Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen

by Mary Sharratt

  In my open palm, I held Richardis’s sapphire necklace. How it glittered in the midday sun.

  “Sapphire,” I dictated, “is hot, more fiery indeed than airy or watery. It symbolizes both divine love and wisdom, Caritas and Sapientia, for Caritas and Sapientia are one—God’s love cannot be separated from God’s wisdom.”

  As I spoke, the noontide heat began to oppress me. A band of pain encircled my head, but I strove to ignore it.

  “If the devil should incite a man to love a woman so that he goes mad with desire, and should this annoy the woman, she should pour a bit of wine over the sapphire three times and each time say: I pour this wine over you; just as God drew off your splendor, wayward angel, so may you draw away from me this man’s lust.”

  Needle-sharp pain pierced my temples, forcing me to cry out. Richardis’s necklace tumbled to the ground as I lurched forward, pitching myself from my chair. My innards churned in nausea, then everything dimmed into nothingness. Only the pain was real, that blade that would not stop stabbing.

  Richardis gripped my shoulders, cradled my cheek. She managed to lift me off the floor and guide me to my bed before darting to fetch help. Meanwhile, my head hammered in such agony that I feared my skull would explode.

  Brother Otto laid a poultice on my forehead. The good physician offered me herbs steeped in honeyed wine, but nothing would ease my torment. My throat burned like hellfire and I couldn’t swallow a single mouthful of water or broth. My womb convulsed, robbing me of my bodily powers until I no longer knew myself.

  Was God punishing me for my very happiness, for daring to embrace life instead of suffering without end as Jutta had done? Did God truly desire nothing less than martyrs roiling in wretchedness? At the age of forty-two years and seven months, I felt as though I were about to die.

  Imprisoned in the infirmary as I had once been imprisoned in the anchorage, I thought it could get no worse. Then the visions returned, wrenching me from my stupor. The Light seared me, turning my bones to putty, burning away my eyelids so all I could do was gape at that overpowering brilliance. And from that luminosity came the voice that shook me to my core. It is time. Time to do what you were born to do.

  The Light dazzled every cell in my body as I thrashed in its grip. I fevered and panted while Brother Otto and my sisters gathered round, powerless to end my ordeal. Adelheid and Guda held each other while Richardis clung to my hand, her face only inches from mine as she wept noiselessly. Cuno watched from the doorway, as though in solemn expectation of my demise. Volmar, weeping as openly as my sisters, hovered at the foot of my bed. He moved his mouth to speak, but I was deaf to everything except the roaring within.

  No longer could I idle away my days puttering about the forest and hospice. God had given me the visions for a purpose and yet I had hidden them away like rags soiled with menstrual blood. My task was to awaken. The command now reverberated within the chamber of my heart. See and speak. Hear and write. Be God’s mouthpiece.

  Shrinking inside myself, I considered the many books in our library penned by scholars whose erudition put me to shame, those great men who had mastered rhetoric, who could debate theology and philosophy in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. The vastness of their knowledge left me cowering, for what was I but a weak, ignorant woman? My Latin grammar was no better than a young boy’s—how dare I presume to write anything? But the vision seized me and would not let me go. O fragile human, ash of ashes. Speak and write what you see and hear.

  Heaven opened, fire descending like Pentecostal flame. Fiery light permeated my brain and inflamed my heart, blinding and illuminating me at once. I thought I would burn up in its radiance, but then it warmed me as the sun warms all she touches. Now I know.

  Meaning filled me. For more than three decades I had studied the holy texts, but now I understood them. Flames stoked my heart and mind, revealing the secret riches in the sacred writings: the psalms, the Gospels, and the other catholic volumes of the Old and New Testaments. The voice sang out like a trumpet. I am the Living Light that illuminates the darkness.

  Dawn broke through the infirmary window. Echoing through the walls came the voices of the choir brothers singing Lauds. Though Cuno had vanished, my sisters, Brother Otto, and Volmar kept their vigil by my bed. As the first ray of sun touched my face, my voice returned.

  “Volmar, please receive my confession.”

  Brother Otto and my sisters tiptoed from the room, leaving me alone with my oldest friend. His hand enclosing mine was warm, his strength infusing me.

  “The visions have returned,” I told him. “I’m not dying, but my old life is over. God has commanded me to do this thing, to speak and write what I see and hear. Only I don’t know how. God should have chosen you.” I smiled at him through my tears. “Not someone as ignorant as I am.”

  I feared he might react with alarm, as he had done when I first told him about my visions as a child, or that he would think these apparitions the sign of a troubled mind. Instead, he gazed at me in reverence.

  “You were chosen for a reason,” he said. “I’ll help you however I can.”

  “Say not a word to Cuno. He’ll have me burned for heresy.” I spoke only half in jest.

  At the very least, my abbot would think it presumptuous that I, the erring and unworthy nun, was trying to outshine holy Jutta whose relics graced our abbatial church, whose bones lay under the chapter house floor. Even after her death, her holy reputation was a beacon that drew a steady stream of pilgrims.

  Before Volmar could say another word, Richardis stepped from the shadowy alcove where she had been eavesdropping. Her eyes brimmed as she bent to kiss me. Then, with a nod to Volmar, she handed me the tablet and stylus I had given her four years ago. Both she and Volmar seemed to hold their breath until I pressed the stylus into the wax. Trembling and faint-headed, I wrote and wrote until I emptied myself. Only then did the pain ebb. In its place came a humming energy, green fire surging through my veins. Throwing off the blankets, I planted my feet on the floor and stretched my arms. Both dazed and ecstatic, I turned to smile at my two dearest friends.

  After I had washed and dressed, Richardis accompanied me to the church where Guda and Adelheid sang Terce along with the brothers. My sisters’ faces lit up in joy and relief as I joined them in song, our voices soaring in harmony. After the Holy Office had ended, my sisters enclosed me in a tight embrace. Cuno stared before drawing away.

  If my miraculous recovery flummoxed our abbot, it was not his way to encourage me to wallow in excess attention. In truth, I was grateful that he chose to ignore me in those first fragile days of my awakening.

  Until that morning when I arose like Lazarus from my infirmary bed, I had lived under my abbot’s thumb. From the age of eight, my every act had been under scrutiny, governed by the monks’ rules and restrictions. Apart from my flamboyant bid for freedom on the day of Jutta’s funeral, my life had been harnessed to one aim—submission. If I was no longer dead to the world in the tomb of the anchorage, Cuno still expected me to be silent, obedient, invisible. But the voice inside shattered the chains. It welled up in an unstoppable gush of words, a song that could never be stilled.

  Every moment I was not in prayer, I was writing feverishly, covering tablet after tablet with revelations of divine love and the nature of the universe, of the macrocosm and the microcosm, of how the rift between the created world and the fallen world might be healed. Adelheid and Guda left me to my business—I wanted it that way lest I bring Cuno’s wrath upon them as well as myself. But Richardis stuck to me like a burr, just as Volmar did. He who had once been Jutta’s appointed secretary now offered himself as mine, behind Cuno’s back. While Volmar transcribed my words to parchment, correcting and polishing my Latin, Richardis gathered pigments, quills, and brushes. With colors as brilliant as the wildflowers that spangled the forest, the girl illuminated my every vision.

  In the chamber of my heart, I discovered a door flung wide open, the enclosure of the mysteries now u
nlocked.

  “Such splendor I see,” I told Volmar and Richardis.

  The vision unfolded as the three of us huddled in an overgrown corner of the medicinal garden where rosebushes grew tall to conceal us, enfolding us in their paradisial perfume.

  “I see a mighty, towering woman.” My voice rose like a melody over the drone of bees. “Around her, there glimmers a brightness as white as snow, as translucent as crystal.”

  Volmar’s stylus scratched his wax tablet while Richardis bent over her own tablet, making a preliminary sketch.

  “Like the dawn, she shimmers, shining forth as high as the secret places of heaven. In the heart of her embrace, I see the most beautiful maiden with long dark hair. Her red gown flows to her feet.”

  Richardis glanced up, a strand of her own hair caught in her mouth while I looked on with double vision, seeing Volmar and Richardis in the garden, and then the woman and girl in my revelation.

  “Around the maiden I see a great throng of men and women, brighter than the sun, each adorned in gold and jewels.”

  The glory half-blinded me.

  “The voice speaks. It says, ‘Behold Ecclesia, the true Church and uncorrupted Bride.’ She is the towering woman. The maiden in her arms is Caritas, Divine Love. The virgin clothed in the red of life.”

  Before me I saw the face of my God, my Mother, as awesome as lightning striking the earth, yet as gentle in her goodness as the sun’s rays. She was incomprehensible to humans because of the dread radiance of her divinity and the brightness that blazed in her. For she was with all, and in all, and of a beauty so great that none could comprehend how sweetly she bore with us mortals and how she spared us with her inscrutable mercy.

  As I opened my mouth to pour my vision into words, Cuno and Egon burst into our sheltering bower.

  “What is this?” my abbot demanded, his eyes bulging in disbelief. “A monk, a nun, and a girl convene in secret? What are you writing?”

  Hoping to shield Volmar and Richardis from any blame, I thrust myself forward.

  “Abbot,” I said, my head drooping lest he accuse me of any breech of humility. I anchored my eyes on his hairy toes peeping from his sandals. “I am but a weak and ignorant woman. I presume nothing. It is not my own thoughts I write but wisdom revealed to me by God. For God is so mighty that he might choose one as lowly as I am for his vessel.”

  “Out of everyone in this abbey, God chose you to be his mouthpiece?” My abbot’s voice swelled in scorn. “If this is true, why did you not tell me? I think you hid your deeds because you knew them to be wicked. Your mind is deranged, beguiled by demons of the air.”

  “Reverend father,” Volmar interjected. “I swear to you that I have detected nothing heretical in Hildegard’s visions.”

  “Visions, no less!” Egon exchanged a look with Cuno, whose face went as dark as Judgment Day.

  As Cuno snatched the tablet from Volmar’s grasp, my dear brother whitened in dread.

  “This demands discipline,” our abbot said. “We have granted you every freedom, Hildegard, and you reward us by making us your fools, wasting Brother Volmar’s time with your delusions. I’ll wager you’ve wasted our parchment as well.”

  “Her visions are holy!” a voice cried out. A young voice. A breaking voice.

  Even Egon was stunned as we turned to the trembling girl with her crimson face. Tears in her eyes, she placed herself between Cuno and me.

  “Her visions are beautiful. Why would you punish her for something so good?”

  I could see only her slender back, her arms rigid at her sides, her hands balled into fists as though to hold on to her courage. My knees buckled to behold the marvel—that mute girl had regained her voice in order to defend me.

  Cuno stared at her, his face incredulous. “The girl speaks? Have you heard her speak before, Brother Volmar?”

  Our abbot looked past Richardis and me, as though he trusted only a man to answer his question.

  “My lord abbot, I have never heard Richardis speak until just now,” Volmar said. “According to her mother, she’s been mute since the age of eleven. Surely this is a miracle.”

  “Yes, I can speak,” Richardis said, full of mettle. She sounded nearly as unshakeable as her mother. “It’s all because of Hildegard. You can’t say her visions are sinful now, can you, abbot?”

  My heart was so full. It was as though my inner calling to speak and write of my visions had also unlocked Richardis’s voice. In the May garden, the girl glimmered like a chalice overflowing with grace. Even the harsh set of Cuno’s face softened before her. The most curious thing was that she spoke not with the long Saxon vowels of her homeland, but just like Volmar and I did, as though she were our daughter, born and bred in this Rhineland.

  “We must write to your mother at once,” Cuno said.

  “Write to her, abbot,” said the girl. “Tell her that Hildegard has given me back my voice.”

  “Or the relics of holy Jutta,” Cuno said, glancing over the tablet he had confiscated, covered in my words that Volmar had recorded. “I must take this away for further study. Brother Volmar, if you have written any more of Hildegard’s supposed visions, I must examine them as well.”

  Before our abbot could depart, Prior Egon clutched his belly and brayed. “If God can speak through Balaam’s ass in the Book of Numbers,” he chortled, so full of his own importance that I had to clamp my lips shut lest my temper flare and ruin everything, “then perhaps he can even speak through Sister Hildegard.”

  Cuno pursed his mouth and went on his way, with Egon at his heels like an eager dog.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, I threw my arms around Richardis. “Oh, my dear blessed girl, it is a miracle. Never stop speaking, no matter what they might do.”

  The May sunlight illumined her lovely young face as she smiled at me and then at Volmar, who looked at her fondly, as though she were his daughter.

  “It would be worth any penance,” he told her, “just to hear you speak, my child.”

  As it conspired, Cuno decided to leave us in peace, at least for the time being. It might have gone no further. This could have been the end of my story: Hildegard, the eccentric nun in her dotage, tolerated as a curiosity by her long-suffering brethren, who, out of Christian charity, allowed her to write. No longer in secret, I embarked upon my first book, Scivias, or Know the Ways, revealing my visions concerning creation and redemption, and how humans might be brought back into harmony with the divine plan, that great cosmic wheel ever whirling. As the book unfolded before me, I saw my own salvation—this, my offering to God, would redeem my entire existence, healing the wound of my long imprisonment.

  And thus the word went out, traveling far and wide on the tongues of passing pilgrims. Before long, I received a letter from Rorich in Mainz.

  Sister, are the rumors true? Everywhere I’ve heard it said that Hildegard of Disibodenberg fancies herself a seeress, and that you even claim to cure the mute. What do your abbot and confessor say? I pray you won’t be led astray by the False One.

  My brother, who had thought me long cured of my childhood affliction of the far-seeing, seemed concerned that my divine awakening would only damage his own reputation. Grabbing my penknife, I scraped every last trace of ink from his letter before passing the bare parchment to Richardis so that she might put it to good use for her illuminations.

  Richardis transfixed us all. How she enthralled the brothers, this lovely and noble virgin, her speech miraculously restored in a living embodiment of holiness. She was the most dazzling person to enter this abbey since Jutta in the days of her youth and beauty. Of course, Cuno wasted no time in sending word to her mother, appealing to her for further donations in gratitude of the glorious wonder that he attributed to the sainted Jutta’s intercession.

  We expected the margravine to swoop down on the abbey any day, though in truth, I was not eager to see her, as I blamed her overarching ambition for her daughter’s affliction. I hoped and prayed that the moth
er’s journey from Stade would be slow, granting the girl a few more weeks in which to savor her brand-new voice before her mother dragged her back home to find a bridegroom.

  My deepest joy was hearing Richardis sing the Divine Office. Her unschooled voice was surprisingly rich, setting a lovely counterpoint to Guda’s ethereal vibrato. Though the two did not always get along, their voices wove together in angelic harmony. Candlelight glinting off her long black hair, Richardis closed her eyes, as though in ecstasy, as she sang the words I had composed.

  O tu suavissima virga

  O sweetest branch

  growing from Jesse’s stalk,

  how great a power is this

  that divinity looked upon

  this fairest daughter

  as an eagle directs

  his gaze to the sun.

  Watching Richardis sing with my sisters brought back the vision I’d had so many years ago, when Adelheid and Guda were children, before Richardis had even been born. I recalled how in my illness I had witnessed three maidens glowing with divinity. Adelheid appeared in the guise of Sapientia, Divine Wisdom, while Guda shone in majesty as Ecclesia, the true and inner Church. Then, from between them, emerged the most splendid figure, glowing in innocence and joy—the black-haired girl, whom I knew now to be Richardis, blazing in my vision before she was even conceived in her mother’s womb. My name is Caritas, Divine Love.

  My memory dissolved in sadness, for I knew I would soon be losing her. But if she lacked a true religious vocation, there was little point in her staying here. I kept thinking back to how that once sullen and silent girl had opened her heart to me, infecting me with the fire of youth as she cartwheeled down the riverbank. She had been a comet blazing her trail through my constrained existence. At seventeen she was as ripe for marriage as a plump peach about to fall from the tree of its own accord. Even her youth would end all too soon.