A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard of bingen and the hirsau reform 73
visions about the hereafter included by Gregory the Great in the fourth
book of his Dialogues.55
A more personal approach to visionary experience can be seen in the
writing of Otloh of St Emmeram, a friend of William of Hirsau, who created
an unusually personal account of his experience in monastic life,
presented as a book of the temptations experienced by “a certain monk.”56
He also composed a Liber visionum, modeled on the fourth book of Gregory’s
Dialogues, in which he describes a series of visions that concern not
so much the reality of the next world as the necessity for individuals to
change their awareness and way of life if they are to live according to God’s
will.57 Otloh departs from Gregory’s precedent by claiming the authority
of his own experience for the fijirst four visions that he describes. The
others he attributes to hearsay or culls from his reading of various early
medieval writings: a letter of St Boniface to abbess Eadburg of Thanet,
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. He is
interested in visions perceived while awake as well as in dreams. One, for
example, is presented as the vision of a certain pauper who sat every day
outside the church of St Emmeram but who described how he had been
transplanted to a great metallic dwelling place without windows, in which
were enclosed those who resisted the peace of the Emperor Henry.58 The
pauper was then taken to a wide fijield with a deep well to which there
were many paths (viae), some badly worn, and was fijinally raised to a high
mountain on which a great monastery had been built, which was inappropriate
for him to identify. His guide showed him that almost all the paths
were worn, with the result that those who dwelt there were more involved
in fornication and other vices than the service of God. The pauper then
saw a tree of immense size stretching up from the ground to the heavens
but dried up in the middle. When asked by his guide if he knew what it
meant, he was told that it signifijied Bishop Gebhard (d. 1060), who had
in part dried up like a tree, and would shortly have to be cut down. The
prophecy was proven by the death of bishop Gebhard not long afterward.59
Otloh uses the pauper as a literary device by which he can present his
own understanding of “the ways of the Lord.” Hildegard’s presentation of
55 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, IV, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 265 (Paris, 1980).
56 Otloh von St. Emmeram: “Liber de temptatione cuiusdam monachi”: Untersuchung,
kritische Edition und Ü bersetzung, ed. Sabine Gäbe (Bern, 1999).
57 Otloh von St Emmeram, Liber visionum, ed. Paul Gerhard Schmidt (Weimar, 1989).
58 Otloh, Visio 10, ed. Schmidt, pp. 72–74.
59 Ibid., p. 74.