A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

the medical, the magical, and the miraculous 263
from the life-giving spirit of God because of her willingness to accept the
vice-fijilled world and her inability to recognize the salvation God offfers; the
voice from heaven identifijies her as blind and deaf and as foolish because
of her sins.65 In the Scivias, Hildegard likewise takes to task those who
wallow in vice, thereby inflicting sufffering upon themselves and disdaining
the cure at hand.66 In the fijinal book of this work, Zelus Dei (God’s
Zeal) punishes the iniquity of the hardened who will not seek a cure in
the form of repentance.67
God’s call and Hildegard’s response to it frequently relate to the Benedictine’s
own struggle with sickness. As a child of fijive, she experienced
visions that entered her brain as a fijiery light, but she refused for years
to reveal them to anyone, acquiescing only after God affflicted her with
illness.68 In her study of Hildegard’s Vita in which she explores the relationship
between sanctity and sickness, Barbara Newman notes Hildegard’s
“prophetic view of illness,” stating that “because she was his chosen
instrument, God did not hesitate to use her body as a sign . . . Hildegard
understood her pains as unsubtle reminders, even punishments, sent by
God when she was not fulfijilling his will as promptly as he wished.”69 However,
in the “Protestifijicatio” of the Scivias, the Living Light probes deeper
into the reason for Hildegard’s sufffering:
The person [Hildegard] whom I have chosen and whom I have miraculously
stricken as I willed, I have placed among great wonders, beyond the measure
of the ancient people who saw in Me many secrets; but I have laid her low
on the earth, that she might not set herself up in arrogance of mind . . . For
she sufffers in her inmost being and in the veins of her flesh; she is distressed
in mind and sense and endures great pain of body, because no security has
dwelt in her, but in all her undertakings she has judged herself guilty.70
65 Vite mer., 5.9–11, pp. 225–27, ll. 184–252. A comparison of the blind to those lacking
hope or faith in God is found elsewhere in the Vite mer., e.g. 3.62, p. 161.
66 Scivias 2.6, p. 277, ll. 1764–68.
67 Ibid. 3.5, p. 411, ll. 125–26: “qui est uindicta inflexibilis iniquitatis, nec ullam medicinam
desiderantis.”
68 Ibid., Protestifijicatio, pp. 3–6, ll. 24–90. This incident is recorded in similar fashion
in the Vita of Hildegard compiled by Gottfried of Disibodenberg and Theodoric of Echternach:
when Hildegard defijies God’s command to write down her visions or speak His
words, she is affflicted by illness, but when she acquiesces, the illness subsides. See Anna
Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources, Brepols Medieval Women Series
(University Park, Pa., 1998), pp. 141, 146–48; V. Hild., pp. 8, 12, 13.
69 Barbara Newman, “Three-Part Invention: The Vita S. Hildegardis and Mystical Hagiography,”
in Context, p. 199.
70 Scivias (Eng.), Declaration, p. 60; Scivias, Protestifijicatio, pp. 4–5, ll. 52–64: “Ego lux
uiuens et obscura illuminans hominem quem uolui et quem mirabiliter secundum quod