Feast Day: September 8th
It was winter, in Trier Germany, in 1148, and Bernard of Clairvaux had brought to Pope Eugenius III a fascinating document that had been anxiously sent to him the prior year by a middle aged nun 60 miles East of them, at the Benedictine Monastery of Disibodenberg. It was a vivid, profound, iridescent presentation of the Christian vision of the world. Orthodox, but unique. Traditional – in the way it drew in the lines of thought from the great teachers of the faith down through the centuries – yet creative, and balanced, and beautiful. The nun had received little education, but had experienced an illumination of her mind by the grace of God and, after keeping the visions to herself for decades, but had now decided to begin writing them down and wanted to ask for the blessing of the Holy Father.
To give you a greater glimpse of the mind of this woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen, I offer an image she wrote herself – of her own place in God’s work – to Pope Eugenius III after his encouragement of her continued writing and teaching:
Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I ‘”A feather on the breath of God.”
But she was also a poet and hymnist. Consider just one line from her hymn praising the Blessed Virgin, Ave, Generosa (and this is a translation! It is simple, yet lovely; sublime, and captivating!):
Thus your womb held joy,
when harmony of all Heaven
chimed out from you,
because, Virgin, you carried Christ
whence your chastity blazed in God.
Your flesh has known delight,
like the grassland touched by dew
and immersed in its freshness:
so it was with you,
o mother of all joy
She was also an artist, drawing images so that other people could picture something of what she saw in her mind under God’s inspiration. See here a self-portrait of sorts, included in her most famous theological work, the Scivias (it was the first part of this work that had been sent to Pope Eugenius III by means of Bernard of Clairvaux), in which she tries to depict her experience of receiving these insights from God (depicted with tongues of fire, though her eyes are still able to see, and her hand to write them down). (This image is from the original Wiesbaden Codex which was made at the end of Hildegard’s life, which was actually lost in 1945 at the end of WWII, then discovered to have been confiscated by the Soviets, who were then tricked out of it when some scholars swapped it for a similar looking book … I kid you not!)
But Hildegard was not just visionary, and composer, and preacher, and iconographer, and mother superior of that community at Disibodenberg, and Doctor of the Church, AND someone who seriously called out the political leaders of her day both secular and religious (she once wrote to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who was meddling again in the election of a pope, “I see you like a little boy or some madman living before the Living Eyes.”)!!
All of this is amazing, but on top of this, she was also the first person in the world to fully articulate the Christian understanding of the full sexual complementarity of men and women. That men and women have equal dignity AND meaningful differences, and we can hold onto both truths (the world long struggled with the first truth, and in our day struggles with the second one. Hildegard nails both, and exemplifies both in her own uniquely feminine, but undoubtably gutsy, life).
What has all this to do with St. Disibod?? He lived 500 years before Hildegard, had a miserable go at trying to a bishop in Ireland, so he traveled to Germany and built a little monastery near Bingen, at the confluence of the Nahe and Glan rivers. That little hermitage, which grew into a monastery during his life, some centuries later would be a bustling monastic powerhouse, with orders of men and women there. And there a little girl, having extraordinary visions, would enter the convent as a teenager, and grow up to change (and challenge) the way the world saw women a thousand years after.
Such is the impact of a failed missionary who was faithful to the prodding of the Holy Spirit to try instead to start a monastery.
– Fr. Dominic is often discouraged when some project that seems important falls apart, or when the project at hand today doesn’t look promising. St. Disibod couldn’t understand his failure in Ireland wither, or why God was sending him to start a monastery in Germany. His job, and ours, is to just keep following the Lord anyway.