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November 24, 2004
Hildegard von Bingen
Liber Scivias, a manuscript by Hildegard von Bingen
Cosmic Man
Cosmic Egg
In 1098 Hildegard von Bingen was born into a noble family of Bermersheim (Rhinehesse) and was educated from the age of eightat the benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. Her education consisted mainly in learning how to sing and mastering various approariate crafts.
In 1136 Hildegard became the abbot of this monastery and founded new monasteries on Rupertsberg near Bingen and in Eibingen. As a highly sensitive person with a deeply inquisitive nature and scholarly disposition, she wrote numerous treatises on theology, natural sciences, medicine and general knowledge. She also became known as author of musical compositions and religious songs.
Early in her life a divine voice instructed her to note down her mystical experiences. Her profuse literary activity made her well known, revered and famous already during her life time. Emperors, popes and noblemen were in correspondence with her. What attracted and attracts people even today, (after 900 years of her birth, is her vision of a harmonious universe, in which each element has its well-defined place: the stones and the stars, the clouds and the flowers, the animals and the human beings in its centre, all pay a perfectly concordant role in the symphony of the universe. Conflicts occur when the human beings play a discordant sound and thereby disturb the harmonious cosmic network of friendship, mutual concern and care for the other. Critically she looked down upon sick people who do not want to be cured but are enchanted with their plight, or those who have lost the vision for the beauty of nature. Even emperors and popes, interlocked in struggles for supremacy, were not spared of criticism from her side, and she condemned the bloody crusades as the dark sides of the human being. Hildegard died at the age of 81 at the Rupertsberg monastery.
What a powerful mind Hildegard von Bingen must have had that her mystical experiences, her writings and her musical compositions are still relevant today!
(Hildegard von Bingen, mystic and church reformer, concerned with the plight of the human being in universe, lived from 1098 to 1179.)
Posted by jacob at November 24, 2004 03:00 PM to 52 - Nun | Religion | Comments (1)
Comments
Hi Jacob,
a quote on Hildegard von Bingen from an interesting article "Romanesque" by Dr. Charles Bergengren of the Cleveland Institute of Art :
"Hildegard's most insightful and important work is the Liber Scivias, a Latin contraction of the phrase "Scito Vias Lucis" or "Know Ye the Ways of Light" (Liber="book"). In it she presented an incredibly independent vision of the Cosmos, innovative far beyond her contemporaries. In other works she employed the traditional medieval concept of Macrocosmos and Microcosmos as conveyed by the image of the "Cosmic Man", but in Liber Scivias she basically conceived of the universe in terms of pure energy, rendered in the vocabulary of her time: light and radiant flames. She also consistently said that there were two layers to the atmosphere, describing the close one as "soft" or "tender" [life-giving] and the outer one as "strong" (or "stark" in German). (In this regard, anticipating stratification of the upper atmosphere and the relativity of celestial matter (the stars were commonly acknowledged to be included the physical dimensions, but she depicted them as energy), I believe we must acknowledge her status almost a millennium ahead her time, on a par with Einstein, or any male scientist you want to name. Why has this genius been overlooked?!)
Hildegard's most arresting image has come to be known as the Cosmic Ball of Fire or alternatively, the Egg of the Universe. She described her vision in the words:
'Then I saw a huge image, round and shadowy. It was pointed at the top like an egg. Its outermost layer was bright fire. Within lay a dark membrane. Suspended in the bright flames was a burning ball of fire, so large that the entire image received its light. Three more lights burned in a row above it. They gave it support through their glow, so that the light would never be extinguished.'"
Sadly, some of the originals of the 12th century manuscript have been destroyed during WWII by US bombs.
comment by: willy to entry Hildegard von Bingen in Category: 52 - Nun | Religion