St. Hildegard writes a sung play in which Virtues fight the Devil

DISIBODENBERG, 1136 AD — Saint Hildegard of Bingen has written a play to be sung. Fifteen Virtues and the Devil contend over a single Soul. The Soul asks the Virtues for the shining robe she lost and is clothed in it, then finds she cannot carry it and goes over to the Devil.

St. Hildegard is the magistra (the mistress of the community) of the women at Disibodenberg, a community of nuns that has grown up inside a men’s Benedictine monastery on the mount where the Nahe meets the Glan. The sisters chose her for the office this year, after her teacher Jutta of Spanheim died; she refused it, and the abbot ordered her to take it. Her music is made for singing inside that community. The play is going down on the page alongside her book of the visions, the Scivias. She says she made and sang chant “without being taught by anyone, since I had never studied neumes or any chant at all.”

The play opens with the Patriarchs and the Prophets, asking a question out of Isaiah: “Who are these that fly like clouds, and like doves to their windows?” The Virtues answer them, and a chorus of souls still living in their bodies takes up the complaint after. Those souls sing that they are exiles, that they should have been daughters of a king, and that through Adam’s fall they lost the inheritance that should have been theirs. One soul steps out of that chorus and asks for the vestem praeclaram (the shining robe) that was hers at her making, and calls on all the Virtues to help her wear it. They answer that they will go to war at her side, because she is a king’s daughter.

Then the Soul gives way. She sings of the weight she is carrying: “O gravis labor, et o durum pondus quod habeo… quia nimis grave mihi est contra carnem pugnare” — “What heavy work, and what a hard weight I am carrying… because fighting against the flesh is too much for me.” The Virtues tell the Soul she is to overcome the Devil in their company. The Soul answers that she does not know what to do or where to run, and that she cannot carry through what she has been clothed in: “Certe illud volo abjicere” — “I mean to throw it off.” She casts it off and runs to the world. The Devil is waiting for her: “Fool, fool, what good is all this work to you? Look at the world, and it will take you in its arms and do you great honour.”

The fifteen Virtues name themselves one at a time, each answered in chorus by the rest, and Humility speaks first: “Ego humilitas, regina virtutum” (I am Humility, the queen of the Virtues).

The Virtues mourn the Soul who has gone: “Oh, oh, let us Virtues beat our breasts and mourn, because the Lord’s sheep has run away from life.” Then the Soul comes back and says what she is: “I am a sinner, I ran away from life, I am full of open sores, and I am coming to you so that you will hold out to me the shield of redemption.” Humility tells the other Virtues to take the sinner in, weeping and scarred as she is, and bring her to Humility.

The Devil speaks when the Soul comes back. The Soul had embraced him once, the Devil says, and he had led her away. The Soul’s return shames the Devil, and he tells her he will throw her down in the fight. The Soul answers that she found every one of the Devil’s ways evil, ran from him, and is fighting him now. Humility calls on Victory, who beat the Devil once in heaven: “Curre cum militibus tuis, et omnes ligate diabolum hunc” — “Run with your soldiers, all of you, and tie this devil up.” They do it, and the Virtues sing praise to Christ, the king of the angels. Bound, the Devil is still talking. Chastity tells the Devil she has crushed his head. The Devil jeers back that Chastity’s womb is empty. Chastity answers in one line: “I brought forward one man, and by being born he gathers the human race to himself against you.”

The last voice in the play is the Son of God, speaking to his Father: “Pater, vide, vulnera mea tibi ostendo. Ergo nunc, omnes homines, genua vestra ad patrem vestrum flectite, ut vobis manum suam porrigat” — “Father, look: I am showing you my wounds. So now, all of you, bend your knees to your Father, and he will hold his hand out to you.”

St. Hildegard has been writing music for the feasts in these years as well. In the music for St. Ursula and the virgin martyrs killed at Cologne, St. Ursula tells the Son of God why she is going. She has longed to come to him and sit with him at the wedding in heaven: “per alienam viam ad te currens, velut nubes quae in purissimo aere currit similis sapphiro” — “running to you by a road that is not my own, like a cloud that runs in the purest air, like sapphire.” The peoples who hear St. Ursula answer: “Innocentia puellaris ignorantiae nescit quid dicit” — “The innocence of a girl’s ignorance does not know what it is saying.”