Feast day: September 17

St. Hildegard of Bingen

Virgin & Doctor of the Church · 1098–1179

Patron of Musicians, writers, scientists

Benedictine abbess, visionary, composer, herbalist, and polymath — one of the most accomplished people of the entire Middle Ages.

Hildegard was born in 1098 in the Rhineland of Germany, the tenth child of a noble family, and as a small girl was given over to the care of an anchoress and raised in the religious life attached to a Benedictine monastery. Often sickly, she had experienced vivid visions since early childhood — perceptions of light and meaning she called 'the shadow of the living Light' — but she kept them largely to herself for decades.

In time she became abbess of her community, and when she was about forty-three she received what she understood as a divine command to write down what she saw. With the approval of the Church, which examined her carefully, she set out her visions in a great work called 'Scivias' and went on to found her own monastery at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, governing it with strength and wisdom.

Her gifts were astonishing in their range. She wrote theology and recorded her visions; she composed a large body of strikingly original sacred music, including what may be the earliest surviving morality play set to music; and she wrote works on medicine and the natural world, describing plants, animals, and remedies with the curiosity of a born naturalist. She corresponded with popes, emperors, and abbots, and even, remarkably for a woman of her time, preached publicly.

Honored in her own day as the 'Sibyl of the Rhine,' she died in 1179. Long venerated as a saint, she was formally canonized and, in 2012, declared a Doctor of the Church — one of only four women ever given that title — recognized at last for the depth and originality of a mind centuries ahead of its time.

She wrote theology, medicine, natural science, and some of the era's most performed music — and invented her own alphabet and language on the side.

“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth's greenings. Now, think.”
— St. Hildegard of Bingen

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/07351a.htm