Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (34 page)

As her eyes searched mine, I longed to say so much, but the words wouldn’t come, only our shared tears for Cara. How my heart beat for her, beacon of my soul, who had been my earthly companion as I had plunged to the depths and then struggled toward the heights. Her angel presence enveloped me on this night of nights, on this clear green summit crowned in blossoming apple trees, when my vision was made real, manifest and alive.

“May you live long, Hildegard.” The margravine drew me into a fierce embrace. “Endure. Your world needs you in it.”

S
OON AFTER THE
triumph of Rupertsberg’s consecration, our world fell apart. My great patrons, Pope Eugenius and Bernard of Clairvaux passed on. Barbarossa rose to become emperor, as my brother had foreseen, and punished Archbishop Heinrich for opposing him by stripping him of his office and replacing him with Arnold, his slavering sycophant. Heinrich became a Cistercian monk and soon died. Later the emperor’s own henchmen murdered Arnold. Then came the papal schism, with Barbarossa raising one antipope after another. He sacked monasteries, burning them to the ground. But not Rupertsberg, for I had done my brother’s bidding and prophesied Barbarossa’s future, and so the fiery warlord left us in peace and even suffered my furious letters decrying his foul deeds.

Meanwhile, the Church, which should have shone forth with the light of justice, festered in every corruption. Cardinals fought one another like village bullies while bishops amassed fortunes buying and selling religious offices for gold. Village priests, now forbidden to marry, took concubines and begat bastards.

Priests and bishops were meant to fulfill a divine office, serving as intermediaries between the laity and God. But how could people hope to find salvation if those meant to serve them were steeped in vice? Ordinary parishioners abandoned the Church in droves to join the Cathari, who called themselves the True Christians. Instead of attempting to woo back the lost flock, the men who were meant to be shepherds merely burned those poor souls as heretics. Evil begat evil. It seemed as though the apocalypse flamed on the horizon.

No man arose to speak out against such abomination. None dared fill the shoes of the dead Archbishop Heinrich or the sainted Bernard of Clairvaux who had risked their lives to defend the Jews of Mainz. Any man who rebuked either Church or emperor risked making himself a martyr, for both sides relied on the existing corruption as their bedrock. My own brother Rorich was terrified to speak out. Soon after Arnold’s murder, he grew ill and died, as though his heart was too broken to live anymore.

What could I do to mend my broken world? God had given me the visions for a reason. More than ever before, I needed to speak and write what I saw and heard, be God’s sibyl. If I gave public sermons condemning this iniquity masquerading as religion, people would listen, if only for the novelty of hearing an old nun preach. And thus it fell upon me, woman though I was, to speak out in a mighty voice and castigate the men who had failed in their duty. Only a woman might stand a chance to get away with this. If no one else had the courage or will, then let it be me. Even if I paid for it with my life. Come what may, no matter what I risked or lost, let me be the message bearer, God’s harp.

Canon law forbade women to preach, but that did not hinder me. Driven by the inner calling, I hastened across the German lands, traveling to Trier, Metz, Würzburg, Bamberg, and Cologne.

Those years of travel, those long hours in the saddle and on barges, blurred into one moment—the morning in 1170 when I, a woman of seventy-two years, stood on the steps of Cologne Cathedral and lifted my voice to be heard by the assembled prelates. The air blackened with smoke and thickened with the stench of nine Cathari, sentenced to burn to death at the stake. Among them was a woman condemned for preaching the Gospel of Saint John. Yet there I was, a woman preaching. One withered crone before that sea of men. I still remember every word of my sermon, that blistering homily that brought me both fame and the prelates’ lifelong enmity.

As the heretics burned on the other side of the cathedral square, their cries filling the air like the wails of the damned, I stared into the faces of bishops and canons, friars and deacons. Behind them, townspeople pressed forward to gawp at me.

Before I could lose courage, my inner sight opened, allowing me to forget myself. The Living Light infused me.

“In a true vision,” I said, pitching my voice to pierce through the crowd’s chatter, their skepticism and disapproval, “I beheld a Lady so beautiful that no man could comprehend her. In stature she reached from earth to highest heaven.”

Their eyes followed my arms as I lifted them toward the cathedral spires.

“Her face shone with indescribable radiance. She was clad in whitest silk. Her mantle was set with emeralds, sapphires, and pearls. Her shoes were made of onyx.”

The prelates’ faces softened like dough in my hands, as though the transports of my revelation lifted them to a place where they could cast from their minds the tortured screams of the Cathari on the pyre. But this was not my purpose—I preached for the very sake of those poor souls, for if the men I saw before me had fulfilled their godly office, those people might have never been cast out and burned.

“I saw that the Lady’s face was besmirched with filth. Her lovely gown was ripped to tatters. Her cloak was ragged and her shoes were soiled.”

My audience recoiled.

“The Lady, whose name is Ecclesia, the Mother Church, cried out in a mournful voice.” Here something much greater than myself issued from my mouth. The voice came from on high—I was merely the instrument. “The priests who were meant to nurture me, to make my face glow like dawn, my clothes flash like the sun, have instead smeared me in excrement. They have rent my gown, blackened my cloak, soiled my shoes. They have failed me miserably.”

The prelates’ faces went white, some in shock, others in derision. But the lay people behind them now tried to elbow their way to the front, eager to hear an elderly nun chastise these high-ranking men. The voice coming out of me rose like a falcon, full of an unstoppable power that was not my own.

“This is the way they soil me: they handle the Host, the body and blood of my Bridegroom, while they are defiled by lust, poisoned with fornication and adultery, corrupted by the buying and selling of holy offices. They encompass my Bridegroom’s body and blood with filth, like someone putting a precious child in the muck among the swine.”

Some of the prelates in front appeared so offended that their bodies twisted, as though they intended to stomp away and not suffer this homily another second, but the press of the crowd trapped them, forcing them to hear me out until the bitter end. The voice issuing forth from me stormed, filling my audience with something that resembled terror.

“Let heaven rain down calamity on these sinful men! Let the abyss tremble. O you priests! You have neglected me, and now the princes of earth and the common folk alike shall rise up against you. They shall take away your property and riches because you have made a mockery of your holy office. They will say: ‘Let us drive these adulterers and thieves from the Church.’”

The prelates’ faces seemed to freeze in panic as they found themselves cordoned in by that mass of bodies, the lay people who eyed them as if they would indeed rise up to overthrow them. For my message was both apocalyptic and as stark as it could be—the churchmen must reform or be toppled from their seats of power. Some of the men glared at me with blazing, undisguised hatred. How dare I make them look so foolish, subjecting them to public ridicule?

The ominous voice ebbed, replaced by my own. Before the enraged prelates could leap up the cathedral steps and throttle me, I clasped my hands in humility and bowed before my superiors. “O great fathers of the Church, poor little woman that I am, I have seen a great black fire kindled against you. May the unquenchable flame of the Holy Spirit infuse you so that you walk in charity and wisdom.”

So ended the sermon that left me staggering and faint. Hiltrud grabbed me around the waist before I could collapse while Volmar shielded us both, drawing us away from the crowd, now rumbling, debating every word they had just heard. My companions drew me into a shadowy side chapel of the cathedral where I could catch my breath.

“You’re a brave woman.” Volmar spoke gravely, as though he longed to protect me from going too far. “People have been excommunicated for less.”

I pressed my brow against his shoulder. Like me, Volmar had grown old, his hair as white and wispy as dandelion fluff. But he was still my rock. Through every upheaval, his friendship had never waned.

“I’m not afraid,” I whispered. “What can they do to one old nun?”

Let the Silence Sing

T
HE HARSHEST WINTER
in my long memory held us captive in icy stasis. Huddled in my cloak, I shivered over Maximus’s unmarked grave, now further obscured beneath the deep crust of snow. Frigid wind scoured my face as I prayed for the boy, prayed for us all. At this moment the church bells should have been tolling Prime, but they remained mute. A crippling pall hung over Rupertsberg, the choking silence of the crypt, as though our entire community lay dead and buried in that frozen earth.

Over a year had passed since the prelates of Mainz had laid the interdict on us, the heaviest penalty they could have imposed—a collective excommunication, severing me and my nuns, both at Rupertsberg and at our daughter house in Eibingen, from our divine vocation. We were cast down to nothing, forbidden Mass, the Eucharist, every sacrament. The prelates even banned us from singing the Divine Office—we were only allowed to whisper the psalms behind the closed doors of our cells.

Father Gottfried, our provost since Volmar went to his eternal rest six years ago, had been ordered back to Disibodenberg. I had written frantic, beseeching letters to Archbishop Christian of Mainz and to Pope Alexander, who was finally back in Rome after the long schism. But neither man would lift the interdict.

Such punishment, all for one dead boy. I lowered my eyes to the mantle of snow covering Maximus and offered another prayer for the abused young man who had died in my arms. Hiltrud had asked me if it would not be more prudent to surrender the corpse and be received back into the Church.
What if you die without salvation, Mother?
But I would burn in hell before I sacrificed an innocent boy to those hypocrites—surely he had already suffered enough at their hands. Besides, the prelates were only using his burial here as their excuse. Even if we had not given asylum and Christian burial to our supposed apostate, they would have found some other transgression of mine as the justification to punish me for my insubordination. My superiors had won. They had vanquished me.

“Mother, come in from the cold before you catch your death!” Guibert of Gembloux appeared at my side, his young face etched in concern.

It still astonished me that Brother Guibert had elected to stay with us through the scandal of the interdict. As gently as though he were my son of flesh and blood, he took my arm and accompanied me back into the warmth of my parlor where Ancilla tended the fire. She tugged off my cloak and sat me down in my chair. Then Guibert handed me a book I’d never seen before, its vellum pages bound in softest calfskin:
Vita Sanctae Hildegardis.

“I thought this might cheer you,” he said, his dark eyes shining.

“How hard you have worked, my friend,” I murmured.

As I leafed through my life story written in his graceful script, a bittersweet chord rose inside me. Now I had come full circle, from my living death in the anchorage to our collective banishment under the interdict. Guibert had sacrificed more than a year of his life to writing the tale of an outcast. The last pages, I observed, remained blank, leaving room for the final details that he could fill in only after my death. So my young friend was committed to abide here until the very end.

“Guibert, you honor me,” I told him, undone by his goodness. “Far more than I deserve.”

Before he could reply, a knock sounded on the door. Verena staggered in, her face the color of boiled linen.

“My dear, what is it?” I crossed the room to clasp her quivering arms.

“Johanna says you must come to the infirmary at once. It’s Sister Cordula.”

Cordula lay in her sickbed, her face a grimace of pain until Johanna tipped the draft of sweet oblivion into her mouth, an elixir of poppy seeds and hemlock. Verena held her sister’s hand and wept.

“Can anything more be done?” I asked Johanna.

The physician shook her head. “She’s dying, Mother.”

Cordula had hidden her malady from us for as long as she could, only collapsing when the dolor became too overpowering for even her to ignore. Cancer was gnawing away at her breast. Though we had tried our every remedy from yarrow to mistletoe to violet salve to combat the tumors, nothing had been able to check the devouring disease. We could only pray and offer her opiates to relieve her agonies. Cordula was forty-two, young enough to be my granddaughter. The injustice shattered my heart. My old feud with the prelates had brought this interdict upon us. If anyone should die without the sacraments and risk damnation, it should be me, not Cordula.

“How can we let her die like this?” Verena clasped my hands. “Oh, Mother, what shall we do?”

Our church reminded me of a mausoleum, the air stale from the dearth of incense and song. Though I prayed and prayed to find a way to lead my daughters out of this wasteland, I felt abandoned. Why had God given me this ordeal when I was eighty years old, too broken to fight anymore?

My knees trembled as I moved toward the stone that marked Volmar’s grave, he who had blessedly gone to God before any of this had unfolded. We had interred our beloved provost in the church transept, in the floor before Saint Rupert’s shrine. Although six years had passed since his death, the loss still rived me. How my soul yearned for his friendship and counsel. What would Volmar have said to see Rupertsberg so disgraced?