Farewell to Bishop Sisk - Episcopal Diocese of New York

Entering Hildegard’s House of Light
Born in the lush green Rhineland in present day Germany, Hildegard of
Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath. She founded
two monastaries, composed an entire corpus of sacred music, and
wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany,
medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a prodigious intellectual
outpouring that was unprecedented for a 12th-century woman. Her prophecies
earned her the title Sybil of the Rhine.
In 2012, over eight centuries after her death,
the Vatican has canonized her and elevated her
to Doctor of the Church, a rare honor reserved
for the most distinguished theologians.
Yet during Hildegard’s own lifetime she
courted controversy for her outspoken critique
of the institutional Church. Though women
were forbidden to preach, she embarked on
four preaching tours in which she delivered
apocalyptic sermons warning her male superiors
that if they did not reform their corrupt
ways, the secular princes would rise against
them and topple them from their seats of
power.
Late in her life, Hildegard and her nuns
were the subject of an interdict (a collective
excommunication) that was lifted only a few
months before her death. Hildegard nearly
died an outcast, her fate hauntingly similar to
that of the contemporary sisters and nuns of
the Leadership Council of Women Religious
as they face the current Vatican crackdown.
Nor did she have an easy childhood. The
youngest of ten children, Hildegard was
offered to the Church at the age of eight. She
reported having luminous visions since earliest
memory, so perhaps her parents didn’t know
what else to do with her.
According to Guibert of Gembloux’s Vita
Sanctae Hildegardis, she was bricked into an
anchorage with her mentor, the fourteen-year-
old Jutta von Sponheim, and possibly one other young girl. Guibert describes
the anchorage in the bleakest terms, using words like “mausoleum” and
“prison,” and writes how these girls died to the world to be buried with Christ.
The anchorage was situated in Disibodenberg, a community of Benedictine
monks. What must it have been like to be among a tiny minority of young girls
surrounded by adult men?
Hildegard spent thirty years interred in her prison with Jutta, whose own Vita
states that she practiced extreme measures of asceticism including semi-starvation
and self-flagellation. Yet miraculously, instead of going mad, Hildegard was
able to educate herself and find solace in her own secret visions of the Living
Light. Instead of embracing Jutta’s masochistic piety, Hildegard formulated her
own spirituality, centered on love rather than suffering.
Still, Hildegard might have been lost to history; but at the age of forty-two,
her life changed forever. A dramatic illness seized her and as she lay in her
sickbed, she received the divine summons to renounce her life of silence and
by Mary Sharratt
Man as Microcosm. From the Lucca MS of Hildegard’s Liber Divinorum
Operum, I.2.
instead speak and write of the visions she had kept secret all her life. Hildegard
then embarked on Scivias, her first book of visionary theology.
In the 12th century, it was a radical thing for a nun to set quill to paper and
write about weighty theological matters. Her abbot panicked and had her examined
for heresy. It could have ended badly for Hildegard, yet after much discussion
and debate, Pope Eugenius endorsed her visions and declared her a
prophet. With this official stamp of approval, Hildegard was able to move her
sisters from Disibodenberg to a site near
Bingen on the Rhine where they built their
new home, Rupertsberg Monastery. This was
an unheard achievement in an era when
monastic houses were founded by bishops and
princes, not by women. Yet miraculously this
“poor weak figure of a woman,” as Hildegard
called herself, triumphed against impossible
odds to become the greatest voice of her age.
I believe that Hildegard’s legacy remains
hugely important for contemporary women.
While writing Illuminations: A Novel of
Hildegard von Bingen, I kept coming up against
the injustice of how women, no matter how
devout they might be, are condemned to stand
at the margins of established religion, even in
the 21st century. Women bishops remain a
subject of controversy in the worldwide
Anglican Communion while the previous
Catholic pope, John Paul II, called a moratorium
even on the discussion of women priests.
Modern women have the choice to wash
their hands of organized religion. But
Hildegard didn’t even get to choose whether
to enter monastic life. The Church of her day
could not have been more patriarchal and
repressive to women. Yet her visions moved
her to create a faith that was immanent and
life-affirming, and that can inspire us today.
Though she was literally walled into a house of
darkness and pain, she burst free and built a
House of Light.
The cornerstone of Hildegard’s spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power,
her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that
infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in
every leaf and blade of grass. Creation revealed the face of the invisible creator.
Hildegard’s re-visioning of religion celebrated women and nature and even perceived
God as feminine, as Mother. Her vision of the universe was an egg inside
the womb of God.
Hildegard shows how visionary women might transform the most maledominated
faith traditions from within.
Mary Sharratt’s Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen is published
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Visit Mary’s website: www.marysharratt.com. The title
for this essay was inspired by Elizabeth Erickson’s 2008 painting “Hildegard’s House
of Light.”