A Child Given to the Church
Hildegard was born about 1098 into a noble family in the Rhineland, the youngest of a large household, and was pledged to religious life while still a child. Around the age of eight she was placed in the care of Jutta von Sponheim, an anchoress attached to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg. The arrangement was part devotion and part property management, a common fate for daughters of the minor nobility. She learned Latin psalmody, scripture and the rhythm of the monastic hours, but she never received the formal schooling given to a boy destined for the priesthood.
She later wrote that she had experienced luminous visions since early childhood and had kept them mostly to herself, afraid of ridicule and of her own presumption. When Jutta died in 1136 the women of the community elected Hildegard as their magistra. Three years later, after an illness she understood as a rebuke for her silence, she began to record what she saw. She sought and obtained approval, first from her abbot, then from the archbishop of Mainz, and finally from Pope Eugenius III, who is reported to have read her work aloud at Trier.
Scivias, Song, and the Green Force
The result was Scivias, completed around 1151: twenty-six visions of creation, redemption and the church, each described and then interpreted. Two collaborators shaped it. The monk Volmar served as her secretary and corrector for decades, and the nun Richardis von Stade worked at her side until a disputed transfer to another house tore the two women apart. Hildegard fought that transfer with letters to abbots, archbishops and the pope, and lost. The episode shows a woman who understood ecclesiastical power well enough to work it, and who could be possessive and imperious when it failed her.
Her other writings range widely: the Book of Life's Merits, the Book of Divine Works, and the natural and medical compilations usually called Physica and Causae et curae, whose transmission is tangled enough that scholars still debate how much of the surviving text is hers. She also composed. More than seventy liturgical songs survive under her name, soaring far beyond the usual range of plainchant, along with Ordo Virtutum, a sung morality play often called the earliest surviving music drama. The word she coined for the vital force running through creation, viriditas, greenness, has outlived most of her theology.
Authority, Conflict, and a Late Canonization
In the 1150s she moved her nuns to a new house at Rupertsberg, over her abbot's resistance, and secured its independence and its endowment. In her sixties and seventies she undertook preaching tours along the Rhine and the Main, addressing clergy and laypeople in public, an activity essentially unheard of for a woman. She rebuked corrupt prelates, corresponded with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and supported harsh measures against the Cathars. Her authority rested on a careful strategy: she presented herself as an unlearned woman, a mere feather on the breath of God, and let the visions carry the argument.
Her last year was a fight. She had allowed a man said to be excommunicate to be buried in her convent's ground and refused to have the body removed, and the prelates of Mainz placed her community under interdict, silencing its music. She argued the case and the ban was lifted shortly before her death in September 1179. Local veneration began at once, yet formal canonization stalled for centuries through failed inquiries and lost paperwork. Only in 2012 did Benedict XVI extend her cult to the universal church and name her a Doctor of the Church.
