A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard, the schools, and their critics 119
with regret, “Perhaps because I ate from the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil despite the commandment, the heavenly wrath . . . has cast this
sinner out.”47
In the second letter, in response to Odo of Paris’s question as to whether
God is his paternity and divinity, Hildegard looks “to the true light” and discovers
the answer is afffijirmative. She realizes that God is whole and entire
(plenus est et integer), beyond human words, and therefore human words
cannot divide him. God is not subject to rational analysis because analysis
divides something into its constituent parts in order to understand. She
explicitly appeals to the scriptural passage most often used to defend God’s
ultimate simplicity of essence and existence—Ego sum qui sum—and uses
precisely the same item of comparison as that used in the charges against
Gilbert at Reims. Although one can separate a homo from humanitas, one
cannot separate Deus from divinitas.48 She accuses anyone who holds this
proposition of calling God a “point without a circle” (an argument Häring
labels cryptic),49 and of thereby denying the Eternal One. In fact, Hildegard
argues with scholastic rigor, employing a reductio ad absurdum, that
whosoever denies that paternity and divinity are God denies God himself.50
If Odo had been seeking an unequivocal condemnation of the proposition,
he was surely not disappointed: Hildegard’s rejection of this thesis
surpasses even that of Bernard of Clairvaux. Hildegard continues, following
the same reasoning as the consistory: “God is complete, and what is in God
is God.”51 Hildegard, by invoking precisely the auctoritas utilized frequently
in the theological debates surrounding Gilbert’s doctrines, shows Odo (and
the subsequent readers of her Epistolarium) how closely attuned she was
to the controversies over incipient scholasticism centered in northern
France.
47 Odo of Soissons, Epistolae VIII, ed. Jean Leclercq, “Lettres d’Odon d’Ourscamp, cardinal
cistercien,” Studia Anselmiana 37 (1955): 156: “fortassis quia de ligno scientiae boni et
mali contra vetitum manducavi, caelestis ira . . . suum peccatorem eiecit.”
48 This is the phrase used in the summary of charges edited by Jean Leclercq, “Textes
sur Saint Bernard et Gilbert de la Porrée,” p. 108: “Cap. I. Quod diuina natura, quae diuinitas
dicitur, Deus non sit, sed forma qua Deus est, sicut humanitas homo non est sed forma
qua homo est.”
49 See Häring, “The Case,” p. 14, n. 28.
50 Epistolarium, I, 39R, p. 104: “Quicumque enim dicit quod paternitas et diuinitas non
sit Deus, hic nominat punctum absque circulo, et si punctum habere uult absque circulo,
illum qui eternus est negat. Et quicumque negat quod paternitas et diuinitas Deus sit,
Deum negat, quia uult quod aliqua uacuitas in Deo sit. Quod non est.”
51 Ibid., 40R, p. 104: “Sed Deus plenus est, et quod in Deo est Deus est.”