Fantastic Metropolis

Hildegard’s vivid writings of the violent loathing God, the eventual destruction of the serpent and the torments of Hell that awaited heretics held schismatics in, and were exactly in line with what Bernard himself had felt his entire life. They were not the hated rationalism of Abelard, who sought to use reason and logic to unlock the kingdom of Heaven: they were emotional appeals to a Christendom that was beginning to waver in its prosecution of the endless war for Jerusalem, that was tired of waiting for the apocalypse to come. But they come in the context of the young woman who first saw a vision in 1101 in her third year, who grew up sickly in the care of a reclusive Anchoress named Jutta, who became a Benedictine nun and eventually became superioress and head of the Abbey at Rupertsberg, near Bingen. Her visions were a lifelong force in her life: “Up to my fifteenth year I saw much, and related some of the things seen to others, who would inquire with astonishment, whence such things might come. I also wondered and during my sickness I asked one of my nurses whether she also saw similar things. When she answered no, a great fear befell me. Frequently, in my conversation, I would relate future things, which I saw as if present, but, noting the amazement of my listeners, I became more reticent.” Finally, after years of affliction, her inner voice finally commanded her to reveal her visions in 1141, just as Bernard finally defeated his great rival Abelard, and from there her fame and influence grew until the end of her life, when she even managed to get an interdiction that had been laid upon her convent due to the burial of an excommunicated man lifted before her death.

Ironically, considering her utter loathing of heretics, Hildegard was also an inspiration to the Protestant reformers like Luther and Zwingli, with her emphasis on condemnation for those of wealth and power who sought temporal gains over spiritual ones, and her scorn for those churchmen who used their offices in a corrupt manner. However, at the time of her preaching, the Cathars of Languedoc had existed quietly and peacefully in that locale for quite some time (it’s speculated that Catharist beliefs were a fusion of Isma’ili and Manichaean, perhaps even Zoroastrian ideas preserved in Islamic al-’Andalus and in the Bogomil heresy of Bulgaria brought back by Crusaders, who encountered it in their march across the Bosporus, perhaps fusing it with direct experience of the persecuted Parsis followers of Zoroastrianism in Antioch) and while it was spreading steadily in tolerant Languedoc, and even in Italy to some degree, it was far from a real threat to Christianity as Hildegard practiced it. “Her visionary language, her (occasional) displacement of devilry and wickedness onto the heretics and ordinary mortals who depart from her canonical view of Christianity at the time” is how Thornton and Washburn put it, but to me it resembles nothing so much as Augustine and Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria (who we all remember as the persecutor of Hypatia, the Neoplatonist philosopher, daughter of the chief librarian of the Library of said city, and possible master of the three-in-one incantation IAO) and how they reacted to the Carpocratian Gnostics.

Some Gnostic leaders—for instance, Carpocrates of Alexandria (c. A.D. 120)—apparently used incantations, drugs, and messages from spirits or daemons, but since much of this information has come down to us through Christian authors who were hostile to the Gnostics, it is not considered reliable. There seems to have been a genuine interest within Gnosticism to reconcile Christianity with contemporary philosophy and occult science, but on the whole the Gnostics were more concerned about understanding how the cosmic mechanisms worked than about switching them on and off.

—Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi