A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

152 kienzle and stevens
Knowledge of Good (Scientia Boni), speaking in Hildegard’s narrative in
parallel to the gospel text, clearly describes itself as having circular form.
While this image does not refer explicitly to the wheel, it illuminates
the previous images where knowledge spreads in a circular fashion. It
also demonstrates that the symbolic geometry underlying the wheel—
that is, the circle—conveys meanings related to both understanding and
knowledge.
Hildegard also employs the image of the wheel to describe the difffusion
of knowledge. In Expositio 41, commenting on Luke 5:1–11, she writes:
And fear spread to all their neighbors, so that all born of humans were stupefijied,
and feared, and to all mountainous places, that is over the height, of
Judea, clearly of the old institution. All these words were made known, led
in a circle like a wheel, since they understood these things.79
In this instance, the seer represents the publication of knowledge about
the blessedness of Elizabeth as circular, spreading out from a central point.
That knowledge will lead, of course, to the birth and ministry of John the
Baptist and his announcement of Jesus’ coming in the flesh.
Hildegard speaks of circles as characteristic of wisdom in O uirtus sapientiae,
the second poem of the Symphonia:
O strength of Wisdom,
Which circling, you have encircled,
Understanding all things
In the one way that holds life,
Having three wings,
Of which one flies in the heights
And another exudes from the earth
And a third flies around every which way.
Praise be to you, as becomes you,
O Wisdom.80
79 Ibid., 41, p. 302, ll. 36–40. “Et factus est timor super omnes uicinos eorum, ita ut
omnes nati de hominibus stuperent et tremerent, et super omnia montana, id est super
altitudinem, Iudeae, scilicet ueteris institutionis, diuulgabantur omnia uerba haec, circumducta
ut rota, quatinus haec intelligerent.”
80 Symph., 2, p. 375, ll. 1–10: “O uirtus Sapientie, / que circuiens circuisti, / comprehendendo
omnia / in una uia que habet uitam, /tres alas habens, / quarum una in altum uolat
/ et altera de terra sudat / et tercia undique uolat. / Laus tibi sit, sicut te decet, / O Sapientia.”
Translation modifijied from Symph. (Eng.), p. 101, by Travis Stevens. Peter Dronke, Poetic
Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry, 1000–1150 (Oxford, 1970), p. 157,
comments on the circular motion of the wings of God in Scivias 3.5 and in the antiphon
O uirtus Sapientiae. He notes that the notion of the cosmos’s circular motion dates back to
the motion of anima mundi (the world soul) in Plato’s Timaeus.