Hildegard von Bingen and the Discipline of Coherence

In the long gallery of medieval Europe, few went as hard in the paint as Hildegard von Bingen. Born in 1098 in the Rhineland, she was a Benedictine abbess (can any of us say the same?), visionary mystic, composer, natural philosopher, medical writer, and political correspondent at a time when women were rarely encouraged to be anything at all. Hildegard did not so much transcend her era as bend it, using its language of faith to articulate a defiantly original intellect.

She entered religious life as a child, enclosed at first in an anchoritic cell (look that up if you want nightmares!) under the guidance of Jutta of Sponheim. After Jutta’s death, Hildegard assumed leadership of the community, eventually founding her own convent at Rupertsberg near Bingen. 

What distinguished her early on was an inner life of extraordinary intensity. From childhood, she experienced visions she described as illuminated by a “living light.” They were vivid, structured, and persistent. For decades, she kept these experiences private, uncertain and perhaps some afraid of their meaning. 

In her forties, she began to write.

The result was Scivias (“Know the Ways”): a sprawling, image-rich account of her visions, accompanied by theological interpretation. Unlike many medieval mystics, Hildegard’s revelations were architectural, cosmic, almost scientific in their precision. Popes and emperors took notice. Bernard of Clairvaux endorsed her work, and papal approval followed, granting her something close to authority in a world that otherwise denied it to women.

Hildegard’s intellect refused to be contained to a single discipline. She composed liturgical music of unusual range and daring, melodies that soar far beyond the modest constraints of plainchant. Today, her compositions are among the most recorded works by any medieval composer. 

She wrote on medicine and natural history, cataloguing plants, stones, and bodily ailments in texts that combined observation with spiritual symbolism. Her attention to the natural world was unusually attentive and systematic.

She was also a formidable public figure. Hildegard preached openly, an almost unheard-of role for a woman in the twelfth century, traveling across German lands to address clergy and laity alike. 

Her correspondence reads like a map of medieval power. She wrote to emperors, bishops, abbots, and popes, offering counsel that ranged from spiritual encouragement to blistering moral critique. She did not hesitate to rebuke authority when she believed it had strayed, grounding her confidence in the conviction that her voice carried divine sanction. She said, “I see you, and I want you to know that I see you”!!!

What emerges from her body of work is not merely sanctity but coherence. Hildegard envisioned the universe as an interconnected whole—animated by a greening, life-giving force that flowed through plants, bodies, and souls alike.

Health, for her, was balance. Sin was disorder. Redemption was restoration. These ideas, articulated in a pre-modern idiom, resonate uncannily with contemporary concerns about ecology, embodiment, and the limits of rationalism.

Hildegard died in 1179, having shaped a life that defied the expected contours of her time. Centuries later, the Catholic Church formally recognized her as a Doctor of the Church, affirming what history had already suggested: her thought was not marginal but central. 

She remains difficult to categorize, which may be her greatest legacy. Mystic and manager, artist and analyst, obedient nun and uncompromising critic, Hildegard von Bingen occupies a space that feels not only ahead of her century but impatient with ours.

She does not survive as a relic of medieval piety. She endures as a mind at full stretch, insisting that intellect, imagination, and authority need not be mutually exclusive—even, or especially, when embodied by a woman.