A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

120 justin a. stover
However, she also shows her keen understanding of the underlying
issues at stake. Gilbert’s argument is not about res, but about nomina. She
continues,
God is not able to be shook out or fijiltered according to man, since there is
nothing in God which is not God. And since creation has a beginning, hence
the racionalitas of man comes upon God through nomina, just as it itself by
its own proper nature is full of nomina.52
Quoting another dictum of 12th-century theology—nihil est in Deo quod
Deus non sit53—Hildegard gestures towards a negative theology, as did
other critics of Gilbert’s proposition.54 While acknowledging the capacity
of human reason on the one hand, she afffijirms the central role of words
(nomina) in a rational approach to God. In so doing, she displays a perceptive
understanding of Gilbert’s point of view: she realizes that his position
is primarily semantic but subverts the traditional language used for God,
through which, and only through which, reason can fijind God.55 That Hildegard
understands and is deeply engaged in the theological controversies
surrounding this debate can scarcely be doubted: she utilizes precisely the
same example used at Reims to explain Gilbert’s position, she includes
almost verbatim two auctoritates of scholastic theology, and she casts her
response in the form of a formally logical reductio ad absurdum. Here the
magistra demonstrates to the magister how he ought to be practicing his
theology.56
52 Epistolarium, I, 40R, pp. 104–05: “Deus enim nec excuti nec excribrari secundum
hominem potest, quia in Deo nihil est quod Deus non sit. Et quoniam creatura initium
habet, ex hoc inuenit rationalitas hominis Deum per nomina, sicut et ipsa in proprietate
sua plena est nominum.”
53 See Bruno of Segni, Commentaria in Iohannem 1, PL 165:451D; Peter Abelard, Theologia
Christiana, ed. Eligius M. Buytaert, CCCM 12 (Turnhout, 1969), 3.75, p. 225; the
anonymous Victorine author of the Allegoriae in evangelia 5.2, PL 175:834D; the Sententiae
varsavienses, p. 336; and Stephen Langton, Commentarius in Sententias, ed. Artur Michael
Landgraf (Münster, 1952), 2.1, p. 69, n. 4.
54 See, for example, the treatise Invisibilia Dei, §37–42, from the 1150s, which explicitly
invokes the via negativa in critiquing Gilbert’s position (ed. Nikolaus Häring, “The Treatise
‘Invisibila dei’ in Ms. Arras, Bibl. Mun. 981 (399),” Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale 40 [1973], 104–46).
55 Mews (“Hildegard and the Schools,” p. 103), in contrast, argues that Hildegard “had
no feeling” for Gilbert’s linguistic argument. However, as demonstrated here, Hildegard
does realize that nomina are what are at stake, and thus at least implicitly grasps that
Gilbert’s own arguments are drawn from nomina.
56 The interplay of genders here is intentional and signifijicant, as Hildegard always represents
herself as acutely sensitive to gender issues in her dealing with (male) masters. See,
for example, Epistolarium, III, 280, p. 33, written to an unknown master: “I, a poor feminine
form, who obey the teachings of the masters and scarcely know the litterae scripturarum,