Ever wonder what it's all about? I need to try and work it out. I'll just begin with the deer.
This is about what and who and where strength comes from.
'The song of the lips must first have been a song in the soul'
Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Saint, 'Sybil of the Rhine', founder of scientific natural history in Germany, mystic and philosopher, was a remarkable composer. The music (above) was written to have a physical and spiritual effect on the singer, as well as the listener. But she worked in the infirmary where she put into practice her extensive knowledge of the practice of medicine and healing.
She was born during the first crusade, 1096-1099, a time of tumult across the known world, and extreme anguish between peoples. The whole of the crusades covered centuries of war, from 1095 - 1291, giving rise to the Carmelite movement, their weapons turned to ploughshares, their armour become the spiritual armour of the Lord in the Wadi El Said. Hildegard's response is to study the wisdom of healing throughout the known world, and respect the wisdom of a shared globalised humanity, in all of God's creation, from the confines of her monastic space, and coherent within her faith tradition.
Hildegard is a phenomenon. There is too much to tell here. Here invention of a private language, a precursor to shorthand and privately used only by herself and her sisters, merits a chapter to itself, probably the earliest example of that form of creativity we continue to see and to celebrate politically in Esperanto and culturally in the Elven poetry of Tolkien.
But what stands out for me today is her idea of 'greening'. She approached medicine as a type of gardening. The health of the natural world is linked to the health of the person. The created world must have a purpose for healing and health. Her work is to "explore the etiology, or causes, of disease as well as human sexuality, psychology, and physiology."* Thus she combines plants in medicine, and wider holistic approaches to bringing health into balance: to uproot the weeds that choke the garden and to enrich the soil and ventilate the air in the health of the individual. The purpose is to restore balance.
The focus goes right back to the Garden of Eden, not the idea that your desert will flower, the theme of the spiritual garden to come with Carmelites Teresa and John, but concerning more the origin of imbalance in the book of Genesis (3:5-6). She does not blame the tempter, the serpent, for the fall. Nor does she focus blame on Eve either in this excerpt:
" All this arose from the first evil, which man began at the start, because if Adam had remained in paradise, he would have had the sweetest health, and the best dwelling-place, just as the strongest balsam emits the best odor; but on the contrary, man now has within himself poison and phlegm and diverse illnesses."
*(Wikipedia quotes Glaze, see below)
I thank Hildegard for the fact that physical disease is not treated as a spiritual failing in the individual.Nor is it blamed on womankind. We've all failed. We all seek to rebalance, to restore, and to remember our humanity.
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*Jöckle, Clemens (2003). Encyclopedia of Saints. Konecky & Konecky, p. 204 according to the wikipedia page the opening quote is probably not really found in St Augustine after all.
*Florence Eliza Glaze, "Medical Writer: 'Behold the Human Creature,'" in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 125-48. Also p 136 re Eden.
