Pity, Lord in heaven above us,
Wretched sinners! save and love us.
There are two notable sequences attributed to the nun Hildegard of Bingen (1104-78), a visionary and prophetess who commanded the respect of Bernard and his pupil, Pope Eugenius, by her castigations of the disorders of Christendom, as did Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna in a later period. There is extant a letter of hers to Bernard, written during his visit to Germany to preach the second crusade, in which she explains in very imperfect Latin the nature of her gift. Her life was begun by Gottfried and finished by Theodorich, monk of Trier. A comparison of her works—the Scivias and the Liber Divinorum Operum—with the letter to Bernard on the one hand, and Theodorich’s part of the biography on the other, makes it very evident that the monk wrote her works as well as her life; and how much of her genuine prophecies he worked into them we are unable to say. It therefore is not decisive as to her authorship that the O ignis Spiritûs Paracliti and the O virga ac diadema are found in the manuscripts of her works, and that Theodorich vouches for the former. The author of these sequences had no acquaintance with the metrical principles of the school of St. Gall, and seems to have taken the Latin psalter as a model. Dr. Littledale, in his version of the former, substitutes a stricter metrical form.
Pierre de Corbeil was successively teacher of theology at Paris—where he had Innocent III. among his pupils—Bishop of Cambray, and in 1200 Archbishop of Sens. Innocent employed him on important missions, and he was a man of note in the Church and State of his age. A manuscript still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris contains a satire on married men which is ascribed to him (Satyra adversus eos qui Uxores ducunt). But it is a very different kind of poem which entitles him to mention here, his hymn
TRINITAS, UNITAS, DEITAS.
Trinity, unity, Deity
Eternal;
Majesty, potency, purity
Supernal!
Stone and mountain, rock and fountain,