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| Scivias II.6: Christ's Sacrifice and the Church. Rupertsberg MS, fol. 86r. |
| O cruor sanguinis qui in alto sonuisti, cum omnia elementa se implicuerunt in lamentabilem vocem cum tremore, quia sanguis Creatoris sui illa tetigit, ungue nos de languoribus nostris. |
O streaming blood, to heaven’s height you cried, when every element enwrapped itself within a voice of woe with trembling misery, for their Creator’s blood had covered them: Anoint us and heal our feebleness. |
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| Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen. From the Rupertsberg Scivias, fol. 1r. |
(O Hildegardis prophetissa, Doctor Ecclesiae: Vera visio Xristi sit nobis lux opusque in via.)
(O Hildegard, prophetess and Doctor of the Church: May the true vision of Christ be for us light and task upon the way.)
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| Liber Divinorum Operum III.3: Theophany of Caritas, Humilitas, & Pax in the fountain. (From the Lucca MS) |
As we celebrate this weekend St. Hildegard of Bingen’s declaration as a Doctor of the Church, we should reflect on how Hildegard understood her theological vocation to be rooted in the self-revelatory relationship between God and Creation. I have chosen to translate below one of the visions from Hildegard’s last and greatest work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works), in which she offers just such a meditation. In this work, Hildegard returns to the history of salvation that formed the structure of her first work, Scivias—but this time, prompted by an extraordinary experience of the divine in the early 1160’s, she envisions and explores it through the dynamic relationship between human and divine.
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| Hildegard of Bingen's portrait. Rupertsberg Scivias (facs.), fol. 1r. |
In commemoration of the Feast of St. Hildegard of Bingen, who died on this day (September 17) in 1179, and in consideration of Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming declaration of her as the thirty-fifth Doctor of the Church, one thing we might wonder about is what her doctoral “nickname” will be. While not all Doctors of the Church have such monikers, many—especially the medieval and early modern thinkers—are lovingly referred to by these unofficial titles. For example, the thirteenth-century mendicant-scholastics St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure are known as the Doctor Angelicus (Angelic Doctor) and Doctor Seraphicus (Seraphic Doctor), respectively.
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| Liber Divinorum Operum III.5, from the Lucca MS. |
Update: A much expanded and revised version of this essay appeared in 2019 in the journal postmedieval, accessible online here.
Part 1 of this post can be found here.
There are two aspects of Joseph Ratzinger’s reformist vision of the Church that find particularly striking parallels in Hildegard of Bingen’s thought: the political relationship between Church and Empire (or secular world), and the renewal of the Church as a purified but dramatically reduced institution. Although Hildegard’s own reformist thought must be situated within the legacy of the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century, what is most striking are the ways in which she departs—sometimes radically—from a Hildebrandian vision of the Church; and in those departures, Ratzinger follows her, as much as that might be to the chagrin of traditionalists today.
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| Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen. From the Rupertsberg Scivias, fol. 1r. |
Update: A much expanded and revised version of this essay appeared in 2019 in the journal postmedieval, accessible online here.
Today, Pope Benedict XVI formally authorized the liturgical commemoration of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and inscribed her name in the catalogue of the saints—effectively concluding the cause for her canonization started 800 years ago. Later this year he will declare her a Doctor of the Church—an extraordinary honor for a woman whose name was practically unknown (at least in Anglo-American circles) until the latter part of the twentieth century. Yet, her meteoric rise to superstardom in these last few decades—propelled, first by her music, and then by her talents in other areas of art, natural medicine, feminism, and mysticism—is really only a rebirth. For most of the centuries between her death in 1179 and the latter twentieth century, Hildegard was known primarily as a visionary prophet of the end times.
The following is a recollection of Ash Wednesday, 2006 (March 1), which I spent in a visit to the Abbey of St. Hildegard of Bingen, in Eibingen, Germany. It was a day that helped change the course of my life.
It was cold, very cold on that Ash Wednesday morning, as I saw the first darts of dawn sparkle on the Rhein’s waters and light the road up the hill to the Abbey of St. Hildegard of Bingen. The bare branches of the grape vines on the slope were dusted with the previous night’s snow, undisturbed by the revelry in Rüdesheim, the town below—the Germans call it Fasching, the French, Mardi Gras. I reveled in neither, for it had been early to bed Tuesday night, early to rise Wednesday morning, that I might catch the trains from Mainz to Rüdesheim in time for the morning service.
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| Vergil and the Sybil receive a vision of the Nativity of Christ. From a 14th-cen. chronicle. |
This week in the Humanities survey I am teaching this semester, we examined the imperial ideologies developed around Octavian (Augustus) in the last decades before the birth of Christ (or dawn of the Common Era). I had my freshmen read selections from Books VI and VIII of Vergil’s Aeneid and, more important, Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue. Written about the year 40 B.C. in the wake of Octavian and Antony’s victory over Caesar’s assassins at Philippi, but before the two Triumvirs descended once more into civil war, the poem expresses Vergil’s hopes for a coming age of restored peace to the Roman world. As we read through the poem in class, I encouraged the students to think about what the text’s prophetic words might remind them of; and after a few ponderous minutes, one student in each section managed to mutter some form of the name of Christ.
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| Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen. Rupertsberg MS, fol. 1r. |
Update: On May 10, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI formalized Hildegard of Bingen's saintly status in a process known as equivalent canonization, by which the Pontiff authorized the universal church to observe the veneration of a holy person (“Servant of God”) according to the rites of full canonization by inscription in the universal calendar of saints. Hildegard’s veneration within the dioceses of Germany was approved by what is now the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in 1940, although her name appeared in the Roman Martyrologium beginning in the sixteenth century, and indulgences for local veneration in the Rhineland can be found throughout the later Middle Ages. Her feast day is September 17 (the date of her death in 1179). On May 27, in his Regina Caeli address for the Solemnity of Pentecost, Benedict announced that on October 7, 2012, Hildegard and St. John of Avila will join the thirty-three other Doctors of the Church, thirty men and three women.
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| Hildegard of Bingen, Illumination for Scivias III.5 in the Rupertsberg MS. |
The parched sands of the Middle East are dampened only by blood spilt in the ravages of war; the powerful and rich, their hearts enflamed by greed, drive their thirst ever harder with guiltless rapine; the Church, our Holy Virgin Mother, is raped and defiled by the lusts of her ministers. Corruption among men, even those supposed holy; floods and famine, quakes and drought, a natural world rent by disaster. These are times of crisis; but are they times of despair?
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| "Galileo before the Holy Office" by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury. Image from WikiMedia. |
Are the claims of modern science and of the Christian faith compatible? Can a practicing and faithful Christian trust the evidence gathered and digested by biologists and chemists and physicists today? Or does a narrowly-defined reading of the Book of Genesis demand that any whose allegiance is with God dismiss the conclusions of rational thought?
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| Image from WikiCommons. |
Today is indeed (or at least was, in the old calendar)[1] the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian. According to legend, they were on this day in A.D. 286 or 287 martyred under Diocletian and his co-emperor, Maximianus near Soissons in modern-day France. But this day in the English-speaking world shall always “be in our flowing cups freshly remember’d,” for on Crispin Crispinian in 1415, King Henry V defeated the French at Agincourt and ushered in a brief renewal of his crown’s hold upon France.
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| Image from the Codex Sinaiticus. |
Why translate again a work so often done already? Is there anything new to be gained by publishing another ream of Iliads, Homer’s epic whose number of translations (and transmutations) might come second only to the Bible? When The Economist’s recent review posed this question, it offered an oblique but important answer.
This is a moving, if idiosyncratic, historiographical meditation on the rise of "modern" medieval studies (to be distinguished from those of the nineteenth century). After a concise sketch of the broad strokes of medieval history and the movements of modern interpretation, Cantor dives into compelling portraits of the twenty medievalists who, in his opinion, "invented" the Middle Ages for the modern world of the twentieth century. Combining a standard academic's review of their works with an esteemed historian's synthetic stitching to tell the history of historians, Cantor attempts to understand not only what each of these men (and one woman) told us about the Middle Ages but also why they approached them the way they did.
James Lang has a penetrating article over at The Chronicle of Higher Education this week exploring contemporary student culture outside of the classroom. Beginning, as many of us do, with fond memories of those late-night discussions of the grand meaning of it all when we were undergraduates--and how naively ambitious those discussions were!--he takes stock of where those discussions might be found today. It can be a depressing, if not altogether surprising, conclusion:
(...) most students do not have a curious and thriving intellectual life outside of their courses. The late-night discussions that I imagined my students having in their dorm rooms about the meaning of life, according to Small, are simply not happening.
…aren’t really all that secret. But if you’re an overzealous editor at NOVA, you might be tempted to invoke “secretly encoded” information in sacred architecture to drum up popular interest. When PBS last week reaired the series’ 2010 opener, “Building the Great Cathedrals”, it was apparent that even their high standards could sometimes be duped by that popular myth that codes, DaVinci or otherwise, are hidden all about those mysterious Middle Ages, just waiting for modern sleuths to expose the hidden past.
With the slight embarrassment that I am so tardy in sharing this news, I am nevertheless pleased to announce that my wife, Heather, and I have embarked on the next stage of our lives. Over the summer, Heather accepted a tenure-track position in the Biology Department at the University of the Cumberlands. At the beginning of August, we packed a great U-Haul and made the eight-hour trek to settle into our new home: Williamsburg, Kentucky. Nestled in the western foothills of the Appalachian mountains and a bare eleven miles north of the Tennessee border, it has certainly marked a change of scenery from South Bend.
For several years now this blog has lain dormant. Originally conceived as a catch-all for what I fancied were my more important thoughts as I began my senior year of college, it served its better times as a repository for my budding efforts as a medievalist and translator and as a travelogue of sorts during my year in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. During my time as a graduate student at the Medieval Institute it went fallow, except for scattered personal announcements and to post a rough paper or two. Certainly the demands of graduate work and falling in love kept me from it; but far more, I think, did I forebear under the realization of my own incompetencies. My graduate committee broke the pride of intellect; to my wife I willingly sacrificed the pride of soul.
It might seem presumptuous, then, that I should now attempt its revival. It is my certain hope (how vain is yet to be seen) that I can offer something worth while. When I recognize and shake my head at the naïve arrogance I once put on display, I hope that some more years along have left me a clearer, more experienced lens. Wise it may not be, but at least a bit more prudent.
The drive to put down in writing the whirlwind of thoughts and experiences, both quotidian and extraordinary, is as strong as ever. One good idea might occasionally escape in that process by which the build-up of voice upon voice escalates until finally, from sheer dint of pressure, it is flung from the chaotic nebula of my head into the galaxy of the world outside. But as Chaucer noticed when he glimpsed this “Domus Dedaly / That Laboryntus cleped ys” (House of Fame, 1920-1), not even in these nascent moments of a story is truth purely found. The muddied waters of human expression are from their very source a mixture of truth and falsehood. I cannot promise pure clarity, but only that in the process, the journey might be a little less murky than before.
Epistemological theorizing aside (for the moment), what concrete shape will this blog take? I can refer you to its very first post years ago, for the motivations remain much the same. As its title would indicate, it will reflect the experiences of a man of faith seeking to understand that faith and the world in which he exercises it. I will strive to understand the grand ideas that animate the course of human history, tempered by the practical limitations we face every day in living out those grand claims we make in our more idealistic moments.
I am an academic; and the methods by which I explore this journey we call “life” will be, by and large, academic. I will read monographs and review them; scour the medieval religious texts I study for clues; and attempt to reconstruct the thoughts and experiences of men and women who lived centuries ago. Some of this work may hopefully find its way into print; at the very least, I hope to make more medieval texts available in English translation. As a teacher, my goal is to help new generations explore and understand the human story, whose conflicts and crises today echo anxieties faced by countless generations before. At my best moments, I hope to bring these fascinating figures back to life; most of the time, I will consider it a success to have told a coherent tale.
But I must also be on guard lest I succumb to that danger that lurks in the path of any academic: the danger of becoming too ensconced in our Ivory Towers, reducing, as it were, the true complexity of the figures we study to the merely academic and scholarly. As I was reminded a few years ago in a visit to the Abbey of St. Hildegard of Bingen, the real rewards of our work should take us beyond the conferences and scholarly monographs and journals. I met there, for example, an Italian-German woman whom we “scholars” would term an “amateur”, that is, whose interest in Hildegard is entirely practical. She studies Hildegard, spends time at Hildegard’s abbey, and reads Hildegard’s works, not because that’s her job, but because she finds meaning for her own life in Hildegard’s. Hildegard’s writings on natural medicine are not merely important as documents in the history of science; for her, they become actual tools in regulating the ailments of her own body. Likewise, Hildegard’s theology is not merely a collection of theoretical notions; rather, this woman has actually allowed her own spiritual life to be taught by Hildegard’s teachings.
The vitality of Hildegard’s personality in our age is the product not of our scholarly researches but of actual people and their real encounters with an extraordinary woman of an age gone by. It is thus for us, the academics, not merely to write our books and give our lectures for the sake of other academics, but to realize that our profession, like all human activities, is meant to be for the advancement of humanity—and that such advancement is not merely an abstract goal of progress, but the concrete reality of people who live their lives in the here and now, perhaps weighed down by the weariness of day-to-day drudgery, yet also lifted up by the simple joys of day-to-day life, well-lived.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.My grandmother faced many enemies in her life, and overcame each one. The most notable was the battle she fought so long against her own body, against Schleroderma, an enemy that took from her some of her fingers; that took from her the healthy breath of her lungs; that ultimately took from her her life. Yet she fought with all the weapons she had. The physical ones we humorously referred to as “puff, pump, and circumstance.”
—I Corinthians 15:26
“Love” today is often primarily understood to signify a passionate, sensual, or even creative feeling; when we think upon it further, we may discover deeper levels of connotation, but they still fall distinctly into the emotional, affective range—what we might call a “right-brained” conception of love rooted in the heart. This is the love that we often see at the center of human interaction, that indescribable and powerful connection that binds one human being to another—the love of neighbor enjoined in the Gospel. As Christians, we see the pinnacle of this Love expressed in the passion and death of Jesus on the Cross—an outpouring of Love in the most anguished moments of human pain and suffering, the humanity of Jesus in its sharpest and most brutal detail. On the other hand, we have the “first and great commandment” to love God with every fiber of our being—agape in Greek, caritas in Latin, from whence derives the English word “charity”. This is that Love that John identifies with God (1 John 4:16), whose pinnacle we also find in Jesus the Son of God, His Logos or Word. This is rational, intellectual Love—what we might call “left-brained” love rooted in the mind—and is often expressed by us in our love of learning, our “philosophy” or “Love of Wisdom.”
What made this concert truly spectacular, however, was the logistical set-up of the choirs. The Münster Domchor sang from risers set up in front of the high altar, while the Kammerchor Rheine stood on the steps that lead to the Westchor of the Cathedral, that is, at the opposite end of the Cathedral from the Domchor. Finally, risers were set up in the central bay of the northern side aisle, where either the children's choirs or a smaller choir composed of assorted members of the various choirs sang; a platform for the conductor was placed in the very center of the nave so that all three choirs could see him at once.
Thus, Saturday evening was truly a three-dimensional musical experience, as the sounds of the choirs came literally from every direction (for maximum effect, they decided to forgo the use of the electronic sound system, allowing rather the natural acoustics of the building to take over--something I wish they would do more often). Furthermore, their selection of music from the late Renaissance and early Baroque was tailored to exemplify what is known as the "Venetian polychoral" style; from the inside cover of the program:This term designates a musical practice that arose in the middle of the 15th century during the late Italian Renaissance. At that time, Venice was a leading center of innovation in the area of music. The polychoral style was chiefly developed for liturgical works that would envelop the space in which they were performed. This effect was achieved by splitting up the music between two or more part-ensembles (so-called "choirs") that stood at various around the performance space; sometimes, the choirs would take turns "answering" each other (a style called "antiphony"), and other times they would join together in the "Tutti" passages and so fill the entire space with music. Fra Ruffino d'Assisi, the Cathedral Kapellmeister in Padua, was one of the first to develop this practice, writing ca. 1510-20 settings of the Psalms for eight voices "a coro spezzato ", i.e. for a separated choir or two choirs of four voices each. While the practice of switching at each verse between one choir and another had roots in the Middle Ages,Fra Ruffino added the innovation of switching between individual words and phrases within each verse, thus inventing the Coro spezzato technique. The technique was further refined by Adam Willaert in his "Salmi spezzati" for eight voices in the 1550's.Since Giovanni Gabrieli (Kapellmeister from 1586 to 1612 at the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice), this Venetian style expanded quickly throughout the rest of Europe. Heinrich Schütz was a student of Gabrieli from 1609 to 1612 and became one of the most important "Venetian" representatives in the German-speaking world. Other important composers of this style were GregorAichinger (Augsburg), Samuel Scheidt (Halle/Salle), and Jakobus Gallus , who was born in modern-day Slovenia and worked in Prague. In parallel to this, the polychoral style was developed in Spain by Tomas Luis de Victoria; in contrast to Gabrieli and Schütz (whose polychoral compositions were often homophonically arranged), de Victoria remained faithful to the old classical vocal polyphony of Palestrina.This polychoral effect of filling the space with music on all sides, as well as bouncing the sound back and forth in antiphony between the choirs, was demonstrated immediately by the first string of works by Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672). As you can see from the following video of the performance of his "Nun Lob, mein Seel, den Herren", it keeps the ear moving just as much as my camera did:
