Fantastic Metropolis

Ultimately, Hildegard served to help Catholicism smash heresy by using the heresy’s own tools of visionary experience and vivid cosmology against them, ironically breeding the very Reformation centuries later that she intended to avoid in her time. This is partly because she could not bear to cross da’ath and return from the abyss, could not surrender her sense of self and realize that her self is a lie, that there is in everything that exists all other things that exist, that all her visions were of a piece with the manifold metaphors of Gnosticism/Manichaean thought, attempting to understand the dual impulses of a single entity that is all possibility at once. Blake called himself a polytheist and a Christian and saw no contradiction because, as he suggested in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a truly omnipotent, omniscient God must by necessity be capable of anything, understand anything, and so the dualistic cosmology is a sucker’s game, be it the starved and crippled limited dualism of Christianity with all the cards stacked in the favor of the Good God Yahweh who strangely exists without the Asherah of ancient inscriptions, the Syriac mother goddess found attributed as the wife of Yahweh. This feminine principle is so glaringly absent that many of those who came after felt the need to restore it, whether using the image of a young virgin girl born without sin or by a more direct subsuming of “the Holy Spirit” into a feminine role. But ultimately, in a true omnipotence, just as Light and Darkness are both potential states that can be expressed as separate, even contradictory principles, so can Male and Female: the true Godhead is neither, of course. So we gain a Yahweh and an Asherah, or an Ahriman and a Whore, and each mates with the other’s chosen, in effect mating with the other for there is no separation between them, in order to bring about all creation. Blake’s plaintive cry of “All religions are one” resonates with us here, for in it we hear the mournful truth of the soul crossing the abyss and realizing that itself is a lie… the cosmic twin, the syzygy of Mani is in fact the Chaos of the cosmos entire, all at once, trying to rush in and embrace its divided soul. Urizen with his calipers and Orc with his burning zeal for freedom were just another way to express the essential division that is, itself, the lie, the error. Why else should opposition be true friendship? “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

In rejecting, or never understanding, this vision of a unified God above all and who is all things, the God hinted at in the Book of Job and suggested by the Bahir, both Hildegard and the Cathars were set on a course of collision and conflict. Ultimately, Hildegard’s vision triumphed for a time, before it sowed the seeds of its own destruction, the enshrinement of Canonical Christianity toppled by those inspired by her, the Champion of same; still, without Hildegard’s fire, the dark might have closed in on Catholic Christendom a good deal faster.

In part two, “Katharoi,” we’ll pick up all the threads left hanging in these pages: the crusaders scattered to the breadth of Europe, the Templars and the Cathars and the fires of the Albigensian Crusade, and see how they connect to the Lollards, the Plantagenets, Henry Bollingbroke, Sigismund of Hungary, the Maid of Orleans, the butcher Marechal de Retz, and the deeply religious son of a prized member of the Order of the Dragon.

Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out next summer from Prime Books.