Virgin Hildegard

Hildegard of Bingen, often called the Sibyl of the Rhine, was born in 1098 at Bermersheim in the Rhineland of the Holy Roman Empire, the tenth child of the noble parents Hildebert and Mechthilde. Following the custom of offering a tenth child to the service of God, she was dedicated to the Church from infancy. At about the age of eight she was placed under the care of Jutta of Sponheim, an anchoress living beside the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. There she learned the Latin Psalter, the Divine Office, and the practices of monastic life. From childhood she experienced intense visionary experiences, which she later termed the reflection of the living Light; for many years she revealed them only to Jutta and to the monk Volmar, who became her secretary and lifelong collaborator.

When Jutta died in 1136 the small community of women elected Hildegard as their magistra. In 1141, during her forty-third year, she received what she understood as a divine mandate to write down her visions. After a period of reluctance and physical illness she began the work known as Scivias, completed around 1151. Archbishop Henry of Mainz appointed a commission to examine the text; at the Synod of Trier in 1147-1148 Pope Eugenius III, supported by Bernard of Clairvaux, gave papal approval and encouraged her to continue writing. Strengthened by this recognition, Hildegard obtained permission to leave Disibodenberg and about 1150 founded a new monastery at Rupertsberg, on the Rhine opposite Bingen, taking some twenty nuns with her. In 1165 she established a second house at Eibingen on the opposite bank.

Hildegard's intellectual and artistic production was exceptional. In addition to Scivias she composed two further books of visions, the Liber vitae meritorum and the Liber divinorum operum. She wrote a comprehensive work on natural history, Physica, and a medical text, Causae et Curae. She produced a large cycle of liturgical chants, the Symphonia armoniae caelestium revelationum, and the earliest extant morality play, the Ordo Virtutum. She invented an artificial language, the Lingua Ignota, together with an alphabet. Her correspondence, numbering several hundred letters, includes exchanges with popes, with Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, with bishops, abbots, and lay nobles. In her later years she undertook preaching tours through the Rhineland and into Franconia, addressing both clergy and laity in public, an activity almost without parallel for a twelfth-century woman.

Toward the end of her life Hildegard became involved in a dispute with the cathedral chapter of Mainz. She had permitted the burial in the monastic cemetery of a young man who had been excommunicated but who, she insisted, had been reconciled to the Church before death. When she refused to have the body exhumed, the chapter imposed an interdict that forbade the celebration of Mass and the singing of the Divine Office. Hildegard protested in a letter that to silence the praise of God was a greater wrong than the alleged irregularity of the burial. The interdict was lifted not long before she died at Rupertsberg on 17 September 1179. A cult developed immediately, and miracles were reported at her tomb. Medieval efforts to secure formal canonization did not succeed, yet her local veneration never ceased. On 10 May 2012 Pope Benedict XVI extended her feast to the universal Church by equivalent canonization; on 7 October 2012 he declared her a Doctor of the Church, the fourth woman so honored.