Justified True Belief

(●) A Benedictine abbess who wrote theology, composed music, practiced medicine, and told popes and emperors what she believed God thought of them. + Imagine a woman who spent her childhood walled into a small stone room beside a monastery church, who was never sent to school, who apologized in nearly every letter for being an unlearned woman, and who then spent the second half of a long life writing three books of theology, sixty-nine songs that still carry their music, two medical handbooks, fifty-eight sermons on the Gospels, and roughly three hundred and ninety letters to popes, an emperor, archbishops, abbots and frightened strangers. That is Hildegard of Bingen, and the strangest thing about her is that almost everything in that sentence is documented. She belongs on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is that she is the best-recorded case in the medieval West of a person who claimed to receive revelation and then submitted the claim for examination: she wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux asking whether she should speak or stay silent, a papal commission was sent to interview her, and a pope read her unfinished book aloud to a synod. Whatever one concludes about the visions, the procedure is worth knowing, because it is the procedure the New Testament itself lays down for anybody who claims to have heard from God: do not despise the claim, and do not swallow it either, but test it and keep what stands up (T1). The second is that her picture of the world, in which God is a living fire inside creation rather than a watchmaker outside it, gave Christian writing a vocabulary it had not had. The word at the center of it is viriditas. It means something like greenness, the sappy freshness of a plant that is alive and growing, and eight hundred years later nobody has found an English word that carries the whole of it (T3). One fact for the memory. Of the fewer than forty teachers the Roman church has named Doctors, meaning writers whose teaching it commends to everyone, four are women, and Hildegard is the only one who left behind music. She is also among the earliest composers in the Western tradition, male or female, whose life can be told in any detail at all, and no woman before her in the Latin West left a body of music anything like this size.

(●) 1098 AD: Born into the lesser Rhineland nobility, the youngest of a large family, and given to the church while still a child. + Hildegard was born around 1098 at Bermersheim, a village near Alzey in what is now Rhineland-Palatinate. Her parents, Hildebert and Mechthild, were free nobles of modest rank in the service of the counts of Sponheim: the kind of family with land, a name, and too many children to settle all of them. Her Vita, the life written by two monks who knew her, calls her the tenth child, though the surviving records name only seven older brothers and sisters. She said later that the visions started before she could have known there was anything to explain. Writing at seventy-seven to a monk named Guibert of Gembloux who had pressed her for details, she told him she had seen what she called the shade of the Living Light since she was three years old, and that she had understood by about five that other people did not see it. Children do not usually have the words for such a thing, and she did not: her account is of a small girl saying something about a light and being looked at oddly, and learning from that to keep quiet. Whatever her parents made of her, they did what families of their class often did with a last daughter. She was handed over to the religious life, and the woman she was handed to was a young noblewoman named Jutta of Sponheim.

(●) 1112 AD: She was sealed into a hermitage beside a monastery, stayed thirty-eight years, and came out of it leading the community. + On All Saints’ Day in 1112, Bishop Otto of Bamberg presided over the enclosure of Jutta of Sponheim, and of Hildegard with her, at the monastery of Disibodenberg, on a wooded hill where the river Nahe meets the Glan. Disibodenberg was a Benedictine house: its monks lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict, the old monastic handbook that cuts the day into fixed hours of prayer, reading and manual work, and that expects a man to enter one house and stay in it for life. Enclosure meant exactly what the word says. An anchorage was a small dwelling built against the wall of the monastery church, entered once and not left again; food came through one window and the liturgy, the church’s set round of daily prayer, could be heard through another. Jutta was in her early twenties. Hildegard was fourteen. The dates do not quite line up, and it is worth saying so rather than smoothing it over. Her Vita states that she was eight years old when she was given to Jutta, but the enclosure at Disibodenberg is documented for 1112, when she was fourteen. The usual reconciliation, and the likeliest, is that she went to Jutta as a child of about eight and was formally enclosed with her six years later. What is certain is that she spent the whole of her youth in a walled room with an older woman who wore a hair shirt next to the skin as a penance, taught her the Latin Psalter, which is to say all hundred and fifty Psalms, prayed straight through week after week, and taught her to sing it. That was the entire curriculum, and it left her in an odd position that mattered for the rest of her life. She could read Latin aloud and she could not take it apart: she knew what the words said, in the way a child knows a song, but she could not have told you which word was the verb or why one ending differed from another. She said so all her life. She knew the Psalter, the Gospels and the other books, she wrote, but not the interpretation of the words of their texts, nor the division of the syllables, nor the knowledge of cases or tenses. A monk of the house named Volmar became her teacher, and in time her confessor, her friend and, from the year she started to write, the man who held the pen; he was still at her side sixty years after she was walled in. Other women came to join what had begun as two women in a cell, so that by the time Jutta died in 1136 the anchorage had quietly turned into a small convent. The sisters elected Hildegard to lead them. She was thirty-eight, and as far as anyone at Disibodenberg knew, that was the shape the rest of her life would take.

(●) 1141 AD: At forty-two she was told to write down what she saw, refused, and was ill until she gave in. + The opening page of her first book gives the date with the precision of someone reporting an accident: the eleven hundred and forty-first year of the Incarnation, when she was forty-two years and seven months old. Heaven opened, a warm fire went through her head and chest, and the Scriptures she had been reciting for thirty years in a language she could sound out but never construe, never take apart word by word and see how it worked, suddenly made sense to her all at once. The voice in the vision told her to write down what she saw and heard. She did not. For a long stretch she said nothing to anyone but Volmar, partly out of doubt and partly, she admitted, out of a plain fear of what people would say, since the Rhineland was full of self-appointed prophets and the church was hunting heretics. Then she got sick. She was bedridden, and she interpreted the illness as pressure, which is how she interpreted every illness of her life. When she finally began to write, she recovered. The book took ten years. It is called Scivias, a compression of Scito vias Domini, "know the ways of the Lord," and it runs to twenty-six visions in three parts: creation and the fall, redemption in Christ and the church, and the history of salvation to its end. Volmar wrote at her dictation and corrected her grammar. A young noblewoman named Richardis von Stade worked beside her on it, and Hildegard loved her, a fact that would later cost her more than she expected. And partway through the work, unsure whether to keep going, she wrote a letter to the most famous churchman in Europe.

(●) 1147 AD: A pope read her unfinished book aloud at a synod, and three years later she moved her nuns to a bare hill above the Rhine. + The letter she sent to Bernard of Clairvaux around 1146 asked one question: should she speak these things openly or keep silent? Bernard’s reply is short and, it has to be said, a little brisk. He rejoices in the grace of God in her, urges her to humility, and points out that when the anointing which reveals all things is already within, there is not much advice an abbot can add. But a few months later he spoke for her in front of Pope Eugenius III, at the synod of Trier, which sat from November 1147 into February 1148. A synod is a working meeting of churchmen, bishops and abbots summoned to settle the business in front of them, and the business at Trier included a book by a nun nobody outside the Rhineland had heard of. The procedure that followed is the part worth remembering. Her own abbot, Kuno of Disibodenberg, brought the matter forward with the backing of Archbishop Henry of Mainz, a commission was sent up the hill to Disibodenberg to interview her and examine the manuscript, and the commissioners came back satisfied. Eugenius then read passages of the unfinished Scivias aloud to the assembled prelates, the senior churchmen, bishops and abbots, who between them ran the dioceses and monasteries of half of Europe, and afterward wrote to her himself, a letter that survives, giving his blessing and telling her to set down whatever she was shown. She was told to keep writing. A woman in an anchorage had been examined by the church and cleared, in public, by name. What she did with that standing surprised everyone. Around 1150 she announced that God had shown her a hill at the confluence of the Nahe and the Rhine, near Bingen, and that her community was to move there. Kuno refused flatly, and no wonder: Disibodenberg would lose the pilgrims, the dowries and the prestige that came with a famous visionary. Hildegard took to her bed and could not be moved, literally, and her Vita reports that Kuno gave way only when he came and tried to lift her himself and found he could not. About twenty nuns walked to Rupertsberg in 1150 to a site with almost nothing on it. The early years there were hard enough that some of the women regretted coming, and Hildegard, who had spent thirty-eight years inside one monastery’s walls, turned out to be formidable at governing.

(●) 1158 AD: At sixty she went out on the road and preached to clergy who had not asked her to. + Between roughly 1158 and 1171 Hildegard made four preaching journeys, which is four more than a twelfth-century nun was supposed to make. The first followed the river Main through Mainz, Wertheim, Würzburg, Kitzingen, Ebrach and Bamberg. The second, around 1160, took her to Trier, where she stood up and told the clergy that they had failed to blow the trumpet of God’s justice, and then on up the Moselle to Metz. A third went north along the Rhine to Boppard, Andernach, Cologne, Siegburg and Werden. A fourth, when she was past seventy, went into Swabia. She preached in cathedrals, and in the chapter houses of monasteries, the room where a community gathered each morning to hear a chapter of its Rule read out and to settle its own affairs. Her subject was mostly clerical negligence, priests and monks who had stopped taking the work seriously, and at Cologne she preached against the Cathars, a movement then spreading through the Rhineland which held that the material world was the work of an evil power and that the body was therefore a prison to escape. She never claimed an office. Her claim was that a message had been given to her, that she was, in her own repeated phrase, a poor little figure of a woman, and that the message was not hers to keep. It is a narrow ledge to stand on, and she stood on it for thirteen years without anyone successfully knocking her off it. What makes the travelling remarkable is that these were also the busiest years of her life at the desk, so that the books were being dictated in the gaps between journeys. Between 1158 and 1163 she finished Liber vitae meritorum, the Book of Life’s Merits, a vision of a man so large that he stands in the cosmos, while thirty-five vices step out one by one to state their case and are answered each time by the virtues. The two medical books, Physica and Causae et curae, belong to these same years, and so do most of the songs. Then, from about 1163 to 1174, she worked at Liber divinorum operum, the Book of Divine Works, her longest and her hardest, grown out of a long meditation on the first chapter of John. She did none of it alone, and near the end she nearly lost the ability to do it at all. Volmar had been taking down her words since 1141, and when he died in 1173 she was left dictating to whoever could be found, until Guibert of Gembloux arrived in 1177 and took the chair beside her.

(●) 1178 AD: Her convent was forbidden to sing, over a grave she refused to open. + A nobleman was buried in the cemetery at Rupertsberg. He had at some point been excommunicated, which is to say formally cut off from the sacraments, but he had been reconciled before he died: a priest had heard his confession and given him the last rites, and the whole town of Bingen had walked in the funeral procession. Some months later the cathedral chapter at Mainz, whose archbishop Christian was away in Italy, ordered Hildegard to dig up the body and put it outside consecrated ground. She refused. The story her community told afterward is that she went out to the cemetery in her abbess’s habit, blessed the grave, and then had every marker and stone taken off it so that no one else could find it either. The prelates responded with an interdict, a suspension of the sacraments laid on a whole community rather than on one offender. Her nuns were cut off from the Eucharist, the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, and they were forbidden to sing the Divine Office, which is the cycle of psalms and prayers a monastery works through together at fixed hours, from the small hours of the morning to the last office before bed. They were permitted to recite it. For a house that had been singing her own music for thirty years, that concession was a particular kind of punishment: the words were left to them and the music was taken away. Hildegard was eighty. What she did next was write the letter that has outlasted the quarrel. It runs to several pages, it concedes the point it should concede, that she ought to have gone to her superiors for permission rather than acting alone, and it maintains the point it should maintain, that the man had been absolved and the burial was lawful. In between, it becomes the most sustained thing anyone in the Middle Ages wrote about why churches sing. The interdict was lifted in March 1179, after letters, witnesses and the intervention of friends, including the archbishop himself once the facts reached him in Italy. She had about six months left.

(●) 17 September 1179 AD: She died at eighty-one, and it then took the church eight centuries to decide what to call her. + Hildegard died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179 and was buried in front of the altar of the church she had built. Her sisters said that two arcs of light appeared in the sky and crossed over the room where she lay, which is the kind of detail a biography should report as what the sisters said rather than as what happened. Rupertsberg was destroyed by Swedish troops in 1632, during the Thirty Years’ War, and her relics were carried to the daughter house she had founded at Eibingen in 1165, across the river, where they remain. The formal process of canonization, which is the church’s investigation of a dead Christian’s life and miracles, ending if it succeeds in a public declaration that the person is a saint, was opened under Pope Gregory IX in 1227, and it collapsed on paperwork. The report on her miracles was rejected in 1237 for want of dates, places and the names of witnesses. Innocent IV had the file reworked in 1243, Clement V and John XXII took it up again early in the next century, and it stalled every time for the same procedural reasons. Meanwhile, and without waiting for Rome, she was simply treated as a saint. Her name went into the Roman Martyrology, the official register of the saints and the days on which they are remembered, her feast was kept, pilgrims came to Eibingen, and the question of whether the paperwork had ever been completed went unasked for roughly seven hundred years. Benedict XVI closed it. On 10 May 2012 he extended her cult to the universal church, cult here carrying none of its modern flavor and meaning only public honor, the keeping of a feast day and the presence of a name in the church’s calendar. The act is sometimes called equivalent canonization: instead of running the investigation over again, a pope recognizes that the church has in fact been honoring the person for centuries, and says so. On 7 October of that year he named her a Doctor of the Church. The citation called her an authentic teacher of theology and a profound scholar of natural science and music, which is an accurate summary of a woman who had apologized for her ignorance in almost every letter she ever wrote.

What She Taught

(T1) What she saw came to her wide awake, with her eyes open, and never in a trance. + Most people picture a medieval visionary in a swoon: eyes rolled back, body slack, the soul off somewhere else. Hildegard spent a good deal of ink denying that this was what happened to her. Writing to Guibert of Gembloux late in life, she told him she did not hear these things with her outward ears or work them out in her own heart, that she saw them in her soul with her outward eyes open, and that she had never fallen into ecstasy, but saw them awake, by day and by night. She kept the name she used for the source constant for forty years: the Living Light, and the shade of the Living Light, the second being the dimmer and more usual of the two. That insistence is doing real work, and it is worth seeing why. A trance cannot be cross-examined; a woman sitting up in a chair can be. Hildegard wanted her claims treated as reports, which meant submitting them to the people whose job was to test such things. So she wrote to Bernard, welcomed the commission, and accepted that the answer might be no. Paul told the Thessalonians, "Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21), and Hildegard is one of the clearest medieval instances of somebody voluntarily putting herself on the second half of that sentence. There is a modern reading that has to be faced, because it is not silly. In 1917 the historian of science Charles Singer noticed that her descriptions of showers of falling stars, of a light with a shimmering fortification-like edge, and of the sickness that reliably preceded and followed, match the migraine aura. The aura is the warning stage some sufferers get before the headache itself arrives: lights that flicker at the edge of sight, a bright zigzag band across the field of vision, nausea, and then hours in a dark room. Oliver Sacks repeated Singer’s suggestion in Migraine in 1970. It may well be right. What it cannot do by itself is settle the question, because a physical mechanism is not an alternative to a meaning: a man may be converted while running a fever without the fever being the explanation of the conversion. The theological question is what the visions contained, and whether it was true, which is exactly the question the synod of Trier took up and exactly the question the migraine diagnosis leaves untouched.

(Q) "Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch." + Source: Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, Declaration (Columba Hart and Jane Bishop’s translation, page 59). This is the opening of her first book, describing the vision of 1141. The sentence that follows is the one that made her a writer: she says that immediately she understood the meaning of the expositions of the Scriptures, the Psalter, the Gospels and the other books of both Testaments, without gaining any command of grammar, syllables, cases or tenses (T1).

(T2) God is not a craftsman standing outside the world but a living fire burning inside everything that exists. + Open the Book of Divine Works and a figure appears in the southern sky with a face too bright to look at, wings meeting above her head, a lamb in her hands and a monster underfoot. Then she speaks, in the first person, and what she says is not what a reader expects from a medieval allegory. She says she is the fire that lights every living spark; she says she flames in the fields, shines in the waters, and burns in the sun, the moon and the stars. The figure is Caritas, Divine Love, and Hildegard has taken the First Letter of John at its word: God is love, so Love speaks as God. Two things need saying about this, because a modern reader is likely to get one of them wrong. The first is that it is not pantheism. Pantheism is the view that the world simply is God, so that a rock is a piece of divinity. Hildegard says something different and much older: that every created thing is being held in existence, from moment to moment, by a God who is not identical with it. Paul said as much to the Athenians when he told them that in God we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), and Hildegard is giving that doctrine a temperature. A watch keeps running when the watchmaker leaves the room. A song stops the second the singer does, and Hildegard’s universe is the song. The second is that this fire has a human address. Her God is not diffuse. The same vision moves straight from cosmic fire to the making of a creature in the divine image, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26), and the whole rest of the book is about what that creature is for. She calls the human being the work of God and also the worker of God’s works, which is as neat a two-sentence doctrine of vocation as the twelfth century produced.

(Q) "I am the supreme and fiery force, who sets all living sparks alight... But I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity; I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars." + Source: Hildegard of Bingen, Liber divinorum operum (the Book of Divine Works), Part I, Vision 1, chapter 2 (Nathaniel M. Campbell’s translation). The speaker is the figure of Caritas, Divine Love, who dominates the opening vision of Hildegard’s last and longest book. A few lines further on she explains the images one by one: flaming above the fields means the earth from which man was made, shining in the waters means the soul, and so through the list (T2).

(T3) Creation is green with the freshness of God, and sin dries it out. + Snap a twig off a living tree in June and it bends before it breaks, and there is sap on your fingers. Snap one off the same tree in a dead winter and it goes with a crack and there is nothing. Any gardener knows the difference at a touch, and Latin has a word for the first condition: viriditas, greenness, the greening quality of a thing that is alive and growing. Hildegard took that ordinary word and made it carry most of her theology. Here is the move. She uses viriditas for a healthy plant and for a healthy soul, and she does not regard the second use as a metaphor for the first. In her account there is one life, God’s, and it arrives in a bean field and in a repentant conscience by the same route. So Christ is green, the live branch the prophet saw coming up out of the stump of Jesse, the father of King David, long after the tree had been cut down; the Virgin is the greenest branch, viridissima virga, in one of her best-known songs; a virtue is green; a healing herb is green. The opposite term is ariditas, dryness, and she uses it for a barren field and for a soul in sin with the same flat literalness. When people sin, she writes, the earth suffers for it, and the twentieth century found that line and made rather a lot of it. It is fair to ask whether this is theology or poetry, and the honest answer is that in Hildegard the two are the same activity, which is a real limitation as well as a real gift. She does not argue; she shows, and a reader who wants a proof will not find one. But the instinct underneath is solid Christian ground, and it is the ground the Cathars she preached against had abandoned. If matter is evil, greenness is a trap. If God made the world and called it good, then the sap in the twig and the grace in the soul are not competitors, and the same God is behind both. Her whole vocabulary is a refusal to let the material world be written off.

(Q) "O noblest green viridity, you’re rooted in the sun and in the clear bright calm you shine within a wheel no earthly excellence can comprehend." + Source: Hildegard of Bingen, O nobilissima viriditas, a responsory for virgins, Symphonia 56 in Barbara Newman’s numbering, and copied into Scivias III.13.7b (Nathaniel M. Campbell’s translation; Latin text as edited by Newman). A responsory is a chant sung between readings in the monastic office, with a refrain the community answers back. Hildegard wrote this one for her own nuns to sing, addressing greenness directly, as a person: it is rooted in the sun, surrounded by the embraces of the divine ministries, and it blushes like dawn and burns like the flame of the sun (T3).

(T4) Singing is how a fallen race recovers the voice Adam lost, which is why silencing a church is a serious matter. + Nearly everything Hildegard thought about music is in one letter, and the letter was written under duress at the age of eighty, with her sisters forbidden to sing. That is worth holding on to. This is not a treatise composed at leisure; it is an eighty-year-old woman explaining to a cathedral chapter what they have actually done. Her argument runs in three steps. Before the fall, Adam’s voice blended with the voices of the angels, and had he kept it, she says, mortal ears could not now bear the power of it. What he lost in the fall was not only obedience but that voice, along with the knowledge he had held, so that he woke into the world the way a man wakes from a dream and cannot recover what he saw. Then the prophets were given songs and told to make instruments, so that people hearing them might be reminded of the harmony they had lost. Music, in other words, is not ornament laid over the liturgy. It is remedial. It is the church getting a little of Eden back through its ears. From there she draws a conclusion about bodies that would have horrified the Cathars. The body, she writes, is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is right that the body should use that voice in harmony with the soul. The Psalms give her two instruments to think with, the harp and the ten-stringed psaltery, the psaltery being a flat box strung across its face and plucked with the fingers, and she reads the pair of them as a picture of exactly this. The harp, plucked from below, is the discipline of the body. The psaltery, sounding from above, is the exertion of the spirit. The ten strings are the fulfillment of the law. Praise needs lungs. "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!" (Psalm 150:6). And a bishop who stops a church’s mouth without a sufficient reason has not merely imposed a discipline; he has taken something from God and something from the people he is meant to be feeding.

(Q) "Therefore, those who, without just cause, impose silence on a church and prohibit the singing of God’s praises and those who have on earth unjustly despoiled God of His honor and glory will lose their place among the chorus of angels, unless they have amended their lives through true penitence and humble restitution." + Source: Hildegard of Bingen, Letter 23, to the prelates at Mainz, 1178 or 1179 (Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman’s translation, volume I, pages 76 to 80). The closing warning of the letter she wrote while her own convent was under interdict. The line immediately after it tells those who hold the keys of heaven to take care that they do not open what should stay closed or close what should stay open, which is as direct a thing as a nun could say to the men who had silenced her (T4).

(Q) "Father, I am greatly disturbed by a vision which has appeared to me through divine revelation, a vision seen not with my fleshly eyes but only in my spirit... Good and gentle father, I have been placed in your care so that you might reveal to me through our correspondence whether I should speak these things openly or keep my silence." + Source: Hildegard of Bingen, Letter 1, to Bernard of Clairvaux, about 1146 (Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman’s translation, volume I, pages 27 to 31). Bernard was the most listened-to churchman in Europe and had never heard of her. She tells him she has seen great marvels since childhood, that she has no formal training and reads only at the most elementary level, that she has told no one but one monk she trusts, and that keeping silent has left her bedridden. Then she asks the question the rest of her career turned on, and waits for an answer she cannot control.

What the Church Made of Her

(†) Her own century took her seriously, and the people in charge of it wrote to her for advice. + The clearest evidence of how the twelfth century regarded Hildegard is not anything written about her. It is the pile of letters written to her. Roughly three hundred and ninety survive, one of the largest bodies of correspondence to come out of the Middle Ages, and the senders include four successive archbishops of Mainz, the archbishops of Cologne, Trier, Salzburg and Bremen, the popes Eugenius III, Anastasius IV, Hadrian IV and Alexander III, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, dozens of abbots and abbesses, and a great many ordinary people with ordinary troubles. They wrote because they wanted to know what she thought, and often what God thought. She was not soft with them. She told Barbarossa, who had granted her house imperial protection, that he was behaving childishly and madly in propping up rival popes against Alexander III, and she told him God was watching. She told the clergy of Cologne to their faces that they had gone slack and that others would come and take their place. The letters are full of the phrase she never dropped, the poor little figure of a woman, and the effect of it is not modesty in any recognizable modern sense. It is a claim: if the message is not coming from her learning, her office or her sex, then the only question left is whether it is coming from God, and that is precisely the question she wanted her readers to have to face. Behind the whole phenomenon lies a strand of New Testament teaching that the medieval West mostly left dormant and that Hildegard woke up. When Peter explained Pentecost he quoted Joel: "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Acts 2:17). Prophecy in that sense is not church office, it is a gift given where God pleases, and it comes with instructions for the hearers: test it, and hold on to what is good. Hildegard’s contemporaries did the testing, at Trier and elsewhere, and concluded that this one was good.

(†) Her writing shaped what later Christians expected a visionary to sound like, and her music came back from the dead. + Two of her legacies are easy to miss, and they are easy to miss for the same reason. Both were absorbed so completely that they stopped looking like anybody’s doing in particular. - A pattern for women who write. A pope had read her book aloud to a synod and had written to tell her to keep going, which is as public a hearing as a woman’s theology had been given anywhere in the Latin West, and everyone who came after her knew it. Elisabeth of Schönau, a younger visionary just down the Rhine, wrote to her for guidance while Hildegard was still alive, and Elisabeth’s brother copied the correspondence. Look at the shape of what Hildegard had done: a woman with no formal schooling writes under obedience rather than on her own authority, hands the work over to be examined, and claims nothing for herself beyond having been told to speak. That is the pattern Mechthild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena would each work within, in their own ways and their own centuries. The Expositiones evangeliorum, her fifty-eight homilies on the Gospels, sermons that walk a congregation through a passage line by line, are the only sustained work of scriptural exposition any medieval woman is known to have written. - A repertoire recovered. Her music sat unsung in two manuscripts for something close to eight centuries, which is a long time for a composer to wait. Then a series of recordings beginning in the early 1980s, and Barbara Newman’s critical edition of the Symphonia in 1988, put it back into the ears of ordinary listeners, and the result was that a body of twelfth-century monastic chant became, improbably, something people buy. One piece in particular has never lost its strangeness. Her Ordo virtutum is the earliest surviving morality play, a drama whose characters are not people but the virtues and vices themselves, given voices and sent out to argue over one soul; and it is the earliest liturgical drama, meaning a play grown out of the church’s own worship, that is not tied to a particular service. In it the Virtues sing and the Devil can only shout, because he has no music in him.

(†) Where her own record will not bear weight: a convent for noblewomen, a friendship she would not let go, and medicine built on the stars. + The honest ledger has a second column, and in Hildegard’s case it is written in her own hand, which is the only kind of evidence that belongs here. - She admitted only noblewomen, and defended it badly. Around 1148 a woman named Tengswich of Andernach wrote to her with careful, deadly politeness. Tengswich was the superior of a house of canonesses, women who lived together under a rule and kept the daily prayers but without the strict enclosure a nun accepted, and she wanted to know two things: by what authority Hildegard’s nuns wore loosened hair, white silk veils and gold crowns on feast days, and by what authority she accepted only women from noble and wealthy families. Tengswich pointed to the fishermen and poor men the Lord had called into the first church and cited Peter at the house of Cornelius, "Truly I understand that God shows no partiality" (Acts 10:34). Paul had made the same point to the Corinthians, "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" (1 Corinthians 1:26). Hildegard’s reply defends the dress at length and then answers the harder charge with an analogy from the farmyard: who would gather all his livestock into one barn, the cattle, the asses, the sheep, the kids? God sets ranks on earth as among the angels, she says, and mixing them ends in ruin. It will not do. James asked a church that seated a man with a gold ring above a poor man in shabby clothing, "have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?" (James 2:4), and Tengswich had the better of the exchange. - She used her authority to hold on to a friend. When Richardis von Stade, the nun who had worked beside her through Scivias, was elected abbess of Bassum in 1151, Hildegard fought the appointment with everything she had: letters to Richardis’s mother, a furious letter to the archbishop of Mainz, an appeal to Pope Eugenius, and a hint of simony aimed at the family’s influence, simony being the sale of a church office, the sin named after Simon Magus, who tried to buy the power of the Spirit from the apostles with money. She lost, and Richardis died the next year. What redeems the episode is that Hildegard saw it clearly. Writing to Richardis she called it what it was, a transgression she had committed through love of a noble person, and when the news of the death came she wrote to the girl’s brother with the accusations dropped and the grief plain. - Her medicine was of its time, and she did not flag the difference. Physica contains a great deal of sober herbal observation, including the first known written note that hops preserve beer. Causae et curae also contains humoral physiology, which was the medical theory of the age: health is the balance of four fluids in the body, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and illness is one of them running to excess. With it come instructions for bleeding a patient to restore the balance, and prognosis drawn from the phase of the moon, including the moon’s effect on a child conceived under it. That was standard twelfth-century medicine and it would be unfair to fault her for not knowing better. The fair criticism is narrower: the same confident voice that reports the visions reports the lunar tables, and a reader is given no way to tell which claims she thought were revealed and which she had simply read. None of this touches the substance of what she taught, and Christians have never needed their teachers to be faultless. It is worth setting down for the same reason she set down her own transgression in the letter to Richardis: a record that omits it is not a record.