Hildegard of Bingen, the “Sibyl of the Rhine”, and her visions
Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century Benedictine abbess: the visions of the Scivias, the approval of Eugene III, her letters to the powerful and her music.
In 1141, at the age of forty-two, a Benedictine nun in the Rhineland received what she herself described as a fiery light that pierced her brain and heart, opening to her the meaning of Scripture. She was Hildegard, born in 1098 at Bermersheim, destined to become one of the most extraordinary figures of the European Middle Ages: visionary, theologian, composer, writer on nature, adviser to popes and emperors. Her contemporaries called her the “Sibyl of the Rhine”.
From Disibodenberg to the Rupertsberg
While still a child, Hildegard was entrusted to the anchoress Jutta of Sponheim, who lived in a cell attached to the men's monastery of Disibodenberg. A small community of women formed around Jutta, and Hildegard became its leader when her teacher died in 1136. She said she had had visions since childhood, but had long kept them hidden out of fear and humility.
Around 1150, overcoming strong opposition, she moved the nuns to a new monastery she founded on the Rupertsberg, near Bingen, where the Nahe flows into the Rhine. In 1165 she founded a second community at Eibingen, on the opposite bank of the river. From these places she maintained a dense correspondence with figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to whom she did not spare stern warnings.
The Scivias and papal approval
Her first great visionary work is the Scivias, a title understood as “Know the Ways”, composed between 1141 and 1151. In it she describes twenty-six visions, each followed by its theological explanation, covering creation, the fall, redemption and the end of time. Hildegard insisted that her visions did not come in dreams or ecstasy, but with open eyes and in full consciousness, in what she called “the shadow of the living light”.
At the synod of Trier in 1147 to 1148, Pope Eugene III, a Cistercian and disciple of Bernard, read some of its pages aloud and encouraged her to continue. This recognition gave her an authority extremely rare for a woman of her time. There followed the Liber vitae meritorum and the Liber divinorum operum, in which humanity appears at the centre of an ordered cosmos, an image of the divine work.
Prophecy, admonition and music
Hildegard's prophecy consists not so much in predicting events as in calling the Church and the powerful to reform. In her letters and sermons, which she also delivered on journeys along the Rhine and the Main, she denounced the corruption of the clergy and announced punishment for those who strayed from justice. After her death some compilers drew prophetic anthologies from her writings, used in the religious controversies of the thirteenth century.
Alongside her visionary work, Hildegard composed numerous liturgical chants and the musical drama Ordo Virtutum, in which the Virtues fight for the human soul. She also wrote two works on the natural world, known as Physica and Causae et curae, which reflect the natural knowledge of her time. The illuminated manuscript of the Scivias once kept at Wiesbaden was lost at the end of the Second World War, but a faithful copy made earlier survives.
Hildegard died on 17 September 1179. Venerated for centuries as a saint in Germany, she was formally entered in the catalogue of saints by Benedict XVI in May 2012 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in October of the same year. Her figure reveals a form of medieval prophecy founded on vision and admonishing speech, far from the idea of forecasting the future but rooted in a spiritual reading of the present.