A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

116 justin a. stover
more recently John Van Engen has defended them as genuine.31 They
have been presumed to be by the same author, but in a century with so
many Master Odos, this assertion needs further evidence, and preliminary
assessments would cast some doubt on this identifijication.32 The dating
of the letters is also far less certain than usually supposed. In 1148, at
the consistory following the council of Reims (the same council in which
Hildegard’s own works were reputedly discussed),33 Gilbert, the bishop
of Poitiers, was put on trial at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux for
holding (among other things) that God’s paternity and divinity are not
identical with him. Based on the (pseudo-)Augustinian axiom “Whatever
is in God is God,”34 the consistory required Gilbert to clarify his proposition.
This same proposition is put to Hildegard by Odo of Paris in Letter
40, and part of Hildegard’s answer mirrors the auctoritas used by Bernard
and his allies at the council, “What is in God is God.” Marianna Schrader
and Adelgundis Führkötter fijirst suggested the connection of this letter to
the council, arguing for a date around 1148, and their arguments have been
accepted by most scholars.35 Van Engen and Mews consider this letter to
31 See Van Acker’s introduction in Epistolarium, I, pp. xii–xiii. Van Engen analyses these
letters and defends their authenticity in “Letters and the Public Persona of Hildegard,” in
Umfeld, pp. 393–95.
32 The strongest argument in favor of the identifijication is that Odo of Soissons is known
to have taught at Paris. The arguments against the identifijication are nonetheless numerous:
the two letters do not appear together in any of the manuscripts; the salutations and
valedictions of the two letters are entirely diffferent; and their styles are quite distinct,
with Odo of Soissons’s phrased in relatively short sentences with conventional word order,
and Odo of Paris’s consisting of a small number of densely constructed periods, with a
liberal use of absolute constructions. The prose cursus of the two letters also difffer: Odo
of Soissons consistently uses a tardus for full stops and a planus for both partial stops
and major divisions, while Odo of Paris is much less consistent in his prose rhythm but
does tend to use a tardus at full stops and a velox at partial stops. Beyond these stylistic
diffferences, the content of the letters and the personae of the authors have little in common
with one another. On the various Odos (36 by one count) of the schools of the 12th
century, see Gillian Evans, “The Place of Odo of Soissons’ Quaestiones. Problem-Solving in
Mid-Twelfth-Century Bible Study and Some Matters of Language and Logic,” Recherches
de théologie ancienne et médiévale 49 (1982): 127. To maintain an agnostic stance on the
question, this paper will follow the manuscripts in identifying the author of Letter 39 as
Odo of Soissons and the author of Letter 40 as Odo of Paris.
33 See Van Engen, “Letters,” pp. 385–86.
34 On this axiom, see most recently and comprehensively the article by Luisa Valente,
“Alla ricerca dell’autorità perduta: ‘Quidquid est in Deo, Deus est,’ ” Medioevo 25 (1999): 713–
38; along with Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: A Study
of Gilbert Porreta’s Thinking and the Theological Expositions of the Doctrine of the Incarnation
During the Period 1130–1180 (Leiden, 1982), p. 60, n. 96.
35 Marianna Schrader and Adelgundis Führkötter. Die Echtheit des Schrifttums der heiligen
Hildegard von Bingen: quellenkritische Untersuchungen (Cologne, 1956), pp. 172–73.