St. Hildegard refuses to open a grave, and Mainz silences her nuns

RUPERTSBERG, near Bingen, this year, 1178 AD — The churchmen governing the archdiocese of Mainz ordered the abbess of Rupertsberg to have a young man’s body taken out of her cemetery. St. Hildegard, who is eighty, refused. They answered by laying her monastery under interdict, and since then the nuns on the hill above the Rhine have gone without Communion and without the sung Office that had filled their day.

St. Hildegard built the house about thirty years ago out of derelict ruins around the tomb of St. Rupert, above the point where the Nahe runs into the Rhine opposite Bingen. She has governed it ever since. The administrators wanted the body out of consecrated ground; she wanted the grave left where it lay.

An interdict falls on a place and on everyone in it, not on the one person who caused the quarrel. By its terms the whole convent was to stop singing the divine praises and stop receiving Communion. The chapter of Mainz imposed it, and Archbishop Christian of Mainz confirmed it from Italy. The emperor had forced Christian into the see during his quarrel with Pope Alexander III. The emperor submitted last year, and Pope Alexander has confirmed Christian as the lawful archbishop of Mainz.

The record gives the dead man no name. He had been bound by ecclesiastical censures at some earlier point, and had been absolved of them long before he died. Before his death he confessed his sins, was anointed and received Communion. His own priest buried him in the cemetery of St. Rupert’s, and nobody objected at the time. By St. Hildegard’s own account, the people of Bingen walked in the funeral procession.

The order to take him up again came a few days after the burial. St. Hildegard wrote that the order terrified her. She looked to the true Light, and with waking eyes she saw what would follow if the body were carried out as commanded: “a terrible and lamentable danger would come upon us like a dark cloud before a threatening thunderstorm.” She did not open the grave. She signed it with her abbess’s staff in the sign of the cross, and after that no one could find the place of it.

Nor did she simply defy Mainz. She wrote that she would not have her refusal look like an injustice done “out of feminine harshness” to the sacraments the man had been given while he was alive. So as not to be wholly disobedient, the nuns stopped singing the divine praises and stopped receiving Communion. Until then they had received it almost every month. They have kept the hours since by reading them instead of singing them.

In the distress that followed, she wrote, she heard words in a vision: “It is improper for you to obey human words ordering you to abandon the sacraments of the Garment of the Word of God, Who, born virginally of the Virgin Mary, is your salvation. Still, it is incumbent upon you to seek permission to participate in the sacraments from those prelates who laid the obligation of obedience upon you.” She heard in the same vision that she had been at fault. She should have gone to the administrators in person, humbly, and asked for that permission.

Then she wrote to the prelates of Mainz. The letter opens on the grave — “a man buried without any objection, with his own priest officiating” — but most of it is about singing. She set out what the instruments of the psalmist are for: through their form and quality, and through the meaning of the words sung with them, “those who hear might be taught, as we said above, about inward things.” She traced praise back to Adam. Before he sinned his voice had “the sweetness of all musical harmony,” and in paradise he lost that angelic voice. The chant her nuns have stopped singing includes her own compositions, each of them written for a particular day or celebration of the Church’s calendar. She has written that she composed and sang them “without being taught by anyone, since I had never studied neumes or any chant at all.”

The letter ends with a warning to the men who silenced her. A prelate must sift the grounds for such a sentence with the greatest care, she wrote, before it “closes the mouth of any church singing praises to God” or suspends it from the sacraments. He must be certain he is moved by zeal for God’s justice and not by anger or a wish for revenge. Those who impose silence on a church without just cause, she wrote, “will lose their place among the chorus of angels, unless they have amended their lives through true penitence and humble restitution.”

The letter did not settle it. Archbishop Christian came back from the synod at Rome, and his own letters reached Rupertsberg through the same administrators, forbidding the divine offices again. St. Hildegard wrote to the archbishop that she had had the greatest confidence in his mercy. She trusted that he would never have sent those letters if he had known the truth of the matter.