[547] Translated from the text as given in E. Monaci’s Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli. Substantially the same text is given in Spec. perf. 120.
[548] The mediaeval term apex mentis is not inapt.
[549] Assurance of the soul’s communion, and even union, with God is the chief element of what is termed mysticism, which will be discussed briefly in connection with scholastic philosophy, post, Chapter XXXVI. II. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries those who experienced the divine through visions, ecstasies, and rapt contemplation, were not as analytically and autobiographically self-conscious as later mystics. Yet St. Theresa’s (sixteenth century) mystical analysis of self and God (for which see H. Delacroix, Études d’histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme, Paris, 1908) might be applied to the experiences of St. Elizabeth of Schönau or St. Hildegard of Bingen.
[550] Ante, Chapter XIII. II.
[551] Neither Othloh’s visions, nor those to be recounted, were narratives of voyages to the other world. The name of these is legion. They begin in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and continue through the Middle Ages—until they reach their apotheosis in the Divina Commedia. See post, Chapter XLIII.
[552] Migne, Pat. Lat. 195.
[553] The works of St. Hildegard of Bingen are published in vol. 197 of Migne’s Pat. Lat. and in vol. viii. of Pitra’s Analecta sacra, under the title Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis opera Spicilegio Solesmensi parata (1882). Certain supplementary passages to the latter volume are published in Analecta Bollandiana, i. (Paris, 1882). These publications are completed by F. W. E. Roth’s Lieder und die unbekannte Sprache der h. Hildegardis (Wiesbaden, 1880). The same author has a valuable article on Hildegard in Zeitschrift für kirchliche Wissenschaft, etc., 1888, pp. 453-471. See also an article by Battandier, Revue des questions historiques, 33 (1883), pp. 395-425. Other literature on Hildegard in Chevalier’s Répertoire des sources historiques du moyen âge, under her name.
Her two most interesting works, for our purposes at least, are the Scivias (meaning Scito vias Domini), completed in 1151 after ten years of labour, and the Liber vitae meritorum per simplicem hominem a vivente luce revelatorum (Pitra, o.c. pp. 1-244), begun in 1159, and finished some five years later. Extracts from these are given in the text. Other works show her extraordinary intellectual range. Of these the Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis (Migne 197, col. 741-1038) is a vision of the mysteries of creation, followed by a voluminous commentary upon the world and all therein, including natural phenomena, human affairs, the nature of man, and the functions of his mind and body. It closes with a discussion of Antichrist and the Last Times. The work was begun about 1164, when Hildegard finished the Liber vitae meritorum, and was completed after seven years of labour. She also wrote a Commentary on the Gospels, and sundry lives of saints, and there is ascribed to her quite a prodigious work upon natural history and the virtues of plants, the whole entitled: Subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum libri IX. (Migne 197, col. 1118-1351); and probably she composed another work on medicine, i.e. the unpublished Liber de causis et curis (see Pitra, o.c., prooemium, p. xi.). Preger’s contention (Geschichte der deutschen Mystik, i. pp. 13-27, 1874) that the works bearing Hildegard’s name are forgeries, never obtained credence, and is not worth discussing since the publication of Pitra’s volume.
[554] Analecta Sanctae Hildegardis opera Spicilegio Solesmensi parata, p. 523; cf. ibid. p. 561; also Ep. 27 of Hildegard in Migne 197, col. 186.
[555] These questions and Hildegard’s solutions are given in Migne 197, col. 1038-1054, and the letter in Pitra, o.c. 399-400.