At forty-two, St. Hildegard begins a book she cannot write

DISIBODENBERG, Rhineland, 1141 AD — Two people are at work in one room of the Benedictine monastery on the mount of St. Disibod. Saint Hildegard, who is forty-two and was never taught to write, speaks. Volmar, a monk of the house, holds the pen. Between them, this year, they have begun a book that sets down what she sees. She came to it only after refusing the work so long that she fell ill and could not get out of bed.

St. Hildegard is magistra of the women’s community here — their prioress, and not an abbess. The women live inside a men’s monastery and under its abbot, so she has no house of her own and no standing to publish anything on her own account; in everything she does she waits on the abbot’s word. Against that she had a command, given her this year in a vision, to set down what she saw and heard and to hand it over to the Church to be read. She needed two things: permission, and a hand that could spell. Abbot Kuno gave both, and ordered a monk of the house to put in writing whatever she related.

The book is to be called Scivias, short for scito vias Domini (know the ways of the Lord). Volmar is a sober, chaste and learned monk, and he agreed to the work willingly. His part is to revise: St. Hildegard’s words come out plain and unpolished, and he puts them into a more fitting style. Richardis von Stade, one of the sisters, takes down dictation as well, and other sisters help often.

Her Latin goes only so far, and she says exactly where it stops. She was taught to read and sing the Latin psalms, enough for the chanting of the Divine Office, and never taught to write. In the preface to the book she says that she understood what the psalter and the gospels meant, but could not parse their words, break them into syllables, or tell one grammatical case or tense from another.

St. Hildegard was eight years old when she was given into the care of Jutta of Spanheim. Jutta was a count’s daughter who had shut herself into a cell under the strictest enclosure beside the monastery. She taught the girls in her charge as though they were her daughters, and taught St. Hildegard to play the psaltery. Noble families brought more daughters and endowed the place with vineyards and estates, so that a community of women grew up inside the men’s house.

St. Hildegard had been seeing visions since her earliest years. Until she was fifteen she saw a great deal and said a great deal, but out of modesty and fear of what people would say she did not dare tell anyone what vision was fixed in her soul. She received the habit of St. Benedict and made her profession. In 1136 AD, when Jutta died, the sisters chose St. Hildegard to take her place.

Then, this year, the light came. She gives the date: the 1141st year of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, when she was forty-two years old. A fiery light of the greatest brilliance came out of an opened heaven. It went through her whole brain and set her heart and her breast burning — velut flamma, non tamen ardens, sed calens (like a flame that does not burn but warms). A voice told her not to delay in writing down whatever she saw or heard from then on, and to hand what was revealed to her over to the Church. The command came to her not in a dream at night but with her reason awake and open. The order to publish was the new thing.

She refused it. In the preface she names what held her back — doubt, the bad opinion of others, and the different things people say — and says it was not stubbornness. She had no doubt where the visions came from; she dreaded what people would think and say. The voice kept at her, urging, rebuking and threatening. Then she fell ill and could not raise herself from the bed. She told Volmar, who was her spiritual director as well as her scribe, and through him she told Abbot Kuno what she had been commanded. The abbot told her to begin. She put her hand to the writing, and the sickness left her as she did it.

The book took ten years of hard work. The records do not agree on the year it was finished: 1150 or 1151 AD.

In the same preface, St. Hildegard says where the words come from. She wrote: “Et dixi et scripsi haec, non secundum adinventionem cordis mei, aut ullius hominis, sed ut ea in coelestibus vidi, audivi et percepi, per secreta mysteria Dei.” (And I have spoken and written these things not out of the invention of my own heart, nor of any other person’s, but as I saw, heard and perceived them in heavenly places, through the hidden mysteries of God.)