One grave, and every nun on the hill stopped singing

RUPERTSBERG, near Bingen, this year, 1178 AD — The nuns of Rupertsberg are not singing. Not a hymn, not a psalm, not one line of the music they used to sing together every day. Churchmen at Mainz, up the Rhine, ordered the silence. It is a punishment. What the nuns had done was let a young man be buried in their churchyard.

Rupertsberg is a convent on a hill above the Rhine, near the town of Bingen. The nun in charge is Saint Hildegard of Bingen, and she is eighty. She started the place about thirty years ago and moved in with twenty nuns. The old accounts don’t agree on when the trouble began. One puts it in this year. Another puts it in the last year of her life.

The man in the grave

A young man died, and his own priest buried him in the convent’s churchyard. Nobody objected. The whole town of Bingen walked behind him to the grave. Before he died he had confessed his sins, been anointed and received Communion. Those three are the sacraments the Church gives at the end of a person’s life.

Years earlier, though, the Church had punished him and shut him out. The old accounts don’t say what he had done, and they don’t give his name. That punishment had been lifted long before he died.

Their archbishop was away in Italy. The churchmen running the church around Mainz said the man was shut out all the same. A man like that could not lie in blessed ground, they said. So they ordered St. Hildegard to have him dug up and carried out of the churchyard. Then they put the convent under an interdict.

She refused. The man had confessed his sins, been anointed and received Communion, she said. Nobody had objected when he was buried. Then she made the sign of the cross over the grave with her staff. After that nobody could find it.

What the punishment took away

The punishment fell on the whole house, not on any one nun. While it lasts, everyone in that place is cut off from the sacraments. Nobody there may go to Communion. The singing in church stops. In a vision, St. Hildegard heard that her nuns were not at fault for letting the man be buried there.

She never opened the grave. But she did not fight the silence. She wrote that she and her sisters had stopped singing. They had stopped going to Communion too, so that they were not going against Mainz in all things.

The songs that stopped

Every day, St. Hildegard and her sisters sang the hours. The hours are the prayers and psalms that nuns sing together at set times through the day. Under the interdict they have gone on praying the hours anyway. They read the words out instead of singing them.

St. Hildegard had written 77 chants for the Church’s services. She wrote each one for a day in the Church’s year. One was for St. Rupert’s day in May. One was for the Holy Innocents in December. A whole set was for St. Ursula in October.

St. Hildegard has never learned to write. Not one word. As a girl she was taught to read the Latin psalms and to sing them. That was enough to chant in church. Her lessons went no further. St. Hildegard said this about her own schooling: “I had scarcely any knowledge of letters. An uneducated woman had taught me.” Her books were made by dictation. She said the words out loud, and the monk Volmar wrote them down. Music she was never taught at all. She said she composed and sang chant “without being taught by anyone”.

The silence did not end quickly. Archbishop Christian of Mainz came home from a council at Rome. Then his own letters arrived at Rupertsberg, forbidding the church services again. The ban on the singing was lifted a few months before St. Hildegard died.