 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode... Leading Light Hildegard of Bingen When I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, a joke was doing the rounds. Notre Dame is playing football away at Boston College and the two coaches are chatting before the game. The BC coach asks whether the Notre Dame coach would like to know the result beforehand. How's that possible? asks the Notre Dame coach and his colleague says, just follow me. He goes to a pay phone and feeds in $10 in quarters, then dials and hands the phone to the Notre Dame coach. A deep voice says, this is God, what would you like to know? The coach asks about the result of the game and God says, you're going to lose by a field goal. When the game is played, the prediction proves true. The following season, BC is playing the return game at Notre Dame. The two coaches meet again and agree to try to find out the result ahead of time. They go to a pay phone and the Notre Dame coach slots in a single quarter. The BC coach says, only 25 cents? Sure, says the Notre Dame coach. From here it's a local call. The point of the joke is presumably to exalt the home of the Fighting Irish at the expense of their fellow Catholic school, Boston College. But I enjoy it in a different, rather more ironic way. It exposes the preposterous notion that God, assuming he exists, would be more strongly tied to one university than another. I say it's preposterous, but probably not everyone back at South Bend would agree. This is, after all, a region which refuses to set its clocks ahead in spring, like the rest of the country, instead sticking to what the locals like to call God's time. But for me, the notion that God arbitrarily chooses certain people or places for his favor is downright medieval. I don't mean that as an insult, of course, but as a genuine historical observation. Actually, the idea goes all the way back to antiquity. In one of his more puzzling pronouncements, which is saying something, Aristotle remarked that the divine mover is located at the periphery of the cosmos, a line which occasioned many attempted explanations by later commentators. The phenomenon of prophecy, meanwhile, was common currency among the Abrahamic religions, and prophecy was usually understood as God choosing certain humans to be granted special knowledge. Hence, many ancient thinkers, and nearly all medieval ones, accepted the possibility that God manifests himself in specific places or to specific people. But it's one thing to believe this, and another to be confronted with someone who claims to have experienced such a manifestation. That's what happened to Bernard of Clavaux in the year 1146, when he opened his mail and found a letter from a woman named Hildegard of Bingen. Amidst fulsome praise for Bernard, the letter contained some disconcerting claims. Hildegard wrote that she had been having visions, in fact experiencing them since childhood. She had long kept them secret but was now asking Bernard what to do about it. Characteristically though, Hildegard had already decided what to do. Five years earlier, a particularly vivid vision had unlocked for her the inner meaning of Scripture. After confiding in a trusted monk named Vollmar, she had begun to compose her first major writing called Scivias. The title apparently abbreviates the Latin, Scivias Domini, Know the Ways of the Lord. So, Hildegard was by this time preparing to reveal herself to the world, just as God had revealed himself to her. Bernard and the other church authorities undertook to investigate her claims, and Hildegard's gift was accepted as true. Henceforth she would not be the obscure head of a convent in the Rhine Valley, southwest of the city of Mainz. She would instead be honored as the Sibyl of the Rhine, a visionary whose fame spread across Europe, like Joan of Arc but with a pen instead of a sword. And we know which of those is the mightier. When Hildegard wrote to Bernard, she was already well into her 40s, having been born just before the turn of the 12th century. According to her own account of her childhood, which is quoted in one of the admiring biographies written after Hildegard's death, she was already visited by what she called the living light at the age of three. She began to display what one can only call magical powers, for instance by foreseeing the pattern on the coat of an as-yet unborn calf. As a reward for this adorable act of clairvoyance, Hildegard was given the calf as a present. Her parents could afford it, they were well-to-do. But they didn't do all that well by Hildegard. At the age of eight, she was entrusted to the care of a woman named Jutta, who brought Hildegard with her to a convent attached to the monastery of Disibodenberg. Hildegard would remain here for decades, living a life of solitude but managing to acquire some degree of education thanks to Jutta and later the monk Volmar. She would later withdraw with her sisters to a new location some distance away, a decision which would annoy just about everyone concerned apart from Hildegard herself. But she usually got her way. This she was of course unlike most 12th century women. But then not too many 12th century women had direct communications from God or would have been a position to write about these communications. As if that weren't enough, Hildegard wrote on scientific topics, particularly medicine, with descriptions of the properties of plants, animals, and gemstones placed in a setting reminiscent of the works on natural philosophy composed by her contemporaries. And speaking of composing, she also wrote words and music for liturgical use. Scores for these pieces have survived, and they are frequently performed by early music groups. In fact, the clip of music you've been hearing at the beginning and end of each episode on medieval philosophy is taken from a piece by Hildegard called Veni Criator Spiritus. These compositions are quite unusual for the period, which is unsurprising given that as one of her correspondents gushed in a letter written to Hildegard, she had made no prior study of music. But now the skeptic in me wants to speak up. In her own day and in modern times, Hildegard has often been treated as a kind of idiot savant, a mere conduit for the inspiration that flowed through her. Yet her three main works all present intense descriptions of the visions she had enjoyed, followed by highly articulate discussions of the theological and philosophical meaning of those visions. The obvious inference is that Hildegard was both an intense visionary and a highly articulate theologian and philosopher. So you can't blame me for being suspicious when her medieval biographers emphasize her simplicity rather than her learning, celebrating the divine fire that dwelt within Hildegard rather than paying tribute to her intellectual firepower. But I have to admit that this way of seeing Hildegard began with Hildegard herself. She said that the entire content of her writings was revealed to her by the living light, not just the visions, but the interpretive passages in which she makes sense of them. Her intimate understanding of the Christian textual tradition, and even of books by certain philosophers, was not the result of study but simply another manifestation of her gift. This aspect of Hildegard's intellectual profile is bound up with the most basic and yet most remarkable fact about her—she was a woman. From what we have seen so far, medieval philosophy was like long-range communication before the invention of the telegraph, exclusively male. It was practiced in the boys' club context of monasteries and schools. The coming of the universities at the turn of the 13th century is going to cause many changes, but gender diversity will not be among them. If Hildegard and her writings were taken seriously, indeed recognized as sources of deep wisdom, it was precisely because that wisdom was understood to be not her own. Hildegard herself said as much, Anyone who picks up her writings expecting to find a proto-feminist will be alarmed at the frequency with which she emphasizes her lowly status as a mere woman formed in the rib of Adam. Her ideas, she seems to suggest, would count for nothing if they had not been dictated to her by God himself. In a letter she wrote to another female mystical thinker of the time, Elizabeth of Schönaal, Hildegard wrote that she is nothing but a vessel built by God for himself and filled with his inspiration. Yet a comparison of these two women reveals that Hildegard was extraordinary even among medieval women mystics. Elizabeth had to rely on her brother to write down her visions, whereas Hildegard boldly and pointedly wrote her own treatises and in Latin, the language of intellectual culture rather than in German. And then there is Hildegard's confident interpretation of her own visions. After you've read Hildegard, you'll probably remember above all the imagery. For instance, Skivias begins by describing how she saw a mountain the color of iron, upon which was seated a vast man glowing with light and sprouting two wings, while a small child stood at the foot of the mountain, its face obscured by light, pouring forth from the man above. But you shouldn't forget to read on to the explanation, which tells you that the man is God, the mountain his created kingdom, and the child the humble person who is suffused with grace. In short, Hildegard is not sharing with us a report about some inscrutable trance state. The visionary image serves as a text, like the text of the Bible, and it is paired with an authoritative exposition that only Hildegard can supply. Indeed, her works frequently slide from exegesis of the visions to exegesis of biblical passages and back again. So even though Hildegard is often described as a mystic, her works are full of discursive explanatory prose. Likewise, Hildegard is far from disdaining rationality as a feeble and inadequate mode of understanding. To the contrary, she speaks frequently and positively of human reason, which she identifies as the third and highest part of the human being along with body and soul. She sees vice as a failure of rationality and reason as our instrument for reaching God. But reason does need to know its limits and accept guidance from faith. Hildegard makes this clear on the rare occasions when she alludes to the masters of the schools in her day, usually critically. Her attitude here is close to that of Bernard of Clavaux or William of Saint-Héry, who encouraged Bernard to persecute Peter Abelard. Hildegard complains that the schoolmen were motivated by desire for fame rather than wisdom, and blames them for failing to root out heretics like the Cathars, who, she remarks in a particularly wince-inducing moment, are worse than the Jews. Were these accusations based on actual acquaintance with scholastic teachings? Hildegard's works touch on a wide range of philosophical and theological issues, so she frequently has the opportunity to imply such acquaintance, and imply it she does. To mention just a few examples, she refers to the understanding and will as twin powers of soul. She speaks of God creating natural things like a smith forming things from bronze, much as authors like Bernard Silvestris spoke of nature coining things from matter. She distinguishes God's foreknowledge from his creative activity, and she assumes Augustine's idea that evil is non-being. With her typical flair, she adds to that idea a wonderful image, saying that evil first emerged when Satan fell and stretched out his hand to grasp at the nothingness through which he was plummeting. Her works on physical topics are also full of recognizable, if occasionally somewhat idiosyncratic, appropriations of standard medical learning. She teaches, for example, that gemstones contain inner heat since they were formed by warmth in the earth. This accounts for their beneficial healing powers. But the most remarkable example of Hildegard's confrontation with scholasticism is a letter she addressed to the Parisian master Odo of Soissons. He had written to her to ask her opinion about Gilbert of Poitiers' idea that divinity is a property distinct from God himself. As usual, Hildegard begins by stressing her humble position. She is not imbued with human doctrine, but depends on God for guidance. But she is far from hesitant in answering his question. Although she well understands Gilbert's point, she thinks he is laboring under the misconception that human words can be applied to God. Like other critics of Gilbert, she argues that his teaching would compromise divine simplicity. Divinity is therefore to be identified with God, and in fact nothing whatsoever can be added to him in adherence to the rule that, whatever is in God is God. Surely though God's light didn't descend all the way from heaven just to tell Hildegard that Gilbert and his scholastic colleagues were stepping out of line. Didn't the visions grant her insights that were unavailable in any other way? Actually, it seems not. One of the stranger aspects of her writings is that, although the accounts of the visions are very strange, the ideas she extracts from them with the help of the living light aren't particularly strange at all. Far from giving her a unique way of understanding God, the light frequently tells her that God is beyond her grasp, just as he is beyond the grasp of all other humans. Divine transcendence is of course anything but a novel idea, even if one can count on Hildegard to express it in an indelibly memorable way. The knowledge of humanity is like a mountain rising up towards God, but the summit of that mountain is God's own knowledge, which remains hidden from view. Unique though her works are, her ideas fit well into the landscape of 12th century thought. For instance, her exegetical remarks, whether directed to her own visions or to Scripture, often juxtapose historical, allegorical, and ethical interpretations. This is familiar to us from Hugh of St. Victor. Her cosmology, too, is similar to what we find in other natural philosophy of the time. It does have unusual aspects as when she describes the cosmos as having an egg-shaped rather than spherical form, but this seems to be intended mostly for symbolic effect. The shape of the egg represents the initial simplicity of humankind, broadening into understanding with revelation, and then constricting to a time of great tribulations as the world approaches its end. One of the key themes we found in Bernard Silvestris and Alain of Lille was that the human is an image and miniature of the universe, a so-called microcosm. And this is a favorite theme of Hildegard's, too. She writes that, This is of course not to say that Hildegard's writing is banal or derivative, far from it, but it is to say that what is really philosophically revolutionary about her writing has not so much to do with what she believes, but with the way she writes about her beliefs. She speaks with an authority that no philosophical argument, however well-designed, can provide, because when she speaks, it is actually God we are hearing. The overall effect is as if an Old Testament prophet were proclaiming the philosophical teachings of the day. This is particularly important when it comes to the area of philosophy that is perhaps most dominant in Hildegard's writings, which is ethics. Again, her ethical teaching itself is nothing revolutionary. She praises virtue and scorns vice, which for her, as for so many Christian authors, means loving God instead of the world. But no other author of her time, and few of any time, expressed this core idea with such a powerful combination of imagery, poetry, and stagecraft. And I do mean stagecraft. Hildegard's Skivias includes a play written to be performed by her sisters in costume, in which they acted the parts of the virtues, the vices, and the penitent soul who was trying to improve her lot. This raised not just eyebrows, but hackles. An abbess, who gives us a late entry in the competition for best name of the 12th century, Kingsvich of Andernach, wrote to Hildegard, criticizing the impropriety of such goings-on. The practical implications of Hildegard's epistemic and moral certainty are evident from her dealings with church authorities. Consider for instance a letter she wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz, who would have been the leading ecclesiastical official in her area. Hildegard had been instructed to allow one of her nuns to depart in order to take up a post elsewhere. Unhappy with this decision, Hildegard did not hesitate to pull rank on the archbishop, speaking on behalf of the clear fountain, that is, the voice of God, to say that, The legal pretext brought in order to obtain authority over this girl are useless before God, for I am the height and the depth, the circle and the descending light. In other words, back off. Of course, Hildegard is not saying that she herself outranks the bishop. The first-person pronouns in that passage represent God, not her. But given that she claims to speak for God, she can effectively pull rank on the archbishop. This is not to say that Hildegard saw herself, or if you prefer that the light of God told her to see herself, as beyond church authority. Towards the end of her life, she became embroiled in the worst controversy of her career. She was instructed to exhume the body of an excommunicated man buried in her graveyard, and refused on the grounds that the man had recanted before his death. Rather than digging up the grave, she dug in her heels, and once again invoked the moral certainty granted to her by her visions. She did not yield even when her convent was punished by being forbidden to indulge in music, as painful a sanction as one could imagine for Hildegard. Nonetheless, she did work through proper channels to get the decision reversed rather than simply engaging in outright defiance. So we cannot consider Hildegard a rebel exactly, but she knew her own mind, and knew that her own mind was aligned with that of God. It's easy to imagine that, amidst the admiration she received from her contemporaries, there was also a good deal of disapproval and frustration, if not envy. Chastising letters like the one from the abbess Tengsvitch of Andernach are presumably only the tip of an iceberg. If she was met with mixed feelings in her own time, Hildegard provokes little but admiration today. As I come to the end of this episode, I'd like to illustrate one more reason why, which is simply the beauty and power of her writing. Here is one of her verses in Latin, and then in English. Caritas abundant in omnia Deimis excellentissima super sidera Atque amantissima in omnia Quia sumoregi osculum pacis dedit Love abounds in all things, excels from the depths to beyond the stars, is lovingly disposed to all things. She has given the king on high the kiss of peace. Whatever we make of her purported gift of divine vision, it's clear that Hildegard had a gift for writing. For this, for her humble yet imperious personality, and for her inimitable fusion of powerful imagery and philosophy, I am tempted to name her as the most fascinating figure we've covered in our look at the 12th century. At the very least, I'd put her in the top three along with Peter Abelard and Heloise, and by my reckoning, the majority of that list is female. So much for the notion that medieval philosophy was a boys' club. Heloise and Hildegard capture our imagination today, and they had the same effect on the powerful men who controlled their fates. In both cases, facility with Latin was a big part of the reason, even though Hildegard lacked a thorough training in grammar and had to have her text corrected before circulating them. Hildegard also allows the German vernacular to come through in her writing on nature, reaching for her native tongue to name plants or maladies. One example I like is her reference to someone who is fergichtiget, meaning affected by gout. And she wasn't the only 12th century scholar thinking in two languages. In the next episode, I'm going to be looking at a development that laid the groundwork for the explosion of philosophical literature we'll be seeing in the 13th century. The fuse was lit by bilingual scholars working in such places as Toledo, Sicily, and Constantinople. Join me as we travel around Europe and from Greek and Arabic to Latin, as our historical journey reaches the topic of philosophical translations. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.