Hildegard Of Bingen Quotes

The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.

Like billowing clouds, Like the incessant gurgle of the brook, The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.

Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.

She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendor with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans.... But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.

We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. —Hildegard of Bingen

I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.

There is the music of Heaven in all things.

Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the Earth's greenings. Now, think.

Patience is not the indiscriminate acceptance of any sort of evil: "It is not the one who does not flee from evil who is patient but rather the one who does not let himself thereby be drawn into disordered sadness." To be patient means not to allow the serenity and discernmet of one's soul to be taken away. Patience, then, is not the tear-streaked mirror of a "broken" life (as one might almost think, to judge from what is frequently shown and praised under this term) but rather is the radiant essence of final freedom from harm. Patience is, as Hildegard of Bingen states, "the pillar that is weakened by nothing.

I so loved the nobility of your character, your wisdom, your chastity, your spirit, and indeed every aspect of your life that many people have said to me: What are you doing?

We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

But when the sun drops closer to the earth, the cold of the earth runs to it from the water and causes all green things to dry up. And because the sun has dropped closer to the earth, the days are short, and it is winter.

And I saw a light-filled man emerge from the aforesaid dawn and pour his brightness over the aforementioned darkness; it repulsed him; he turned blood-red and pallid, but struck back against the darkness with such force that the man who was lying in the darkness became visible and resplendent.

The dark membrane contained also a dark fire of such horror that I was unable to perceive it properly. The horror buffeted the dark membrane with a massive impact of sounds and storms and sharp stones great and small.2 Whenever the noise arose it set in motion the layer of bright fire, winds and air, thus causing bolts of lightning to presage the sounds of thunder; for the fiery energy senses the first agitations of the thunder within it.

The soul is the greening life force of the flesh, for the body grows and prospers through her, just as the earth becomes fruitful when it is moistened. The soul humidifies the body so it does not dry out, just like the rain which soaks into the earth.

Nevertheless, if someone has an empty brain—and because of this is vexed by insanity, and is delerious—take the whole grains of wheat and cook them in water. Remove these cooked grains from the water, and place them around his whole head, tying a cloth over them. His brain will be reinvigorated by their vital fluid, and he may recover his health and strength. Do this until he returns to his right mind. If

Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1189) with her prophetic gift and depth of vision, was the first to describe the healing powers of food. Hildegard’s nutritional approach is simple and healthy

For Hildegard, the human soul is ‘symphonic’; music is part of the profound nature of the spirit, by which a human being can recall the heavenly harmony and ‘divine sweetness and praise by which with the angels, Adam was

Who is this woman who preached of the “web of life” that all creation shares, but who warned that “the earth must not be injured, the earth must not be destroyed”—and that if humans misuse creation, “God will permit creation to punish humanity”?

But one whose face has hard and rough skin, made harsh from the wind, should cook barley in water and, having strained that water through a cloth, should bathe his face gently with the moderately warm water. The skin will become soft and smooth, and will have a beautiful color. If a person’s head has an ailment, it should be washed frequently in this water, and it will be healed. V.

Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me.” Hildegard of Bingen

Let us always invoke the Holy Spirit, so that he may inspire in the Church holy and courageous women, like St. Hildegard of Bingen, who, developing the gifts they have received from God, make their own special and valuable contributions to the spiritual development of our communities and of the Church in our time.

The model provided by biblical parables is strongly influential in the following story, from Scivias I, 2, 32, in which Hildegard develops her motif of the ‘pearl’ as a symbol for humanity: The same lord who lost his sheep but so gloriously restored it to its life, also owned a costly pearl. The same happened again: the pearl was lost, and it fell into the ugly dirt. But he did not leave it lying in the dirt. He lifted it out carefully, and he cleaned it of the mud into which it had fallen, like gold purified in the furnace. He restored it to its former beauty till it gleamed even brighter than before. The probable sources of this story reveal something of Hildegard’s methods as a maker of new narratives. The basic message is the same as that of the parable of the Lost Sheep (Matthew 18:12–14), but she draws on other New Testament passages such as the parable of the Costly Pearl for which a merchant sold everything he had (Matthew 13:45–6). There is perhaps also an echo of the command not to ‘cast your pearls before swine’ (Matthew 7:6), since if they lie in the mud they are useless. Taken together these echoes of Hildegard’s biblical reading blend into a new motif which she can add to the storehouse of her memory and bring out for use when appropriate.18

How I fevered to study the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Reason is the root, through which the resonant word flourishes.

Sed et anima hominis symphoniam in se habet et symphonizans est, unde etiam multotiens plantus educit, cum symphoniam audit, quoniam de patria in exilium se missam meminit.

Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things. —Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, 1151

You are a terror to the unlawful foolishness of the world…

Who is this woman who took on the Emporer Barbarosa, comparing him to an infant and a madman, and threatened that God’s sword would smite him? Who is this woman

As Rabbi Heschel teaches, humanity will be saved not by more information, but by more appreciation.

Past and future were connected in an eternal ring,

The drama streamed forth from the might of its own grace, like a waterfall plunging into a woodland pool. Underneath the words, the watery variety of sounds, silences, and terrifying mysteries beat in my pulse, in the ebb and flow of the music. I was not the composer, merely the conduit as this new creation poured out of me, floating like a feather on the breath of God.

Virginity empowered them. Women became nuns and took religious vows, and some, like Catherine of Siena and Hildegard of Bingen, found their voices rang with the authority of men.7 Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.

Encircling all this was a ring of flame, the holiness of God, my Mother, blazing everywhere. Our abbot and prior preached that God was above all things, and yet my vision told me that God was in all things, alive inside every stone and leaf. A white cloud, filled with light, opened and a voice began to sing. I am the breeze that nurtures everything green and growing, that urges the blossoms to flourish, the fruits to ripen. I am the dew that makes the grasses laugh with the joy of life.

Beryl: Beryl is a warm gemstone which develops, between the third hour and midday, from the foam of water when the sun burns it severely. Its power is thus more from air and water than from fire, but nevertheless it has some of the properties of fire. And if a man has drunk or eaten poison, then he should place a little beryl in spring water and drink it at once. Continue for five days drinking it once a day while fasting, and the poison will foam up through vomiting, or it will pass out of him through the rear.

O most honored Greening Force, You who roots in the Sun; You who lights up, in shining serenity, within a wheel that earthly excellence fails to comprehend. You are enfolded in the weaving of divine mysteries. You redden like the dawn and you burn: flame of the Sun.

Trutwib went on speaking, her voice picked up volume and power until I heard her prediction ring out, her words that changed everything. “The one who lives under your wing, my lady, shall grow and grow until she outshines you. You will die, forgotten and obscure, and she shall blaze like the sun.

The soul is symphonic. Such is the sweetness of music that it banishes human weakness and fear, and draws us back to our original state of grace, reuniting us with heaven. All creation seemed to share our joy, the sky a pure and cloudless arc above our heads, the rising sun filling the leaves with gold.

Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.

The splendor of light was a central metaphor (in the mystic) Hildegard of Bingen’s thought, a divine luminescence filling the earth…She heard God say, “I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of light…I flame above the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars… for all life lights up out of me.” The same idea was also emerging in Jewish mystical thought (Kabbalistic)…the vessels containing God’s Shekinah glory were said to have shattered at creation, dispersing divine sparks that lie hidden within all things. The healing of the world (tikkun olam) requires the recovery of these shards of light.

ancient runic systems and the Irish codes of the Book of Ballymote with their exotic names (‘Serpent through the heather’, ‘Vexation of a poet’s heart’), through the codes of Pope Sylvester II and Hildegard von Bingen, through the invention of Alberti’s cipher disk – the first poly-alphabetic cipher – and Cardinal Richelieu’s grilles, all the way down to the machine-generated mysteries of the German Enigma,

In the Scriptures, God appears as Father, and yet the Holy Spirit chose to reveal God’s face to me as Mother.” I never dreamt of calling myself holy, never presumed. Yet God, whom I called Mother, chose to grace even one as flawed as I am with the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit moving through me. And so I became the Mother’s mouthpiece, a feather on Her breath. How was I to describe such a mystery to Guibert? I never sought the visions, and yet they came.

I recalled how in my illness I had witnessed three maidens glowing with divinity. Adelheid appeared in the guise of Sapientia, Divine Wisdom, while Guda shone in majesty as Ecclesia, the true and inner Church. Then, from between them, emerged the most splendid figure, glowing in innocence and joy—the black-haired girl, whom I knew now to be Richardis, blazing in my vision before she was even conceived in her mother’s womb. My name is Caritas, Divine Love.

When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings forth 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 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.

In a true vision, Ecclesia, the Mother Church, had appeared to me as a ravished woman, her thighs bruised and bloody, for her own clergy had defiled her. The prelates preached chastity while allowing young men to be abused. In defending the boy, my daughters and I risked sharing his fate—being cast out and condemned. The prelates would crush my dissent at all costs. Everything I had worked for in my long life might be lost in one blow, leaving me and my daughters pariahs and excommunicants. How could I protect my community now that I was so old, a relic from another time, my once-powerful allies dead?

Hildegard. I am Sapientia. God’s Wisdom. A ray of light from her heart touched mine. Guda had grown into a beauty with her golden curls and emerald eyes, crowned like Adelheid. She offered me a cup overflowing with blood-red wine, her eyes brimming in joyful welcome. Know me, Hildegard. I am Ecclesia, the true and hidden Church. From between these two women, a third appeared, an utter stranger, and so beautiful. Crowned like the others, her long black hair swept to her waist. Her silk gown was as red as the Virgin’s beating heart, and her smile gleamed in tenderness as she stretched out her arms. Hildegard, seek me. My name is Caritas, Divine Love. Before me this trinity of women blazed, the sacred shimmering through them. My fever was broken by the vision of these three divine maidens dancing around a flowing fountain of pure grace. Three women who formed the face of God.

More specifically, Hildegard of Bingen, in her Book of Divine Works (written in the twelfth century), discussed spiritual “progress” in terms of a cycle of four, which she called “the very pulse of life.” She wrote that progress begins with a time of “purging and purification,” followed by “confrontation with temptuous impulses,” then moves into “vigorous life and enchanting fragrance,” and finally reaches “the ripeness of nature and the perspicacity of the increasingly alert and mature human being.

The twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen suggests a simple way for us to begin exploring the richness of seasonal soulcraft: Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, Think.

In assigning Palmer to the margins of official Methodist history and denying the mysticism that gave birth to her powerful ministry and theology, Methodist theologians and historians have missed one of the greatest gifts the Methodist tradition has to offer the church universal. To put it another way, dismissing Palmer from the “important” and “real” history and theology of Methodism, is something like dismissing Catherine of Siena or Hildegard von Bingen from the “real” story of Catholicism. It is time for Phoebe Palmer to be restored to her rightful place as one of the great saints and mystics in the history of the church.

Stephen D’Evelyn, a scholar working primarily on Hildegard’s Symphonia, was a teaching assistant in my 2005 course on “Hildegard and the Gospels” and a valuable discussion partner for the translations we looked at in class.

The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature. —Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

You are a terror to the unlawful foolishness of the world..

The church retried Jehanne posthumously and reversed her conviction in 1456, citing Saint Thomas Aquinas who allowed an exception to the biblical ban on cross-dressing: “Nevertheless, this [cross-dressing] may at times be done without sin due to some necessity, either for the purpose of concealing oneself from enemies, or due to a lack of other clothing.…” Similarly, Saint Hildegard von Bingen had written, “Men and women should not wear each other’s clothing except in necessity. A man should never put on feminine dress or a woman use male attire… unless a man’s life or a woman’s chastity is in danger.…” The new tribunal concluded that Jehanne had worn male garb out of necessity.

Concerns about female reproductive health are probably as old as humankind, and I had many interesting conversations with people listed in these pages on this topic, but perhaps none were more important or more poignant than the ones I had with Marina Bokelman, folklorist, healer, family friend, and second mother to me. In our last conversation before she decided to leave this life, she spoke at length about Hildegard von Bingen, a Catholic nun born in 1098, who became an abbess, composer, writer, and medical practitioner. In her medical texts, Physica and Causae et Curae, she described herbs and provided recipes that would regulate menses, offer contraception, end unwanted pregnancies, and see a woman through pregnancy and birth.

The soul is symphonic. Such is the sweetness of music that it banishes human weakness and fear, and draws us back to our original state of grace,

But I always found that a bit awful of God. To withhold evidence, if the Cosmic Egg is so important. That’s how Hildegard von Bingen puts it—the Cosmic Egg. But yeah, it’s suspiciously stingy to give us nothing but a couple of self-professed messiahs every three thousand years. Prophets whose stories don’t align. Mary on toast. Somebody’s cured muscular dystrophy. It’s a lot to ask of us without collateral, don’t you think? Especially when there are so many competing stories, and the stakes are so high. Inferno or paradise. Forever.

vision told me that God was in all things, alive inside every stone and leaf.

other people’s love brings us closer to God, for how can God be found if not through love?

The marvels of God are not brought forth from one’s self. Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played. The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather, through the touch of the Musician. I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God’s kindness. Hildegard of Bingen

What if evangelicals remembered women like Christine de Pizan and Dorothy L. Sayers? What if we remembered that women have always been leaders, teachers, and preachers, even in evangelical history? What if our seminaries used textbooks that included women? What if our Sunday school and Bible study curriculum correctly reflected Junia as an apostle, Priscilla as a coworker, and women like Hildegard of Bingen as preachers? What if we recognized women’s leadership the same way Paul did throughout his letters—even entrusting the Letter to the Romans to the deacon Phoebe? What if we listened to women in our evangelical churches the way Jesus listened to women?

A true love,” she said at last, “sees past the beginnings of things. It sees them through to the end. Anything less is mere vanity.

How easy it was to tear things down, how difficult to build something up from the ground.

Hildegard of Bingen grounded both her ecospirituality and her herbal medicine in this knowing. Her central concept of viriditas, or divine “greenness,” sanctifies more than the literally green mosses and leaves; over and over Hildegard calls upon the interdependence of trees, seeds, spirit, and soil as sacred cocreators. She used various trees in her practical cures, but they were also stand-ins for the mythic tree of life in her writings and visions. In one of Hildegard’s greatest hymns, she sings to the trees on her lush Rhineland. “O happy roots, mediatrix, and branches…” The “happy” roots, ever underland, grow in the particular favor of the divine (and perhaps of Hildegard herself—there is speculation that some of her visions may have been enhanced by the hallucinogenic mandrake root, which she prescribed as a cure for depression). Green branching is only and always mirrored in rooted darkness—the place we, too, come from and return to. To be whole on earth is to embrace this exuberant darkness, the landscape we visit with every turn of day into night.

For eternity is called the “Father,” the Word is called the “Son,” and the breath that binds both of them together is called the “Holy Spirit.

I do not see with external eyes, and I do no hear it with my external ears; I do not perceive with thoughts of my heart nor by any medium of my five senses, but rather only in my soul, with open eyes, so that I never experience the unconsciousness of ecstasy, but, awake, I see this day and night.

Hildegard's pragmatism, whether stepped in science and biology or not, can never be divorced entirely from her theology. In her mind, they sprang from the same visionary and prophetic source.

In the first place, Hildegard calls for a marriage of science and spirituality. For religion and the secular sciences to be sundered as they currently are is a blunder of immense proportions on the part of our species—and with potentially dire consequences.

As Sister Joan Chittister, a direct descendant of Hildegard in the Benedictine tradition, says, the issue today is not “radical feminism,” which the Vatican accuses Catholic sisters in America of, but “radical patriarchy.

Without the Word of God no creature has meaning. God’s Word is in all creation, visible and invisible. The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests in every creature. Now this is how the spirit is in the flesh—the Word is indivisible from God —Hildegard of Bingen101

Hildegard von Bingen, an 11th-century nun who saw apocalyptic visions and was later canonized, had a cipher alphabet which she claimed came to her in a flash of inspiration.

Besides being a writer, and in her spare time enjoying religious visions, she cranked out some pretty wicked music, which she intended that the sisters at the convent would sing at liturgical and other functions.