A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard as musical hagiographer 207
In her vita of St Disibod, Hildegard portrayed the saint as an exiled bishop
who spread the gospel of salvation in multiple regions and lands, from his
native Ireland to the German Rhineland, where he established his hermitage
and performed miracles worthy of the fijirst apostles. According to her
vision of the Church, then, Disibod was a follower of the apostles who, like
them, contributed to the crystalline shine around Ecclesia’s head.
That Hildegard saw Disibod in this light is supported by her use of
the image of crystal in her antiphon for another local missionary saint,
St Boniface, the “Apostle of Germany” and the fijirst archbishop of Mainz.
Hildegard praised Boniface as “a crystal gleaming with goodwill along
the righteous paths where [he] wisely ran.”29 Boniface and Disibod were
sometimes linked as regional missionaries in local religious lore. Hildegard
herself identifijied Boniface as the one who presided at the elevation
and translation of Disibod’s bones from his simple oratorio to the fijirst
monastery church.30
Hildegard wrote her Life of St Disibod at Abbot Helenger’s request in
1170, many years after her fijirst songs for the saint (completed before Abbot
Kuno’s death in 1155). The more explicit vita, then, may have been fresh
in her mind during the production of Dendermonde in the early 1170s.
Perhaps it was due in part to her recent, detailed portrayal of St Disibod
as a traveling bishop and miracle-working “follower of the apostles” that
Hildegard included him with the apostles in Dendermonde. Perhaps, too,
in thinking more recently about the cult of St Disibod, his relics, and the
monastery church on the Disibodenberg (all addressed in Disibod’s vita,
and for whose community she originally wrote it and the songs), Hildegard
may have had in mind the main altar of the church, dedicated in 1143 not
only to Christ and Mary but also to “the blessed evangelist John, and our
Apostolica doctrina circumfulsit ecclesiam in capite, cum apostoli primum illam sua
praedicatione coeperunt aedifijicare, scilicet cum per diuersa loca discurrentes colligerent
operarios qui illam in catholica fijide roborarent, et qui ipsi presbyteros et episcopos ac
omnem ecclesiasticum ordinem prouiderent, atque iura uirorum ac feminarum qui sub
coniugio sunt, et cetera talia fijideliter constituerent. . . . [U]nde etiam apostoli ordines illos
eligebant, cum quibus ecclesiam superna inspiratione exornabant. Quid est hoc?
Nam sequaces eorum in uice ipsorum saluberrima pigmenta gestantes fijideliter plateas
et uillas et ciuitates atque alia loca regionum et terrarum pertranseunt, et populo diuinam
legem annuntiant.”
29 Symph. (Eng.), 51, pp. 204–05; Symph., 51, p. 443: “et cristallus lucens / in benivolentia /
rectarum viarum, / in quibus sapienter / cucurristi.” The antiphon is found only in the
Riesenkodex, fol. 475r–v.
30 PL 197: 1110–16; Two Hagiographies, pp. 86–157, esp. 144–45.