The year is 1174.
Gravity, oxygen, and electricity have not yet been discovered.
Clocks, calculators, and the printing press had not been invented.
The earth is the center of the universe, it is surrounded by heavenly bodies whose movements serve the angels.
Most people never live past thirty.
Medicine is based on the Greek doctrine of humors and cures all diseases with a combination of bloodletting, herbal tinctures, amputation, and the touch of the Lord.
No university will educate a woman. In fact, there is no university.
At seventy-six, Hildegard of Bingen — poet, artist, healer, composer, philosopher, mystic, medical writer — has just finished writing and presenting his third and farthest book: Book of Divine Worksrecounting seven years of prophetic visions. God had first spoken to him with the “voice of a living light” when he was three years old, but he did not feel the pain of the self-proclaimed prophet – on the contrary, he considered himself a “completely uneducated person,” “sorrowful.” and a weak creature,” which is simply a channel of divine wisdom. He may have been the Western world's first great anti-unification hero – in sermons he gave to priests, bishops, abbots, and lay people throughout modern Germany and Switzerland, he preached that “God is the Reason,” that “the Reason is the root” from which comes the “mighty Word that blossoms,” but and that “healing comes from the heart,” so that we can grasp the world and its wisdom more clearly through the senses of the “inner eye” and the “inner ear.”
Hildegard was fifty-six when she first had a vision of who she would become Book of Divine Works. In its pages, among the writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, among calculations about the nature of eternity and the foundations of love, he considers something that will not be named for another seven centuries: nature.
Long before Alexander von Humboldt founded modern nature with his observation that “in this great series of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered alone,” before John Muir insisted that “when we try to choose anything in itself, we find. it affected everything else in the universe,” Hildegard puts at the center of her cosmology the idea that viriditasfrom the Latin for “green” — the green life force permeating the entire world, manifested by virtues that fill the soul.
He writes that humans are “co-creators with God” in the workings of nature. We must work with one another in the task of protecting and nurturing this interconnected creation, and we must do so with our common sense and understanding. Hildegard's person is a “fragile vessel in which the soul and reason work,” full of “full time.”
In one of his ideas, collected in a wonderful translation Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works: With Letters and Songs (public library), paints a frightening picture of the world we've grown up in disconnected from the raw life force in our souls. Seven centuries before Eunice Newton Foote discovered greenhouse gases, and before we had a sense of climate change or a hand in it, Hildegard's prophecies:
Then the green power of goodness fades away, and all justice enters a period of decline. As a result, the power of green life on Earth was reduced in every seed because the surface of the air was changed in a way that was contrary to its original purpose. Summers are now subject to paradoxical cold while winters tend to be paradoxically warm. On Earth there were periods of drought and wetness… As a result, many people asserted that the Last Day was near.
He was not clear what stood between us and such an end:
If… we give up the raw vitality of [our] good qualities and surrender to the drying of our laziness, so that we do not have the water of life and the raw power of good deeds, then the power of our soul will begin to fade and dry up.
However, Hildegard believed in “the raw zeal of human self-determination,” she believed that “the soul knows good and evil.” By combining our rational intellect with our heart-adorned hearing, by refusing to shame our souls, we have within us the power to renew this Earth. In what may be the clearest, most eloquent manifesto for climate action, he writes:
Our thinking affects our raw power… The soul is the raw life force of the flesh… When we humans work in harmony with the efforts of our soul, all our actions become good.
This is, indeed, the beating heart of Hildegard viriditas: to emphasize that stewardship of the Earth's life force is not only our moral responsibility to the universe but our spiritual duty to our souls. And this can be – words sacred again perfect share a Latin root; if the natural conscience is a way of seeing the whole world, it is a way of seeing its holiness, of seeing our holiness – not above it, but nested in it. Rachel Carson knew this when, picking up Hildegard's lamp eight centuries later to inspire the modern environmental movement, noting that “for us there is a deep response to the natural universe, which is part of our being,” that the work now before. humanity “to prove their maturity and strength – not of nature, but of themselves.” It was Hildegard who gave us the first model of poetic ecology.
