Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I have to be honest
with you, looking at the stack of research we
have on the desk today, I am feeling a distinct
sense of inadequacy. Oh, I know that feeling.
Usually we tackle a subject that fits into a
nice tidy category. You know, we do a history
dive or a science dives or a music appreciation
session. We stay in our lane. And today, the
lane is gone. We are off -roading. We are completely
off the map because if we tried to categorize
today's subject, we'd be here all day just listing
the labels. It's almost impossible. We're talking
about a 12th century Benedictine nun. But if
I just say nun, you picture someone praying quietly
in a corner, and that is not this woman. Not
even close, no. If you look at her CV, it reads
like a fever dream of productivity. It's almost
unbelievable. It really is. We are talking about
a mystic visionary, a composer of music that
is, I mean, still on the charts today. Which
is wild to think about. It is. And then a philosopher,
a medical writer, a practitioner of holistic
medicine, a linguist who invented her own language
just for the fun of it, and a poet. And a political
consultant to the most powerful men in Europe.
Let's not forget that. Exactly. I mean, she was
a universal genius centuries before the Renaissance
even gave us a term for it. We are talking, of
course, about Hildegard of Bingen, the Sybil
of the Rhine. And the mission for this deep dive
is pretty specific. We want to understand how.
How does a sickly 10th child who is literally
locked into a stone cell at age eight become
one of the loudest, most influential voices of
the Middle Ages? And not just influential. And
that's the mission part that intrigues me. Why
is she influential now? Right. Why are techno
DJs in Berlin sampling her chants? Why are feminist
scholars dissecting her letters? Why are holistic
healers selling Hildegard stones? It's true.
She seems to be everywhere all of a sudden. She
is this massive. multifaceted prism and everyone
sees a different color when they look at her.
So let's go back to the source of the light.
We need to start with the origin story. And it
really does feel like a superhero origin story,
doesn't it? Starting with the tragic backstory.
It really does. It's 1098. the very end of the
11th century. Yeah, the First Crusade is kicking
off. Europe is in the state of, you know, aggressive
expansion and religious fervor. And in the Rhineland,
in the service of the Count of Sponheim, a girl
is born to a noble family. Hildebert and Mechtild
are her parents. And immediately, we hit a concept
in the sources that stopped me in my tracks.
The tithe. It's a heavy concept. It's not something
we really think about in human terms anymore.
Most people know a tithe as, you know, 10 % of
your paycheck you might put in the church offering
plate. Yeah. But the sources suggest her parents
tithed her. That's the tradition, yes. It's a
fascinating window into the medieval noble mindset.
The tradition holds that Hildegard was the 10th
child. The 10th. And just as you owe God 10 %
of your harvest or 10 % of your coin, these parents
believe they owed God 10 % of their human output.
Well, just hear God. We had 10. This one is yours.
Essentially, yes. It was viewed as a pious act,
a way to accrue spiritual capital for the family.
It was a good look, so to speak. But there's
a practical side to it, too, isn't there? Oh,
absolutely. We have to be realistic about the
economics of feudalism, too. Having 10 children
is expensive. You have to split the inheritance
for the sons. You have to find substantial dowries
for the daughters. That's a huge financial burden.
So sending a child to the church was also a way
of balancing the family books? It was a career
path and a financial relief valve. Though I should
add a footnote here. Historians debate the 10th
child claim. Yeah. We only have records for seven
older siblings. So it's possible 10th was added
later to make her sound more biblically significant,
like a perfect offering. A bit of retroactive
PR. You could say that. But whether she was the
10th or the 8th, the result was the same. She
was marked for the church from the cradle. And
she wasn't exactly a prime candidate for strategic
marriage anyway, was she? The sources are pretty
clear on that. No. She was described as sickly
from birth. She was frail. She had trouble walking.
In a brutal physical world, she wouldn't have
survived the rigors of running a castle or, you
know, enduring 10 childbirths of her own. The
convent was, in a way, a survival strategy. A
safe harbor. A very specific kind of safe harbor,
yes. But while her body was weak... Her mind
was doing something. Yeah. Unexplained. She wrote
about this much later when she was 77 years old,
looking back. Yeah, in her autobiography. She
said she started seeing things at age three.
Three years old. Just imagine that. A toddler.
She called it the shade of the living light,
umbra viventis lucis. And I want to be really
specific here because when we say visionary or
mystic, I think we tend to picture someone having
a seizure. or fasting until they hallucinate
or dreaming. Right, the ecstatic state. You leave
your body and God enters. That's the classic
model. But that's not what she described. No,
Hildegard was adamant that this was not what
happened to her. She was very precise about it.
She wrote, I do not hear them with my outward
ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts
of my own heart, but in my soul alone while my
outward eyes are open. So she's sitting at the
dinner table, fully awake, maybe holding a spoon,
looking at her parents, and simultaneously she
is seeing. An augmented reality. That's exactly
how I think of it. It's an AR overlay on reality.
She described a light that was brighter than
a cloud carrying the sun. And within that light,
she saw architectural forms, people. writing,
symbols. It was a constant dual consciousness.
He was living in two worlds at once. All the
time. That sounds terrifying for a toddler. It
was isolating. I mean, how could you explain
that? There's a famous anecdote where, as a very
young child, she looked at a pregnant cow and
described the color of the calf inside the womb.
No way. Yes. And her nurse was freaked out. Hildegard
realized very quickly that other people didn't
have this second sight, and she learned to shut
up about it. She hid it. So she has this secret.
She's sickly. She's tithed. And then comes the
enclosure. This is the part of the story that
gave me genuine claustrophobia reading about
it. Oh, it's intense. She is sent away to Dizzy
Bodenberg. A male monastery that had a small
annex for women of frown clothes. And she is
placed in the care of Jette von Sponheim. Who
is Jette? Judah is a key figure. You can't understand
Hildegard without understanding Judah. She was
the daughter of a count, beautiful, wealthy,
about six years older than Hildegard. And she
decided to reject the world entirely. She chose
to become an anchoress. We need to define anchoress
because it's not just a nun. It's a whole other
level. A whole other level. A nun lives in a
community, works in the garden, serves the poor.
An anchoress is an anchor. She is literally walled
into a cell attached to the church for life.
Literally walled in, like with bricks and mortar.
Often, yes. There was a formal ceremony called
the rite of enclosure. It was essentially a funeral
service for a living person. Oh, my God. The
bishop would read the office of the dead. The
anchors would lie on a beer like a corpse. They
would sprinkle dust on her and then they would
walk her into the cell, lock the door and sometimes,
yes, seal it with stone. She was dead to the
world, alive only to God. An eight -year -old
Hildegard goes into that cell with her. That's
the setting. A hermitage. Just a stone room with
one small window looking into the church so they
could hear mass, and one window looking out to
the world to receive food. For 30 years. Roughly,
yes. From about 1112 to 1136. Just imagine the
psychological pressure cooker of that. Two women,
one a charismatic ascetic, one a sickly visionary
child trapped in a stone box. But it wasn't just
staring at the wall. This is where Hildegard
gets her education. such as it was right judah
taught her to read the psalter the book of psalms
and this is crucial the psalms are the heartbeat
of benedictine life they would recite them constantly
constantly they recited all 150 psalms every
single week so hildegard absorbed the rhythm
the poetry the imagery of the psalms into her
bones that's why her later writing sounds so
biblical she was marinating in it for decades
and she learned music yes judah taught her to
play the psaltery a 10 stringed instrument sort
of like a zither so in the In the darkness of
that cell, there was language and there was music.
Fast forward. It's 1136. Jida dies. The cell
has actually grown into a small convent by this
point because so many other women were inspired
by Jida and wanted to join them. Right, the community
had grown around them. And Hildegard, now in
her late 30s, is elected magistra. She's the
boss. She's in charge. But she's still hiding
the big secret, the visions. She's only told
Jida and a monk named Volmar about the full extent
of them. Ah. Volmar. He's the third character
in this early drama. He's her tutor, her secretary,
her confessor. And her greatest cheerleader,
her biggest supporter. He's the one who kept
telling her, you aren't crazy, this is a gift
from God. He believed her. He did, which was
essential. But then comes the year 1141. Hildegard
is 42. And the living light changes. It stops
being a passive movie she watches and becomes
an active command. This is the moment everything
pivots. She receives a vision she describes as
a stream of fire entering her brain, and a voice
says, write down that which you see and hear.
And her reaction is so relatable. It's not, yes,
Lord, I've been waiting for this. It's panic.
Absolute terror. She writes, I refuse to write.
Not out of stubbornness, but out of humility
and the doubt of unworthiness and the fear of
gossip. The diversity of human words, as she
put it. Exactly. She was terrified of being labeled
a heretic, a woman writing theology, a woman
claiming to speak for God. That's how you get
investigated. That's how you get burned at the
stake. So she resists. She says no. And then.
and this is the pattern that defines her life
the divine strike happens yes she falls physically
ill and not just i have a headache she describes
being paralyzed bedridden in agony. It's psychosomatic
in the most extreme sense. Well, Hildegard would
say the body and soul are completely connected.
If the soul resists its God -given purpose, the
body breaks. She explicitly attributed this illness
to her disobedience. It was a battle of wills
between her fear and Graz command. And the pain
wins. Eventually, she can't take it anymore.
She calls for Volmar. She calls for one of her
nuns, a close friend named Richardus von Stade,
and she says, okay, all right. And the moment
she picks up the wax tablet to start dictating,
She recovers. Just like that. Just like that,
the illness lifts. And that brings us to section
two, the visionary theology. Because she doesn't
just write a diary. She writes civius. Civius,
which means know the ways. It took 10 years to
complete. It's a massive volume documenting 26
major visions. But here's the problem. You can't
just publish a book like that in 1147. You need
a permit, right? You need the church to say,
this is legit. Especially as a woman. If she
had released this on her own, she would have
been silenced immediately. Or worse. But providence,
or maybe some clever maneuvering, intervened.
Pope Eugenius III was nearby at a synod in Cher.
This is the high -stakes moment. The abbot of
Dissabodenburg, a man named Cuno, realizes, hey,
this nun might be famous. This could be good
for us. He sees an opportunity. He takes a chunk
of the unfinished book to the pope. Picture the
scene. A room full of cardinals, bishops, the
pope himself, all men, all highly educated in
formal dogma. And they are reviewing the wild,
rambling, fiery writings of an uneducated nun
from a backwater convent. It could have gone
so wrong. So wrong, they could have declared
it heresy on the spot. But the pope reads it.
He has it read aloud to the entire assembly.
And he is moved. He sends a letter back to Hildegard,
giving her his apostolic blessing and commanding
her to write more. That is the golden ticket.
It changed everything. It gave her instant credence.
She was no longer just some strange nun. She
was a prophetess. She had the pope a seal of
approval. That made her untouchable. So what's
in the book? I've seen the illustrations from
the Rupertsburg manuscript. Yeah. They are, well.
Trippy is the only word that comes to mind. They
are incredibly complex. She describes the universe,
for instance, as a cosmic egg. A literal egg.
Yes. An oval structure. The outer shell is bright
fire. Then there's a layer of black fire. Then
pure ether, watery air, and so on. It's a complete
cosmology. She's trying to explain how the physical
universe is held together by God's power, all
visualized in this one image. And the art style,
there are these strange, jagged lines, stars
that look like fortifications or walls, figures
with eyes all over their wings. It's very distinctive.
Those specific visual details, the shimmering
lights, the zigzag lines, the fortress shapes,
led to a very famous modern theory about what
was going on. Right. This is where the science
comes in. Yes. In the 20th century, the neurologist
Oliver Sacks analyzed her descriptions and the
art. And he had a diagnosis. He proposed that
Hildegard suffered from severe migraines with
aura. For listeners who haven't experienced that.
What exactly does an aura look like? It's a neurological
event that can precede the headache. The visual
cortex basically goes haywire. You see scottamata
blind spots, you see shimmering lights, and you
see fortification spectra expanding zigzag patterns
that look exactly like the crenellated walls
in Hildegard's drawings. Which tracks perfectly
with her description of the living light. It
matches the clinical description almost perfectly.
Sachs argued that the sickness she battled her
whole life, the illnesses that struck her down
were likely these chronic debilitating migraines.
Now, does that explain it away? Does that mean
she wasn't a mystic, just a headache sufferer?
No. And Sachs was very clear about this. And
I agree with him. It explains the mechanism,
not the meaning. That's a great distinction.
Hildegard was a genius. She took these debilitating
neurological events and interpreted them through
the lens of her profound faith. She didn't just
suffer. She built a cathedral out of her pain.
To her, the aura was God speaking. That's a beautiful
way to put it. She didn't stop at Sivius though.
She wrote two more massive theological works.
Right. Liber Vitae Meritorum, the Book of Life's
Merits. This is where she gets into moral psychology.
It's structured as this dramatic debate between
the virtues and the vices. And this is where
she helps invent purgatory. Or at least popularize
it. She's one of the early architects of the
concept as we know it. Before this, the astral
life was a bit more binary. You know, heaven
or hell. Hildegard describes a place of purging
where souls work off their temporal debts before
entering heaven. And her descriptions of the
punishments are grotesque. Give us a taste. Well,
if you were a liar in life, your soul might be
punished by being gnawed on by toads and snakes
for a while. If you were a seducer, you might
find yourself standing in a lake of fire up to
your loins. That is specific and vivid. It's
medieval horror. But the point was pastoral.
It was meant to scare people straight. And then
her final great work, written in her 70s, Liber
Divinorum Operum, the Book of Divine Works. This
is the Grand Unified Theory. This is her masterpiece.
She connects the microcosm and the macrocosm.
The classic, as above, so below. Exactly. The
human body, the microcosm, is a perfect mat of
the universe, the macrocosm. The winds of the
world correspond to our breath. The rivers correspond
to our veins. The structure of the cosmos is
mirrored in the structure of man. It's this beautiful
holistic view where physics and theology are
the same thing. They are completely intertwined.
There is no separation. It's amazing to think
of her in her 70s, still trying to solve the
riddle of the universe. But she wasn't just a
writer locked in her room. She was a politician.
And section three of our outline is titled The
Politician and the Founder. Because this is where
Hildegard stops being polite. I'm not sure she
was ever very polite, to be honest. But yes,
this is where she fights for her independence.
Okay, so she's at Dissabodenburg. She's famous
now. Pilgrims are coming to see the visionary.
The monastery is making money off her fame and
the donations. Right. She's a major asset. And
she decides she wants to move. She wants to take
her grand community of nuns and found a new independent
convent at a place called Rupertsburg. Why? I
mean, Disabodenburg was established. It was comfortable.
Rupertsburg was a ruin on a hill. It was about
autonomy. At Disabodenburg, she was under the
thumb of the abbot. The monks controlled the
finances, the property, and the sacramental life
of the nuns. Hildegard wanted a space where women
were self -governing. She wanted to be the abbess
in truth, not just in title. But Abbot Kuno wasn't
going to let his golden goose fly the coop. No,
he refused. He said, absolutely not. You stay
here. He probably didn't want to lose the prestige
or, more importantly, the income. And this is
where we see Hildegard the tactician. She doesn't
just write a letter of complaint. She invokes
the divine strike again. She falls ill. But this
time, the description is frightening. Her biographer
writes that she became paralyzed and so heavy
that she could not be lifted from her bed. Supernaturally
heavy. Is that the claim? That's the claim. The
abbot tries to physically move her or have her
moved and she is like lead. She is immovable.
She claims that God is pinning her down until
the abbot relents and lets her community go.
It's a standoff. The immovable nun versus the
greedy abbot. And the nun wins. The abbot realizes
he looks terrible. The people are on her side.
The pope is on her side. And apparently gravity
is on her side. He caves. He gives in. So in
1150, she moves to Rupertsburg. She oversees
the construction. She secures property rights.
She proves she's a CEO as well as a mystic. Absolutely.
And once she has her own base of power, she starts
to project that power outwardly. She undertakes
preaching tours. We have to pause on how wild
this is. St. Paul said, I do not permit a woman
to teach. For centuries, women were not allowed
to preach in public. It was strictly forbidden.
But Hildegard went on four major tours up and
down the Rhine. She spoke in cathedrals, in public
squares, to huge crowds of clergy and laity,
an old nun traveling by boat and cart, commanding
the attention of the entire region. And she wasn't
giving nice, gentle homilies about love and forgiveness.
Oh, no. She was roasting them. She attacked the
clergy for corruption. She attacked simony, the
buying and selling of church offices. She called
the priest. dogs who do not bark. Dogs who do
not bark. That is a savage insult. A watchdog
that doesn't warn of danger. It is. She told
them, you are failing God. You are corrupt. So
God has sent me a weak, poor woman to tell you
how to do your job. That weak woman rhetoric
again. So clever. It was her shield. She called
herself a poor little female figure. By constantly
emphasizing her own weakness, she made the argument
that her strength must be supernatural. If a
man spoke like that, it would be arrogance. If
a weak woman spoke like that, it was a miracle.
It's brilliant reverse psychology. And she used
it on emperors, too. She wrote to Frederick Barbarossa.
The Holy Roman Emperor. The most powerful man
in the Christian world. They were friends, or
at least correspondents for a while. But when
he supported a rival, Pope and anti -Pope Hildegard
turned on him. Did she send a polite letter of
disagreement? No. She wrote a letter that essentially
said, you are acting like a madman and a child.
Watch out because the king of kings is watching
you and he will crush you. She threatened the
emperor with God's wrath to his face. And she
survived. Anyone else would have been executed
for treason. But Hildegard was too respected.
She had too much moral authority. Barbarossa
didn't dare touch her. But she wasn't entirely
invincible. Section three ends with the excommunication
crisis. And this happens at the very end of her
life. She's 80 years old. It's her final battle.
A nobleman who had been a benefactor to the convent
died. Hildegard allowed him to be buried in the
convent cemetery. Standard procedure, right?
Except the clergy in Mainz, the big city nearby,
claimed this guy had been excommunicated before
he died. Therefore, his body was unclean. They
ordered Hildegard to dig him up and throw his
body out of consecrated ground. It is gruesome.
What does she do? She refused. She insisted he
had reconciled with the church before death.
She refused to violate the sanctity of his grave.
In fact, she went out to the cemetery with her
staff and erased all the grave markings so the
men from Mainz couldn't find the body to dig
it up themselves. An 80 -year -old nun playing
a shell game with a corpse to protect a man's
soul. That is punk rock. The clergy's were furious,
absolutely livid. They placed her entire convent
under interdict. Explain what that means for
the nuns. What are the consequences? It's a collective
punishment. It's a lockdown. No mass could be
said. No sacraments could be administered. And
crucially for Hildegard, no music. They were
forbidden to sing the divine office. Silence.
For a community that believed singing was the
language of angels, that must have been a form
of torture. It was devastating, but she didn't
fold. She wrote a blistering letter to the prelates
of Mainz. She argued that music is the highest
form of praise. It's the harmony of heaven. And
by silencing her nuns, they were the ones doing
the devil's work. She completely flipped the
script on them. She warned them that God would
judge them for silencing his praise. And eventually,
after months of this, they blinked. The interdict
was lifted in March 1179. She died six months
later. She won her final fight. Speaking of the
silence being torture, let's talk about the noise
she made. Section 4. The composer. Because this
is probably how most people know her today, even
if they don't know they know her. She's the most
recorded medieval composer in history, by a wide
margin. If you type medieval music into Spotify,
Hildegard is the first thing you see. What makes
her music so distinctive? To my untrained ear,
chant is chant. It's monks humming in unison.
Standard Gregorian chant is very restrained.
It's beautiful. but it's functional it moves
in small steps up a note down a note it stays
within a pretty narrow melodic range it's meant
to be calming not exciting exactly hildegard's
music which she collected in a cycle called symphonia
is ecstatic it's emotional how so what does that
sound like the range first of all her melodies
swoop from the very bottom of the register to
the very top sometimes over two octaves it's
incredibly athletic and demanding for the singers
and it's melismatic Define melismatic for us.
So syllabic singing is one note per syllable.
Think twinkle, twinkle little star. Melismatic
singing is when you take one vowel like the O
in Gloria and you sing 30, 40, 50 notes on that
one single sound. So it's like a jazz run or
a diva moment in a pop song. That's a great modern
analogy. It creates this feeling of timelessness,
of floating, of divine inspiration just pouring
out. It's meant to induce a trance state, to
lift you out of the ordinary. And she wrote the
lyrics to the poetry. Yes, and the lyrics are
just incredible. Feather on the breath of God,
the blood of the rose that blossoms in the thorn.
It's rich, sensory, almost psychedelic imagery.
She also wrote what is arguably the first opera,
the Ordo Virtutum. The play of the virtues. It's
a musical drama, a morality play. That's the
plot. It's an allegory. The main character is
Anima the soul. She is struggling. She is tempted
by the world but wants to reach heaven. She is
surrounded by the virtues personified as women
like humility, charity, chastity, and she is
stalked by the devil. And there is a fascinating
theological detail in how the music works in
this play. This is one of those things that just
makes you go, whoa. This is my favorite aha moment
in all of Hildegard's work. In the play, the
soul sings, the virtues sing in beautiful, harmonious
planchon, but the devil. He does not sing. You
can't carry a tune. Is that it? He is incapable
of music. In the manuscript, his lines are written
without any musical notation. The instructions
say he must shout, grunt, or speak discordantly.
Why? What's the theology there? Because for Hildegard,
music is divine harmony. it is the order of the
cosmos it is the echo of god's voice from before
the fall the devil is the spirit of discord of
chaos of separation by rebelling against god
he lost the ability to harmonize he is purely
noise that is profound to be evil is to be unmusical
to be without harmony exactly and practically
it must have been quite a scene in the convent
you have the nuns dressed in beautiful robes
singing like angels and then volmar the poor
monk playing the devil just stand standing there
shouting and grunting at them. It brings the
theology to life in a way a sermon never could.
But Hildegard wasn't just concerned with the
soul's harmony. She was concerned with the body's
harmony, too. Which takes us to Section 5, The
Scientist and Healer. This is the side of her
that gets you into the health food store. She
wrote two major scientific texts, Physica, which
is a book of natural history, and Causae Cure,
or Causes and Cures. Where did she learn medicine?
Was she reading Galen and the Greek texts? She
read some Latin texts, sure. She was well -read.
But mostly she learned in the garden and the
infirmary. Monasteries were the hospitals of
the Middle Ages. The nuns grew the herbs. They
treated the sick locals who came to the door.
Hildegard was a practitioner. She had dirt under
her fingernails. And there's a central concept
here that ties everything together for her. Viriditas.
Viriditas. It's one of her favorite words. It's
a Latin term that is really hard to translate
perfectly. It means greenness, greening power,
vitality. It sounds like virility mixed with
verdant. That's exactly the root. To Hildegard,
viriditas is the life force that comes from God.
It flows through nature, making plants green
and moist and alive, and it flows through humans.
If you are healthy, you are green and moist.
If you are sick or sinful or melancholic, you
are dried out. You are withered. So health is
essentially a kind of spiritual hydration and
photosynthesis. In a spiritual sense, yes. She
saw a direct link between the health of the soul
and the health of the body. Sin dries you out.
Grace makes you green again. She categorized
everything. Plants, stones, animals. And she
had some specific theories. She used the humoral
theory, right? That was the standard model. That
was the standard science of the day. The body
has four humors. Blood, phlegm, yellow bile,
black bile. Sickness is caused by an imbalance.
You need to keep them balanced. Hildegard accepted
this. But she gave it a biblical twist. Of course
she did. Everything gets a biblical twist. She
said that Adam and Eve were perfectly balanced
in Eden. They had healthy bodily fluids. But
the fall of man threw the humors out of whack.
It turned those healthy fluids into poisonous
phlegmata. So disease is literally a result of
original sin. But she also had some surprisingly
practical cures. let's talk about beer this is
her claim to fame in the brewing world she is
credited with the first written reference to
using hops in beer as a preservative before that
what was in beer a mixture of herbs called groot
But it spoiled quickly. Hildegard noted that
the bitterness of hops stopped putrefaction.
It made the beer last longer. So in a way, she
helped invent the IPA. I've seen Hildegard, patron
saint of craft breweries. I love it. She also
recommended boiling river water before drinking
it. She didn't know about bacteria, obviously.
She had no concept of germ theory. But she observed
that people who drank raw water got sick, and
people who drank boiled water... didn't that
simple observation probably saved thousands of
lives in her care but not all her advice was
great by modern standards she was big on bloodletting
oh yeah Bloodletting was the aspirin of the Middle
Ages. Everyone did it for everything. But Hildegard,
being Hildegard, was meticulous about it. She
said you have to look at the moon phases. You
should only bleed during a waning moon when the
humors are less agitated. And she had a very
specific unit of measurement for how much blood
to take. This one grossed me out when I first
read it. Me too. She said to take the amount
that a thirsty person can swallow in one gulp.
That is such a visceral, horrifying unit of measurement.
But also, you know exactly what she means. It
is. But it's practical. It's brilliant in its
own way. Everyone knows what a gulp looks like.
It's better than saying 50 milliliters when you
don't have a beaker. It's folk science. It shows
her mind at work. She's trying to standardize
medicine. She's trying to find order in chaos.
Which brings us to section six, the linguist.
Because apparently, writing theology, composing
music, running two convents, or curing the sick
wasn't enough. She had to invent a language.
The lingua ignota, the unknown language. Why?
Just why? What was the point? That is the million
-dollar question that scholars are still arguing
about. We have a glossary of about a thousand
words she invented, and an alphabet of 23 strange
-looking letters called literae ignotae. Give
us some examples. What does it sound like? God
is Agon's. It sounds a bit like a mashup of Latin
and German with a lot of Zs thrown in. It has
a phone aesthetic quality. It sounds mysterious
and ancient. But the purpose is debated. Theory
one, it was a secret code. Right. A way for the
nuns to talk to each other without the monks
or visitors understanding. A clubhouse language
to build solidarity and a sense of special identity.
Like Twinspeak, but for a whole convent. I can
see that. Exactly. But theory too is deeper.
Scholar Sarah Higley suggests it was a theological
project. Hildegard believed the world was fallen.
Maybe she believed human language was fallen
too imprecise, dirty, corrupted. Maybe she was
trying to create a pristine language, a language
fit for angels, to describe divine things without
the baggage of everyday Latin or German. So it
wasn't just a game. It was an attempt to fix
the Tower of Babel on a small scale. Possibly.
Today, she's considered a pioneer of conlangs
-constructed languages. She's the spiritual grandmother
of J .R .R. Tolkien's Elvish and the Klingon
language. She really did do everything. It's
staggering. But we have to remember, beneath
the genius, she was a human being. And Section
7 brings us to the personal side, the emotional
vulnerability. You can't talk about Hildegard
without talking about Richard Esfand's state.
Richards was the nun who helped her write Sivius.
Her secretary. She was much younger, a noble
woman. She was Hildegard's assistant, her secretary,
her confidant, her protege. They worked side
by side for 10 years. Hildegard called her the
light of my eyes. But then politics intervened,
as it always does. In 1151, Richardus' powerful
family arranged a promotion for her. She was
elected abbess of a different, more prestigious
convent. It meant she had to leave Rupertsburg.
And Hildegard did not handle this well. She had
a meltdown. A complete and total meltdown. She
wrote desperate letters. She wrote to Richardus'
mother, begging her to intervene. She wrote to
the Pope, claiming the move was not God's will.
She used the God card again. But it sounds different
this time. It does. It feels less like a prophet
speaking from on high and more like a heartbroken
woman trying to keep her dearest friend from
leaving. It feels intensely personal. Did it
work? No. The Pope ordered Richardus to go to
her new post. She left. And then... The tragedy.
One year later, Richardus died suddenly. Oh,
that is just gut -wrenching. After all that.
It crushed Hildegard. We have a letter she wrote
to Richardus' brother after her death. It is
full of raw, unfiltered grief. She writes, I
loved the nobility of her conduct, and I loved
her. And this has led to some modern interpretation.
Queer medieval scholars look at this relationship
and see something significant. It is significant.
Now, we have to be careful not to just slap a
21st century label like lesbian on a 12th century
nun. Identity and relationships worked very differently
then. Of course. But the emotional intensity,
the language of divine love she used, the physical
distress at the separation, it clearly fits within
a queer reading of history. Whether it was sexual
or not is almost beside the point. It was a profound
romantic same -sex bond that defined her emotional
life. It humanizes her. She wasn't a stone statue
of a saint. She loved deeply, and she lost deeply.
There's also some discussion about her art in
this context, right? Right. If you look at the
Sivius Illuminations, particularly the way she
depicts the side wound of Christ, well, it's
a diamond shape. It's often red. To a modern
eye, it looks very ionic. It looks like a vulva.
Is that intentional? Or is that just us projecting
modern sensibilities onto it? It's probably a
bit of both. Formally, it's likely a mandorla
in almond shape used in medieval art to signify
holiness. But Hildegard's theology was radically
feminine. She talked about God as a mother. She
talked about the church as a bride. She saw the
feminine as a source of divine creative power.
So using imagery that evokes birth and life makes
perfect sense in her theological system. It just
adds another layer to her complexity. So we come
to section eight, the legacy. She died in 1179.
The Chronicles say two rainbows crossed in the
sky when she took her last breath. A fitting
end, don't you think? It really is. But she wasn't
officially a saint for a long, long time. This
is a classic case of Vatican red tape. The canonization
process started almost immediately, but documents
got lost, committees dragged their feet, the
Reformation happened and threw everything into
chaos. For centuries, she was a saint by popular
tradition, but not on the official list. When
did it finally happen? Not until May 2012. Pope
Benedict VI finally used a process called equivalent
canonization to basically say, look, everyone
has treated her as a saint for 800 years. Let's
just make it official. And then he gave her an
even rarer title a few months later, Doctor of
the Church. That is a huge deal. There are only
about 37 doctors of the church in all of history.
You're talking Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of
Avila. It means your teachings are considered
universally important and orthodox. It's the
hall of fame of theology. For a woman who called
herself unlearned, that is the ultimate vindication.
Absolutely. But her legacy isn't just in the
church. As you said earlier, it's in the club.
This is my favorite part of the story, the pop
culture revival. It started in the 80s and 90s
with the chant craze, but then electronic artists
found her. The British band Orbital sampled her
track O Eucharist for their classic ambient song
Belfast. I listened to that track this morning.
It works so well. It works perfectly. Her music
is floating, timeless, unmoored from a strict
rhythm. It fits ambient techno like a glove.
The artist Grime cites her as a major influence.
The artist Lingua Ignota took her name from Hildegard's
language. She is the patron saint of the avant
-garde. And the New Age movement loves her. Oh,
of course. The crystals, the herbs, the healing
stones, the green power. She fits perfectly into
the holistic wellness trend. And there's even
a reincarnation theory. You have to tell me about
this. Rudolf Steiner, the mystic philosopher.
In 1924, he claimed that a Russian philosopher
named Vladimir Soloviev was the reincarnation
of a nun who fit Hildegard's description perfectly.
Sure. Why not? At this point, she is everything
to everyone. That's a thing. She is a mirror.
Feminists see a feminist icon who broke the patriarchy.
Catholics see a doctor of the church. Musicians
see a compositional genius. Healers see a pioneer
of holistic medicine. She's big enough to hold
all of it. So let's wrap this up. We've covered
the mystic, the politician, the artist, the scientist.
What is the final takeaway? What is the thread
that ties the 12th century to the 21st? For me,
the keyword is connection. Hildegard didn't believe
in boxes. She didn't see music and medicine and
theology and botany as separate subjects. She
saw them as different languages for describing
the same divine truth. The cosmic egg. It all
fits together. Exactly. The mathematical interval
in a song is the orbital mechanics of the stars,
is the balance of humors in the blood. It's all
one interconnected web. We live in an age of
hyper -specialization. You are a biologist or
a poet. You're a data scientist or a musician.
Hildegard challenges us to see the whole picture.
And that concept of viriditas, that greening
power. feels incredibly urgent right now, doesn't
it? We are facing a climate crisis. We are facing
epidemic levels of burnout. The idea that we
need to tend to the garden, both the planet and
our own bodies and souls, is a powerful message.
She believed the world and the body were a garden
that needed tending. If she were alive today,
I don't think she'd be locked away in a convent.
I think she'd be a climate scientist, a protester,
and an experimental musician all at once. And
she'd probably be sending very angry, prophetically
worded emails to world leaders. Oh, absolutely.
She'd be in their DMs telling them they are madmen
if they don't fix the climate. And honestly,
knowing her track record, they might just listen.
That is Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval powerhouse
who is somehow 800 years later still ahead of
her time. Thank you for listening to this deep
dive. Go listen to some of her music, maybe the
remix, maybe the original drink and IPA in her
honor, and find your own greening power. Sticky
Curious. See you next time.