Hildegarde of Bingen (Creationtide 2 Year A)

May the God who laid the foundations of the earth, who commands the morning and gives the dawn its place, open our hearts to the wonder of creation. Amen.

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This week the old oak trees here at St Luke’s have come out in their spring green. It is one of those imperceptible shifts that seems to arrive overnight every year – suddenly, astonishingly, everything is different. The whole place seems to have greened.

As we continue to reflect on Creation through these weeks of September, with Christians around the world, it seems impossible to pass by Hildegarde of Bingen, one of the great creation-centred mystics and theologians of the Western church, whose feast day falls on 17 September.

Hildegarde was a polymath, a hugely prolific abbess of a Benedictine abbey – an influential preacher, healer, scientist, composer, theologian, artist, author and pastor. In all these fields she was ahead of her time, making unprecedented achievements for a woman of the 12th century. She was an outspoken critic of political and church corruption.

In 2012, more than eight centuries after her death, Pope Benedict XVI declared her a Doctor of the Church, a rare title given to saints whose teaching has particular significance for the life of the Church. Of the 38 Doctors of the Church, only four are women.

Hildegarde coined the Latin term viriditas, one of the cornerstones of her theology – by this she means the greening power or vitality of God in all of creation. “There is a power that has been since all eternity, and that force and potentiality is green!” she once wrote.

For Hildegarde, every flower and stone bore the trace of divine life. Creation revealed the invisible Creator; the greenness and vitality of the world spoke of the life of God flowing through it.

There is something here that resonates deeply with the Wisdom we heard speaking in Proverbs this morning: present with God before the beginning of the earth, there when the heavens were established, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race. For Hildegarde, creation is not inert matter. It is alive with the wisdom and delight of its Creator.

She celebrated the sacred in nature, a highly relevant perspective for us today as Christians in the face of the destruction of natural habitats and the climate crisis. In the voice of God, Hildegarde wrote:

“I, the fiery life of divine essence,
am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows,
I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon and stars
… I awaken everything to life.”

Hildegarde of Bingen was born in 1098 in Germany, the youngest of ten children. Very early in life she was given to the church by her parents as a gift to God, a kind of tithe. Though she had luminous visions since her earliest childhood, she didn’t dare speak of them for many years. She served her order faithfully. Eventually she was elected abbess, and then five years later, at the age of 42, Hildegarde received a call to “proclaim and write” the visions she had been receiving for some time.

“When I was forty-two years and seven months old,” she wrote, “Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch.”

After overcoming an initial reluctance, Hildegarde began to write her first book, the Scivias – “Know the Ways [of the Lord].” She illustrated the work with her own drawings. She received official recognition from Pope Eugenius III, and among her champions was Bernard of Clairvaux, the immensely influential 12th-century reformer to whom Hildegarde had written for counsel. Thanks to this growing respect and support from some of the most powerful leaders of the church of her day, she was able to write and preach without incurring the usual sanctions against women.

The Scivias was followed by other major theological works, writings on medicine and the natural world, commentaries, letters and a remarkable body of original liturgical music. She also wrote what is generally regarded as the earliest surviving morality play. In the midst of this intense activity, she also established two monasteries for women.

Her interest in medicine, healing and human wellbeing was grounded in a holistic understanding of humanity as part of Creation. She understood the human person as a microcosm within the macrocosm of the universe: our wellbeing is bound up with the wellbeing of the whole, and healing involved restoring balance and harmony.

Hildegarde’s approach to health – and this has a very contemporary resonance – included things like rest, herbal remedies, steam baths and proper diet. She also believed that beer was most wholesome and pleasing to God!

Always staunchly orthodox, despite the unconventional style and imagery of her writings, she thundered against the heresy and corruption in the church of her era that she saw “in head and members”. Concern for reform led her, remarkably for a woman of her time, to undertake extended preaching tours throughout Germany.

During her lifetime Hildegarde achieved fame as a visionary, prophet and healer. Pilgrims came to her in search of spiritual counsel, and people across Europe wrote to her for advice, including political and church leaders.

Even late in life she remained a fierce champion of those in need. At one point, she and her nuns were subject to an interdict – a collective excommunication by church authorities – because it was alleged they had allowed an apostate, someone who had rejected their faith, to be buried in their churchyard.

When they heard that church authorities were coming to disinter the individual, Hildegarde and her nuns went out into the churchyard, said prayers over all the graves, and then removed all the gravestones so that none of the graves could be identified.

The interdict was lifted only a few months before her death.

Hildegarde died in 1179 at the age of eighty-one, after a life marked by chronic and often excruciating illness as well as inexhaustible energy. She immediately became the object of a cult and was widely celebrated for miracles. In recent decades both her writings and her music have been rediscovered and made more widely available.

It is deeply important for us to hear voices from the Christian tradition like Hildegarde, who have brought the doctrine of Creation to life with extraordinary vibrancy. Especially the sense of Creation as an expression of the life and energy of the Creating God.

In Hildegarde’s own words,

“O, You who are ever
giving life to all life,
moving all creatures,
root of all things,
washing them clean,
wiping out their mistakes,
healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
luminous, wonderful,
awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.”

As the season turns now, while around us the consequences of a changing climate and the degradation of the natural world become increasingly difficult to ignore, we give thanks for Hildegarde’s brilliant vision of Creation: a vision that combines charismatic jubilation with prophetic indignation, a longing for life in its fullness with a quest for social justice.

We pray that we would be brought alive to understand our place within her holistic vision of divine wisdom, uniting God’s Creation and humanity in one living, breathing world, all of it infused with viriditas – the greening vitality of God in Creation.

I close with a prayer of Hildegarde’s about our place in this world…

“O Beloved,
your way of knowing is amazing!
The way you recognize every creature
even before it appears.
The way you gaze into the face
of every human being
and see all your works gazing back at you.
O what a miracle
to be awake inside your breathing.”

Amen.