Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (20 page)

“Those will inspire some fine illuminations,” I told her.

The girl ducked her head, as though my praise both pleased and embarrassed her.

“Stade is very close to the sea. You must have laid eyes on all manner of marine creatures that I can scarcely imagine.” I spoke breezily, in hope that the sun on the waters and her love for the wild life around her might coax her to speak.

She scribbled at the bottom of her tablet.

ONCE I SAW A WHALE-FISH. IT WAS BIGGER THAN A CASTLE.

Beside this, she had etched a leviathan spouting a huge plume of spray. Then she wrote:

I HAVE SEEN DOLPHINS THAT CAN LEAP OVER TALL-MASTED
SHIPS AND SEALS THAT TURN INTO MERMAIDS
BENEATH THE LIGHT OF THE MOON.

Before I could frame a suitable response, she cracked a grin, as though laughing in silence.

I laughed along, sharing her joke before asking her, as gently as I could, “Do you miss home?”

The girl pulled a face and flipped her braid over her shoulder. Fleet as a hind, she launched herself into cartwheels down the riverbank. Kicking her legs heavenward, every part of her seemed to revel in the freedom previously forbidden her—her mother, no doubt, would have thrown a fit to see her marriageable daughter indulging in such infantile play. Her joy was so infectious that I could only think that God had liberated me in order to give this girl sanctuary.

Richardis became my steadfast companion. Although she made no vows and remained as mute as she was the day her mother delivered her to us, she matured into a stately young woman of seventeen, an accomplished psaltery player and illuminator. In the scriptorium, she worked with Adelheid and Volmar, embellishing their manuscripts with her trumpeting angels and fruited vines. She grew even more beautiful, a fact not lost on her mother, who visited each summer and seemed crestfallen that such an exquisite girl remained unmarriageable.

As for my other sisters, Adelheid seemed well-contented with her scribing. Only Guda seemed unhappy. Of the three of us, she seemed to like Richardis least, perhaps because that girl’s arrival had displaced Guda from her position as youngest and loveliest. Now even golden-haired Guda was thirty. In the secular world, she would have had a great brood of children by that age. As she grew older, Guda appeared to regret her vocation more and more. Her deepest misgiving, I thought, was that she would never experience the joy of motherhood. This loss only seemed to deepen her resentment of Richardis. She muttered that the girl’s supposed muteness was something she had freely chosen in order to spite her mother—had Richardis deigned to utter even the simplest of words, her mother would have whisked her away and married her off with every honor. In Guda’s view, her cousin was a spoiled, over-indulged child who frittered away her youth, beauty, and fertility by painting pictures and tramping through the forest with me. My worst fear was that Guda would grow into a bitter old woman.

I myself was happier than I ever dreamt I could be. Studying God’s wild creation, the river and forest teaching me more than any book, my days passed in bliss. Cuno had no love for me and yet he was prepared to suffer me, he who had loved Jutta with his entire soul, who lifted her up to the shining pinnacle of womanhood. Since I was only six years younger than my dead magistra, perhaps he didn’t expect me to outlive her by much.

It could have ended there, with my spending the remaining days left to me at Disibodenberg, enjoying the fruits of friendship and study, taking over the hospice duties from Brother Otto as he aged.
Ora et labora,
work and prayer, devotion to God and service to others, set the rhythm of my days.

One balmy May afternoon in 1141, I set to work on a new lapidary with Richardis as my scribe. We sat in what had once been the anchorage courtyard, its formerly high blank walls now lowered to reveal sweeping views of the Nahe and the forested hills beyond.

In my open palm, I held Richardis’s sapphire necklace. How it glittered in the midday sun.

“Sapphire,” I dictated, “is hot, more fiery indeed than airy or watery. It symbolizes both divine love and wisdom, Caritas and Sapientia, for Caritas and Sapientia are one—God’s love cannot be separated from God’s wisdom.”

As I spoke, the noontide heat began to oppress me. A band of pain encircled my head, but I strove to ignore it.

“If the devil should incite a man to love a woman so that he goes mad with desire, and should this annoy the woman, she should pour a bit of wine over the sapphire three times and each time say:
I pour this wine over you; just as God drew off your splendor, wayward angel, so may you draw away from me this man’s lust.
”

Needle-sharp pain pierced my temples, forcing me to cry out. Richardis’s necklace tumbled to the ground as I lurched forward, pitching myself from my chair. My innards churned in nausea, then everything dimmed into nothingness. Only the pain was real, that blade that would not stop stabbing.

Richardis gripped my shoulders, cradled my cheek. She managed to lift me off the floor and guide me to my bed before darting to fetch help. Meanwhile, my head hammered in such agony that I feared my skull would explode.

Brother Otto laid a poultice on my forehead. The good physician offered me herbs steeped in honeyed wine, but nothing would ease my torment. My throat burned like hellfire and I couldn’t swallow a single mouthful of water or broth. My womb convulsed, robbing me of my bodily powers until I no longer knew myself.

Was God punishing me for my very happiness, for daring to embrace life instead of suffering without end as Jutta had done? Did God truly desire nothing less than martyrs roiling in wretchedness? At the age of forty-two years and seven months, I felt as though I were about to die.

Imprisoned in the infirmary as I had once been imprisoned in the anchorage, I thought it could get no worse. Then the visions returned, wrenching me from my stupor. The Light seared me, turning my bones to putty, burning away my eyelids so all I could do was gape at that overpowering brilliance. And from that luminosity came the voice that shook me to my core.
It is time. Time to do what you were born to do.

The Light dazzled every cell in my body as I thrashed in its grip. I fevered and panted while Brother Otto and my sisters gathered round, powerless to end my ordeal. Adelheid and Guda held each other while Richardis clung to my hand, her face only inches from mine as she wept noiselessly. Cuno watched from the doorway, as though in solemn expectation of my demise. Volmar, weeping as openly as my sisters, hovered at the foot of my bed. He moved his mouth to speak, but I was deaf to everything except the roaring within.

No longer could I idle away my days puttering about the forest and hospice. God had given me the visions for a purpose and yet I had hidden them away like rags soiled with menstrual blood. My task was to awaken. The command now reverberated within the chamber of my heart.
See and speak. Hear and write. Be God’s mouthpiece.

Shrinking inside myself, I considered the many books in our library penned by scholars whose erudition put me to shame, those great men who had mastered rhetoric, who could debate theology and philosophy in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. The vastness of their knowledge left me cowering, for what was I but a weak, ignorant woman? My Latin grammar was no better than a young boy’s—how dare I presume to write anything? But the vision seized me and would not let me go.
O fragile human, ash of ashes. Speak and write what you see and hear.

Heaven opened, fire descending like Pentecostal flame. Fiery light permeated my brain and inflamed my heart, blinding and illuminating me at once. I thought I would burn up in its radiance, but then it warmed me as the sun warms all she touches.
Now I know.

Meaning filled me. For more than three decades I had studied the holy texts, but now I understood them. Flames stoked my heart and mind, revealing the secret riches in the sacred writings: the psalms, the Gospels, and the other catholic volumes of the Old and New Testaments. The voice sang out like a trumpet.
I am the Living Light that illuminates the darkness.

Dawn broke through the infirmary window. Echoing through the walls came the voices of the choir brothers singing Lauds. Though Cuno had vanished, my sisters, Brother Otto, and Volmar kept their vigil by my bed. As the first ray of sun touched my face, my voice returned.

“Volmar, please receive my confession.”

Brother Otto and my sisters tiptoed from the room, leaving me alone with my oldest friend. His hand enclosing mine was warm, his strength infusing me.

“The visions have returned,” I told him. “I’m not dying, but my old life is over. God has commanded me to do this thing, to speak and write what I see and hear. Only I don’t know how. God should have chosen
you.
” I smiled at him through my tears. “Not someone as ignorant as I am.”

I feared he might react with alarm, as he had done when I first told him about my visions as a child, or that he would think these apparitions the sign of a troubled mind. Instead, he gazed at me in reverence.

“You were chosen for a reason,” he said. “I’ll help you however I can.”

“Say not a word to Cuno. He’ll have me burned for heresy.” I spoke only half in jest.

At the very least, my abbot would think it presumptuous that I, the erring and unworthy nun, was trying to outshine holy Jutta whose relics graced our abbatial church, whose bones lay under the chapter house floor. Even after her death, her holy reputation was a beacon that drew a steady stream of pilgrims.

Before Volmar could say another word, Richardis stepped from the shadowy alcove where she had been eavesdropping. Her eyes brimmed as she bent to kiss me. Then, with a nod to Volmar, she handed me the tablet and stylus I had given her four years ago. Both she and Volmar seemed to hold their breath until I pressed the stylus into the wax. Trembling and faint-headed, I wrote and wrote until I emptied myself. Only then did the pain ebb. In its place came a humming energy, green fire surging through my veins. Throwing off the blankets, I planted my feet on the floor and stretched my arms. Both dazed and ecstatic, I turned to smile at my two dearest friends.

After I had washed and dressed, Richardis accompanied me to the church where Guda and Adelheid sang Terce along with the brothers. My sisters’ faces lit up in joy and relief as I joined them in song, our voices soaring in harmony. After the Holy Office had ended, my sisters enclosed me in a tight embrace. Cuno stared before drawing away.

If my miraculous recovery flummoxed our abbot, it was not his way to encourage me to wallow in excess attention. In truth, I was grateful that he chose to ignore me in those first fragile days of my awakening.

Until that morning when I arose like Lazarus from my infirmary bed, I had lived under my abbot’s thumb. From the age of eight, my every act had been under scrutiny, governed by the monks’ rules and restrictions. Apart from my flamboyant bid for freedom on the day of Jutta’s funeral, my life had been harnessed to one aim—submission. If I was no longer dead to the world in the tomb of the anchorage, Cuno still expected me to be silent, obedient, invisible. But the voice inside shattered the chains. It welled up in an unstoppable gush of words, a song that could never be stilled.

Every moment I was not in prayer, I was writing feverishly, covering tablet after tablet with revelations of divine love and the nature of the universe, of the macrocosm and the microcosm, of how the rift between the created world and the fallen world might be healed. Adelheid and Guda left me to my business—I wanted it that way lest I bring Cuno’s wrath upon them as well as myself. But Richardis stuck to me like a burr, just as Volmar did. He who had once been Jutta’s appointed secretary now offered himself as mine, behind Cuno’s back. While Volmar transcribed my words to parchment, correcting and polishing my Latin, Richardis gathered pigments, quills, and brushes. With colors as brilliant as the wildflowers that spangled the forest, the girl illuminated my every vision.

In the chamber of my heart, I discovered a door flung wide open, the enclosure of the mysteries now unlocked.

“Such splendor I see,” I told Volmar and Richardis.

The vision unfolded as the three of us huddled in an overgrown corner of the medicinal garden where rosebushes grew tall to conceal us, enfolding us in their paradisial perfume.

“I see a mighty, towering woman.” My voice rose like a melody over the drone of bees. “Around her, there glimmers a brightness as white as snow, as translucent as crystal.”

Volmar’s stylus scratched his wax tablet while Richardis bent over her own tablet, making a preliminary sketch.

“Like the dawn, she shimmers, shining forth as high as the secret places of heaven. In the heart of her embrace, I see the most beautiful maiden with long dark hair. Her red gown flows to her feet.”

Richardis glanced up, a strand of her own hair caught in her mouth while I looked on with double vision, seeing Volmar and Richardis in the garden, and then the woman and girl in my revelation.

“Around the maiden I see a great throng of men and women, brighter than the sun, each adorned in gold and jewels.”

The glory half-blinded me.

“The voice speaks. It says, ‘Behold Ecclesia, the true Church and uncorrupted Bride.’ She is the towering woman. The maiden in her arms is Caritas, Divine Love. The virgin clothed in the red of life.”

Before me I saw the face of my God, my Mother, as awesome as lightning striking the earth, yet as gentle in her goodness as the sun’s rays. She was incomprehensible to humans because of the dread radiance of her divinity and the brightness that blazed in her. For she was with all, and in all, and of a beauty so great that none could comprehend how sweetly she bore with us mortals and how she spared us with her inscrutable mercy.

As I opened my mouth to pour my vision into words, Cuno and Egon burst into our sheltering bower.