Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (35 page)

“We are ruined,” I murmured, as though my confidant still lived. “Poor Cordula! If only I could take this away from her.”

Longing for solace, I whispered the words of a hymn I was forbidden to sing. Of all the privations we endured, giving up the Divine Office was hardest for me, even more so than being denied the sacraments. For seventy-two years, sacred song had set the rhythm of my days. Singing the Psalms of David, my voice twining with those of my daughters as our harmonies rose like incense in an offering to heaven, allowed us to glimpse into paradise restored, the fiery life beating at the center of creation. I was a bride of Christ, not because I wore a Benedictine habit or strove to live according to the Rule, but because, eight times daily, I surrendered myself, body and soul, to the ecstatic chorus.

Unde, o Salvatrix, que novum lumen
O Salvatrix, redeeming Lady
who bore the new light for humanity,
gather the limbs of your Son
into celestial harmony.

Among the devotional songs I had written, this was dearest to my heart. Before the Lady Altar, I contemplated the great mystery of how the Virgin had gathered together the limbs of her slain Son, restoring his broken body. And I reflected how, in performing the miracle of the Eucharist to make the body of Christ manifest in this world, the priest took on the role of Mary, the saving mother of our redemption. Would the sacrament ever pass my lips again?

Still whispering my hymn, I crossed the transept and entered the chancel and sanctuary. My heart pounding, I stood before the high altar. Midwinter sun poured through the windows to bathe the immaculately white altar cloth. I quaked as the brilliance dissolved into a vision of pure light. Embraced in its nimbus, I felt like a girl instead of a despairing old woman. The church, the entire outer world fell away. Before me I saw Ecclesia, crowned and resplendent, the true inner Church who would never shun my daughters or turn us away. She smiled with such joyful welcome, as though wondering why I had kept myself from her beauty and grace for so long.

Tears in my eyes, I fell to my knees to behold the radiant man clothed in sapphire blue—Christ, who in dying, destroyed death and shattered hell. Ecclesia stood beside the crucified Christ. With a golden goblet, she received his blood. From heaven descended a flame of ineffable brightness, flooding the chalice with its radiance, just as the sun pierces every living thing with her life-giving rays.

Ecclesia turned her beautiful face to mine. “Hildegard, bride of Christ.”

Standing at the high altar, Ecclesia raised her eyes and hands to that overpowering radiance.

“Behold your eternal marriage feast,” she sang as she offered me the body and blood of my Bridegroom.

The Light poured down with divine, consecrating power.

My head ringing like a bell, I paced through the medicinal garden, quietly chanting my canticle. No longer would I allow the prelates and their political maneuvering to come between my daughters and their God.
No one can ever destroy the Light or separate us from our source.

The sun shimmered on the holly bush, its warmth melting off a shroud of snow to reveal the green beneath, the red berries pulsing with life. Lost in my reverence, I collided with Ancilla, who was cutting across the garden with a basket of laundry.

“Mother!” she cried. “I’ve not seen you smile in so long.” Her face, golden in the sunlight, shone as though in hope. “Do you have good news for us?”

If the interdict forbade us from singing in the church, I could find no rule against our singing in the infirmary.

My daughters and I gathered around Cordula’s bed while Guibert looked on, his face as anxious as mine must have been. He was tempted, I knew, to disobey the interdict and give Cordula the last sacraments, even if he risked excommunication himself. But first we would sing for our sister. If Mistress Tengswich of Andernach Abbey still lived, no doubt she would have tutted in dismay to see us in our feast-day garb. Verena, Hiltrud, Wiebke, and the rest were arrayed as regal brides, their diadems adorned with the Lamb in the front and the angels at the side. Consecrated virgins, my daughters were the epiphany of Eve in the garden, the vision of womanhood restored to paradise.

Before the fall, Adam and Eve’s voices rang out with the sound of every harmony. If they had remained in that state, singing in their joy, evil would have been erased from the world. For the soul is symphonic and music is divine. Angels exulted in constant song whereas Satan lured men and women away from the heavenly chorus. Satan’s silence had ruled this abbey for too long.

Cordula stared at us through the haze of poppy syrup. I longed to give her peace and assurance that even the interdict could not sever her from God’s love and mercy. Let her hear us sing—sing for
her—
after fourteen months of forced silence. How could it be a sin to offer hope to a dying woman? We were nuns, prayer was our calling, and the highest form of prayer was song. If we were denied the Holy Office, we would at least sing in praise of Saint Ursula, for our sister was named after one of Ursula’s eleven thousand virgins—Cordula, the last of their number to be slain.

Sister Waltraud, our precentor, didn’t quite have the nerve to lead us in song since it seemed scandalous, as though this one act of rebellion might invoke an even greater retribution from the prelates.

As abbess and instigator, it fell upon me. With age, my voice had grown husky and dry, as dark as smoke. So it was with trepidation that I sang the first bar. The others joined in, hesitant and uncertain. Our voices, so long out of practice, were raw as we struggled to find the pure notes—I feared that we sounded like crows. Poor Cordula would think we were howling demons. Then our voices settled, remembering the cadences, reassembling all that had been fractured. Our voices lifted our song to heaven as we sang in praise of Saint Ursula and her virgins. This was no retelling of Jutta’s bruising tale of slaughter, but a hymn of women in love.

In visione vere fidei
In a true vision
Ursula fell in love with the Son of God
And renounced the world.
Gazing straight into the sun,
She cried out to the most beautiful youth, saying:
How I yearn to come sit with you, Bridegroom,
At the heavenly wedding feast,
Running to you by strange paths
As clouds stream like sapphire in the purest air.

And after Ursula had spoken,
The news spread through all nations.
How naïve the girl is, they cried.
She does not know what she is saying.

Our song took on body and shape, cresting like a wave then filling with light as it washed over us. We sang how Ursula was soon joined by her eleven thousand maidens. But Satan and his mortal minions scorned them, and soon the fiery burden of martyrdom fell upon them. When they were murdered, their blood cried out to heaven. All of nature joined the angels in a chorus of praise. Ursula and her virgins became pearls strung upon the Word of God and so they choked the ancient serpent. Mere girls crushed Satan.

My daughters’ voices, so resonant with beauty, covered my old croaking. We sang as though our harmonies could restore this broken world. As we raised our voices for Cordula, the ecstasy of Caritas, divine love, surged through us all. Let my daughters feel their shackles breaking. No matter what the prelates would decide, our exile ended the instant our song shattered the silence.

O rubor sanguinis
O ruby blood, which flowed from on high,
Touched by divinity,
You are the flower that the serpent’s
Wintry breath never wounded.

My heart beat in pure joy when I saw the rapture on Cordula’s face, the tears in her eyes, her lips moving silently in the shape of the lyrics she adored.

“Sisters,” she whispered. “I see him coming. My Bridegroom has come to take me home.”

Something shifted that day. Our canticles broke the dark and crippling enchantment that had befallen Rupertsberg. Stagnant waters now flowed, running pure and clear. The miracle was how our very song transformed our banishment into harmony and belonging.

No interdict could separate us from this whirling cosmos, the wheel of the sacred year, the tide of seasons bringing their procession of holy days. We were still part of it, caught up in that great dance, the round of creation. We offered our songs to the universe, which expanded to receive them.

As my daughters prayed around Cordula’s bed, an invisible cord drew me out into the snowy garden, glowing in silvery luminescence under the rising full moon. I lifted my eyes to see two brilliant streaks of light arching across the heavens. What marvel was this—twin comets? Soon the others joined me to watch the unfolding wonder. Verena held Cordula so she could look out the window.

Before our eyes, those two arcs widened into shimmering roads, stretching to the four corners of the earth. At the axis where the two arcs met, a cross blazed, as red as dawn. Fiery light bathed the whole of Rupertsberg. And it was not just my vision, for they saw it, too, my daughters and Guibert, my son, who cried out, their voices ringing in the air.

The supposed apostate buried at Rupertsberg was a man of noble birth, but nothing else is known about his identity. As a result of her defiance in refusing to allow the prelates to disinter the man’s body and desecrate his Christian burial, Hildegard and her nuns suffered an interdict that was lifted only a few months before her death in September of 1179. The appearance of the cross of light blazing in the sky over Rupertsberg was Hildegard’s last vision, seen on her deathbed and witnessed by her nuns and Guibert of Gembloux, her secretary, provost, and biographer. In my novel, I moved this reported miracle forward to coincide with the fictional Sister Cordula’s death while the interdict was still in force.

All major characters and events in this novel are drawn from recorded fact. Sometimes, however, historical accounts reveal discrepancies.

Two diverging versions of Hildegard’s early religious life exist. According to Guibert of Gembloux’s
Vita Sanctae Hildegardis,
eight-year-old Hildegard was bricked into the anchorage with fourteen-year-old Jutta von Sponheim and possibly one other young girl. Guibert describes the anchorage in the bleakest terms, using words like “mausoleum” and “prison,” and writes how these girls died to the world so they could be buried with Christ. In
Scivias,
Hildegard’s first book, she strongly denounces the practice of offering child oblates to monastic life. Disibodenberg Abbey is now in ruins and it’s impossible to precisely pinpoint where the anchorage was, but the suggested location is two suffocatingly narrow rooms and a narrow courtyard built on to the back of the church. Only the foundations remain.

In 1991, the
Vita Domnae Jutta Inclusae (Life of Mistress Jutta, the Anchorite)
came to light. Probably penned by Volmar, this presents a completely different story, suggesting that Hildegard spent her childhood at Jutta’s family estate of Sponheim, only entering the monastery when she was fourteen and Jutta twenty. It’s difficult to say which account is more accurate.

According to Guibert, Jutta was a very beautiful and desirable young woman who spurned male attraction on no uncertain terms.

She put up an unflinching resistance to all the base-minded who told her unseemly stories and who stood in the way of her vow, crying out in imprecation to them: “Get away from me, you detestable purveyors of an oil which shall never anoint my head.” (Ps. 140:5)

Did some buried sexual trauma influence Jutta’s extreme choice to become not an ordinary nun but an enclosed anchorite and to embrace the fanatical asceticism that eventually brought about her premature death? Before entering the religious life, Jutta longed with all her heart to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but her brother Meginhard forbade her. So instead she renounced the world. Jutta’s Vita describes her extensive fasts and how she refused to allow food to pass her lips even when her abbot implored her to eat. The Benedictine Rule itself preaches the moderation that Hildegard herself espoused. Jutta’s Vita also provides the detail of Hildegard discovering the penitent’s chain wound three times around her dead magistra’s starved and wasted body.

Although fervently forthcoming regarding her affection for her lifelong friend Volmar and her deep love for Richardis von Stade, Hildegard is curiously reticent in describing her feelings for Jutta, the woman who was her mentor and spiritual mother. Only after Jutta’s death did Hildegard come into her own and begin to write about her visions, which would eventually make her one of the most famous women in Europe. The rest of her colorful life is history.

I’ve taken some liberties with the time line. It is believed that Richardis von Stade died in 1151, within one year of leaving Rupertsberg Abbey and a year before Rupertsberg’s consecration in 1152. It is certainly a possibility that Richardis illuminated Hildegard’s visions, though this cannot be proven. We do know that she worked closely with Hildegard during the ten years it took her to complete
Scivias.

Some traditionalists will point out that Hildegard was deeply conservative in many respects and will argue that she has been unfairly appropriated by feminists and New Age spirituality. Others, such as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton in her essay “Prophet and Reformer: Smoke in the Vineyard,” maintain that although Hildegard’s sacramental theology was orthodox, her reformist thought was radical, as evidenced in her blazing sermon against ecclesiastical corruption that she delivered in Cologne in 1170. Pope Benedict XVI cited this same sermon in his 2010 address to the Roman Curia concerning recent sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. The Lutheran Church in Germany regards Hildegard not only as a reformer, but also as a prophet of the Reformation. Indeed, her theology and philosophy are so complex and multistranded that her work and life continue to inspire very diverse groups of people, from conservative Catholics to feminist theologians, such as Barbara Newman, whose book
Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine
profoundly influenced me during the writing of this book.