A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

118 justin a. stover
the Pope to clarify the situation: “Writing to the Parisians, you should
defijine whether paternity is God.”42 Even after 1200, the English theologian
Alexander Neckam (who was trained in Paris in the 1180s) dedicated an
entire chapter of his Speculum speculationum to a refutation of those who
deny that paternitas est Deus.43 If this accurately describes the intellectual
climate of the Parisian schools during the decades following Reims, there
is no need whatsoever to assume that Master Odo of Paris wrote to Hildegard
around the time of the council in 1148, and, given the fact that Odo
explicitly does not ascribe the proposition to a single individual, a date at
some point after Gilbert’s death is to be preferred.44
Regardless of its date, however, this pair of letters is essential to
understanding the link between Hildegard and the schools, as it provides
the most direct, tangible interaction of her thought with the great
Chartrian and Parisian scholastic traditions of the fijirst half of the 12th
century. The fijirst letter is more typical of her correspondence with the
masters. Hildegard writes to Odo of Soissons, comparing again the masters’
knowledge to the sun. She continues: “Those who have the day of
good knowledge, but look to others’ inquiry of uselessness and to the
varieties of shadows, which do not seek help in rationality but are vain,
are dry and have no viridity in God.”45 The problem for the masters is
not directing their minds towards God, “into the font of leaping waters,”
but looking instead for secondary causes, “various causes in another’s
house.”46 Odo seems to have taken Hildegard’s criticisms seriously. In the
1150s, he quit the schools and became a Cistercian at Ourscamp. Looking
back much later, having been made cardinal-bishop of Tusculum, he says
letter and subsequent dialogue defending Gilbert, see Nikolaus Häring, “A Latin Dialogue
on the Doctrine of Gilbert of Poitiers,” Mediaeval Studies 15 (1953): pp. 243–89.
42 Everard of Ypres, Epistola ad Urbanum papam III, p. 116: “Parisiensibus scribens diffijinias
utrum paternitas sit Deus.”
43 Alexander Neckam, Speculum speculationum 1, 11, ed. Rodney M. Thomson (Oxford
1988), pp. 129–30. On Alexander’s life and education, see Richard W. Hunt, The Schools and
the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam (1157–1217), ed. and rev. Margaret
Templeton Gibson (Oxford, 1984).
44 Given the fact that this letter of Odo’s is crucial for establishing the date at which
Hildegard’s reputation began to spread, this later dating is also more consistent with other
pieces of evidence we have, which report of Hildegard’s fame spreading beyond her immediate
area in the Rhineland.
45 Epistolarium, I, 39R, p. 101: “Qui diem bone scientie in uarietates tenebrarum, que
auxilium in rationalitate non querunt sed uane sunt, arescunt, nec uiriditatem in Deo
habent.”
46 Idem: “aspice in fontem aque salientis, et non require diuersas causas in aliena
domo.”