“Hildegard’s Song of Creation” was written by Richard Proulx and was commissioned by the St. Stephen congregation and friends of Mark Scott in tribute to him on April 1, 2000, the date of his 25th anniversary as Minister of Music and Organist. Proulx, composer, organist and choir trainer from Chicago, put the magnificent text from the writings of Hildegard von Bingen into a daring and expressive piece of music.
Who was Hildegard von Bingen? She is best described as a visionary, composer, poet, author, artist, prophet, naturalist, healer, monastic trouble-shooter, consultant-exorcist and theologian. She corresponded with bishops, archbishops, popes and kings and spoke out openly against corruption in the church. She was not a rebel or schismatic, but a woman ahead of her time who was deeply committed to the Catholic Church but who crusaded against corruption in the church and fought for reform of the clergy. Richard Proulx, the composer of “Hildegard’s Song of Creation” described her as a “thorn in the side of the clergy and nobility of her day.”
Hildegard was born in 1098, the tenth child of a family of minor nobility at Bockelheim, Germany. Her parents were concerned not only about their ability to feed their children, but also about giving proper care to this child of frail constitution. They dedicated their child at birth to the church and sent her at age 8 to live with an anchoress, Jutta, daughter of Count Stephan von Spanheim, in Disibodenberg, a community consisting of daughters and widows of wealthy families and even some nobility.
Anchoresses were not average nuns. Their lives were far more solitary and brutal, living alone in cells, having food passed to them through a small window and spending most of their time in meditation or handiwork. Because they would become essentially dead to the world, anchors would receive their last rights from the bishop before their confinement. This macabre ceremony was a complete burial ceremony with the anchor laid out on a bier. Though Jutta taught Hildegard to read Psalter in Latin, Hildegard always felt inadequate because of her minimal education. Upon the death of Jutta, Hildegard, at the age of 38, was elected mother superior.
Hildegard began having visions at the age of 3. During these visions she heard voices speaking in Latin, and typical of all mystics, she experienced complete loss of self during her visions. She saw a brilliant light with an even brighter light inside which she called “the living light.” Her visions were accompanied by pain and fainting spells in which she saw “in her soul” falling stars which turned black as they plunged into the ocean. She interpreted this as the rebellious angels falling from Heaven. She confided her visions only to Jutta and to her friend and confidant, the monk Volmar.
Not to take away from her visions, it is now generally agreed that Hildegard suffered from migraines. The way in which she described her visions and the aftereffects points to classic symptoms of migraine.
However, it was not until her 40’s that she began having the visions for which she would become famous. In 1141 she became bedridden, hearing voices, seeing images and unable to move. During this illness God gave her understanding of the religious texts and commanded her to write down everything she saw and heard in her visions. When Hildegard hesitated, concerned about the reactions of her male contemporaries, she fell ill. She interpreted this as a sign of God’s displeasure and began immediately dictating the details of her visions to Volmar, who would become her lifelong secretary. In many instances, Hildegard illustrated the scripts of her visions, depicting herself as a small figure gazing upwards at huge mandalas.
The first set of writings took 10 years and was entitled Scivias, the meaning of which is uncertain but may come from the Latin Scito vias Domini, or Know the Ways of the Lord. Scivias also contains Hildegard’s interpretation of her visions through artwork, Biblical exegesis and one of the earliest known liturgical plays. Scivias covers a wide range of themes ranging from divine majesty, the Trinity, creation, the fall of Lucifer and Adam, the stages of salvation, the church and its sacraments, the Last Judgment and the world to come. It can be said that Scivias is an attempt to answer the question of how Christians should live in order to reach Heaven.
While still in progress, excerpts from Scivias were sent to Pope Eugenius III, who read from it to the prelates assembled at the Synod of Trier in 1147-48. He gave papal approval both to this text and to whatever else Hildegard might produce in transcribing her visions. Official recognition that her work was divinely inspired served to disarm potential critics and allowed her freedom to criticize her secular and spiritual superiors. She completed nine books in Latin including biographies of saints, books on health and healing, as well as books on theology and an entire morality play.
There exists also a series of illuminations based upon Hildegard’s visions and music for more than seventy chants along with numerous letters speaking to the role of music as a bridge uniting the sacred into the profane.
Hildegard was an expert on the curative power of herbs, known today as holistic medicine. Her scientific views were derived from the ancient Greek cosmology of the 4 elements – fire, air, water and earth – with their complementary qualities of heat, dryness, moisture and cold and the corresponding four humours in the body – choler (yellow bile), blood, phlegm and melancholy (black bile). Human health was based on the preponderance of one or two of the humours. Today words like “choleric”, “sanguine”, “phlegmatic” and “melancholy” are still used to describe personalities. In her work Physica, consisting of 9 books, she characterizes more than 200 plants and devotes part of the books to the elements of earth, water (including local German rivers and air), trees, precious stones, fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and metals and their medical uses. Sometimes their qualities were described in a single statement as being either hot, dry, wet or cold. This lack of information makes some of the plants hard to identify, especially those that only appear under German names. In her Causae et Curae, there is a list of more than 200 diseases and conditions along with herbal remedies for curing a number of illnesses. In an essay on medicine in 1157, Hildegard provides a recipe for spice cookies, saying, “Eat them often, and they will calm every bitterness of heart and mind, and your hearing and senses will open. Your mind will be joyous, and your senses purified, and harmful humours will diminish.”
Hildegard certainly believed that God, through the Holy Spirit, was present in everything. But she also believed that God could never be fully known by humans. In this sense she was not a pantheist (universe = divinity) but a panentheist – everything is fully in God, but God is not fully in everything. She viewed the human body and soul as merely repeating the divine plan and the natural world. In her opinion the external world and the human body were seen as symbols of divine and spiritual matters. But she also followed an orthodox theology and believed in angels, Satan, Paradise and the divine scheme of Incarnation, Atonement, Redemption and Resurrection.
In 1147 God commanded her in a vision to move her convent and sisters to Rupertsberg near the town of Bingen on the banks of the Rhine. The new convent was built on the ruins of a monastery founded by the mother of St. Rupert, the patron saint of Salzburg. Interestingly though, the convent at Rupertsberg had fresh running water, one of the first examples of indoor plumbing in Western Europe.
Hildegard met with opposition from the abbot, monks and even some of the nuns of Disibodenberg, who would suffer both spiritual and financial losses from the move. Hildegard oversaw the process of designing and constructing the new monastery and in several of her chant texts compared the architectural process to the building of a spiritual community.
In her sixty-seventh year Hildegard founded a second woman’s monastery at Eibingen. Between the ages of 60 and 72 she embarked upon a series of preaching tours traveling by horseback and boat, a highly unusual practice for a woman of her age in the 12th century.
At the heart of Hildegard’s extraordinary life was her accomplishment in music, describing it as the means of recapturing the original joy and beauty of paradise and the highest form of praise to God. She used music to illustrate spiritual truths over 300 times in her writings believing that music was the sacred vehicle that could put our feet back onto the ways of God. As a child in the monastery, Hildegard took part in the Divine Office sung by the monastics 8 times a day.
Since nuns chanted for almost 4 hours each day, she was immersed in music. Most of her music was written for the Divine Office. One of her greatest challenges came towards the end of her life, when an interdict barred her and her nuns from communion and the singing of the Divine Office for many months. As a result, she wrote a series of letters describing the role of music as a bridge uniting the sacred into the profane.
Hildegard composed in the plainchant style. Plainsong is derived from earlier Jewish chants and consists of a single melody sung by soloist or choir. Often no instruments were used, though Hildegard may have used them to accompany her music, considering them a means to soften the heart and direct it toward God. Although plainchant usually never employed intervals larger than a second or third, Hildegard’s music had a very wide range, creating the “soaring arches” that are signatures of her music. Her chants contrast neumatic passages (two or three notes per syllable) and melismatic passages (three or more notes per syllable) to articulate, animate and to create lively melodies.
In 1179 “The Sybil of the Rhine” died at age 81. Her relics have rested in the parish church in Eibingen since 1642. In 1900, Prince Karl of Lowenstein founded a new convent of St. Hildegard at Eibingen, as a home for Benedictine nuns. Although not an official saint of the Catholic Church, Hildegard von Bingen is regarded as one within her native Germany. Hildegard von Bingen, deeply attached to tradition and mindful of her duties to the Church, was a woman ahead of her time and is today being claimed as one of their own by Catholics, feminists, musicians, scientists and New Age devotees.
On September 16, the sanctuary choir will sing “Hildegard’s Song of Creation” written by Richard Proulx. Mr. Proulx died at age 72 in 2010 in Chicago.
~Article written by Mary Jane Harbison~