Hildegard von Bingen

Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, mystic, composer, naturalist, poet, and theologian — the scope of her output is unusual even among the polymaths of the medieval period. She founded two monasteries, conducted preaching tours, corresponded with emperors and popes, wrote treatises on medicine and natural history, and produced visionary texts of striking originality. Her music — collected in the Symphoniae and staged in the morality play Ordo Virtutum — is among the most distinctive in the medieval repertoire: modal, unusual in its interval choices, with melodic lines that climb and fall across wide ranges, creating an effect that sounds both archaic and uncanny.

The garden’s interest in Hildegard centers on two things: her account of how she received her visions (and by extension her music), and the quality of encounter that her work, nine centuries later, continues to produce.

Vision and Reception

Hildegard did not claim to compose her music in any ordinary sense. She described receiving it — hearing it, seeing it, experiencing it as something addressed to her from beyond herself. Her visions, which she began experiencing in childhood but only began recording in middle age (at divine instruction, she said), were not dreams or hallucinations but what she called living light: a quality of direct perception that bypassed ordinary sensation and disclosed what could not otherwise be known.

This account of creative reception places Hildegard within a tradition that runs through the garden’s philosophical world. Henry Corbin’s account of the imaginal describes a mode of perception that is neither sensory nor purely intellectual — an intermediate realm in which genuine images arise that carry real meaning. Hildegard’s feather on the breath of God (her description of herself as the vehicle of divine inspiration) is a phenomenological claim: she is reporting what the experience of visionary reception actually feels like, not advancing a theological argument.

Simone Weil described genuine attention as the emptying of self that allows the object of attention to be truly received. Hildegard’s creative posture is structurally similar: she does not assert herself into the composition; she makes herself available to what seeks expression through her.

The Music

The Symphoniae — a collection of liturgical songs — contains antiphons, responsories, sequences, and hymns for use in divine office. The texts are Hildegard’s own; the music she describes as received. The intervals are often unusual for the period: leaps of a seventh or octave in melodic lines, extended melismas on single syllables, modal ambiguities that resist easy categorization. The range demanded of singers is extreme by the standards of the time.

The effect is difficult to describe technically without reducing it. The music does not sound like any other medieval plainchant. It sounds like something reaching — lines that move upward and then turn back on themselves, vocal flights that suggest aspiration without resolution. Listeners who encounter it without historical context often describe it as otherworldly, which is, presumably, approximately what Hildegard intended.

Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues, c. 1151) is the earliest surviving morality play with music. It stages the conflict between the virtues and the devil for a human soul. The devil, notably, is the only character who does not sing — he speaks in a broken, harsh voice, because, Hildegard explained, the devil has no harmony.

“Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a statue of lines — one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity — so it is with the human being to whom I say You.” — Martin Buber, I and Thou

Buber’s observation about melody connects to Hildegard’s account of music’s function: for her, sacred music enacts the unity that human consciousness, fallen into multiplicity, strains to recover. The chant does not represent the sacred; it participates in it.

Viriditas — Greening Power

One of Hildegard’s central concepts is viriditas — often translated “greening power” or “greenness.” It refers to the divine vitality that animates living things: the quality of aliveness that distinguishes a living system from its components. She applied it to plants, to human bodies, to the soul, and to music. Sacred music, in her understanding, participates in viriditas: it carries the quality of divine life into the listener.

This connects to Paul Tillich’s account of the Ground of Being as the vitality that underlies all particular beings — not a being among beings but the power of being itself. Hildegard’s viriditas is a twelfth-century name for something similar: the animating force that is encountered, not constructed.

Iain McGilchrist argues that music is primarily a right-hemisphere phenomenon — its meaning is holistic, temporal, relational, and cannot be extracted into propositions without being destroyed. Hildegard’s account of how her music arrives (whole, as received) is consistent with this; what she reports is not a process of composition but a process of reception, which is to say, right-hemisphere attention in its most unmediated form.

Legacy and Contemporary Resonance

Hildegard’s work was largely unknown outside monastic circles until the late twentieth century, when recordings — beginning with Sequentia’s Symphoniae in the 1980s — brought her to wide attention. Her music now occupies an unusual cultural position: it is used in contemplative settings, in New Age contexts, in academic early-music programs, and as a touchstone for contemporary composers working at the intersection of the sacred and the minimal.

Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli works share with Hildegard’s chants a quality of received simplicity — the sense that the music arrived from a place of preparation and waiting rather than invention and construction. Both composers spent periods of relative silence before arriving at their mature style, and both describe a relationship to their creative work that is closer to receptivity than authorship.

Key Works

• Symphoniae — the collected liturgical songs; antiphons, responsories, sequences, and hymns; the body of her musical work
• Ordo Virtutum (c. 1151) — the morality play; the earliest surviving music drama; the devil who cannot sing
• Scivias (1142–52) — her first major visionary text; includes descriptions of the visions that accompanied her music
• O Virtus Sapientiae — one of her most recorded antiphons; characteristic example of the melodic style

Connections

• Henry Corbin — Hildegard’s account of visionary reception belongs to the same phenomenological territory as Corbin’s imaginal: perception that is neither sensory nor abstractly intellectual, but genuinely intermediate
• Paul Tillich — Viriditas as a medieval name for the Ground of Being; the sacred encountered as vitality rather than as a being
• Simone Weil — Both Weil and Hildegard describe creative and spiritual work in terms of receptive attention: the self emptied to allow genuine reception of what seeks to be received
• Iain McGilchrist — Hildegard’s creative process as right-hemisphere reception: holistic, non-analytical, oriented toward the whole before the parts
• Arvo Pärt — Convergent approaches to sacred composition across nine centuries; both move through periods of silence to arrive at a stripped-down style experienced as received
• Hilliard Ensemble — The Officium recordings bring together medieval sacred polyphony and contemporary improvisation; Hildegard’s tradition is the historical wellspring of the Hilliard Ensemble’s repertoire
• Imaginal — Hildegard’s visionary experience as a form of imaginal perception: real images arising in an intermediate realm, carrying genuine meaning
• Theophany — Her music as theophanic: the divine appearing through the medium of sound; the chant as encounter rather than representation
• Centering Prayer — The contemplative tradition that Hildegard’s monasticism stands within; her practice of reception anticipates the hesychast and apophatic forms of prayer that the centering prayer tradition recovers
• Martin Buber — Her music as the address of the sacred to the human: the I-Thou structure applied not to another person but to the encounter with the divine through sound