Fifteenth-century depiction of Bernard of Clairvaux with the Devil at his heels. By the Belgian artist Dirk Bouts. (Photo Credit 1.9)
In the last two decades of her life, she made sensational preaching tours of the Rhineland and beyond, wherever she went attracting overflow crowds to the unique spectacle of herself. Though the reports of her sermons are in Latin, we may guess that she spoke German to Germans, saving her halting Latin for Lorraine and similar French-speaking districts. She is full of scorn for heretics such as the Cathars, a Manichean sect that had gained purchase amid the newly literate populations of eastern France, western Germany, and northern Italy. The Cathars, like their successors the Albigensians, were purists who hated human bodies, the Christian sacramental system, and the entire material world. They were the twelfth-century manifestation of an antiphysical bias that resurfaces continually through Christian history. They would have made common cause with the Encratites; had they known of him, Plato would have been to their taste; and they would have adored Plotinus. They disapproved of marriage and normal sexual intercourse—though they were rumored to approve the anal variety, like their predecessors the Bogomils, who had hailed from Bulgaria (and thus were also called Bulgars or Buggers). For the apocalyptic, survivalist Cathars, both church and state were absolute evils to be shunned. In 1163, not long after Hildegard preached at Cologne, the local authorities rounded up their Cathar neighbors and burned them at the stake.
Hildegard is mindful that Heaven is the final goal of everyman and presses ordinary people to live a life that will make them welcome there. But above all she attacks the clergy for their enervated presentations of Christian truth and the scandal of their compromised lives. The sermon she delivered at Trier on Pentecost 1160 is typical. She begins by denigrating herself as “a poor little female figure”—“paupercula feminea forma” in the Latin report—lacking health, strength, courage, and learning. And yet she is the bearer of God’s words to the bishops and their clergy. Because these men have failed to “sound the trumpet of justice,” the four corners of the earth have grown dark and cold. We see no longer in the east the dawn of good works; in the south the warmth of virtue grows chill; in the west the twilight of mercy has given way to the blackness of midnight; and from the north Satan blows his noisy wind of pride, faithlessness, and indifference to God. In her day, the courage of “poor little” Hildegard’s attack would have been thrilling enough to make the hairs on a listener’s neck stand up.h
The bishops, she says, are sleeping, “while justice is abandoned. Thus did I hear this Voice from heaven saying: O Daughter of Sion [that is, the church], the crown will fall from your head, the far-flung mantle of your riches will be collapsed to a narrow confine, and you will be banished from place to place. Many cities and monasteries will be scattered by the powerful. And princes will say: Let us deprive them of the iniquity that turns the whole world upside down.”
What nerve this woman had. No wonder that in later times these sermons will be read as prophecies of the Reformation. But Hildegard is thinking of the twelfth, not the sixteenth, century; and we need go no further than her own time to find confirmation of her majestic references. As early as 1153, she had fired her first verbal missile at a pope, Anastasius IV, an octogenarian who lasted but a year and a half: “You, O Man, who are too tired … to rein in the pomposity of arrogance among those placed in your bosom … why do you put up with depraved people who are blinded by foolishness and who delight in harmful things, like a hen that cackles in the night and terrifies herself? Such people are completely useless.”
Her advice and her prayers were sought by the kings and queens of her day—the list of her correspondents in the last decades of her life reads like a roll of the royal houses of Europe—and to all she gave what succor she could, as well as frank counsel. No one, in the end, was beyond the reach of her criticism, not even the emperor himself. Early in his imperial reign, the young, vigorous, widely admired Frederick Barbarossa (or Redbeard) had sought an alliance with the nun, confirming her status and asking her sweetly what prophecies God might have for him. When he held court at Ingelheim, she came into his presence by his invitation, promising him privately that certain gifts from Heaven were to come his way—which, he wrote her subsequently, they had:
Frederick, by the grace of God Emperor of the Romans and always august, sends his grace and every good to the Lady Hildegard of Bingen.
We inform you, holy lady, that we have now in hand those things you predicted to us.…We will continue to strive with all our efforts for the honor of this our kingdom. Therefore, beloved lady, we sincerely beseech you, and the sisters entrusted to your care, to pour out your prayers to almighty God for us so that He may turn us to Himself as we labor on our earthly business and so that we may merit to obtain His grace.
Please be assured that with regard to that matter you directed to our attention we will be swayed by neither the friendship nor the hatred of any person, but we intend to judge with perfect equity.
We cannot guess what the secret “matter” may have been, but Hildegard was always one to seize an opening that might further her own pet projects. Her replies, in any case, were no less sweet, no less courtly than his, till Frederick interfered repeatedly in church elections, even backing antipopes (irregularly designated candidates who he knew would prove more malleable than the validly elected popes). At the appointment of a second antipope, Hildegard was moved to a withering reappraisal. “You juvenile fool,” she scolded the emperor. In 1168 Frederick, now well into his campaign to reunite Germany and lift his reduced Western Roman Empire to the kind of greatness it had achieved under Charlemagne, appointed a third antipope upon the death of the second. Hildegard’s (probably final) communication to the emperor was terse: “He-Who-Is says: ‘I destroy disobedience and the rebellion of those who scorn me. Woe, woe to the malice of evil men who turn from me! Hear this, O king, if you wish to live; otherwise, my sword shall run you through.’ ” The emperor, who could easily have silenced, even executed, the little nun for such impudence, wisely left her in peace.
Like other medieval monarchs, he would learn that interference with the church was not a strategy for long-term success. By 1176, he was defeated at the Battle of Legnano—the first time in history that infantry defeated cavalry, presaging an age in which plodding bourgeoisie would loom larger than swashbuckling nobility—and had to admit that he would never be able to reclaim the Lombard dominions of Charlemagne. The next year, two years before Hildegard’s death, he knelt and begged the valid pope’s forgiveness for his intrusions into papal politics—at a public ceremony in Venice.i Pope Alexander III graciously forgave. In 1190, a dozen years after Hildegard’s death, Frederick Barbarossa, long a romantic figure to his German subjects but now in his late sixties, drowned while crossing the River Saleph (in modern-day Turkey) as he led his knights to Jerusalem on the expiatory adventure of the Third Crusade.
Twelfth-century late Romanesque dom (or cathedral) of Trier, its foundations laid by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Hildegard preached here to capacity crowds. Next door (on the right) is a graceful early Gothic church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. (Photo Credit 1.10)
Despite her continuing publicity, Hildegard remained in important ways a very private person—and an artist of markedly individual spirit in a time when individuality was just beginning to show its face again in society after centuries of banishment. Her music is chant, largely unaccompanied, as was most church music of her time, but quite possibly polyphonic (despite the fact that the manuscripts give us only the line of melody), since polyphony, appearing as early as the ninth century, had become the musical dessert of Hildegard’s day. But no one else was singing songs that sounded like what the nuns of Bingen were singing. The melody lines of Hildegard’s compositions alternate between moments of rigid control and those of floridly swooping excess, as the melody threatens to abandon pattern altogether and jump the tracks. The rhythms are as far from ti-dum, ti-dum a
s can be imagined, full of wild irregularity, yet coming together in an intelligible whole. The words, also by Hildegard, are one with her music, obedient to no known rules, loosely metrical but unbound, the Western world’s first free verse. As one follows her kaleidoscopic patterns, melting into chaos, melting into new patterns, one cannot but think of the abandoned sensuality of jazz. Her songs would have made sense to Bessie Smith. This was one loose sister; and nothing is more arresting than the bald passion of her subject matter:
O dulcissime amator, o dulcissime amplexator:
adiuva nos custodire virginitatem nostram.
Nos sumus orti in pulvere—
heu, heu, et in crimine Adam;
valde durum est contradicere
quod habet gustus Pomi;
tu erige nos, salvator Christe.
Nos desideramus ardenter te sequi.
O quam grave nobis miseris est
te immaculatum et innocentem
regem angelorum imitari.
Tamen confidimus in te—
quod desideres gemmam requirere in putredine.
Nunc advocamus te, sponsum et consolatorem,
qui nos redemisti in cruce.
In tuo sanguine copulate sumus tibi
cum desponsatione, repudiantes virum
et eligentes te, Filium Dei.
O pulcherrima forma,
o suavissimus odor residerabilium deliciarum,
semper suspiramus post te in lacrimabili exilio.
Quando te videamus
et tecum maneamus?
Nos sumus in mundo
et tu in mente nostra,
et amplectimur te in corde
quasi habeamus te presentem.
Tu fortissimus leo rupisti celum
descendens in aulam Virginis,
et destruxisti mortem
edificans vitam in aurea civitate.
Da nobis societatem cum illa
et permanere in te,
o dulcissime sponse,
qui abstraxisti nos de faucibus diaboli
primum parentem nostrum seducentis.
O sweetest lover, sweetest hugger,
help us keep our virginity.
We rise from dust—
alas, alas, from Adam’s guilt.
How very hard to hold out against
whatever tastes of the Apple;
thou, savior Christ, set us aright.
Ardently we long to follow thee.
O what a struggle it is for us, the wretched ones,
to imitate the king of angels,
spotless, innocent.
Still, we trust in thee—
that thou wouldst find again the jewel in the filth.
Now do we call upon thee, spouse and comforter,
who redeemed us on the cross.
In thy blood we couple with thee
in betrothal, refusing a husband
and choosing thee, Son of God.
O most beautiful figure,
O sweetest smell of longed-for delights,
always do we sigh for thee in tearful exile.
When shall we see thee
and stay with thee?
We are in the world,
and thou in our mind,
and we hug thee to our heart
as thou wert here with us.
Thou, mightiest lion, tore open the sky,
descending to the Virgin’s vestibule,
and destroyed death,
building life in the Golden City.
Give us fellowship in that city
and rest with thee,
O sweetest spouse,
who dragged us from the jaws of the devil,
our ancient ancestor’s debaucher.
She’s a virgin but no prude, and she makes no attempt to mask or excuse the sex and violence that inhabit her. (“If I go to church on Sunday / Then just shimmy down on Monday / ’Taint nobody’s business if I do,” sings Bessie Smith in a not entirely dissimilar vein, big Bessie of the assertive, unafraid voice, who was orphaned early, mentored by the bisexual Ma Rainey, and worked so hard to achieve her fleeting fame.) Virginity is Hildegard’s torment, as she salivates over the lingering taste of the Apple that tempted Adam and Eve—which was seen by medievals as a sexual temptation. Like a debased creature from The Story of O, she is a jewel defiled by rottenness. Her only defense is the presence of Christ in her heart, a sensation she heightens by reminding herself of his arms around her and the very smell of him, as they couple in his blood. She sees her mighty lion-lover rending the sky itself to come “in aulam virginis” (to the Virgin’s vestibule), her empty entry space. This is the moment of Incarnation: just as the Word of God entered the Virgin Mary, he may enter Hildegard.
Her medical writing, as useless to us as the rest of medieval medicine, is notable for its uncompromising descriptions of human sexual organs and activities. Hildegard was a woman who made the best of the situation in which she found herself, a believer but a realist. She never doubted the reality of Christ, nor did she disguise the fierce strength of her own temptations. This is, after all, an age of unabashed public confession, not of shamed defensiveness, for the judgmental repressions of Calvinism will not infect Europe for many centuries.
As I see her, she is a small woman, wrinkled in old age—“Schrumpilgard” (Wrinklepus), she was called derisively by a demon who possessed a young woman named Sigewize. Only Schrumpilgard, screeched the demon, could bring the possession to an end, which she did. But she is a know-it-all, always right about everything. Her sisters could find her unendurable because of her “insufferable hammering way” and they would glower at her and, in her words, “tear me to pieces behind my back.”
The lonely child became a lonely grown-up, one still full of fantasies. She dressed her sisters like princesses for special feast days. As they processed into the abbey church, singing one of Hildegard’s remarkably personal compositions, they presented a sight seen nowhere else. Unlike other nuns, who sheared their hair and covered what was left, Hildegard’s virgins wore their hair long and unbound, scarcely concealed by the flowing silk veils, pure white—Hildegard’s favorite color—that trailed in their wake, attached to their heads by elaborate crowns as golden as the many rings that adorned their fingers and the bangles that clinked down their arms. When the superior of another congregation, one Tengswich, wrote to Hildegard, inquiring how she justified such practices—in a letter as full of catty innuendo as the dialogue from an episode of Desperate Housewives—Hildegard’s response was serene:
A woman, once married, ought not to indulge herself in prideful adornment of hair or person, nor ought she to lift herself up to vanity, wearing a crown and other golden ornaments, except at her husband’s pleasure, and even then with moderation. But these strictures do not apply to a virgin, for she stands in the unsullied purity of paradise, lovely and unwithering, and she always remains in the full vitality of the budding rod.
Take that, bitch. And as for Mistress Tengswich’s other objection to Hildegard’s m.o.—“that you admit into your community only those women from noble, well-established families”—the great abbess gave this unblushing reply:
God keeps a watchful eye on every person, so that a lower order will not gain ascendency over a higher one, as Satan and the first man did, who wanted to fly higher than they had been placed. And who would gather all his livestock into one barn—the cattle, the asses, the sheep, the kids? Thus it is clear that differentiation must be maintained in these matters, lest people of varying status, herded all together, be dispersed through the pride of their elevation, on the one hand, or the disgrace of their decline, on the other, and especially lest the nobility of their character be torn asunder when they slaughter one another out of hatred. Such destruction naturally results when the higher order falls upon the lower, and the lower rises above the higher. For God establishes ranks on earth, just as in heaven with angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, cherubim, and seraphim. And they are all loved by God, although they
are not equal in rank.
In the twelfth century, virginity had its pleasures. So did noble birth. Without both these ancient social institutions, we would never have heard of Hildegard. Thank God her parents didn’t marry her off and keep her mute for the ages.
In our Age of the Common Man, nobility has fled the field, which makes it difficult for us to come to terms with the temper of an age in which class structures were taken for granted and everyone was duly expected to fulfill his or her divinely assigned role, an age in which shoemakers remained forever shoemakers, and duchesses duchesses and fishwives fishwives, and no one entertained even a whisper of hope for an improvement in status. The disadvantages of such a society are so evident to us that its contentments may remain hidden from view. We fail to acknowledge, on the one hand, how full of anxiety our own society is, how its lack of assigned roles leaves so many individuals woefully isolated, permanently nervous about the random fluctuations of their fortunes. If, on the other hand, one could say, “I am the shoemaker of Trier, as was my father before me, as will be my son after me; I am an integral part of my community, even necessary to it; my neighbors respect me and depend on my skill,” one could own an abiding peace that eludes all but a very few children of the twenty-first century.
Even more confounding to us Sex and the City devotees is the honor awarded virginity within the medieval world. Why did they privilege a life without sex? What on earth were they thinking? What were they feeling?
Each society makes assumptions that it regards as effectively axiomatic—as so obvious that no explanatory defense is needed. In the world in which I came to adulthood, the value of unending progress was just such an unassailable assumption. Each generation was an improvement on the one before, each new invention a leap forward in the betterment of human life; and sinking backwards was unthinkable. It is possible that the vast majority still hold similar assumptions, even though the limitations of the globe itself—a round, finite sphere with strictly finite resources—are becoming all too obvious; nor will struggles between haves and have-nots be put off forever.
Mysteries of the Middle Ages Page 10
