Hildegard of Bingen · Theology
Hildegard’s distinctive way of seeing: not the trance of the ecstatic nor the pictures of a dream, but a waking vision received with ‘the eyes and ears of the inner person’ - a steady brightness she called the <em>umbra viventis lucis</em>, the reflection of the living Light.
Hildegard of Bingen said she had seen a mysterious light since she was a small child - by her own account from the age of three - but for forty years she told almost no one. Then, in 1141, when she was forty-two, something broke open. A fiery light of tremendous brightness flooded her mind, and with it came a voice commanding her to write down what she saw and heard. She fell ill, she tells us, until she finally obeyed and began her first great visionary book, the Scivias. What is striking from the very first page is how she describes the experience. This was not a dream in the night, nor a swoon, nor a trance in which she lost herself. The light came while she was wide awake, going about her life, her ordinary eyes open. She had lived with it, quietly, for most of her life.
Late in her life, at seventy-seven, a monk named Guibert of Gembloux wrote to Hildegard with the question everyone wanted answered: what, exactly, was it like? Her reply is one of the most precise first-person accounts of visionary experience we possess from the Middle Ages. The brightness she saw, she explained, was not in any particular place; it was vaster and brighter than the cloud that carries the sun, and she could not measure its height or breadth. She had a name for it: the umbra viventis lucis, the reflection - or shadow - of the living Light. She was careful with the words. The living Light itself (lux vivens) is God; what she saw was its reflection, as the sun and moon and stars are mirrored on the surface of water. To call it a ‘shadow’ is not to call it dim - the reflection was brighter than common daylight - but to insist that even her highest seeing was not God face to face, only God mirrored.
The turning point was not the seeing but the command. Hildegard reports that the voice from the light told her to speak and write what she perceived - and that when she held back, out of doubt and fear of what people would say of a woman presuming to teach, she was pressed down onto the bed of sickness until she yielded. Only when she began to write did her strength return. She did not compose alone: a monk named Volmar, her trusted secretary, helped her set the Latin in order, and her nun Richardis assisted her. But the visions and their meaning, she always insisted, were given to her, not invented by her. She was a mouthpiece, a trumpet that makes no sound of its own but only sounds when breath is blown through it. The image recurs across her writing: she is the instrument, God the player.
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 insisted her visions came while she was fully awake (not in dreams, ecstasy, or bodily sight), that she called the light she saw the umbra viventis lucis (the reflection of the living Light), and that she received the meaning of an image together with the image itself. Explain this visionary…
Leads to Julian of Norwich.
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