A life, rightly ordered.
Born in 1098 in the Rhineland, Hildegard was entrusted as a child to the care of the anchoress Jutta of Spanheim at the monastery of Disibodenberg. She was formed from her earliest years in the Benedictine rhythm of prayer, work, and study. When Jutta died, the community chose Hildegard as their leader.
From her earliest years she experienced what she called the “reflection of the Living Light” — luminous visions she received fully awake, with her senses intact. For decades she told almost no one. Only at about forty, after a command she understood as coming from God to record what she had seen, did she begin — with the encouragement of her confessor Volmar and, eventually, the approval of Pope Eugenius III (1147) and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
The visions & Scivias.
Her first and greatest visionary work, Scivias (“Know the Ways”), was begun in 1141 and took about ten years to complete; in Pope Benedict XVI’s summation, it gathers thirty-five visions of salvation history — creation, redemption, and the Church. She went on to write two more visionary books, Liber Vitae Meritorum and Liber Divinorum Operum, alongside works on medicine, natural science, and the lives of the saints.
What unites them is a single picture: a universe held in concentric order, everything alive and interdependent, everything turning around God at the center. It is this picture — one center, all things ordered in relation to it — that A New Gift takes as its own.
Viriditas — the greening power.
A theme widely drawn from Hildegard’s writings is viriditas — the “greenness” or freshness of life, often described as the vitality of the Holy Spirit running through all created things like sap through a branch. To be in right order with God is to be green — fruitful, growing, alive. To be cut off is to dry up.
For a center built around generosity, this is the heart of the matter. Giving, leadership, and service are not duties squeezed from a dry root; they are fruit that overflows naturally when a life is rooted in its source. Seek first the Kingdom, and the greening follows.
Music, healing, and a public voice.
Hildegard composed hymns, antiphons, and songs gathered under the title Symphonia Harmoniae Caelestium Revelationum, and wrote Ordo Virtutum, a morality play for which she provided both words and music. She practiced and wrote on medicine and the healing properties of the natural world. In her later years she undertook journeys to preach to the people of God — remarkable for a woman of her age — and corresponded fearlessly with popes, emperors, abbots, and kings.
She founded her own monastery at Rupertsberg, and later a second at Eibingen, leading her sisters in independence from the monks of Disibodenberg — a quiet act of well-ordered courage.
Saint & Doctor of the Church.
Hildegard died on 17 September 1179. Venerated as a saint for centuries, Pope Benedict XVI on 7 October 2012 proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, alongside Saint John of Ávila. Her feast is kept on 17 September.
