A reflection by Christina Brennan Lee for September 22, 2024
This past Tuesday, September 17, was the Feast Day of Hildegard of Bingen.
I learned of her from the late Rev. Jeanne Linderman, one of the first women ordained in Delaware and an associate priest “here” at the former St. Andrew’s who, with her husband Jim, was for many years a parishioner of St. Andrew’s, where they raised their children, before Jeanne went to seminary. Jeanne had visited Germany expressly to find the medieval Hildegard and introduced her to us in the mid-1980s.
Hildegard is considered a polymath, that is a person with broad and comprehensive knowledge; all the more extraordinary given that she was born in the year 1098 in Germany’s Rhineland Valley. As her parents’ tenth child, she was tithed to the Church and raised by the Anchoress Jutta in a cottage near the Benedictine monastery of Saint Disibod: Disibodenberg. Other women joined them, finding the rare freedom to develop their own intellectual gifts within a community of prayer and silence. They then organized as a convent under the authority of the abbot of Disibodenberg, with Jutta as abbess. When Jutta died, Hildegard, then 38, became abbess. Later she founded several other independent convents.
Hildegard was a mystic, poet, dramatist, doctor, and scientist.
She is also one of the first identifiable Western composers in history, and has the most surviving compositions of any composer from the Middle Ages; and one of the few who wrote both lyrics and music. Additionally, she is one of four women named as Doctors of the Church by the Vatican.
From childhood, Hildegard experienced many in-depth spiritual visions. At 43, one such vision demanded that she capture those visions for others to know. Her original writings with unusual and brilliant illuminations began. Filled with feminine imagery for God and God’s creative activity, her works brought (now Saint) Bernard of Clairvaux in 1147 to recommend her first book of visions, Scivias, to Pope Eugenius III, leading to papal authentication. As Hildegard’s fame grew, many notables and royals sought her counsel, even archbishops and popes.
Despite all-male governance in and out of the Church, within her convents and outside them, she reasoned and led with strong spiritual authority rooted in the confidence of her visions and her considerable political astuteness. One of my favorite anecdotes is that shortly before her death, she defied a bishop who wanted her to dig up the grave of a recently buried man whom he said was excommunicated. She and her sister monastics went to the graveyard and removed all of the markings and headstones so that it was impossible to tell which grave was which.
Both feisty and faithful, Hildegard traveled through northern Europe on four preaching missions — unheard of for a woman in her time. With her knowledge and skill, she was a medical practitioner, focusing on women’s needs; she published treatises on natural science and philosophy; and wrote a liturgical drama, The Play of the Virtues, in which the personified Virtues sang their parts while the devil, condemned to live without music, could only speak.
For Hildegard, music was essential to worship.
Her liturgical compositions, unusual in structure and tonality, were described by contemporaries as “chants surpassing sweet melody” and “strange and unheard-of music.”
When she died in 1179 at 81, she left a rich legacy which speaks eloquently across the many ages of time for us all. Thank you, Rev. Jeanne, for bringing her to me. And to Holy Women, Holy Men from Church Publishing, 2010, for some of the details of Hildegard’s life and work.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Every week, Christina Brennan Lee writes the Prayers of the People we use in our worship services on Sundays. She also leads weekday prayer services and serves on the SsAM Vestry. Click here to see her People’s Prayers website.
Click here to see more of Christina’s reflections.
