A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard, the schools, and their critics 121
The issues raised by Odo of Paris’s letter remained of great importance
to Hildegard, as she stresses the identity between God and his paternity
and divinity in three of her subsequent works, clarifying her “cryptic”
critique. In the Expositiones, she twice glosses the biblical pater as
divinitas in a passage discussing the deadly consequences of reason gone
astray.57 In the Cause et cure, a work of uncertain date, Hildegard very
prominently revisits the question of God’s divinity and paternity at the
beginning of the fijirst book, employing an image similar to “the point without
a circle.” God’s paternity is the rim of the wheel, and without his divinity,
the wheel would be empty. Deity, or “Godness,” is the fullness of the
wheel.58 She also discusses it obliquely in a fascinating vision in the Liber
vite meritorum. In the vision, she sees a fijigure with the head of wolf, the
tail of a lion, and the body of a dog. This grotesque chimera is Malefijicium,
or Witchcraft, who says:
From Mercury and the other philosophers I will learn many things, who by
their inquiry used to join the elements together in this way, that they discovered
every single thing they wanted. The bravest and wisest men found
these things partly from God and partly from evil spirits—what prevented it?
And so they named the planets after themselves, since from the sun and the
moon and the stars, they received most of their wisdom and much of their
inquiry. But, I, wherever I desire, rule by these arts and dominate: namely, in
the lights of heaven, in the trees, and in the herbs and in all the living things
of the earth, and in the beasts and in the animals on the earth, and in the
worms on the earth and under the earth. And who will resist me in my journeys?
God created all things, whence in these arts I do no injury to him.59
greatly tremble to speak or write to a master of masculine person the things which . . .
I see in the true light” (Ego paupercula feminea forma, que doctrine magistrorum obedio
et que uix litteras scripturarum cognosco, ualde formido ea, que . . . in uero lumine uideo,
magistris uirilis persone dicere aut scribere). On this topic, see particularly Barbara Newman,
Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, rev. ed. (Berkeley, 1997),
pp. 1–4.
57 Expo. Euang., 30, p. 275: “Sicut nouit me in humanitate pater, id est diuinitas, et ego
agnosco patrem, scilicet diuinitatem, et animam meam, uidelicet uitam qua eas suscitaui,
pono in humano corpore pro ouibus meis.”
58 Cause 1.4–5, p. 21: “Deus autem integer ut rota permansit et pater in bonitate, quia
paternitas ipsius bonitate ipsius plena est, et ita iustissima et benignissima et fijirmissima
atque fortissima est paternitas, et de hac mensura sicut rota ponitur. Nunc alicubi rota est
et ipsa alicuius rei plena est. Quod si rota illa nichil aliud preter exteriorem circulum haberet,
uacua foret. Et si forte alienus superveniret et ibi operari vellet, hoc esse non posset;
nam in rota una duo fabri res suas constituere non possunt. homo, aspice hominem! Homo
enim celum et terram atque alias facturas in se habet et forma una est, et in ipso omnia
latent. Sic paternitas est: quomodo circulus rote paternitas est plenitudo rote deitas est.”
59 Vite mer., 5.6, p. 222: “De Mercurio et de aliis philosophis multa discam, qui sciscitatione
sua elementa hoc modo iugabant, quod unamquamque rem quam uoluerunt, certis-