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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Some persons are, by their nature, trailblazers, innovators, avant-gardists—just generally ahead of their times. In many ways, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the subject of this investigation, is representative of such a personality. Embodying enough of the intellectual eclecticism and enthusiasm for the arts and sciences characteristic of the historical period after hers, some twentieth century critics dub this talented polymath a Renaissance woman.
A list of Hildegard’s salient accomplishments and personal charisms confirms that appellation at a glance. Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine aristocrat, was a mystic, a visionary, and a prolific writer. Her oeuvre deals with subject matter as diverse as natural science, medicine, theology, biblical exegesis, dramatic poetry, music, hagiography, and linguistics. She was elected Abbess of a community of Benedictine nuns who were attached to the Abbey of Disibodenberg and subsequently founded two other Benedictine houses. Guided by her ecclesiastically sanctioned gift of prophecy, she launched into a missionary style of preaching and teaching aimed at the spiritual and moral reform of the clergy and laity throughout the kingdom of Germany. Undaunted by her lack of formal, classical education or by whatever misogynist tradition prevailed in secular or ecclesiastical circles, she managed to maintain a lively correspondence with kings, queens, emperors, saints, popes, and fellow religious.
1 Joseph McLellam describes Hildegard as “a Renaissance woman several centuries before the Renaissance.” (Washington Post, March 30, 1986, p. H4 quoted in Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works, ed. Matthew Fox, Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1987, p. ix.)
2 Hildegard's major works are Scivias (Know the Way) (1146–1151), Liber vitae meritorum (Book of Life's Merits) (1158–1163), and Liber divinorum operum (Book of the Divine Works) (1163–1173). They are sometimes thought of as a trilogy because they are similar in their theological content, i.e. Christian doctrine and ethics combined with a cosmology that taught how persons should best live their lives in order to reach the heavenly city, and in their visionary form, i.e., their content was delivered by the voice from heaven which is part of the vision Hildegard received.
3 Susan Mosher Stuard remarks that the Medieval church's opinion about women is a dual one: A more positive inclusive one corresponding to the period before the Gregorian Reform where double monasteries were allowed and the period after in which they were banned, a move that “quite effectively walled women's houses off from the institutional hierarchy of the church.” Women in Medieval Society, U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976, p. 8.
4 The abbot of Disibodenberg look the first chapter of Hildegard's first work, Scivias, to the archbishop of Mainz, and in 1147 parts of the book were submitted to Pope Eugenius III and St. Bernard of Clairvaux who were together at the Council of Trier. In 1148 Eugenius wrote to Hildegard: “We look on you with admiration, my daughter… for the new miracles that God shows in our time, filling you with his spirit that you might see, understand, and make known many mysteries. Reliable persons who have seen and heard you confirm these things for us. … Preserve and guard this grace that is in you.” PL 197:145AB
5 Caroline Walker Bynum has this to say about religious women and their place in Church leadership: “…, religious women paid surprisingly little attention to their supposed incapacity. Although told by the theological tradition that, qua women, they were not created in God's image, women writers ignored the warning. Creation in the image of God and return to his likeness were reiterated and significant themes in their spirituality.” Speaking of Hildegard, she says: “The first great woman theologian, Hildegard of Bingen, both used and argued against the idea that woman is to man as flesh is to spirit; she supported the denial of ordination to women, arguing that women's role as bride of Christ (i.e., mystic) was complementary to the priesthood.”‘“…And Woman His Humanity”: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages’ in Gender and Religion: on the Complexity of Symbols ed. by Bynum, C. Walker, Harrell, S., Richman, P., Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, p. 260, p. 261Google Scholar, respectively. Cf. “Woman” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14, pp. 994–5 for a view on the lived reality of women's place in social economics during the Middle Ages. Cf. Eileen Power's refreshing discussion of a medieval women's involvement in the workplace in chapter three of her Medieval Women, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 3–75.
6 To speak of a modem development in conjugal ethics is, of course, to set it apart from the prevalent marital theology before it. The latter was, in greater part, the theology of marriage set down by Augustine which Noonan describes as “seriously impaired” because Augustine taught that the only worthy motive for marital intercourse was procreation. (Contraception, (enlarged edition) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 304). A balanced presentation of Augustinian marital theology appears in Catholic Sexual Ethics (Lawler, Boyle and May, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1986, pp. 36–41): “Augustine's analysis of the goods of marriage has provided the church with a powerful analytical device for understanding both the human significance and the salvific importance of marriage and human sexuality. Later theologians and the magisterium even till the present time make use of a framework whose full implications Augustine did not grasp. Augustine's study of sexual morality, therefore, even though it has limitations, is an important step in the development of the Church's understanding of sexual morality” (p. 41).
7 The story of Genesis was for Hildegard, as well as for many medieval Christians, the source of meditation on marriage and woman. Marriage is discussed in her first books and still occupied her interest in her last major work The Book of Divine Works.
8 Fabian Parmisano, O.P., “Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages–I and II” New Blackfriars, (1969), 599–608, 649–660.
9 In this paper, I eschew the question of whether Hildegard's views on marriage are largely those of the theological establishment of her time. Generally speaking, although she does not deviate from common or orthodox teaching of the church, I believe that, in the tension of maintaining fidelity to tradition, she produces creative improvisations on commonly held strains of 12th century marital theology. While her views on marriage were not necessarily new their significance comes from the emphasis she places on specific ideas. Her frequent references to the complementarity of the sexes is a good example. She accepts the wife's submission to her husband while at the same time emphasizing the interdependence of husband and wife. Hildegard does, however, depart from some of the more negative notions held by a contemporary of hers, Hugh of St. Victor. In Book II, chapter II, par. 2 of Concerning the Sacraments of the Christian Religion, according to Georges Duby, Hugh “speaks of marriage as a medicine that is the clergy's duty to administer to the laity. So marriage does possess “virtue,” or saving grace, as long as it is dissociated from sex.” The Knight the Lady and the Priest, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, p. 181Google Scholar.
10 In the Yconomique Oresme not only translates the Aristotelian text (which was originally written in Greek and subsequently translated into Latin) into the French vernacular, but also writes a running commentary (gloss) on the text. The latter becomes a popularized version, readable by lay people, of marital theology written in Latin by the academic theologians of the time. The gloss makes up two–thirds of the French text. Oresme was commissioned to translate and comment on the four treatises of Aristotle (the third of which is the Livre de Yconomique, comprising two books) by Charles V who wanted to make these writings available in the French vernacular. The first book of Yconomique deals with the economy of a household and divisions of the household and the second book discusses the relationship between husband and wife.
11 Le livre de Yconomique d'Aristole, critical edition of French text with English translation and introduction by Albert Douglas Menul, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, vol. 47, part 5 (Philadelphia, 1957), p. 811.
12 Ibid, p. 812.
13 Ibid, p. 813.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 814.
16 Ibid., p. 815.
17 Ibid., p. 845.
18 Ibid., p. 830.
19 bid., p. 845.
20 An important point to remember is that Hildegard (like Oresme) does not specifically indicate that she is talking about the sacramentum. But, in her meditations on the love between the husband and wife, their complementarity, and the indissoluble bond of love that unites them, that is the issue she is developing.
21 I take credit for all errors and clumsiness in the translation of the passages that follow except as indicated in endnt. 38.
22 Et deus fecit formam ad dileclionem viri, et sic femina dilectio viri est. Et mox cum femina formata est, vinutem illam creationis deus viro dedit, ut dilectione sua quae femina est, filios procrearet. Causa et Curae, ed. Paul Kaiser, Leipzig: Teubner, 1903, p. 136:17–21.
23 Nunc autem cum vir in effusione fortis seminis sui et in recto amore caritatis, quam ad mulierem habet, ad ipsam accedit muliere quoque rectum amorem ad virum tunc in eadem hora habente masculum concipitur, quia sic a deo ordinatum est. Nee aliter fieri potest, quin masculus concipiatur, quoniam et Adam formatus est de limo, qui fortior materia est quam caro. Et hie masculus prudens et virtuosus erit … Ibid., p. 35:17–24.
24 Generally speaking, Hildegard's moral evaluations of sexual expression within marriage are ambivalent. Sometimes she speaks glowingly of sexuality, its naturalness, its goodness, but, at other times, she speaks of the exercise of sexuality as hopelessly steeped in vice. She also accepts the medieval notion that a woman was the cause of the fall. Some of her positive descriptions of the relationship between husband and wife refer to Adam and Eve before the Fall, her more negative comments describe the relationship after the fall. In Scivias, vision 2, ch. 13, the heavenly voice proclaims: “For since the fall of Adam I have not found in human seed the righteousness which ought to be in it, since the Devil stole it away in the taste of the apple.” Be that as it may, I think that Hildegard's purpose in describing the ideal with such poetic force is because she believed that the ideal was realizable. The prelapsarian Adam and Eve are, by Hildegard's intent, meant to be seen as models for husbands and wives who must struggle to become who they are by right of their marriage vows, that is, two in one flesh.
25 Quod autem vir et mulier una caro sic fiunt el sunt, hoc in latere viri latitabat, ubi mulier de latere viri sumpta caro eius facta est, ac ideo vir et mulier tanto facilius ad conceptionem in sanguine et sudore suo sic in unum confluunt. Sed vis aetemitas, quae infantem de ventre matris suae educit, virum et feminam sic unam carnem facit. Causae et Curae, p. 68:8–14.
26 Deus elenim mulierem viro cum juramento fidei adjunxit, ita ut fides haec in ipsis nunquam deslruatur, sed ut in unum consenliant, sicut corpus et anima, quae Deus in unum conjunxit. Book of Divine Works, 1,14 PL 1 97:749D
27 Et ideo perfecta charitas in his duobus esse debet qucmadmodum et in illis prioribus. Adam enim uxorem suam culpare posset, quod ei consilio suo mortem intulit, sed tamen earn non dimisit quamdiu in hoc saeculo vixit, quoniam illam sibi per divinam potentiam datam esse cognovit. Unde propter perfectam charitatem non relinquat homo uxorem suam nisi propter rationabilem causam illam, quam sibi fidelis ecclesia proponit. Scivias, 1,2 PL 197:392C
28 Quod autem prima mulier de viro formata est, hoc est conjunctio desponsationis mulieris ad virum…Conjunctio ista non est vane neque in oblivione Dei exercenda, quia qui mulierem de viro tulit, conjunctionem istam bene et honeste inslituit, videlicet camem de came formans. Quapropter ui Adam et Eva caro una exstitemnl, sic et nunc vir et mulier caro una in conjunctione charitatis ad multiplicandum genus humanum efficiumur. Ibid., 1,2 PL 197.392C
29 Causae el Curae, p. 136.
30 Vir itaque et femina sic ad invicem admisti sunt, ut opus alteram per alteram est, quia vir sine femina vir non vocaretur, nec femina sine viro femina non nominaretur. Femina enim opus viri est, et vir aspectus consolationis feminae est, et neuter eorum absque altero esse posset. The Book of Divine Works, 4,100 PL 197:885C
31 … quia in uno opere, unum operantur, quemadmodum aer et ventus opera sua invicem complicant Scivias 1,2 PL 197:393B.
32 Unde cum semen viri in locum suum cadit, tunc sanguis mulieris cum voluntate amoris illud suscipit et in se inlrorsum trahit, sicut spirumen in se aliquid tollit. Et sic sanguis mulieris cum semine viri miscetur, et unus sanguis fit, ita quod etiam caro eiusdem mulieris de hoc permixto sanguine fovetur, crescit et augmentatur. Ac ideo sic est mulier una caro cum viro de viro. Sed caro viri de calore et de sudore mulieris interius et exterius coquitur, atque sic de spurn a et de sudore eiusdem mulieris in se introrsum trahit. Nam de fortissima vi voluntatis viri sanguis eius liquefactus diffluit atque ut molendinum circumvolvitur (et) aliquid de spuma et de sudore mulieris in se suscipit, ac sic caro eius de muliere miscetur, ita quod cum ea et de ea caro una fit; et quoniam vir et mulier sic una caro sunt, facile mulier de eodem viro fetum concipit, ita tamen, si fecunda ad fetum est Causae et Curae, pp. 67:29–37 – 68:1–8.
33 Creavit hominem, masculum, scilicet majoris fortitudinis, feminam vero mollioris roboris, faciens et in recta mensura longitudinem et latitudinem in omnibus membris illius ordinans, quemadmodum etiam atitudinem [sic], profunditatem et latitudinem reliquae creaturae in rectum statum posuit, ne aliqua illarum alteram inconvenienter transcendat. Book of Divine Works, 5,43. PL 197: 945C
34 For just as woman has been subjected to man, and as she brings forth sons, so too should men hear God's commands through me and obey them. (Quemadmodum enim mulier viro subdita est, et ut filios producit sic etiam nomines praecepta Dei per me deberent audire, eisque obedire.) Ibid., PL 197:1014B
35 Mulier propter virum creata est, et vir propter mulierem factus est…Scivias, 1,2 PL 197:393B.
36 The Book of Divine Works, PL 197:844B.
37 Personality types, classified according to their predominant characteristic: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, are assigned psychosexual traits by Hildegard.
38 Translation of this text taken from Peter Dronke's Women Writers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 175.
39 Sed dilectio viri ad dilectionem feminae in calore ardoris est velut ignis ardentium montium, qui difficile extingui posset, ad ignem lignorum, qui facile extinguitur; dilectio autem feminae ad dilectionem viri ut suavis calor de sole procedens, qui fructus producit, ad ardentisstmum ignem lignorum, quoniam et ipsa suaviter in prole fructus profert. Causae et Curae, p. 136:27–33.
40 Sed ipsi adjutorium simililudinis suae defuit. Unde et Deus illi adjutorium, quod speculaliva forma mulieris fuit, in qua omne humanum genus latuit, quod in vi fortitudinis Dei producendum erat, sicut et primum hominem in vi fortitudinis suae profecerat. Book of Divine Works, 4,100, PL 197.885C
41 Cum enim Adam inspexit Evam, lotus sapientia impletus est, quia matrem, per quam filios procreare debebat, inspexit Cum autem Eva inspexit Adam, sic eum inspexit, quasi in caelum videret, et ut anima sursum tendit, quae caelestia desiderat, quoniam spes eius erat ad virum. Causae et Curae, p. 136:21–26.
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