Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen

by Mary Sharratt

  My audience recoiled.

  “The Lady, whose name is Ecclesia, the Mother Church, cried out in a mournful voice.” Here something much greater than myself issued from my mouth. The voice came from on high—I was merely the instrument. “The priests who were meant to nurture me, to make my face glow like dawn, my clothes flash like the sun, have instead smeared me in excrement. They have rent my gown, blackened my cloak, soiled my shoes. They have failed me miserably.”

  The prelates’ faces went white, some in shock, others in derision. But the lay people behind them now tried to elbow their way to the front, eager to hear an elderly nun chastise these high-ranking men. The voice coming out of me rose like a falcon, full of an unstoppable power that was not my own.

  “This is the way they soil me: they handle the Host, the body and blood of my Bridegroom, while they are defiled by lust, poisoned with fornication and adultery, corrupted by the buying and selling of holy offices. They encompass my Bridegroom’s body and blood with filth, like someone putting a precious child in the muck among the swine.”

  Some of the prelates in front appeared so offended that their bodies twisted, as though they intended to stomp away and not suffer this homily another second, but the press of the crowd trapped them, forcing them to hear me out until the bitter end. The voice issuing forth from me stormed, filling my audience with something that resembled terror.

  “Let heaven rain down calamity on these sinful men! Let the abyss tremble. O you priests! You have neglected me, and now the princes of earth and the common folk alike shall rise up against you. They shall take away your property and riches because you have made a mockery of your holy office. They will say: ‘Let us drive these adulterers and thieves from the Church.’”

  The prelates’ faces seemed to freeze in panic as they found themselves cordoned in by that mass of bodies, the lay people who eyed them as if they would indeed rise up to overthrow them. For my message was both apocalyptic and as stark as it could be—the churchmen must reform or be toppled from their seats of power. Some of the men glared at me with blazing, undisguised hatred. How dare I make them look so foolish, subjecting them to public ridicule?

  The ominous voice ebbed, replaced by my own. Before the enraged prelates could leap up the cathedral steps and throttle me, I clasped my hands in humility and bowed before my superiors. “O great fathers of the Church, poor little woman that I am, I have seen a great black fire kindled against you. May the unquenchable flame of the Holy Spirit infuse you so that you walk in charity and wisdom.”

  So ended the sermon that left me staggering and faint. Hiltrud grabbed me around the waist before I could collapse while Volmar shielded us both, drawing us away from the crowd, now rumbling, debating every word they had just heard. My companions drew me into a shadowy side chapel of the cathedral where I could catch my breath.

  “You’re a brave woman.” Volmar spoke gravely, as though he longed to protect me from going too far. “People have been excommunicated for less.”

  I pressed my brow against his shoulder. Like me, Volmar had grown old, his hair as white and wispy as dandelion fluff. But he was still my rock. Through every upheaval, his friendship had never waned.

  “I’m not afraid,” I whispered. “What can they do to one old nun?”

  Epilogue

  Let the Silence Sing

  Rupertsberg, 1179

  THE HARSHEST WINTER in my long memory held us captive in icy stasis. Huddled in my cloak, I shivered over Maximus’s unmarked grave, now further obscured beneath the deep crust of snow. Frigid wind scoured my face as I prayed for the boy, prayed for us all. At this moment the church bells should have been tolling Prime, but they remained mute. A crippling pall hung over Rupertsberg, the choking silence of the crypt, as though our entire community lay dead and buried in that frozen earth.

  Over a year had passed since the prelates of Mainz had laid the interdict on us, the heaviest penalty they could have imposed—a collective excommunication, severing me and my nuns, both at Rupertsberg and at our daughter house in Eibingen, from our divine vocation. We were cast down to nothing, forbidden Mass, the Eucharist, every sacrament. The prelates even banned us from singing the Divine Office—we were only allowed to whisper the psalms behind the closed doors of our cells.

  Father Gottfried, our provost since Volmar went to his eternal rest six years ago, had been ordered back to Disibodenberg. I had written frantic, beseeching letters to Archbishop Christian of Mainz and to Pope Alexander, who was finally back in Rome after the long schism. But neither man would lift the interdict.

  Such punishment, all for one dead boy. I lowered my eyes to the mantle of snow covering Maximus and offered another prayer for the abused young man who had died in my arms. Hiltrud had asked me if it would not be more prudent to surrender the corpse and be received back into the Church. What if you die without salvation, Mother? But I would burn in hell before I sacrificed an innocent boy to those hypocrites—surely he had already suffered enough at their hands. Besides, the prelates were only using his burial here as their excuse. Even if we had not given asylum and Christian burial to our supposed apostate, they would have found some other transgression of mine as the justification to punish me for my insubordination. My superiors had won. They had vanquished me.

  “Mother, come in from the cold before you catch your death!” Guibert of Gembloux appeared at my side, his young face etched in concern.

  It still astonished me that Brother Guibert had elected to stay with us through the scandal of the interdict. As gently as though he were my son of flesh and blood, he took my arm and accompanied me back into the warmth of my parlor where Ancilla tended the fire. She tugged off my cloak and sat me down in my chair. Then Guibert handed me a book I’d never seen before, its vellum pages bound in softest calfskin: Vita Sanctae Hildegardis.

  “I thought this might cheer you,” he said, his dark eyes shining.

  “How hard you have worked, my friend,” I murmured.

  As I leafed through my life story written in his graceful script, a bittersweet chord rose inside me. Now I had come full circle, from my living death in the anchorage to our collective banishment under the interdict. Guibert had sacrificed more than a year of his life to writing the tale of an outcast. The last pages, I observed, remained blank, leaving room for the final details that he could fill in only after my death. So my young friend was committed to abide here until the very end.

  “Guibert, you honor me,” I told him, undone by his goodness. “Far more than I deserve.”

  Before he could reply, a knock sounded on the door. Verena staggered in, her face the color of boiled linen.

  “My dear, what is it?” I crossed the room to clasp her quivering arms.

  “Johanna says you must come to the infirmary at once. It’s Sister Cordula.”

  Cordula lay in her sickbed, her face a grimace of pain until Johanna tipped the draft of sweet oblivion into her mouth, an elixir of poppy seeds and hemlock. Verena held her sister’s hand and wept.

  “Can anything more be done?” I asked Johanna.

  The physician shook her head. “She’s dying, Mother.”

  Cordula had hidden her malady from us for as long as she could, only collapsing when the dolor became too overpowering for even her to ignore. Cancer was gnawing away at her breast. Though we had tried our every remedy from yarrow to mistletoe to violet salve to combat the tumors, nothing had been able to check the devouring disease. We could only pray and offer her opiates to relieve her agonies. Cordula was forty-two, young enough to be my granddaughter. The injustice shattered my heart. My old feud with the prelates had brought this interdict upon us. If anyone should die without the sacraments and risk damnation, it should be me, not Cordula.

  “How can we let her die like this?” Verena clasped my hands. “Oh, Mother, what shall we do?”

  Our church reminded me of a mausoleum, the air stale from the dearth of incense and song. Though I prayed and prayed to find a way
to lead my daughters out of this wasteland, I felt abandoned. Why had God given me this ordeal when I was eighty years old, too broken to fight anymore?

  My knees trembled as I moved toward the stone that marked Volmar’s grave, he who had blessedly gone to God before any of this had unfolded. We had interred our beloved provost in the church transept, in the floor before Saint Rupert’s shrine. Although six years had passed since his death, the loss still rived me. How my soul yearned for his friendship and counsel. What would Volmar have said to see Rupertsberg so disgraced?

  “We are ruined,” I murmured, as though my confidant still lived. “Poor Cordula! If only I could take this away from her.”

  Longing for solace, I whispered the words of a hymn I was forbidden to sing. Of all the privations we endured, giving up the Divine Office was hardest for me, even more so than being denied the sacraments. For seventy-two years, sacred song had set the rhythm of my days. Singing the Psalms of David, my voice twining with those of my daughters as our harmonies rose like incense in an offering to heaven, allowed us to glimpse into paradise restored, the fiery life beating at the center of creation. I was a bride of Christ, not because I wore a Benedictine habit or strove to live according to the Rule, but because, eight times daily, I surrendered myself, body and soul, to the ecstatic chorus.

  Unde, o Salvatrix, que novum lumen

  O Salvatrix, redeeming Lady

  who bore the new light for humanity,

  gather the limbs of your Son

  into celestial harmony.

  Among the devotional songs I had written, this was dearest to my heart. Before the Lady Altar, I contemplated the great mystery of how the Virgin had gathered together the limbs of her slain Son, restoring his broken body. And I reflected how, in performing the miracle of the Eucharist to make the body of Christ manifest in this world, the priest took on the role of Mary, the saving mother of our redemption. Would the sacrament ever pass my lips again?

  Still whispering my hymn, I crossed the transept and entered the chancel and sanctuary. My heart pounding, I stood before the high altar. Midwinter sun poured through the windows to bathe the immaculately white altar cloth. I quaked as the brilliance dissolved into a vision of pure light. Embraced in its nimbus, I felt like a girl instead of a despairing old woman. The church, the entire outer world fell away. Before me I saw Ecclesia, crowned and resplendent, the true inner Church who would never shun my daughters or turn us away. She smiled with such joyful welcome, as though wondering why I had kept myself from her beauty and grace for so long.

  Tears in my eyes, I fell to my knees to behold the radiant man clothed in sapphire blue—Christ, who in dying, destroyed death and shattered hell. Ecclesia stood beside the crucified Christ. With a golden goblet, she received his blood. From heaven descended a flame of ineffable brightness, flooding the chalice with its radiance, just as the sun pierces every living thing with her life-giving rays.

  Ecclesia turned her beautiful face to mine. “Hildegard, bride of Christ.”

  Standing at the high altar, Ecclesia raised her eyes and hands to that overpowering radiance.

  “Behold your eternal marriage feast,” she sang as she offered me the body and blood of my Bridegroom.

  The Light poured down with divine, consecrating power.

  My head ringing like a bell, I paced through the medicinal garden, quietly chanting my canticle. No longer would I allow the prelates and their political maneuvering to come between my daughters and their God. No one can ever destroy the Light or separate us from our source.

  The sun shimmered on the holly bush, its warmth melting off a shroud of snow to reveal the green beneath, the red berries pulsing with life. Lost in my reverence, I collided with Ancilla, who was cutting across the garden with a basket of laundry.

  “Mother!” she cried. “I’ve not seen you smile in so long.” Her face, golden in the sunlight, shone as though in hope. “Do you have good news for us?”

  If the interdict forbade us from singing in the church, I could find no rule against our singing in the infirmary.

  My daughters and I gathered around Cordula’s bed while Guibert looked on, his face as anxious as mine must have been. He was tempted, I knew, to disobey the interdict and give Cordula the last sacraments, even if he risked excommunication himself. But first we would sing for our sister. If Mistress Tengswich of Andernach Abbey still lived, no doubt she would have tutted in dismay to see us in our feast-day garb. Verena, Hiltrud, Wiebke, and the rest were arrayed as regal brides, their diadems adorned with the Lamb in the front and the angels at the side. Consecrated virgins, my daughters were the epiphany of Eve in the garden, the vision of womanhood restored to paradise.

  Before the fall, Adam and Eve’s voices rang out with the sound of every harmony. If they had remained in that state, singing in their joy, evil would have been erased from the world. For the soul is symphonic and music is divine. Angels exulted in constant song whereas Satan lured men and women away from the heavenly chorus. Satan’s silence had ruled this abbey for too long.

  Cordula stared at us through the haze of poppy syrup. I longed to give her peace and assurance that even the interdict could not sever her from God’s love and mercy. Let her hear us sing—sing for her—after fourteen months of forced silence. How could it be a sin to offer hope to a dying woman? We were nuns, prayer was our calling, and the highest form of prayer was song. If we were denied the Holy Office, we would at least sing in praise of Saint Ursula, for our sister was named after one of Ursula’s eleven thousand virgins—Cordula, the last of their number to be slain.

  Sister Waltraud, our precentor, didn’t quite have the nerve to lead us in song since it seemed scandalous, as though this one act of rebellion might invoke an even greater retribution from the prelates.

  As abbess and instigator, it fell upon me. With age, my voice had grown husky and dry, as dark as smoke. So it was with trepidation that I sang the first bar. The others joined in, hesitant and uncertain. Our voices, so long out of practice, were raw as we struggled to find the pure notes—I feared that we sounded like crows. Poor Cordula would think we were howling demons. Then our voices settled, remembering the cadences, reassembling all that had been fractured. Our voices lifted our song to heaven as we sang in praise of Saint Ursula and her virgins. This was no retelling of Jutta’s bruising tale of slaughter, but a hymn of women in love.

  In visione vere fidei

  In a true vision

  Ursula fell in love with the Son of God

  And renounced the world.

  Gazing straight into the sun,

  She cried out to the most beautiful youth, saying:

  How I yearn to come sit with you, Bridegroom,

  At the heavenly wedding feast,

  Running to you by strange paths

  As clouds stream like sapphire in the purest air.

  And after Ursula had spoken,

  The news spread through all nations.

  How naïve the girl is, they cried.

  She does not know what she is saying.

  Our song took on body and shape, cresting like a wave then filling with light as it washed over us. We sang how Ursula was soon joined by her eleven thousand maidens. But Satan and his mortal minions scorned them, and soon the fiery burden of martyrdom fell upon them. When they were murdered, their blood cried out to heaven. All of nature joined the angels in a chorus of praise. Ursula and her virgins became pearls strung upon the Word of God and so they choked the ancient serpent. Mere girls crushed Satan.

  My daughters’ voices, so resonant with beauty, covered my old croaking. We sang as though our harmonies could restore this broken world. As we raised our voices for Cordula, the ecstasy of Caritas, divine love, surged through us all. Let my daughters feel their shackles breaking. No matter what the prelates would decide, our exile ended the instant our song shattered the silence.

  O rubor sanguinis

  O ruby blood, which flowed from on high,

  Touched by
divinity,

  You are the flower that the serpent’s

  Wintry breath never wounded.

  My heart beat in pure joy when I saw the rapture on Cordula’s face, the tears in her eyes, her lips moving silently in the shape of the lyrics she adored.

  “Sisters,” she whispered. “I see him coming. My Bridegroom has come to take me home.”

  Something shifted that day. Our canticles broke the dark and crippling enchantment that had befallen Rupertsberg. Stagnant waters now flowed, running pure and clear. The miracle was how our very song transformed our banishment into harmony and belonging.

  No interdict could separate us from this whirling cosmos, the wheel of the sacred year, the tide of seasons bringing their procession of holy days. We were still part of it, caught up in that great dance, the round of creation. We offered our songs to the universe, which expanded to receive them.

  As my daughters prayed around Cordula’s bed, an invisible cord drew me out into the snowy garden, glowing in silvery luminescence under the rising full moon. I lifted my eyes to see two brilliant streaks of light arching across the heavens. What marvel was this—twin comets? Soon the others joined me to watch the unfolding wonder. Verena held Cordula so she could look out the window.

  Before our eyes, those two arcs widened into shimmering roads, stretching to the four corners of the earth. At the axis where the two arcs met, a cross blazed, as red as dawn. Fiery light bathed the whole of Rupertsberg. And it was not just my vision, for they saw it, too, my daughters and Guibert, my son, who cried out, their voices ringing in the air.

  Afterword