Hildegard of Bingen · Theology
Hildegard’s theology of music: the soul itself is <em>symphonic</em>, and song is no ornament but the soul’s deepest act - a recovery of the harmony Adam sang with the angels before the Fall, and a participation, here and now, in the praise of heaven. Her <em>Symphonia</em> and her sung morality play, the <em>Ordo Virtutum</em>, put the doctrine into sound.
In the last year of her life, defending her nuns’ right to sing, Hildegard wrote a phrase that condenses her whole philosophy of music: symphonialis est anima - the soul is symphonic. She did not mean that souls happen to enjoy music, as one might enjoy a good meal. She meant that harmony is built into the very structure of the soul, that a human being is a symphonic thing by nature, tuned to resonate with the harmonies of heaven and of the created world. On this view, to sing is not to add a pleasant decoration to worship; it is to do what the soul is for, to sound the note it was made to sound. Music, for Hildegard, is not an art laid on top of the spiritual life. It is the spiritual life becoming audible.
Hildegard told a striking story about where music comes from. In the beginning, she said, Adam’s voice held the sound of every harmony and the sweetness of the whole art of music; he sang with the angels, whose nature is praise. When he sinned and was cast out, he lost that angelic voice - the world went, in a sense, out of tune - and human beings were left with only a memory of the harmony they had forfeited. But the memory was not nothing. The holy prophets, Hildegard taught, moved by that memory and by the Spirit, composed psalms and canticles and even devised musical instruments, so that the beauty of the sound might rekindle in listeners the delight they had lost and lift their hearts back toward God. Music is therefore a kind of sacred technology of memory: it exists to recall the paradise we fell from and to carry a trace of heaven into a fallen world. Every hymn is an attempt to sing our way back.
Hildegard did not only theorize about music; she composed a large and extraordinary body of it, gathered under a title that says everything: Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum - the ‘Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations.’ It collects dozens of liturgical songs - antiphons, responsories, sequences, hymns - for the feasts of the Church and the saints of her region, and it is unlike anything else in the twelfth century. Where the plainchant of her day tended to move in modest steps within a narrow range, Hildegard’s melodies leap across wide intervals and soar to great heights, spinning out long, ecstatic chains of notes on a single syllable, straining, it seems, to break the bounds of ordinary chant and reach the celestial harmony they describe. The music enacts its own theology: it sounds like the soul stretching upward toward a heaven it can almost hear. To sing it is strenuous, even athletic - as if reaching back toward Adam’s lost voice required the whole range of the human one.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Hildegard held the soul to be symphonialis (symphonic), that music recalls the paradisal harmony Adam lost in the Fall and lets us share in heaven’s praise, that her Symphonia is a large body of soaring liturgical song, and that her Ordo Virtutum is the earliest known morality play - sung throughout,…
Leads to Boethius.
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