Introductory notes and background
Hildegard
was born in 1098 as the youngest of 10 children, to Hildebert and
Mechtild of Bermersheim in the Rhineland-Hesse region of Germany.
She was dedicated to a religious life by her parents from her infancy
and began religious instruction and rudimentary schooling around the
age of eight under the guidance of a devout recluse named Jutta.
From an equally tender age--from age 3, she would later say--Hildegard
routinely experienced waking visions, perhaps brought on by powerful
migraine headaches that would incapacitate her for long periods of
time. In part because of these experiences, she would eventually,
if reluctantly, come to see herself as a visionary. As a
teenager, she took the veil and become a nun, and on Jutta's death
Hildegard took over the direction of the small convent, serving as
abbess from 1136. Five years later, during one of her visions,
she heard herself commanded to write down everything she saw and
heard. After considerable delay she finally obeyed, and began
work on the
Scivias, or
Three Books of Visions and Revelations.
The pope read parts of this treatise, ultimately approving its content
and Hildegard's visions as authentic and legitimate. Although
apparently never formally educated beyond what was customary for girls
in
a monastic cloister, Hildegard was a person of exceptional intellectual
curiosity
and talent. She wrote, in addition to collection of visions,
medical works, poems, musical
compositions, a wide range of learned treatises, sermons, and
letters, as well as an unfinished autobiography. In 1150, she and
her community of nuns moved to
Bingen, where she
continued to serve as abbess until her death. During this time
she was an active correspondent and sometime critic of popes, kings,
queens, cardinals, other religious leaders, abbots, and abbesses.
Approximately 300 of her letters survive. She traveled
extensively in western German, and was permitted to preach sermons on a
range of subjects, a highly unusual distinction for a woman at this
time. Although sometimes regarded as a saint, Hildegard was never
canonized. She died in 1179.
Between 1151 and 1158, thus after her move to Bingen, Hildegard
composed her
Holistic Healing
(in Latin, known as the
Causae et
curae, or
Causes and Cures),
which describes the natural world, human physiology and psychology,
illnesses, and treatments. Hildegard’s discussion, which may seem
a bit disconnected at times, will be more comprehensible if you bear in
mind that she viewed all created matter as being composed of
admixtures, in different proportions, of physical elements and bodily
humors, and subject to a variety of external forces. The bodily
humors or four fluids had been identified by earlier Greek medical
thinkers and were reiterated by the physician Galen (died about 200
CE), the great summarizer of Greek medical knowledge. The humors,
and their corresponding elements, were:
phlegm or mucus
(phlegmatic) / water
blood
(sanguine) / air
black bile (
melancoly) / earth
yellow bile or gall (
choleric) / fire
We know that Hildegard practiced medical healing as well as wrote about
it. She was frequently sought out for medical advice as
well. Her achievements in the field are all the more impressive
given that the practice of medicine itself was gradually diminishing in
monasteries, and medical training from the thirteenth century on was
generally secured in universities.
Holistic Healing survived the
Middle Ages in a single manuscript, which was not "discovered" until
1859, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Questions and exercises
(1) As you read, try to arrange by subject the topical headings of the
first 17 assigned pages. Why does Hildegard begin her treatise on
holistic healing with an overview of Creation and Lucifer’s fall?
(2) What sort of images and metaphors does Hildegard use to explain and
discuss natural phenomena, human biological functions, and the
composition of the universe?
(3) What is the logic behind her descriptions of the different
personality types? (that is, melancholics, phlegmatics, etc.)
(4) How can we understand or explain the sorts of cures she prescribes
for routine and unusual illnesses? Are there common
characteristics to her prescriptions?