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Commentary on the Johannine prologue
Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Newman, Barbara
Theology Today 60 (2003): 16-33
Hildegard of Bingen
In the dramatic rediscovery of medieval women mystics in the late twentieth century, perhaps no figure has fired the popular imagination more widely or implausibly than Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Born over nine hundred years ago in the Rhineland, St. Hildegard lived in an age that might seem to us impossibly remote, before the beginning of the world as we know it. In the twelfth century, we like to imagine, the world was young. Troubadours sang of love as if they had invented it; knights went in quest of the Holy Grail as if they might actually find it; and Bernard of Clairvaux expounded the Song of Songs as if he were the first to discover God. "O that he would kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!" In our historical naivete, we might imagine that the twelfth century was an Age of Faith when religion was easy. The Reformation and the breakup of Christendom lay far in the future, and no one had ever dreamed of Feuerbach or Freud, Darwin or Derrida.
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Hildegard, however, looked around her and saw a world grown old, a society on the verge of senility. Civil war, corruption in high places, and clerical sex scandals were the order of the day, and the holier the office, the more cynically it was bought and sold. We at least can feel confident that, whatever the failings of our local bishop, he is not likely to impose an enormous tax on our city in order to wage war against the pope, then excommunicate us all for refusal to pay it and wind up assassinated amid mass riots. Yet that is what happened to Hildegard's prelate, the archbishop of Mainz, during her lifetime. Disgusted with the arrogance and self-indulgence of their leaders, the best and the brightest were leaving the church in droves to join the Cathars, an impressively chaste sect of heretics who despised the world so perfectly that their contempt extended even to its Creator. Hildegard, afflicted with the pitiless vocation of prophecy, had a great deal to say about these evils. No one was ever less tempted to make religion a safe haven from the storms of the world. But what she said most emphatically, ceaselessly, ardently, was this: Remember your beginning. Remember where you came from, who made you, what you are.
When Hildegard began the Book of Divine Works, the last volume of her great theological trilogy, she was sixty-five and felt every day of her years. Racked by migraine and fever, she had come close to death more than once and had known pain so excruciating that she felt sure the demons were tempting her to blaspheme. So it was no innocent, starry-eyed maiden who "saw a mystical and marvelous vision" and felt "drops as of gentle rain splashing into the knowledge of [her] soul," inspiring her to interpret the magnificent prologue of St. John.1 The One who appeared to her then-luminous, androgynous, and winged like an angel-told her how to begin. "I, Who Am without beginning, from whom all beginnings proceed-I, the Ancient of Days-speak thus. I, by Myself, am the day that never came from the sun, but the sun was kindled from Me."2
Hildegard has achieved fame in these latter days as an apostle of "creation-centered spirituality," a theological movement promoted by the former Dominican (now Episcopalian) writer, Matthew Fox. There is some truth in the report: Few theologians in any age have spoken more insistently or eloquently than Hildegard of creation's intricate harmonies. Yet, in and through and beyond creation, she is bedazzled by the sheer stupendous fact of God, and she calls us again and again to marvel, to be singing mirrors reflecting that uncreated light: "Humankind is the signature work of God and a light that is kindled by him, but our life has a beginning and in our flesh we will eventually die. For this reason, John was sent to bear witness that God is not like this . . . . God never arose in any morn or any dawn: Before time he eternally was."
American culture does not speak or think much of eternity, obsessed as we are with the frenetic pace of time. Impatient to grow up when we are young and desperate to stay young as we grow old, we will leap through any hoop to remain on the cutting edge of fashion, technology, or thought, terrified that the times may pass us by. Even God appears timebound: Many Christians fear that if we fail to find the historical Jesus-or worse, if we succeed in finding him-our faith will become obsolete. To our historicist age, Hildegard's Christian Platonism may seem the ultimate heresy. Yet, her ceaseless return to beginnings is not a call for nostalgia, a sentimental yearning for a past that cannot be recovered. In her theological vision, the eternal is sovereign over the past as well as the present: Only the eternal is neither past nor passing. In the words of an ancient hymn to Christ, "This is he who was from the beginning, who appeared as new, who was found to be old, who is ever born young in the hearts of the saints."3
What could it mean to be created in the image of this God, who is eternal life and never-setting light? Hildegard's vision of human grandeur may seem at first profoundly alien to us, accustomed as we are to thinking of ourselves as fractured postmodern subjects on a globe spinning out of control. But if readers will pardon an irreverent comparison, the medieval visionary's worldview is rather like a comic scene in Douglas Adams's science fiction novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Adams's fantasy features an amazing machine called the Total Perspective Vortex, said to be the most horrible instrument of capital punishment ever invented. This machine gives its victim "just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says 'You are here.'" Faced with such a vision, the victim's brain is completely annihilated and he perishes with a howl of terror. One day, a lovable villain named Zaphod Beeblebrox is sentenced to death in the Vortex. But instead of dying, he emerges thirsty, ravenous, and awed by the beauties of creation. Astonished, the executioner asks how he survived the experience, and Beeblebrox says that he "had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him-everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it."4
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