Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 at Bermersheim vor der Höhe in the Rhineland, the tenth child of the free noble couple Hildebert of Bermersheim and Mechthild of Merxheim-Nahet. From early childhood she experienced visionary phenomena that she later described as the reflection of the living Light. In keeping with the practice of offering a tenth child to religious life, her parents placed her in the care of the anchoress Jutta of Sponheim, who lived enclosed beside the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. There Hildegard received a basic education in Latin and the psalter, was enclosed in the anchorage, and in due course made monastic profession as a Benedictine nun. After Jutta's death in 1136 the community of women elected Hildegard as their magistra.

In the 1140s, with the encouragement of her provost and secretary Volmar, she began to set down the visions she had long kept private. The resulting work, Scivias (Know the Ways), was examined at the Synod of Trier in 1147–1148; Pope Eugenius III, having heard portions of it, authorized her to continue writing. Seeking independence from the monks of Disibodenberg, she founded a new monastery about 1150 on the Rupertsberg, a hill overlooking the Rhine near Bingen, and later established a daughter house at Eibingen on the opposite bank. As abbess she conducted a wide correspondence with popes, with the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, and with bishops and lay notables, and she undertook preaching journeys through the Rhineland and into Swabia, an exceptional public role for a twelfth-century woman religious.

Her writings range far beyond the three great visionary books—Scivias, the Liber vitae meritorum, and the Liber divinorum operum—which together set out a theology of creation, the human person, and salvation. She also composed two works of natural history and medicine, Physica and Causae et Curae, cataloguing plants, animals, stones, and the causes and remedies of disease. A prolific composer, she produced a cycle of liturgical chants known as the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum and the musical morality play Ordo Virtutum, among the earliest surviving examples of that genre. She further invented a constructed language, the Lingua Ignota, together with an alternative alphabet. In her last years she came into conflict with the Mainz authorities after she allowed burial at Rupertsberg of a man who had been excommunicated but whom she believed to have been reconciled; she refused to have the body disinterred and eventually obtained the lifting of the interdict laid on her community.

Hildegard died on 17 September 1179 at Rupertsberg. She was widely venerated in the Rhineland after her death, and in the fourteenth century Pope John XXII permitted her local cult. Her relics, moved from the ruined Rupertsberg monastery, rest in the parish church of Saint Hildegard at Eibingen. On 10 May 2012 Pope Benedict XVI extended her liturgical cult to the universal Church by equivalent canonization; on 7 October 2012 the same pope proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, acknowledging the lasting theological and spiritual importance of her work. She is often called the Sibyl of the Rhine.