What is Hildegard of Bingen?
Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098–1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, theologian, composer, and visionary. Over a twenty-year period she produced three major works of theological vision: Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, and Liber Divinorum Operum. The Catholic Church declared her a Doctor of the Church in 2012, one of four women to hold that designation. She was also the most prolific composer of sacred monophony in the medieval period, and her concept of viriditas — a Latin term for the greening life-force she saw animating all of creation — runs through her theology, her music, and her writings on natural history alike.
Hildegard vs the medieval Christian mystics
Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), writing a century after Hildegard, built his mystical theology on philosophical speculation. He worked through scholastic reasoning and vernacular preaching, aiming at the soul's union with the Godhead. Hildegard worked differently. Her theology emerged from visions she received as living experience, dictated to a monk and compiled into illustrated manuscripts. Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–after 1416), indexed here in *Revelations of Divine Love*, is a closer parallel: both women received visions and framed them as theological teaching. The difference is that Julian focused on a single sustained vision of the Passion, while Hildegard's visions ranged across cosmology, morality, and natural history. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) represents a later current — Spanish Carmelite reform — and wrote from a practitioner's standpoint, mapping the interior life of prayer. Hildegard, by contrast, never wrote systematically about interior method. Her mysticism is outward-facing: cosmic, prophetic, and cosmological.
Three great works
Scivias (Know the Ways, completed c. 1151) is Hildegard's first and most celebrated work. It records twenty-six visions in three books, covering creation, redemption, and the church. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential churchman of his era, examined and approved the project at the Synod of Trier in 1147. Liber Vitae Meritorum (The Book of Life's Merits, 1158–1163) is a moral theology presenting virtues and vices in dialogue. Liber Divinorum Operum (The Book of Divine Works, 1163–1173) is the most cosmologically ambitious: ten visions exploring the relationship between the human body, the cosmos, and God. Together the three volumes constitute the main record of what the tradition calls her revelations. These are not private devotional experiences — they were presented as publicly authoritative theological statements, examined by church authorities and approved for dissemination.
Viriditas and the wider output
Hildegard's most original concept is viriditas, a Latin word she uses for the life-force or greening power that animates creation. It appears in her theological writing, her medical texts, and her music. She composed roughly seventy-seven songs and a morality play, Ordo Virtutum — the earliest surviving morality play with a known composer. She also compiled two texts on natural medicine and healing: Physica and Causae et Curae. Scholars debate how much of these medical works reflects her own observation and how much draws on existing monastic and classical sources. The consensus is that her natural-history knowledge was genuine and extensive, though not fully independent of the tradition she inherited. Her constructed language, Lingua ignota — an invented vocabulary of over nine hundred words — has no clear parallel in the medieval record and its purpose remains a subject of scholarly discussion.
Hildegard in the index
Matthew Fox's *Original Blessing* places Hildegard at the centre of what Fox calls Creation Spirituality — the theological tradition that begins in original blessing rather than original fall. Fox reads her viriditas as the key to this tradition, using her work alongside Meister Eckhart's selected writings and Julian's to argue for a Christian theology grounded in the goodness of creation. Cynthia Bourgeault's *The Wisdom Way of Knowing* draws on Hildegard alongside Eckhart and Jacob Boehme to outline a tradition of wisdom-knowing that is distinct from ordinary rational cognition. Julian of Norwich's *Revelations of Divine Love* is the closest parallel in the index: the same era, the same visionary genre, the same theological seriousness. Both women received what they understood as authoritative visions of God, both wrote them down in the vernacular, and both have been claimed by later generations as models of contemplative prayer that belongs equally to women.
