Saint Hildegard of Bingen

Abbess, Doctor of the Church
(1098–1179)

Saint Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 at Bermersheim vor der Höhe in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a noble family who dedicated her as a tithe to God. She was given as an oblate to the Benedictine anchoress Jutta of Sponheim, with whom she lived and was educated. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was unanimously chosen to lead the community that had grown around Jutta, and she governed it as abbess for the rest of her long life.

From childhood she experienced visions, which she described as seeing in the Living Light, and at the age of forty-two she received what she described as a command from God to write down what she saw and heard. With the encouragement of her confessor and the approval of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugenius III, she began to dictate her great visionary work, the Scivias, which she completed after ten years. This was followed by two other major visionary works and an enormous output of other writings including natural history, medicine, music, letters, homilies, and hagiography.

She is one of the most creative and original minds of the twelfth century. She composed over seventy pieces of sacred music, which she called a symphony of the harmony of heavenly revelations, including a liturgical drama that is the earliest surviving morality play. Her scientific and medical writings show an observational capacity remarkable for her age. She corresponded with popes, emperors, bishops, and ordinary people, and undertook four preaching tours in her seventies and eighties, preaching publicly to clergy and laity, an activity unprecedented for a woman of her time.

She died on September 17, 1179. She was canonised by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 and simultaneously declared a Doctor of the Church, the fourth woman to receive this title. Her feast is celebrated on September 17th.