A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hildegard of bingen and the hirsau reform 79
Hildegard and Monastic Life
Leaving Disibodenberg c.1148 undoubtedly liberated Hildegard from an
environment where she was feeling increasingly constrained. The writing
of Scivias during that decade was a major achievement that inevitably
created tensions within the community to which she was attached. In her
opening vision, she implicitly rebuked those in the Church—hidden as
it were in a mountain—who did not benefijit directly from the grace of
Christ. During those fijirst 30 years at the abbey, she had had to subordinate
herself to the personality of Jutta, whose zeal for extreme asceticism
was not a practice she shared. Hildegard sufffered regular bouts of physical
incapacity and must have occupied herself with the task of looking
after the herbs in the garden. The fund of knowledge that she recorded in
her Physica and Cause et cure soon after she moved to Rupertsberg must
have been gathered over many decades. She was always interested in the
capacity of diffferent parts of the natural world either to offfer healing in
the appropriate situation, or to be toxic when taken in the wrong way.
The flash of insight that she reports experiencing in 1141 was marked by
a decision to write down what she could “see and hear.” Rather than rely
on what any scholars had said about the meaning of the Bible, she sought
to demonstrate that the Scriptures provided a way of thinking about the
moral destiny of humankind, drawing on her experience of dynamic
life—the uiriditas of nature—to explain the God-given life accorded to
humanity, abused through sin. In a powerful way, she came to accept the
constraints imposed on her by monasticism, the Bible, and ecclesiastical
tradition, by identifying the central thread that she saw as most important,
the insight given her by the Living Light. Moving away from Disibodenberg
to Rupertsberg enabled her to develop her own identity and
implement her vision away from the constraints of the past but with the
assistance of Volmar, from whom she had gained so much.
At the same time, Hildegard was powerfully indebted to the monastic
traditions she had absorbed at Disibodenberg, in particular through the
liturgy. Just as Gregory the Great provided a set of 40 homilies on extracts
of the Gospels set down for reading in the liturgy, so Hildegard sought to
present her own reflections on the Gospels, interpreted in her own unique
way.75 While it is difffijicult to reconstruct her full liturgical experience at
75 See the critical edition of Expo. Euang. and Kienzle’s discussion of Hildegard’s debt
to Gregory, in Speaking New Mysteries, pp. 67–68, 78–80, 89–91, 123–27, 146–48, 151, 154,
167–68, 170–73, 177, 181–82, 203.