Hildegard of Bingen

A Book of Essays

Maud Burnett McInerney, Maud Burnett McInerney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134824533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the extraordinary life and work of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century abbess and prophet whose interests ranged from music to theology to zoology to medicine. These essays-written specifically for this volume-approach Hildegard from a variety of perspectives including gender theory, musicology, art history, the history of science, and comparative studies.

Worlds Beyond:
Poetry, Visions, and Music

A Poetry of Science

Relating Body and Soul in the Scivias

Jan S. Emerson

In everything from hymn to musical drama, practical medicine to abstract theological commentary, personal letters to dramatic exorcistic ritual, Hildegard von Bingen celebrates harmony. So did many of her contemporaries. Medieval thought paired both likely and unlikely to imagine a unified and ordered cosmos, with God as the author, the architect, the ultimate composer. Medieval minds brought together God and man, angel and devil, Good and Bad, healthy and sick, life and death (Pawlik 13) and the topic addressed here, body and soul. Yet many medieval writers, though preoccupied with the relationship between the body and the soul, saw that relationship as a primarily antagonistic one. As debate more than dialogue, animosity more than reciprocity.¹ From medieval to modern times, a similarly problematic relationship has existed between poetry and science, one that was perhaps intensified as university disciplines were defined in the Middle Ages.

In this article I ask how Hildegard understands these relationships, and I seek answers in her use of body-related imagery in the Scivias. I want to show how the imagery reveals three major points: 1) The integration of body and soul is total but not without tension. 2) The body and senses can be seduced into evil but are not inherently so. Indeed, they offer the greatest human potential, that of recognizing God.² And 3) Even Hildegard's most poetic images of the body are based in observation.

Understanding the body both as the place of her own physical pain and as microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe, Hildegard moves in the Scivias between images of embodiment and abstraction. To the modern reader there can appear “an almost schizophrenic relationship between her creative urges and her need to remove them from herself; between her organic, [potentially] erotic visions,³ and her reasoned, at times somewhat forced, analyses of them. She opens the Scivias by declaring the split between her [calm] inner and her [disquieted] outer being.”⁴ In the opening Declaration, she has the voice from Heaven describe how “she suffers in her inmost being and in the veins of her flesh; she is distressed in mind and sense and endures great pain of body, because no security has dwelt in her, but in all her undertakings she has judged herself guilty.” But describing the fiery light that came from Heaven to “permeate [her] whole brain,” and “inflame” her heart and breast, she says at the same time that it “was not like a burning but a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch,” invoking a gentle, non-invasive touch that allows her to see with a “pure mind” (59–60).

Recognizing with other medieval writers a split between inner and outer sense, she says that Man can know God better “by opening the inner eyes of the spirit to good, and denying and cutting off the evil that the outer person can do” (429). At the end of times, according to the divine commentary on Book 3, Vision 11, many will be deceived by the magic of the Antichrist, “For they will use their minds to probe this novelty their outer eyes see and their hands touch, and despise the invisible things that abide in me and must be understood by true faith” (503). Clarifying her own experiences in a well-known passage, Hildegard relates the inner and outer senses to the inner and outer self: “But the visions I saw I did not perceive… by the eyes of the body, or by the ears of the outer self… ; but I perceived them while awake and seeing with a pure mind and the eyes and ears of the inner self” (60). Many medieval visionaries must experience a split between body and soul to gain access to the divine; they cannot have moments of divine insight unless their souls leave their bodies.⁵ Hildegard's visions, though not perceived with the outer senses of body, are experienced while she is in the body, which distinguishes her from other visionaries and grounds her experience in her belief that body and soul are integrated.⁶ This integration she sees as a unity of precisely those oppositely inclined visible and invisible aspects of the human being, brought together to serve God, for example in the celebration of the sacrament of communion:

The human soul, which is invisible, invisibly receives the sacrament, which exists invisibly in that oblation, while the human body, which is visible, visibly receives the oblation that visibly embodies that sacrament. But the two are one, just as Christ is God and Man, and the rational soul and the mortal flesh make up one human being…. (245)

Like her contemporaries, Hildegard condemns acts of the flesh, which stem from placing love of the world and the carnal above God.⁷ In Book 2, Vision 6, the Living Light describes how a person's faith can weaken: “For the body and the soul fight with each other; the soul seeks to dominate the body, since the desire for sin in the flesh goes against its wishes, and the body (corpus) disdains the righteousness that is the desire of the life-loving soul…. The flesh loves sin (caro amat peccatum), and the soul loves justice, and so they oppose each other and rarely agree.”⁸ The pilgrim soul of Book 1, Vision 4, laments of its body, “… alas! Its sensibility gives rise to filth, licentiousness and wantonness of conduct and every kind of vice…. the Devil's persuasion meets me and ensnares me, and uplifts me in haughty pride, so that I say ‘I want to act according to the joys of earthly fertility.’” The soul continues, “I condemn all those works that burn with carnal desire” (113).

Hildegard also condemns her own body and senses: “To my own inner soul I seem as filthy ashes of ashes…. When I think of the worthlessness of my foolish bodily senses, I deem myself the least and lowest of creatures….” Her exceeding fear makes her unworthy even “to be called a human being,” nonetheless she asks that the Living Light not “blot [her] out from the land of the living, for [she] labor[s] at this vision with great toil.” The divine voice tells her that her eyes are beautiful because the divine counsel dawns in them, and admonishes her to speak out regardless of any unworthiness: “Though you are ashes, I will that you speak” (310).

Despite this condemnation of the carnal, Hildegard's work, as Prudence Allen has suggested, “abound[s] in metaphors for the complete integration of body and soul.” It thus differs from the Neo-Platonic continuation of the “Platonic tendency to separate the soul from the body.”⁹ I want to explore the nature of that integration as expressed in the images used to portray it. Hildegard stresses again and again how body and soul, person and senses, spirit and senses are interdependent, in practical as well as philosophical terms. The lamenting soul above, though sorrowful over the struggle with its body, also notes its life-giving link to that body: “I am the living breath in a human being placed in a tabernacle of marrow, veins, bones and flesh, giving it vitality and supporting its every movement” (113).

This relationship is a requirement of life, for the soul permeates the human body and blood (416) and rules the body: “The soul is the mistress, the flesh the handmaid. How? The soul rules the body by vivifying it, and the body is ruled by this vivification, for if the soul did not vivify the body it would fall apart and decay.”¹⁰ Elsewhere Hildegard adds the senses to body and soul to form a human trinity:

But a person has within himself three paths. What are they? The soul, the body and the senses; and all human life is led in these. How? The soul vivifies the body and conveys the breath of life to the senses: the body draws the soul to itself and opens the senses; and the senses touch the soul and draw the body. For the soul gives life to the body as fire gives light to darkness…. (120)

Hildegard applies anatomical images to the intellect and will, the two principal powers of the soul: “The intellect is joined to the soul like an arm to the body. For as the arm, joined to the hand with its fingers, branches out from the body, so the intellect, working with the other powers of the soul, by which it understands human actions, most certainly proceeds from the soul.” It “sifts things” to pick out the useful, the lovable, and that which is pertinent to life (121). The intellect “has true faith in its work, which is the joint of the hand, with which it chooses among the various works wisely as if with fingers” (121). Where the intellect understands, the will activates: “Thus it [the soul] puts its will, like a right arm, as the support of the veins and marrow and the movement of the whole body; for the will does every work…” (121).

In the voice of the Living Light, Hildegard urges humans to pay attention to the scriptures because they are “not just a bundle of marrow” (120). But as humans are not simply body, they are also not simply soul. At death, the soul “breaks away lamenting from its abode; for, taking itself out of the body with anguish, it tremblingly allows its habitation to fall, dreading the imminent tribunal of the Celestial Judge” (125). Humans must acknowledge and use both intellect, an arm of the soul, and body correctly: “But you, O human, are blind when you need to see, deaf when you need to hear and senseless when you need to defend yourself, since the intellect and the five bodily senses God gave you are no more to you than filth and emptiness” (127). Not only does the soul permeate and give life to the physical body, but the two cooperate: “the body is the tabernacle and support of all the powers of the soul, since the soul resides in the body and works with the body, and the body with it, whether for good or for evil” (123).

Thus the problem of sin lies not in the senses themselves but in the way humans use them, as the divine voice urges “…why do you not serve God, Who gave you both soul and body, for the sake of heavenly wages?” (127). “When you say that you cannot do good works, you speak in unjust wickedness. For you have eyes to see with, ears to hear with, a heart to think with, hands to work with and feet to walk with, so that with your body you can stand up and lie down, sleep and wake, eat and fast. Thus God created you. Therefore, resist the desires of your flesh, and God will help you.”¹¹ Humans simply forget they have their nature so that they can do good, she says (433). But even those whose senses are thrown into disorder by vices still “aspire to eternal reward” (195). In that reward, as in John's Revelations, body and soul will be reunited. In Hildegard, they retain their gender. In the New Heaven and the New Earth, after the call to arise, Hildegard saw that “all the human bones in whatever place in the earth they lay were brought together in one moment and covered with their flesh, and they all rose up with limbs and bodies intact, each in his or her gender….”¹² Also in Hildegard's vision, Christ makes no inquiry or statement concerning their works, and there is no list of works, for their bodies are marked with brightness or darkness, indicating their past and their fate. In the commentary which follows immediately, Hildegard emphasizes the integrity of body and gender and the signing of the body-soul unit with its own works: “so all people will rise again in the twinkling of an eye, ‘in soul and body, with no deformity or mutilation but intact in body and in gender; and the elect will shine with the brightness of their good works, but the reprobate will bear the blackness of their deeds of misery’” (517). Important to Hildegard also is that Christ will return “with the same appearance He had had in the world and with His wounds still open…” so that He too shares the integrity of body and the transparency of His deeds with the risen humans.¹³

Thus Hildegard does not limit her use of body imagery to descriptions of the purely human. She applies it also to describe how humans grasp the dual nature of God: The intellect “is also to the soul as the shoulder is to the body, the very core of the other powers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Hildegard of Bingen, Prophet and Polymath
• The Social World and the Natural World
• Worlds Beyond: Poetry, Visions, and Music
• Echoes of Hildegard: The Fourteenth Century and Beyond
• Contributors