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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Bingen, Hildegard of
Legal name: Bingen, Hildegard von
Other names: Hildegardis Bingensis (Latin)
Sybil of the Rhine (byname)
Saint Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard von Bingen
VON BINGEN, Hildegard
BINGEN, Hildegard VON
Birthdate: 1098
Date of death: 1179-09-17
Gender: female
Education: Jutta
Occupations: nun
abbot
writer
composer
Organizations: Order of Saint Benedict
Roman Catholic Church
Awards and honors: Doctor of the Church
canonized 2012-05-10
Short biography: Blessed Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sybil of the Rhine, was a Christian mystic, German Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. She became a nun at age 15. Elected a magistrate (abbess) by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. She was a composer with an extant biography from her own time. One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama. She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and the first surviving morality play, while supervising miniature illuminations.
Nationality: Germany
Birthplace: Bermersheim, Germany
Places of residence: Bermersheim, Germany
Disibodenberg, Germany
Rupertsberg bei Bingen, Germany
Eibingen, Rüdesheim am Rhein, Germany
Place of death: Rupertsberg, Bingen, Germany
Burial location: Pfarrkirche, Eibingen, Germany
Associated Place (for map): Germany

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67 reviews

StFrancisofAssisi 2,416 reviews

Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

“Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You’re a world – everything is hidden in you.” –Hildegard of Bingen

She was a Benedictine abbess, artist, composer, dietician, naturalist, poet, travelling preacher, mystic, and political consultant. She was a self-doubter with acute certainty in a merciful and mysterious God; a gifted healer who suffered from illness her whole life. Meet the incomparable Hildegard of Bingen. show more Nourishing, challenging, and idea-bursting, her writings will stir and awaken your soul. show less

Jan 16, 20241 other review

MeditationesMartini 2,425 reviews

Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

I'm truly not just a Hildy Hater. I think her music is downright beautiful. I think it's neat that she knew about herbs and stuff. I think it's cool that she was a strong woman who used God to beat people into submission, because what other weapon did she have really, and I even think she meant well, most of the time. She's mendacious and she resorts to that smelling our wounds metaphor just a little too much, but on the other hand I like that her word for what God brings us and the feeling show more he leaves is "green."

It doesn't help that Carmen Acevedo Butcher is a condescending Christian lady who seems to think the whole point of Hildy is that she was just! like! us! and isn't! that! nice! only more godly and maybe we could learn a thing or two from the anchoress, ahem. Butcher really hammers that point home--like we won't care about the Middle Ages unless they're super-relevant to our lives, which just makes me super-suspicious that Butcher actually wouldn't care if she didn't think her God wanted her to and would be more excited about, like, her new washing machine. A more serious issue is that she can't write for shit--really kindergarteny stuff like when the devil vomits up some bad crud she can't use the noun vomit to describe it because she already just used the verb vomit, so we end up with a sentence that goes something like "the devil vomited up some evil throw up on them," which is so puerile it almost makes me feel bad for picking on her. But then when she writes things like "Hildegard's letters weren't like the emails we send today," or rattles on and on and on about her trip to Korea--no, not even the trip, the baggage claim, because her writing workshop told her she should write her experience and include sensory detail--I get over feeling bad, because man, stop wasting our time, Butcher (of the English language).

Enough of her. After a serviceable biography, we get excerpts from the songs and visions, and at the risk of a Carmeacevedobutcherian presentism I have to say that all this stuff about e.g. the Church being a woman with a demon's maw emerging from between her legs just seems really traumatized and sad to me. That's not a dig--it seems like Hildegard feels frozen and helpless and like a Jesus who will smite all the doubters and lazy Christians and basically everyone except Hildegard as long as she sucks up really good would be just the thing. I know how sneery that sounds, and let me stress that my attitude toward religious belief is calmer and less frothy-violent than I sound now. But I do sort of feel like whenever I encounter medieval Church literature it reminds me of that thing my internet acquaintance Lola said about the Middle Ages being a Christian thousand-year Reich. The poor people seem broken, and unequal to the task of living without a bunch of empty, sad threats about how their friend Mercy will stomp you and Humility will judge you and Chastity will fuck some more righteous dude. Hildegard doesn't seem to get that an endless parade of virtues that come on and pose and sneer and threaten and boast is comical or pathetic.

(oh, Butcher also took out all the "O!s". Like "O! Christ, you who are our shield," and "O! St. Disibod, right arm of the Church, O! exemplar," etc. Why would you take out the "O!"s?)

The parade of asshole virtues is repeated several times in several ways--sort of implicitly in the visions in the excerpts from Scivias, which were the foundation of Hildegard's spiritual authority, where she sees a woman whose body is covered with eyes, but she's not a demon, she's "Fixing-one's-eye-upon-God"--it takes a lot to tell the grotesque virtues from the grotesque vices sometimes, which is weird because the vices all gnash and gnarr and have beetle torsoes or, like, hair made of offal, so you wouldn't think telling the difference would be that hard)--then in musical form in Ordo Virtutum or the "Play of the Virtues," which is included in its entirety so I have spoken of it elsewhere, and finally, again, in the Book of Life's Merits in detail--this book is not included in toto, but good luck finding that out from Butcher, who takes an approach probably best described as ramshackle.

There is also the physick, which is all mad libs: "If you have (name of an ailment), that is because your (name of a bodily humour) is out of balance; do (name of a penance)." Also, everyone should eat more garlic. That's another place where we agree, and I'm being judgmental on the mores of a different time and probably coming across like a pretty repulsive person in this review. But you know why? Because Hildegard comes across pretty badly too--shallow, opinionated, given to histrionic threats--and I could forgive that on the grounds that she created tihngs of cool weird beauty (besides the music, her illustrations of her visions in the Scivias, not included here, are freaky-Christedelic) if not for the fact that she never, never stops judging and threatening and bludgeoning me, or my Bavarian peasant great-to-the-seventy-first power grandfather. Sheerest presentism, that. But like Hildegard reaching out and weaponizing a mythology, I'm only using the best tool--for me, mockery--available in my self-defence. show less

Nov 22, 2011 (Edited)1 other review

MeditationesMartini 2,425 reviews

Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard von Bingen

"I'm 'Pride-in-one's-appearance!' I'm a bad dude! Grrrr, graaaah, I'm awwwwful! God is stupid! I'm just gonna stand here and enjoy combing my hair and not thinking about Christ's suffering! Because that's what pride means to me!" And he's got, like, crab arms and snake legs (?) and breathes a wind of daggers (???) or something.

And The Soul is like "yeah, groovy."

BUT THEN: "You're STUPID, Pride-in-one's appearance! You're STUPID and DUMB. God thinks you are a LAME and we all do too. I'm show more Distaff Modesty! I'm sooooooo great! Nobody's as pretty and smart as me and God is buying me an Audi for grad! You are stupid and bad and I am good and the best. Go away, stupid."

And The Soul is like "Coo'."

And then that happens like nine more times and the last one is the Devil, who gets to shout and yell and get up in all their plainchants. (And to be fair, this WAS written for music, and we all know how dopey, like, an opera, say, would be if there was no music and it was all down to the libretto. And actually! Imagine those lines above, which are surprisingly close to the real lines, sung with a tonne of melismata, like by R. Kelly. Now make him a monk. Amazing! Hallelujah! Eh? Eh?) And certainly you can imagine the procession and the costuming and the reassurance that everything'll be okay and The Soul will be saved, as opposed to when the Mongols have burned down the cow and Young Hans gots the megrims or whatever. I can see this going over on the medieval circuit. But woooooow, Hildegard was impervious to irony. I guess that's what happens when you spend your life in a broom closet. show less

Nov 22, 2011

nathanielcampbell 6 reviews

Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs by Hildegard of Bingen

This is a review specifically of the Matthew Fox / Bear & Co. 1987 edition, with English translation by Robert Cunningham.

Although this edition is the only widely-available English translation of Hildegard's final and magnum opus, it is highly abridged and has several significant defects. When Matthew Fox commissioned Robert Cunningham to produce the first English translation of Hildegard’s Liber Divinorum Operum ("Book of Divine Works," also known as De Operatione Dei, "On the Activity of show more God"), the only published Latin text available was Mansi’s 1761 edition of the Lucca Codex, as reprinted in Migne, PL 197. Since Schrader and Führkötter’s pioneering work in the 1950’s, however, it had been widely recognized that this text had significant flaws, including a slightly different numbering system and frequent errors in transcription. In place of the Lucca manuscript, they had established the Ghent manuscript (G, the first fair-copy of the text for editing), together with the Troyes manuscript, as the superior witnesses. Thus, when Heinrich Schipperges published the first authoritative German translation (Welt und Mensch [Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1965]), he worked to collate the Mansi/Migne text against that Ghent manuscript, and included a partial appendix indicating passages from G that ought to supersede Migne—however, as Dronke notes in the new critical edition of the text in CCCM 92, this was only a partial collation, and there remain passages in Schipperges’ translation that were made from Migne rather than the superior reading of G. Moreover, Schipperges chose not to translate the full text, replacing large sections of repetitious or arcane material with his own summaries.

Thus, without access to a full and accurate critical Latin text, Fox and Cunningham chose to make their English translation from Schipperges’ German, “because of its accurate interpretation of the difficult original text" (Cunningham's Translator's Note, p. 2). In addition to Schipperges’ own summarized abridgement, Cunningham made his own further omissions. Fox explains the rationale for this decision: “Since this volume was designed to be a ‘Hildegard Reader,’ we did not want to expend the cost or the time necessary to reproduce Hildegard’s entire text. (…) To publish the whole work will take several more years and, of course, it is our fondest wish that scholars and scholarly publishing houses will undertake such an exercise" (Fox's Introduction, p. xxii).

Ultimately, the Cunningham/Fox edition omits (sometimes with summary, more often without) approximately 40% of the total text. Because they relied on Schipperges’ translation, some of those omissions reflect the latter’s particular lens in interpreting Hildegard, which emphasized the scientific, homeopathic, ecological, and cosmological. Often, some of the more overtly theological sections were left out—for example, the allegoresis of the seven heavenly bodies as the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in I.2.36-8 (Cunningham/Fox, p. 50), or most of Hildegard’s discussion of the archetypal characters of the apostles and the history of the Church in III.5.9-11 (Cunningham/Fox, p. 237). Perhaps the single most egregious omission, however, was the latter nearly three-quarters of Part II, Vision 1 (Vision 5), which is Hildegard’s hexaemeral commentary on Genesis. These 41 chapters—among whose unique characteristics is Hildegard’s ecclesiological interpretations of Creation—represent the single longest, sustained scriptural exegesis in Hildegard’s entire oeuvre (at more than 50 pages of Latin text, more than twice as long as the LDO’s kernel exegesis of the Prologue to John’s Gospel in I.4.105), and yet have remained entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences.

Finally, the Cunningham/Fox edition has several significant deficiencies in scholarship, including its lack of substantial bibliography and Fox’s distortions of Hildegard’s ideas to fit his own theological points of view (for a penetrating critique, see Barbara Newman's essay, "Romancing the Past: A Critical Look at Matthew Fox and the 'Creation Mystics'"). Following Schipperges, they render Hildegard’s frequent use of the generic homo (“human person,” “humankind”) in the third-person singular with first-person plurals in English (“we,” “us”), which shifts the register away from Hildegard’s visionary voice. Moreover, they claim to mark divine speech (“The sections of quotations, when Hildegard is writing down the ‘voice’ she hears”) with indented, italicized text—but their choices of what text fits this category seem quixotic and random; and this obscures the fact that, besides the initial visual description of each vision and the Prologue and Epilogue, which are rendered in the first-person singular (Hildegard speaking), all of the remaining text is at least purported to be from “the voice from heaven” that spoke to Hildegard in her visionary experiences (when it lapses into the first-person singular, it is God speaking, not Hildegard). A fundamental component of Hildegard’s construction of her authority as a theologian was her claim that everything she wrote was of divine, not human, origin; and Fox's edition obscures this authorial claim.

Because of these many deficiencies and omissions, a new, full, and scholarly translation of Hildegard's Book of Divine Works, with critical introduction and bibliography, will be published in 2016 by CUA Press in their Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation Series. show less

Dec 20, 20145 other reviews

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