Hildegard of Bingen: Viriditas, the Scivias Visions, and the Greening Power of Creation

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Life and the Benedictine Formation

Hildegard von Bingen was born in 1098 in Bermersheim vor der Hohe in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a noble family. In the practice of the time, the tenth child was offered to the Church as a tithe: a living offering of the family's abundance to God. At age eight, Hildegard was given into the care of Jutta von Sponheim, a noblewoman who had chosen the religious life as an anchoress, living in a small cell attached to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg.

This was not an education in the modern sense. Jutta taught Hildegard to read the Latin psalter, to sing the divine office, and to live according to the Benedictine rule. The formation was musical, rhythmic, and liturgical: the day organized by the eight canonical hours of prayer, the year organized by the liturgical calendar, the inner life shaped by the continuous practice of psalmody. It was, by any standard, a rich education in the sacred arts of the medieval Benedictine world.

When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was elected magistra (leader) of the small group of nuns that had formed around Jutta's cell. The community had grown and the cell had become a proper convent. Hildegard was now 38 years old, an experienced practitioner of the Benedictine life, and still carrying the visionary experiences she had had since childhood.

In 1141, she had what she described as a decisive experience: the Living Light commanded her to write down what she saw and understood. She was initially reluctant, understanding herself as unlearned and unworthy. With the encouragement of her confessor Volmar and her beloved fellow nun Richardis von Stade, she began the work that would become the Scivias.

The Living Light: Hildegard's Visionary Experience

What distinguished Hildegard's visionary experience from other forms of mystical experience was its specific quality and mode. She was emphatic, consistent, and technically precise about this throughout her life. She was not describing dreams, ecstasies, or states in which ordinary consciousness was suspended or replaced.

She described her experience through two related phenomena she called the "living light" (lux vivens) and the "reflection of the living light" (umbra viventis lucis). The living light was the direct divine reality: not a visual perception but an awareness of divine presence that was simultaneously luminous, alive, and utterly beyond any ordinary sensory experience. She rarely described the living light directly because, she said, it could not be described. It could only be acknowledged.

The reflection of the living light was the dimension in which the actual visions occurred: a shining, illuminated space in which figures, architectural structures, colors, and moving scenes appeared with extraordinary vividness and symbolic richness. These were the visions she recorded in her books. They were not the divine reality itself but its reflection in the medium of her perception, and she was careful always to say so.

The Scivias: Structure and Key Visions

The Scivias (from Scito vias Domini, Know the Ways of the Lord) was composed between 1141 and 1151, taking ten years to complete. It is Hildegard's first and most celebrated visionary work, and the one for which she received formal ecclesiastical approval: in 1147-1148, Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugenius III reviewed portions of the Scivias and gave it their endorsement, an extraordinary validation for a woman writing in the 12th century.

The Scivias contains 26 visions organized in three books. Each vision is first described, often in dense, symbolic, and visually overwhelming language, and then interpreted: Hildegard provides the theological meaning of each element, speaking in the first person but attributing the interpretation to the divine voice that accompanied the vision.

Book I (6 visions) addresses the relationship between God, creation, and the human being. The opening vision shows the cosmic mountain of God with a luminous figure seated on it and a human being at its base: the vision of the divine-human relationship in its most fundamental form.

Book II (7 visions) presents the drama of salvation history: the Fall, the Incarnation, the Church as the bride and body of Christ, the sacraments, and the ordering of the virtues. The most famous vision in this book is the cosmic egg, showing the structured universe as a cosmic body within which the human being stands at the center.

Book III (13 visions) is the longest and most complex, addressing the final realities: the ordering of the heavenly powers, virtue and vice in their cosmic dimensions, and the consummation of all things in the Day of the Lord.

Viriditas: The Greening Power of Creation

The concept that most distinctively expresses Hildegard's vision of the natural world and its relationship to the divine is viriditas, from the Latin viridis (green). The term appears in the Scivias, the Liber vitae meritorum, the Liber divinorum operum, and extensively in her medical writings, her letters, and her music.

Viriditas is the cosmic life force that flows through all living things: the quality of greenness, fertility, vitality, and capacity for growth that characterizes life as distinct from death, health as distinct from illness, spiritual aliveness as distinct from aridity. Hildegard applies the concept across multiple levels simultaneously. The greenness of a plant is viriditas at the physical level. The healing power of that plant's juice or fragrance is viriditas expressed medicinally. The soul's longing for God, its capacity for moral growth and spiritual renewal, is viriditas at the spiritual level.

The theological source of viriditas is the divine creative act: God creates by pouring viriditas into the world. The Holy Spirit, for Hildegard, is the primary mediator of viriditas: the green, growing, life-giving presence of God within creation. She wrote: "The Holy Spirit is a burning, fiery spirit. It enkindles everything. It has no beginning and no end. It is in motion, ever, and just as with the green of the earth, the spirit moves and acts without ceasing."

The connection to Goethe's and Steiner's understanding of the etheric forces, the formative life energies that organize living organisms, is striking and direct. Viriditas is not merely a metaphor: it is Hildegard's observation, from her visionary perspective, of the same reality that Steiner later described as the etheric body and the etheric forces of nature.

Ariditas: The Dryness That Opposes Life

Viriditas does not exist in isolation. It is defined, in part, by its contrast with ariditas, the dryness, aridity, and barrenness that occur when viriditas is blocked, depleted, or turned away from its source. The viriditas-ariditas polarity is one of the organizing axes of Hildegard's entire system.

In the natural world, ariditas is drought: the drying and dying of the green world when water and the life-giving warmth of the sun are withheld. In the human body, ariditas corresponds to illness, especially the cold, drying conditions associated with melancholic and phlegmatic imbalances: lethargy, coldness, poor digestion, and the accumulation of dry and impure humors. In the soul, ariditas is spiritual dryness: the loss of the felt sense of God's presence, the dullness of prayer, the failure of moral will and creative energy.

Hildegard's medicine is therefore a medicine of restoring viriditas. The herbs she recommends in the Physica are often selected for their heating, moistening, and life-giving properties, their capacity to drive out the cold dryness of ariditas and restore the warm greenness of health. Her spiritual guidance is similarly directed: practices, musical experience, and the liturgical life of the monastery are all understood as channels through which viriditas flows into the dry and depleted soul.

Sapientia: The Divine Feminine Wisdom

Alongside viriditas, the other great feminine theological concept in Hildegard's work is Sapientia (divine Wisdom). Drawing on the personified Wisdom of the Hebrew Bible, particularly Proverbs 8 and the Book of Wisdom, Hildegard developed an extensive theology of divine Wisdom as the cosmic feminine principle that mediates between the transcendent Father and the created world.

Sapientia is the beauty and intelligence of creation, the principle by which the divine Creator expressed the divine self in the multiplicity of the natural world. She is the presence of intelligence in things, the reason why the cosmos is ordered rather than chaotic, the ground of the correspondences between the celestial and the terrestrial that Hildegard observed throughout her visionary work.

For Hildegard, Sapientia and viriditas are related but distinct. Viriditas is the power of life: the green force that makes things grow and heal. Sapientia is the wisdom dimension of the divine creative act: the intelligence and beauty that give the world its form and meaning. Together, they express the fullness of the divine presence in creation: not an absent transcendent God who created the world and withdrew, but an actively present, immanent divinity whose green power and whose wisdom shine through every leaf and stone and human face.

The Three Major Visionary Works

The Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works, 1163-1173), Hildegard's final and most cosmologically ambitious work, is particularly important for understanding her relationship to Steiner's spiritual science. The work's central vision is of the cosmic human: a vast being whose body is co-extensive with the universe, whose organs correspond to the celestial spheres and the four elements, and who stands at the nexus of the divine and natural worlds. The human being, in Hildegard's vision, is not a small creature in a large cosmos but the cosmos's most concentrated and most fully realized form: the microcosm that contains and mirrors the macrocosm.

Medical Writings: Physica and Causae et Curae

Hildegard's medical works stand apart from most medieval medical texts in two important ways: they reflect genuine empirical observation of plants and their effects, and they integrate medical knowledge with a coherent spiritual-physical framework in which the health of the body and the health of the soul are expressions of the same underlying reality.

The Physica (also known as Liber subtilitatum naturae creaturarum, Book of the Subtleties of the Nature of Created Things) is organized in nine sections covering plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, and metals. For each item, Hildegard describes its physical properties and its medicinal applications, always in terms of its hot-cold-moist-dry qualities and its specific relationship to the human constitution. The work draws on the humoral medicine of Galen and Avicenna but integrates these with Hildegard's own observations and with her understanding of viriditas.

The Causae et Curae (Causes and Cures) addresses illness more systematically, discussing the causes of disease in terms of humoral imbalance, the relationship between moral life and physical health, and the specific treatments appropriate to different conditions. Hildegard's account of the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of the human body, and between spiritual and physical health is more fully developed here than in any of her other works.

Music and the Ordo Virtutum

Hildegard's musical output is extraordinary by any standard. She composed 77 liturgical chants, organized in a collection she called the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations), and one complete musical morality play, the Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues). Together, these represent more surviving music by a single named composer than any other person who lived before the 13th century.

Her melodies are distinctive and do not conform to the modal conventions of standard Gregorian chant. They tend toward wider melodic ranges, soaring upward leaps, and sustained high notes on emotionally significant words. Modern performers and musicologists have noted that Hildegard's music has an unusual quality of spaciousness and intensity that distinguishes it immediately from conventional Gregorian plainchant.

The Ordo Virtutum is particularly remarkable: it is the earliest surviving morality play with a complete musical score, and one of the earliest surviving operas in Western music. It stages an allegorical drama in which the Soul is tempted by the Devil, falls, suffers, is rescued by the sixteen Virtues, and is finally restored. The Devil is the only character who speaks but never sings: Hildegard explained this by saying that the devil is incapable of the harmony of music. This theological-aesthetic claim, that musical harmony is a spiritual reality inaccessible to destructive forces, runs through all her musical thought.

Lingua Ignota: The Invented Language

One of the most intriguing and least explained aspects of Hildegard's multifaceted genius is the Lingua ignota, an invented language consisting of approximately 1,011 words and an invented alphabet of 23 letters called the Litterae ignotae. The glossary of Lingua ignota words was recorded in two 12th-century manuscripts and covers terms for human beings (arranged hierarchically from God through the celestial orders to humans), plants, animals, and a few other categories.

The language has no known precedent and no known successors until J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages in the 20th century. Its purpose remains debated. Hildegard never explained it in any of her surviving writings. Possibilities include: a private language for communication within the convent (perhaps for a degree of privacy in letters), a sacred language for specific liturgical or meditative purposes, an expression of her visionary perception of a reality beyond ordinary language, or simply an outpouring of the same creative generativity that produced her music, her medicine, her theology, and her art.

The Four Temperaments in Hildegard's Medicine

Hildegard's medicine uses the classical four-temperament framework, which she calls the four complexions or humors: the sanguineous (warm and moist, associated with air and blood), the choleric (warm and dry, associated with fire and yellow bile), the melancholic (cold and dry, associated with earth and black bile), and the phlegmatic (cold and moist, associated with water and phlegm). This framework was standard in medieval humoral medicine, but Hildegard's treatment of it is distinctive in several ways.

She connects the four temperaments not only to physical constitution and disease susceptibility but to specific moral tendencies and spiritual challenges. The choleric type is given to anger and impatience but also to great energy and productivity. The melancholic type is given to sadness and self-enclosed heaviness but also to depth, seriousness, and spiritual sensitivity. The sanguineous type is given to cheerfulness and social ease but also to inconstancy and difficulty maintaining commitments. The phlegmatic type is given to stability and patience but also to inertia and difficulty being moved to action.

These descriptions, which parallel Steiner's own treatment of the four temperaments in his pedagogical writings (most fully in GA 57), are not merely abstract classifications. In Hildegard's medicine, knowing a patient's dominant temperament determines the entire treatment approach: what foods to prescribe or avoid, what healing herbs to use, what physical practices to recommend, and what spiritual counsel to offer.

Steiner's Recognition: Viriditas and the Etheric Forces

Rudolf Steiner mentioned Hildegard in several contexts across his lecture cycles. In his Karma lectures (GA 235-236, 1924), he described her as someone whose visionary perception was working primarily through the etheric body, the formative life body, in a way characteristic of the medieval consciousness. Medieval clairvoyance, in Steiner's account, was less individualized and more direct than the spiritual perception he believed the modern era required: it worked through the etheric body without the full individualization of the I that modern spiritual development demands. This gave it an immediate, vivid, and often cosmic quality, but also a quality of being received rather than cognitively developed.

The connection between viriditas and Steiner's etheric forces is striking enough to merit specific attention. Steiner's etheric body is the formative life organization that holds the physical body together as a living being, prevents it from decomposing during life, and organizes its growth, regeneration, and rhythmic processes. It is associated with water, with the plant kingdom, and with the green, growing aspects of the natural world. When Hildegard describes viriditas as the divine life force present in green plants, in healing herbs, in the flowing waters of the earth, and in the living warmth of the human body, she is describing exactly what Steiner would call the etheric forces in their natural and human expressions.

Canonization and Doctor of the Church

Hildegard died on September 17, 1179, at her convent at Rupertsberg. She had been venerated informally as a saint almost immediately, and several attempts to have her formally canonized were made in the centuries following her death. The formal process stalled repeatedly, partly because her cause was complex and the documentation extensive, and partly because the medieval canonization process was not well-suited to cases involving prolific theological writing that required careful evaluation.

On October 7, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI officially completed her canonization and proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church. She was the 35th Doctor of the Church and only the fourth woman to receive the title, after Teresa of Avila (1970), Catherine of Siena (1970), and Therese of Lisieux (1997). The designation Doctor of the Church is awarded to those whose writings have been of outstanding importance to the universal Church, not merely their own local or national tradition.

The timing of the canonization, in the first decade of the 21st century, reflects a broader renewed interest in Hildegard's work that began in the late 20th century. Her music has been recorded by many groups and has found wide audiences far beyond academic musicology. Her medical and nutritional recommendations have attracted interest from integrative medicine practitioners. Her theology has been claimed by feminist theologians, by ecological theologians, and by anyone interested in the integration of spiritual and natural knowledge.

The Viriditas Renewal Meditation

The following practice draws on Hildegard's understanding of viriditas as a force that can be attended to, invited, and allowed to flow. It is a practice of receptive attention to the living world, designed for use outdoors or near living plants.

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