Birth at Bermersheim
She was born near Alzey into a noble family, its tenth child, and was destined from childhood for the religious life.
Benedictine monasticism · visionary theology · 1098 – 1179
Hildegard of Bingen
Speak and write what you see and hear: the world is God’s living work.
Disibodenberg · Rupertsberg · Eibingen
Biography
The thread of a life.
Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine magistra in the Rhineland who, from 1141, set down in Latin the visions she said she received from the “living light”. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg and Eibingen, wrote three great visionary works, books on nature and medicine, liturgical songs and a sung morality play, corresponded with popes and emperors, and preached in public, an exceptional role for a woman of her time.
Enclosure at Disibodenberg
She was enclosed with Jutta of Sponheim beside the Benedictine monks of Disibodenberg, where she later took her vows.
The call to write
A fiery light, she reports, flooded her mind and commanded her to write down her visions; the Scivias took her ten years.
Synod of Trier
Pope Eugenius III read from her work before the assembled bishops and encouraged her to continue writing.
Rupertsberg
She moved her community to a new monastery on the Rupertsberg near Bingen, and in 1165 founded a second house at Eibingen.
Interdict and death
Shortly after the prelates of Mainz lifted the interdict on her monastery, she died at the Rupertsberg on 17 September.
Understanding a life in depth
01A child given to God
Hildegard was born in 1098 at Bermersheim near Alzey, the tenth child of the noble Hildebert and Mechthild, who dedicated her to the religious life. As a girl she was entrusted to Jutta of Sponheim, and according to Jutta’s biography the two were enclosed in 1112 in a cell beside the Benedictine monks of Disibodenberg. There Hildegard learned the psalter, the liturgy and enough Latin to read Scripture, though she later called herself unlearned. She had seen a dazzling light since early childhood but spoke of it to almost no one. When Jutta died in 1136, the growing community of women elected her as its magistra.
02The call of 1141
In 1141, when she was forty-two years and seven months old, Hildegard reports that a fiery light from the open heavens flooded her brain and heart and let her suddenly understand the Psalms, the Gospels and the other books of Scripture. A voice commanded her to speak and write what she saw and heard. After hesitating and falling ill, she began the Scivias with the help of the monk Volmar, her secretary, and the nun Richardis of Stade. Around 1146 she sought the support of Bernard of Clairvaux, and at the synod of Trier in 1147–1148 Pope Eugenius III read from her work and encouraged her to continue writing.
03Founder, abbess and preacher
Around 1150, against the resistance of the monks of Disibodenberg, Hildegard moved her nuns to a new monastery on the Rupertsberg near Bingen, and in 1165 she founded a second house at Eibingen across the Rhine. She defended the independence of her foundation, mourned bitterly when Richardis left in 1151 to head another convent, and obtained in 1163 a charter of protection from Frederick Barbarossa. Between about 1158 and 1171 she made preaching journeys to Mainz, Würzburg, Bamberg, Trier, Metz, Cologne and Swabia, denouncing the negligence of the clergy and the Cathars. Some four hundred letters survive from her correspondence with popes, bishops, rulers, monks and lay people.
04A visionary encyclopedia
After the Scivias, Hildegard wrote the Book of Life’s Merits between 1158 and 1163 and the Book of Divine Works between 1163 and about 1173, in which the human being stands at the centre of the cosmos. She also composed about seventy songs and the Ordo Virtutum, wrote on nature and medicine, produced lives of local saints and devised an invented language, the Lingua ignota. In 1178 she refused to exhume a once excommunicated nobleman buried at the Rupertsberg, insisting that he had been reconciled with the Church; the prelates of Mainz kept her community under interdict until March 1179. She died at the Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179.
Venerated soon after her death, Hildegard was honoured as a saint in local calendars even though canonization proceedings begun under Gregory IX and Innocent IV were never completed; in 2012 Benedict XVI extended her cult to the whole Church and proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church. In recent decades her songs have been widely recorded and performed, and historians of theology, science and women’s writing study her works, while modern “Hildegard medicine” goes far beyond what her texts contain.
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