutum (Order of Virtues), a morality play about the soul’s journey. Hildegard also included songs in her Symphonia of celestial harmonies, songs that she may have started to compose long before she moved to Rupertsberg in 1150.

In the Liber subtilitatum rerum creaturarum (Book of the Subtleties of Created Things) - preserved as two separate texts, the Physica and the Causae et curae (Causes and Cures), Hildegard considers how not only did God create all things, but how creation, rightly used, can help restore human health to physical and spiritual balance (Moulinier 1995). Her teaching recapitulates some familiar themes of traditional medical wisdom, but placed within a spiritual framework, in which physical illness is seen not simply as a means for testing spiritual stamina, but as a sign of spiritual imbalance within the human being. Hildegard constantly refers to physical illnesses by which she was afflicted throughout her life. Whereas Jutta seems to have treated the body by ascetic exercises, Hildegard understood the spiritual life as involving a restoration of physical as well as spiritual harmony. She developed the psychological aspect of her teaching in the Liber vitae meritorum, composed after 1158, on a visual image to highlight her teaching about conduct that ultimately leads away from God. Using apocalyptic imagery to warn against vices of infidelity, slothfulness, and worldly love, and the Consequences of such behavior on those who follow such vices, she sees herself as a legitimate philosopher, though wiser than those who simply trusted in head knowledge (Liber vitae meritorum In.9).

In 1163, Hildegard started her greatest composition, the Liber divinorum operum (LDO) a vast synthesis of visionary teaching, expounded through her technique of describing and commenting on a series of ten visions. The task took her another ten years to complete. While Hildegard was never trained in the schools, she would have been exposed to theological works like the De sacramentis of Hugh of St. Victor, wIth its theme of God’s plan for restoring humanity to God. She takes a verY different tack, however, from scholastic theologians. The first section of LDO is devoted to a symbolic account Of the natural world, and the relationship of the human person to the wider universe. She has an apocalyptic figure proclaim her distinctly dynamic vision of the life force, divine in origin, that sustains creation: