Fantastic Metropolis

The daughter of a noble family in the Rhineland, Hildegard was enrolled early in the elite order of Benedictine monasticism. To her contemporaries, she was a Sibylline figure, a prophetess of the Apocalypse, and a woman whose enigmatic writings seemed lit by a fiery prescience.

—John F. Thornton and Katherine Washburn, Tongues of Angels, Tongues of Men

Therefore, O you My beloved children, avoid them with all devotion and with all the strength of your souls and bodies. For the ancient serpent feeds and clothes them by his arts, and they worship him as God and trust in his false deceptions. They are wicked murderers, killing those who join them in simplicity before they can turn back from their error; and they are wicked fornicators upon themselves, destroying their semen in an act of murder and offering it to the Devil. And they also invade My Church with their schisms in the fullness of vice; in their shameful plots they wickedly scoff at baptism, and the sacrament of My Son’s body and blood, and the other institutions of the Church.

—Hildegard of Bingen, Nosce Vias Domini

It’s fair to say that, of all their medieval critics, none was as strident in denunciation or as unceasing in condemnation of Catharism as Hildegard. And certainly, almost none could claim, as Hildegard did, to be speaking for God when doing so! Being a visionary certainly aided her there. It’s certainly unfair to dwell on Hildegard’s anti-Catharism; like Swedenborg and Blake after her, Hildegard crafted visions of Heaven and Hell that were shocking and revelatory for her time; her musical gifts were obvious and long-lasting (you can buy the music even today, recorded by many) and she even wrote about such diverse subjects as orgasms and biology. But fair or not, Hildegard’s influence was rooted in the visions she began having at a young age: it was because she was believed to be able to speak with authority on subjects such as what happened after death (especially in her Nosce Vias Domini, “Know the Ways of the Lord”) and how one could achieve salvation that she became a respected advisor of Europe’s powerful, and it was that power that allowed her relentless attack on Catharism to take root. Innocent II, Eugenius III, and eventually Innocent III (who would begin the Albigensian Crusade) were all influenced by her rhetoric, and it’s clear that before his death in 1153, Bernard of Clairvaux was deeply influenced by it as well. St. Bernard of Clairvaux is a somewhat paradoxical figure: he loved learning and thought, yet so loathed Peter Abelard and his brand of rational, Sic et non dialectical Christianity that he sought the man’s official condemnation and accomplished it in 1141; and he worked tirelessly to support the Second Crusade and the Knights Templar, yet in 1145, possibly due to his exposure to Hildegard’s visionary tracts or perhaps on his own accord, he began working against Catharism… it’s known that Bernard was the one to show Hildegard’s first visions to Pope Eugenius III, his own student, and this is how her Nosce Vias Domini was completed.

Hildegard was born into a world of constant conflict: in the south, Spain was a battleground between Christians and Muslims (and also a melting pot for Islamic, Jewish and Christian ideas, as well as older ones from the classical world—Al-’Andalus helped create a flowering of learning that would allow Gerbert of Aurillac to rediscover the astrolabe, construct a mechanical organ, and perhaps even design and build the oracular brass head that prophesied his ascension to the papacy ninety-nine years before Hildegard’s birth—Cardinal Benno would claim that Gerbert, as Sylvester II, was a sorcerer some ten years before Hildegard was born) where a man like Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar could serve on both sides of the conflict depending on the vagaries of personal honor and Christendom seemed perpetually threatened. The Pyrenees served to some degree as a barrier from Muslim incursion into Europe, as did the armed power of the French: as the largest and most powerful Catholic nation in Europe, France served then, as it had under Charlemagne, as a bulwark against the heresy of Mohammedanism. Similarly, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade in his famous Deus vult! sermon/speech three years before Hildegard was born, and the first Cistercian monastery was founded by St. Robert in the year of her birth. Apocalyptic fervor had been growing in Europe for a hundred years (the expectation of an apocalypse of some kind had only grown with every year that it had not happened since Sylvester II presided over the change of the millennium and promptly died thereafter, which may be what allowed charges of witchcraft and diabolism to be levied against a former pope less than eight years after his death) and was reaching a fever pitch by the time Hildegard began to preach. Indeed, Hildegard’s visionary writings and the impulse that led others to abandon what was by then extremely mainstream Christianity for the Catharist heresy seem as two tributaries of the same stream: a desire for the tension to break, the waiting to end and the next phase to begin… a need for something to happen.