St. Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 in Bermersheim, in the Rhineland region of Germany, into a family of minor nobility. From early childhood she reported vivid interior experiences of light and mystical visions, which she later described as ongoing throughout her life. Because she was considered physically frail and was given as a tithe to the Church, she was placed under the care of Jutta of Sponheim, an anchoress living at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. Jutta became her teacher in monastic life, and the two formed the heart of a small women's community attached to the larger abbey.

When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was elected as the magistra of the community. Around 1141, after a period of illness, she experienced what she described as a divine command to write down the visions she had been receiving for years. Though initially reluctant and uncertain of her own worth, she eventually confided in her monastic superior and in the abbot of Disibodenberg, and began composing the work that would become known as Scivias ("Know the Ways of the Lord"). To accommodate the growing community, she founded a new convent at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, around 1150, where she served as abbess for the rest of her life.

Hildegard's range was extraordinary even by the standards of medieval polymaths. She wrote major theological works, including Scivias, the Book of Life's Merits, and the Book of Divine Works. She produced Physica and Causae et Curae, two treatises on the natural world and on human health that catalogued the properties of plants, animals, and minerals and the use of herbs in healing. She corresponded with popes, emperors, bishops, and ordinary believers; she preached in public, including in the cathedrals of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, which was unusual for a woman of her era. She also traveled extensively through Germany, founding a second convent at Eibingen in 1165 and surviving an interdict placed on her community in 1178 related to the burial of a rebellious nobleman in the convent cemetery.

In music Hildegard was a composer of remarkable originality. The collection known as Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum contains more than seventy liturgical pieces, including the antiphon O vis aeternitatis and the sequence O Ecclesia. Her melodies are expansive, melismatic, and shaped by the imagery of her visions rather than by the more measured patterns of contemporary chant. She is also credited with writing what scholars have identified as one of the earliest surviving morality plays in the German vernacular, the Ordo Virtutum, in which personified virtues contend with the Devil for the soul of a soul.

Hildegard died on 17 September 1179 at Rupertsberg, at the age of about eighty-one. News of her sanctity spread quickly, and her cult was confirmed when Pope Benedict XVI inscribed her on the General Roman Calendar in 2012, fixing her feast day on 17 September. In 2019, Pope Francis declared her a Doctor of the Church, the fourth woman to receive that title. Her writings, music, and medical texts continue to be studied seriously in academic, liturgical, and artistic contexts, and she is now recognized as one of the most significant intellectual and spiritual figures of twelfth-century Europe.