3. Hildegard of Bingen and Catholic Mystics and Scholars
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Hildegard of Bingen and Catholic Mystics and Scholars
Hyacinth Bucket (she always insists the pronunciation is “bouquet”), played by Patricia Routledge, was the star of Keeping Up Appearances, a popular British sitcom, still seen in reruns on PBS. She is a social climber always trying to impress those she encounters, whether car salesmen, realtors, or neighbors. Her husband, Richard, and her low-class brother-in-law and sisters, Daisy and Rose, play second fiddle but with clever lines of their own. It’s a brainless, silly show, and I would never admit having watched it were it not for the fact that Routledge also played the part of Hildegard of Bingen in a 1994 docudrama. I showed portions of the film on more than one occasion to my seminary students. Those who, like me, knew Hyacinth found it difficult to see the actress as Hildegard.
But perhaps Hildegard was a lot more like Hyacinth than we imagine. Matters of pride and one-upmanship are certainly not unknown to people who devote their lives to religious vocations. Like many other religious women of her day, however, Hildegard was not above using self-deprecating terms to advance her cause—“poor little woman though [I am].” She was anything but a “poor little woman,” and she is widely recognized today as a renaissance woman long before the Renaissance. Her music has never been more popular. In fact, even as I’m writing these words I’m listening online to her “Canticles of Ecstasy,” available on CD at Amazon for less than ten dollars. Her recipe book sells for slightly more, though her cookie recipe is free online. Could Hildegard in her wildest visions have ever imagined this?
As modern as Hildegard may seem with her now-popular music and recipes, she was very clearly a woman at home in the medieval world—more so by far than Héloïse—and she knew how to navigate that world as a woman. How do we evaluate these medieval women in ministry? In many respects they are far removed from contemporary evangelical women, and it is difficult for us to identify with them. Their focus on celibacy as the key to true spirituality was misdirected, as was their intense mysticism that often gave support to erroneous doctrines—all of which may have been fostered by the gender restrictions they endured.
Indeed, some historians have argued that the visionary experiences of these women transported them into priestly roles that the church denied them, authenticating their ministry through messages and revelations given directly by God. As such they took on a role as mediators between God and those who came for spiritual succor.
There were dozens of holy women besides Hildegard who are known to us today through their writings and the roles they played in monasticism. Among them are Julian, Catherine, and Margery. Julian of Norwich, who lived all her adult life secluded in a cell attached to a church, had a significant counseling and writing ministry. Catherine of Siena was a tireless social worker and a traveler who sought to change the course of the Catholic Church. Margery Kempe was a wife and mother, a pilgrim and gadabout, who authored the first autobiography in the English language and left an indelible mark wherever she went.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
Renaissance Abbess in Medieval Europe
Hildegard was born in 1098, and her life would span most of the twelfth century—more than eighty years. Despite her reputation as a holy woman for most of a millennium, she was not canonized a saint until May 10, 2012, under the papal reign of Benedict XVI.
One of the required marks of a saint, properly canonized by the Catholic Church, is to be credited with miracles. On that score, Hildegard’s credentials were stellar. For her, miraculous events occurred early in life. She recounted how she had informed her nurse that a calf soon to be born would be white with spots from its head to its feet. Just as she prophesied, the calf turned out to be spotted. She may have related the story to demonstrate that even at a very young age she was able to see things that were entirely hidden from others. Her real visionary life, however, began decades later.
And it came to pass . . . when I was forty-two years and seven months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame . . . and suddenly I understood the meaning of the expositions of the books.1
By this time Hildegard was an abbess, the head of a large convent in what is today Germany. But more than three decades earlier, like so many little rich girls, she was singled out to be a nun. In fact, as the tenth child, she was offered to God as a tithe. Bidding farewell to her family, she left to reside with the anchoress Jutta. Her only other alternative would have been to be betrothed at an early age to an aristocrat and, beginning at puberty, hope to survive the pregnancies that would inevitably follow. Here with Jutta, she lived in a small cell attached to a church and spent her days surrounded not only with prayer and meditation but also with liturgy, music, and books.
Though surely missing her family, Hildegard never looked back. This was the very life she longed for. Jutta told her young charge of her visions, and soon Hildegard was receiving her own revelations from God. Mystical experiences were expected, and they served Hildegard well in the years after Jutta’s death, when she took charge of what had become a community of nuns.
What Hildegard testified to at age forty-two was very different from what might be considered routine revelations, and it was this claim that most distinguished her from others. Although she was convinced that the blinding light was an opening to God’s truth given uniquely to her, she was not without misgivings. There were heresy hunters aplenty, and she was consumed with self-doubt, particularly after she began consulting the opinions of others. A serious illness, however, convinced her that God was commanding her: publish or perish. She had no other choice.
I started writing this book and received the strength to finish it, somehow, in ten years. These visions weren’t fabricated by my own imagination, nor are they anyone else’s. I saw these when I was in the heavenly places. They are God’s mysteries. These are God’s secrets. I wrote them down because a heavenly voice kept saying to me, “See and speak! Hear and write!”2
Know the Ways of God (Scivias) was completed a decade after the first blinding light. Here the reader sees in vivid detail what Hildegard herself is seeing, whether the spotlight is on the Virgin Mary or the terrors of punishment awaiting sinners after death: “I saw a well deep and broad full of boiling pitch and sulphur, and around it were wasps and scorpions. . . . And I saw a great fire, black, red, and white, and in it horrible fiery vipers, spitting flame; and there the vipers tortured the souls of those who had been slaves of the sin of uncharitableness.”3
If we imagine Hildegard to be nothing more than a navel-gazing visionary, however, we would be far off the mark. She relocated her convent to the town of Bingen on the Rhine, and there she presided over what could be considered a ren d’la femme—a female renaissance—a high point of scholarship and art specifically among women. The breadth of studies was wide-ranging, from literature and letters to art and music, with a heavy dose of natural medicine and even what appears to be elementary psychology.
One does not have to read far in Hildegard, however, to be reminded that she is still very much a twelfth-century woman. Her cures for various ailments border on the ludicrous, no more than superstitious folk remedies. For jaundice, fasten a live bat onto the sick person’s back or abdomen and have the person wear it around until the creature dies. To treat a hangover, fetch a container of water, submerge a female—preferably small—dog, and wash the inebriated person’s head in the water. Works every time. Or had it not been tested sufficiently in clinical trials?
One of Hildegard’s strangest writings relates to women, sex, and how babies are conceived. No bat or dog or even stork is involved in the process. Simply a woman making love to a man—and some unusual bodily responses:
When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man’s seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman’s sexual organs contract, and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist.4
Hildegard would never know the love of a man, but she did express a deep bond of love for the young nun Richardis von Stade, who had encouraged her in her writing: “When I wrote the book Scivias, I bore a strong love to a noble nun . . . who suffered with me until I finished this book.”5 When Hildegard was informed that Richardis would be transferred to become an abbess of another convent (a promotion arranged by her archbishop brother), she was heartbroken. More than that, she was enraged. She called on the pope to step in and intervene, but to no avail. Richardis left, and Hildegard wept. It would not be exaggerating to say that she was in love with the young woman. To assume this was a hidden lesbian love, as some have done, however, is not warranted.
Richardis had nursed her beloved abbess during a long sickness. Their relationship was so intimate and intense that certain nuns and others were troubled—perhaps even envious. Hildegard alluded to this in a letter to Richardis: “I loved the nobility of your conduct, your wisdom and your chastity, your soul and the whole of your life, so much that many said: What are you doing?”6
There is no doubt about the enormous emotional outlay that Hildegard had invested in Richardis. She fought for the young nun not to relocate and, when she did, placed the blame squarely on her: “Then, however, due to her noble origin, she strove for the honour of a greater name in order to be called the mother of a prestigious church. And she did not strive for this for the sake of God, but for her own secular glory.”7 Though angry, she begged Richardis to return.
But the young woman died soon after at age twenty-eight. The grieving Hildegard would cling to the alleged last words of Richardis. Word came that on her deathbed she had expressed her deep love for Hildegard and her desire to return to the convent. But Hildegard could not let go. She had to have the last word. The faithful Richardis, tempted by fame, met her untimely death: “But the ancient serpent had attempted to deprive her of that blessed honor by assaulting her through her human nobility. Yet the mighty Judge drew this my daughter to Himself, cutting her off from all human glory.”8
Hildegard would live on for more than a quarter century during which time her fame would spread as her creative genius shone forth in music, poetry, plays, letters, and memoir as well as academic writings. She traveled widely as a sought-after preacher and met with popes and other well-known figures of the era. And she still reigns today as the most celebrated abbess of the Middle Ages.
JULIAN OF NORWICH
English Anchoress
Like Hildegard, Julian captures the religious seeker’s imagination even today. A quick check on Amazon reveals dozens of books available under her name, though perhaps not to be outdone by Hildegard, whose cookbook was released in 2010: From Saint Hildegard’s Kitchen: Foods of Health, Foods of Joy by Jany Fournier-Rosset. From pasta and poultry to jams, jellies, and table grace, the book seeks to re-create medieval monastic meals. If only Julian had left behind recipes! Catherine of Siena also fares well on Amazon, as does Margery Kempe. Even the most established writers today could envy their popularity—and certainly their enduring shelf life.
Julian was an anchoress who like Hildegard in her youth lived in a tiny cell attached to a church. But she would remain clinging like a barnacle to a church in the English town of Norwich for the remainder of her life. She is a nameless mystic, known only for her writings, her name taken from the church to which she was attached: St. Julian. Nor does she write about her life or her loves, and for her there is no travel abroad or encounters with famous people. Her oft-quoted self-description, we know to be patently false: “a simple unlettered creature” who is “lewd, feeble and frail.”9
Indeed, Julian’s personal life is barely more than a blank slate. That has not stopped historians, however, from speculating. Did her family determine she would be an anchoress? Did her family perish in the Black Death, and did she then devote her life to God? Or was she a married woman who lost her husband and children to that terrible epidemic and only then decided to live a life of complete devotion?
Even the most basic questions concerning this fourteenth-century woman have gone unanswered in the seven hundred years since her death (though the exact year, as that of her birth, is unknown). Was she a laywoman rather than a nun? That no monastic order has ever been associated with her perhaps makes the former more probable. Benedictines and others have sought to claim her, but she remains ever elusive. Indeed, so little is known of her that she is not even officially a saint.
Perhaps the most baffling question of all is: Why was there so little curiosity about her personal life? She did not, after all, live in ancient times nor in the medieval Dark Ages. Norwich was the second largest city in the land. And she lived on into the fifteenth century as England was approaching the Renaissance. The life of John Wyclif, some two decades younger than she, is fully fleshed out. But she herself, like that of another well-known English writer, William Shakespeare, remains elusive.
Yet despite her obscurity, then as now, her influence has been enormous. Her contemporaries, including Brigitta of Sweden and most likely Catherine of Siena, were familiar with her writings, and Margery Kempe wrote in her autobiography that she had gone out of her way to consult with her.
As was true with Shakespeare, it was Julian’s words, not her personal life, that mattered to contemporaries. She is best known for her Revelations of Divine Love, drawn from visions that she experienced during a prolonged illness. It would have been a time when she might have pleaded with God for healing. But she came to understand otherwise:
Our customary practice of prayer was brought to mind: how . . . we spend so much time on petition. I saw that it is indeed more worthy of God and more truly pleasing to him that through his goodness we should pray with full confidence, and by his grace cling to him with real understanding and unshakeable love, than that we should go on making as many petitions as our souls are capable of.10
Most of her writing would be viewed today as spiritual discipline with little that would cause controversy save her feminine images of God. The medieval English text speaks for itself: “God is oure moder,” “oure savyouure is oure very moder,” “very moder Jhesu,” and “oure moder, Christ.”11
CATHERINE OF SIENA
Saint on the Streets of Siena
On Wednesday, November 24, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI lectured on the fourteenth-century St. Catherine of Siena to a General Audience of the Catholic Church. He told his listeners how she, having been called by St. Dominic in a vision, entered the Third Order of Dominicans when she was just sixteen years old. The pope also reminded them that forty years earlier, in 1970, Pope Paul VI had declared Catherine a doctor of the church. Pope Benedict went on to relate another mystical experience:
In a vision that was ever present in Catherine’s heart and mind Our Lady presented her to Jesus who gave her a splendid ring, saying to her: “I, your Creator and Saviour, espouse you in the faith, that you will keep ever pure until you celebrate your eternal nuptials with me in Heaven.” . . . This ring was visible to her alone.12
Benedict’s reference to a “splendid ring” that “was visible to her alone” on the surface sounds like an ordinary saint story. What he surely knew but did not elucidate was that Catherine’s splendid ring was actually the holy foreskin of Jesus. Doctor Catherine, however, did not originate the idea of such an object. Her visionary Holy Prepuce was a popular medieval relic that was kept safe and certified authentic by a number of Catholic churches.
From the earliest years of childhood, Catherine knew the horrors of suffering and dying having survived the terrible plague known as the Black Death. She responded with intense religious emotion, and at age seven, as her story goes, she took the vow of virginity. In the years that followed, she spurned social gatherings and settled into a secluded cell of her family home—though perhaps it was a more figurative “cell of the mind.” In opposition to her parents’ strong objections, and in her desire to sacrifice herself to her holy spouse, she practiced strict asceticism. She not only wore a hair shirt against her skin and around her hips an iron chain, but she also flagellated herself and deprived herself of tasty food and sleep—a rough board her only bed.
Like other medieval holy women, Catherine would emerge from her solitary confinement to take on a public role. Her focus was on those Jesus identified as the least of these—Mother Teresa’s poorest of the poor. With the plague still claiming lives and filling people with fear, she did not have far to go—simply outside her door, where the streets of Siena became her mission field. Had she been a fourteenth-century version of Mother Teresa, she might have been upstaged only by St. Francis.
But Catherine was weird—weirder than Francis. She carried her all-consuming asceticism right into the streets with her, and not simply the hair shirt and iron chain. To stoop down and drain and wash a woman’s pus-filled sores and apply an herbal balm was not enough. Nor was it enough to carry the pitiful creature home and gently place her on the board bed. No. To demonstrate her utter selflessness, she drank the pus that filled the bowl. God alone, she insisted, gave her—a woman who could barely eat anything without vomiting—the strength to do this. How the suffering woman felt about Catherine’s repugnant act is unclear. Many questioned her sanity.
Each day Catherine made a pilgrimage from disease-ridden streets to filthy dungeons where hardened criminals were chained. Here she found holy relics in human form. She symbolically clothed herself in Christ’s love for suffering humanity. Of one man she related, “I was there at the place of execution, waiting and praying.” When he was brought from his cell, she greeted him and gave him most unusual last rites. She made the sign of the cross and said:
“Kneel down now, my sweetest brother. To the nuptials! In a moment you will have entered into life eternal.” He knelt down gently and I bent over him and held him as he lowered his head, reminding him of the blood of the Lamb. His lips murmured nothing but the names, Jesus and Catherine. I closed my eyes accepting in the Divine Goodness the sacrifice, and as he was speaking I received his head into my hands.13
Catherine did turn her attention to larger issues of the day, especially the contentious matter of papal relocation to the French town of Avignon. In fact, she led more than a dozen of her followers to that “Babylon of the West” in an effort to convince the pope to return to Rome. He was unmoved. Her efforts came to naught.
Like that of the other well-known women mystics of the Middle Ages, Catherine’s reputation was built in part on her writings, particularly her Dialogue on Divine Providence, completed two years before her death. Here she recounts the vision of her dialogue with “the eternal Father, indescribably kind and tender,” who “turned his eye to this soul and spoke.” If the reader is hoping for God to say something extraordinary or perhaps unexpected, she may be disappointed by how bland his words are, at least in comparison to Catherine’s own often startling style and demeanor. Here we find a typical example of the messages she heard:
O dearest daughter, I have determined to show my mercy and loving kindness to the world, and I choose to provide for mankind all that is good. But man, ignorant, turns into a death-giving thing what I gave in order to give him life. Not only ignorant, but cruel: cruel to himself. But still I go on providing. . . . I want you to know: whatever I give to man, I do it out of my great providence.14
MARGERY KEMPE
Unconventional Pilgrim
Gregory of Tours, a sixth-century bishop and since canonized a saint, often extolled his ideal for marriage by way of a story. A young couple had just celebrated their nuptials. The groom leads his young bride off to bed. She begins weeping. When he inquires of her sorrow, she responds, “I had determined to preserve my poor body for Christ, untouched by intercourse with man. . . . At this moment when . . . I should have put on the stole of purity, this wedding dress brings me shame.” The husband is taken aback but then relents: “If you are determined to abstain from intercourse with me, then I will agree to what you want to do.” Gregory’s punch line: “Hand in hand they went to sleep.” And they lived happily ever after: “For many years after this they lay each night in one bed, but they remained chaste in a way which we can only admire.”15
Margery Kempe’s situation was very different. She “put on the stole of purity” only after having given birth to fourteen children. One day on or around the time of their twentieth anniversary, she proposed to her husband that they live a chaste life, and he agreed. A mystical marriage, she had long before determined, was more suited to her than motherhood. She had given birth to enough children, and now God was calling her to a new life of travel. It was an era of pilgrimages, and she would see herself as God’s pilgrim.
Margery’s life is easily divided into three nearly equal periods: youth, marriage and family, and pilgrim. In fact, for more than twenty years she would spend much of her time journeying from one shrine to another, always requesting an audience with priests and prelates. Few churchmen had time to listen to her personal revelations, and fellow pilgrims regarded her as a nuisance, if not completely deranged.
Margery was born in Norfolk, England, in 1373, into a prosperous family of wool merchants and statesmen. At twenty she married John Kempe, who himself would become involved in local politics. Soon after the birth of her first child, she suffered a lengthy episode of serious mental illness, which she later described in third person in her autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe:
For dread she had of damnation . . . this creature went out of her mind and was wonderfully vexed and labored with spirits half year eight weeks and odd days. And in this time she saw, as her thought, devils open their mouths all inflamed . . . sometime ramping at her, sometime threatening her, sometime pulling her and hauling her both night and day . . . with great threatenings and bade her she should forsake her Christendom. . . . And so she did. She slandered her husband, her friends, her own self . . . like as the spirits tempted her. . . . She bit her own hand so violently that it was seen all her life after. And also she [scratched] her skin on her body . . . with her nails.16
Her husband had no choice but to restrain her until she came out of her madness by way of a vision of Jesus. In the years that followed, she had babies, ran a brewery, and milled corn, all the while claiming visions and revelations—and weeping. Indeed, her signature spiritual discipline, so to speak, was loud wailing and shedding of copious tears that she was convinced authenticated messages from God. Among her visionary messages was confirmation that she had been actively involved—more than a mere bystander—at both the birth and the crucifixion of Christ.
That Margery’s trademark was shedding tears makes all the more amazing her humor and ability to poke fun at her opponents, as her Book reveals. Indeed, she might have been a stand-up comedian of her day with this knee-slapping routine (with my own italicized phrases added): So the archbishop says to me: “I hear bad reports about you; I hear it said that you’re a thoroughly wicked woman.” And I say to him: “And I hear it said you’re a wicked man, sir. And if you’re as wicked as people say, you will never enter heaven unless you mend your ways.” Then he, exploding in rage, says: “Why you! . . . What do people say about me?” I say, chuckling under my breath: “Others can tell you well enough, sir.”17
Many of Margery’s fellow pilgrims, however, failed to catch her humor. To them, she was too often more than just a wacky woman. She was demented, a woman whose shrill cries and claims of God’s special calling quickly became tiring. It is tempting today to resurrect her reputation and find her amusing. But at the time, some seven hundred years ago, she was not easy company on a pilgrimage that too often involved arduous travel, dirty, flea-filled inns, and sleepless nights. Tempers ran short even without her in the midst.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
They are medievals, further along on the evolutionary scale, to be sure, than Cro-Magnons, but too far removed for us to easily comprehend their ways.
How easy it is for us to be consumed with the present, losing sight of history, and relatively recent history at that. It is true that much of medieval Europe was a backwater in comparison to classical Greece and Rome. But these women of the High Middle Ages are ones with whom we can resonate, ones who know the heartbreaks and struggles we ourselves confront.
Yet they lived in an era when, in the name of God, girls resided in little cells. Today we would call social services, reporting the shocking child abuse. We would prescribe drugs for Catherine or confine her to a mental institution. We should not assume, however, that the town folk and extended family members sanctioned such treatment of children or admired someone who drank pus. Margery was shunned in her own day and how much more would we steer clear of her today. We often consider street preachers to be on the edge of insanity in our own age.
Nevertheless, Hildegard, Julian, Catherine, and Margery still speak to us today, reminding us that their spiritual struggles and torn relationships are ours, though often in very different apparel. Hildegard, particularly, demonstrates a love for learning and a lively life of the mind. Margery’s story offers a fascinating glimpse of a mother and laywoman who knew so well the hardscrabble life of a medieval village. Unlike the others, she was not devoted to a life of prayer or humanitarian service—yet ever longing for a deeper relationship with God. We do well to invite these women into our lives and living rooms and learn from them.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Do kids grow up too fast today? Faster than Hildegard, Julian, and Catherine? How do you assess their childhood spiritual desires? Have you or anyone you have known had such spiritual longings as a young child?
Was Hildegard overly controlling in her expectations of Richardis? Did she accuse her younger protégée of seeking the very fame and significance that she herself had sought and was continuing to seek? Do you know people today who are blinded in that respect?
Do you agree with Julian that too much time in prayer consists of petition—of making requests for our needs and the needs of others? Do you ever think of God—of Jesus—as a mother, as she did? Is there anything wrong in relating to God in feminine terms?
Have you ever known anyone who in any way resembled Catherine in her effort to demonstrate holiness, or perhaps unworthiness? Would you assume a mental illness for such a person today?
How do you assess Margery’s conversion to the life of a pilgrim? Do you assume she may have had mixed motives that involved a true love for God, a strong distaste for another pregnancy, and serious emotional issues?
If you were able to interview one of these women for an in-depth media feature, which one would you choose? Which one do you find most interesting, most authentically spiritual, most colorful?