A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard, the schools, and their critics 135
Now the Catholic faith totters amid the people and the gospel limps among
those same men. Even the mightiest tomes which the most renowned doctors
expounded with much zeal waste away in shameful neglect and the
food of the life of the divine Scriptures has already grown tepid. Whence
now I speak, not through one speaking of the Scriptures, nor one learned
from an earthly master, but I who am speak through that one new secrets
and many mysteries which until now have lay hidden in these tomes.120
In this vision, from Hildegard’s earliest work, she sees her own visionary
activity as a response to the failures of the schools—their pride and
disdain for the traditional authorities, their disgraceful neglect of sacred
Scripture—and many of her subsequent writings (the Expositiones, the
Liber diuinorum operum, the Cause et cure) put this mission into practice.
Hildegard is a deep and difffijicult thinker. Her writings are capable of
sustaining a great number of readings. Nonetheless, in her correspondence
with the masters and in her Expositiones, one can discern a real
consistency in her language and thought on the relationship between reason
and faith. This notion of reason places Hildegard in a broader tradition
of monastic opposition to the methods and the doctrines of the new
scholasticism. Hildegard’s involvement in the 12th-century debate about
the Cathar heresy has already been well documented.121 The foregoing
analysis suggests that she should also be considered among the great 12thcentury
critics of the schools, articulating within a monastic, Benedictine
context a vision of reason in sharp contrast with the sort of reason championed
by the masters of the schools of the 12th century.
120 Scivias 3.11, pp. 381–89: “Sed nunc catholica fijides in populis uacillat et euangelium in
eisdem hominibus claudicat, fortissima etiam uolumina quae probatissimi doctores multo
studio enucleauerant in turpi taedio difffluunt et cibus uitae diuinarum Scripturarum iam
tepefactus est: unde nunc loquor per non loquentem hominem de Scripturis, nec edoctum
de terreno magistro, sed ego qui sum dico per eum noua secreta et multa mystica quae
hactenus in uoluminibus latuerunt.”
121 The essays by Beverly Kienzle have amply documented Hildegard’s preaching against
the Cathars. See most recently “Crisis and Charismatic Authority in Hildegard of Bingen’s
Preaching against the Cathars,” in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and
Muslim Preaching, 1200–1600, eds. Miri Rubin and Katherine Jansen (Turnhout, 2010), pp.
73–91, and Speaking New Mysteries, pp. 245–88.