“Hildegard Listening” 2015 © Sue Ellen Parkinson

Hildegard of Bingen, Visionary Genius of Creative Relationship

Dr. Alan J. Crowley, June 14, 2025

Hildegard of Bingen was a twelfth century Benedictine Abbess of extraordinary genius, spiritual vision, and community leadership. She, along with the great reformer Francis of Assisi, who was born just three days after Hildegard died , is the one of the most influential of all of the great mystics of medieval Europe, beginning a lineage that includes Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Marguerite de Porette, and Julian of Norwich. Hildegard began receiving spiritual visions in childhood, but told of them only to the abbess Jutta, who had become Hildegard’s guardian when her parents placed her in a convent. She did not begin writing about her visions until she was forty three years old, in large part because of the low regard she would be given in a male dominated church culture and because she knew well how dangerous it could be to seem to be challenging church doctrine. Nonetheless, in part due to the advocacy and encouragement of the great abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard was the only woman of her times to be accepted as an authoritative voice on Christian doctrine; the first woman who received express permission from a pope to write theological books. Nearly a millennium after her death, Pope Benedict XVI named her a “Doctor of the Church in 2012, the same year she was canonized a saint.

Hildegard is often referred to as a “polymath,” because her genius extended to so many different areas of scholarship and art. Hildegard is poetically referred to as “The Sybil of the Rhine”, a title that celebrates both her divine vision and captivating music. In addition to being a prominent abbess, a visionary mystic, and and a theological innovator, Hildegard was a poet, a composer of ethereal music, a botanist with high regard for her applications to medicine, and a creator of complex visual arts made for illustration of complexly layered ideas and for use in meditative prayer. Like many later literary geniuses, such as the Bronte sisters and JRR Tolkein, she even made up her own language, which she taught to the women she lived among so that they might have a confidential, yet shared, language. Medieval scholar Cynthia Overweg explains that “an important aspect of Hildegard’s visions was her experience of spiritual wisdom as a feminine attribute. Her description of the feminine divine principle, personified as Wisdom, was sometimes provocative, but always powerful.”

Though Hildegard lived a millennium ago, her ideas have been recovered and reclaimed as a force for contemporary spiritual and cultural renewal. The key ideas that make her both so anciently rooted and so modernly relevant are 1) that all created things are profoundly interrelated and 2) that all existence is engaged in a continuous process of growth into a divine wholeness. Her most important concept, still used and resonant today is the term viriditas (in Latin, literally “greenness”) . In her great written work Scivias (which means “Know the Ways”), Hildegard explains viriditas as an attribute of the divine nature. In her works, the word viriditas has been translated in various ways, such as freshness, vitality, fertility, fecundity, fruitfulness, verdure, or growth. In Hildegard's understanding, viriditas is a metaphor for spiritual and physical health. Scholar of spiritual healing Stephanie Roth suggests "Homeostasis" as a modern scientific equivalent, but without the theological and spiritual connotations that viriditas has. Our contemporary language for such nurturing, healing, and creative power might be expressed with words like “life force”, “spiritual energy”, or “essence.” The concepts “chi,” “mana,” and “prana.” from eastern spirituality have connotations similar to viriditas,

Hildegard’s cosmology (understanding of the universe) and Christology (understanding of the relation of Jesus Christ to the universe) anticipates evolutionary concepts like Teilhard de Chardin’s “christogenesis”, the idea that the universe and each living being is in an ongoing process of birth into a new wholeness, or oneness. For the purposes of our gathering’s listening, writing, and sharing, Hildegard is a model for what scholar of spirituality in nature Lisa Dahill names “experiential” kinship, the sense that all living things are created to thrive in a context of familial empathy and mutual care.

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