Hildegard the Architect

As I was reading Hildegard’s account of the cosmic egg, I was struck by its elemental nature. She writes that the egg has a “bright fire within,” and from that fire, there are fractal “whirlwinds.” The egg of creation is layers of storms: “And while [the dark fire] made its thunders heard, the bright fire and the winds and the air were in commotion.” Water and Earth are represented: there are “watery air” and “rain” and “a sandy globe of great magnitude. There’s even the ether. Plus, if we’re extending it a bit, the light and the dark (for all, see pp. 93-4).

Colored Ver. of Hildegard's Cosmic Egg via Hildegarden

The first reaction she has/receives to the image of the egg is, “God, who made all things by His will, created them so that His Name would be known and glorified, showing in them not just the things that are visible and temporal, but also the things that are invisible and eternal” (94).

We heard a version of the elements being connected with the higher and lower orders of the universe before, in Barker’s chapter on “Creation” in Temple Theology. The colors of the veil, she says, “represented the four elements from which the world was made, the red being fire, the blue air, the purple water and the white linen the earth” (29). Barker asserts that the veil “which concealed the Glory of God represented matter, the stuff of the visible creation” (30). The veil also represented the “Incarnation” (Barker 31). The veil thus suggests the miracles of God. If the veil, with its elemental coloring, represents the incarnation, then it must represent Jesus. And, as we’ve been talking about, Jesus is the Creator in medieval understanding.

For Hildegard, the ascent and descent of the sun represent the Incarnation [the medieval writers I’ve read loved the son/sun pun]. Also, she says that the ether and surrounding images show the connection between Old and New and “connect it to the divine rule of celestial mysteries” (96-7). I think that this makes sense but given the nature of the vision and the important role of the elements in it, it seems that the vision itself is a veil linking Creation and the Incarnation.

Hildegard herself discusses the visible and temporal and invisible and eternal works of God and says that “the visible and temporal is a manifestation of the invisible and eternal” (94). We saw this with Hugh of St. Victor’s idea that the beauty of that “lower” order informs of the invisible “higher” order. Hildegard pushes this theology one step forward because she doesn’t just have to use reason, as Hugh does; instead, she has a vision. By seeing but not seeing, Hildegard’s vision is a union of the visible and the invisible. The visible because she can describe it somewhat in physical terms—we have the sand and storms, for example. The invisible because it is still something shown to her by God through her inner eye. As this certain type of vision, it seems that Hildegard is experiencing the veil. Perhaps even allegorically becoming the veil while she’s having these visions. At the very least, her vision is a type of veil. It too, in Barker’s terms, depicts “the stuff of visible creation” as well as the “Incarnation.” She alone does not have the power to lift the veil entirely—that was the Incarnation’s job—but she can reveal the parts of the divine that still seem opaque.

In her first vision, vision itself becomes veil-like: “at the foot of the mountain, stood an image full of eyes on all sides, in which, because of those eyes, I could discern no human form” (67). Ironically, the very thing that should allow vision obscures it. And, Hildegard herself loses a certain type of vision: “I could not look at its [the One enthroned] face” (67). Nominally it’s because the One is too bright. But considering further, this seems to be because she is purely seeing (with her inner eye) divinity; she is seeing the invisible. This is not so with the Creation vision (Vision Three). Creation and the Incarnation both reveal divine glory in a way that is tangible or, dare I say, visible to us. They both link the visible and invisible, just like the veil. The Creation (particularly of Adam) seems to be a figural type to the antitype of the Incarnation. In the former, the Word creates the world. In the latter, the Word enters the world.

This fits with what Prof. Fulton Brown argues in her essay, “Hildegard of Bingen's Theology of Revelation,” particularly when she says that a theological “exploration should be disciplined, that is, ordered or structured on the basis of some aspect of revelation to which it relates everything else” (305). In describing Creation and the cosmic egg, Hildegard is drawing an explicit link between her revelations and order. The relationships between the elements of this vision are very important and unpacking them comprises most of Hildegard’s exegesis about the vision. The aspect of revelation that Hildegard seems to be connecting to everything else is Creation. Biblical Creation here necessarily structures both the universe’s cosmology and reveals the structure of the Trinity. By putting the descriptive emphasis on the elements and their order within the different layers of the egg, Hildegard seems to be performing a similar argumentative move as Hugh, St. Victor and the temple tradition: She, like the other two examples, emphasizes how the visible/material reveals the invisible. And her vision itself links these two aspects of the divine.

- LAJ

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Sources:

• Temple Theology: An Introduction by Margaret Barker
• Scivias Book 1 by Hildegard of Bingen
• “Hildegard of Bingen's Theology of Revelation" by Rachel Fulton Brown

A side question:

• About the musical aspects of her work, does this relate to the idea that later medieval people had where if the cosmos is aligned properly, it generates heavenly music?