EASTERTIDE · 8 MAY & TRINITY · 17 SEPTEMBER
Hildegard of Bingen & Julian of Norwich
Abbess & Anchoress · Doctor & Mystic · d. 1179 & c. 1416 · The Living Light and the Hazelnut
Hildegard — HIL-deh-gard · Bingen — BING-en · Scivias — SKEE-vee-as · viriditas — vih-RID-ih-tas · Julian — JOO-lee-an · Norwich — NOR-ij · Showings · All shall be well
O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit didst instruct the hearts of thy servants Hildegard and Julian, and by their visions didst reveal thy glory and thy love to thy Church; Grant that in the same Spirit we may always be truly wise, and ever rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
They are two of the most extraordinary women in the history of Christian theology — separated by two centuries and utterly unlike each other in temperament, method, and the mode of their vision — and they belong together in this archive because together they represent the full range of what the medieval Church could produce when it gave women the conditions, the formation, and the freedom to think deeply about God. Hildegard of Bingen (HIL-deh-gard of BING-en) was an abbess, a prophet, a natural philosopher, a composer, a correspondent of popes and emperors, a woman of formidable practical energy who governed a double monastery and went on four preaching tours in her seventies. Julian of Norwich (JOO-lee-an of NOR-ij) was an anchoress enclosed in a cell beside a church, who had sixteen visions on a single afternoon in May 1373 while she believed herself to be dying, and who spent the remaining forty years of her life quietly working out what they meant. Hildegard fills the world with her viriditas (vih-RID-ih-tas) — the greening power of God, the living sap of the divine life running through creation. Julian reduces it to a hazelnut held in the palm of the hand: It lasts and ever shall last, for God loves it.
Hildegard (1098–1179) began receiving visions at the age of three and kept them secret for decades, until at the age of forty-two she heard a voice saying Say and write what thou seest and hearest. The result was the Scivias (SKEE-vee-as) — Know the Ways — a systematic theology of salvation history in the form of twenty-six visions, illustrated with illuminations of startling visual power. She described herself as a feather on the breath of God — entirely passive in the divine movement, entirely formed by it. But the passivity is the ground of extraordinary activity: she wrote three major theological works, two works of natural history and medicine, a morality play, an invented language with its own alphabet, and over seventy musical compositions — the largest surviving body of music from any medieval composer, male or female. Her music soars and undulates with a harmonic strangeness that reaches beyond the standard intervals of medieval theory, as though the living light required a different kind of sound to carry it.
Julian (c. 1342–c. 1416) had prayed in her youth for three gifts: a recollection of the Passion, a bodily sickness in youth, and three wounds — contrition, compassion, and longing for God. In May 1373 she received the sickness and with it the sixteen Showings of divine love: visions centred on the face of the crucified Christ, and a conversation with the Lord about sin and suffering and the great question she could not let go — if God is all love and all power, how can sin exist at all? The answer she received and spent forty years elaborating is the most theologically courageous passage in the English mystical tradition: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. This is not optimism; it is the eschatological confidence of a woman who has looked directly at the face of the suffering Christ and seen in it not the defeat of love but its fullest expression. Her God answers the question of meaning with a single word: Love was his meaning.
They stand side by side in the medieval series — Hildegard in September, Trinity-tide, in the season of the harvest; Julian in May, Eastertide, in the season of the Resurrection’s first warmth. Hildegard looks at the creation and sees the divine greening power coursing through every living thing; Julian holds a hazelnut in her palm and sees in its smallness the whole universe held in the love of the God who made it and loves it and keeps it. Both are doctors of the Church in everything but the formal title — Hildegard was declared Doctor of the Universal Church by Benedict XVI in 2012, the first medieval woman so named — and both have given the tradition phrases and images it has been unable to live without: Hildegard’s feather on the breath of God, Julian’s all shall be well. The archive that includes Rolle and Hilton and the Cloud-author was incomplete without them.
O Almighty God, who by the living light didst fill thy servant Hildegard with the knowledge of thy ways, and by the Showings of thy love didst assure thy servant Julian that all shall be well; Grant that we may receive thy truth through whatever form thou choosest to give it, and may find in the greening power of thy life and the hazelnut of thy keeping the same God who is love from beginning to end; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.