Speak and write what you see and hear: the world is God’s living work.
Viriditas, greenness, names the moist, life-giving vigour that God pours into plants, bodies and souls; its opposite is dryness, the withering of nature and of virtue alike.
In the song O viridissima virga, Mary is hailed as the greenest branch, in whom a flower blossoms and the whole earth rejoices.
Hildegard says she saw neither in dreams nor in ecstasy but awake and with open eyes, in a radiance she called the shadow of the living light, in which words and images appeared to her soul.
In a letter of 1175 to the monk Guibert of Gembloux she explains that she has seen this light since childhood while her outward senses kept working.
The human being is formed from the matter of all creation and stands at its centre, so the elements, winds and humours of the world correspond to the body, its health and its passions.
In the Book of Divine Works a human figure stands with outstretched arms inside the circles of the cosmos, while the winds blow towards it from every side.
Music is for Hildegard a trace of the harmony Adam knew before the fall; singing the liturgy joins the human voice to the praise of the angels and to the order of creation.
When the prelates of Mainz forbade singing in her monastery, she warned them that those who silence God’s praise without just cause will lose the company of the angels.