Plate VI. NOUS PERVADED BY THE GODHEAD AND CONTROLLING HYLE
Apart from the Biblical books, the work which made the deepest impression on Hildegard was probably Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, which seems to form the background of a large part of the Scivias. The books of Ezekiel and of Daniel, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocalypse, all contain a lurid type of vision which her own spiritual experiences would enable her to utilize, and which fit in well with her microcosmic doctrines. Ideas on the harmony and disharmony of the elements she may have picked up from such works as the Wisdom of Solomon and the Pauline writings, though it is obvious that Isidore of Seville and the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni were also drawn upon by her.
Plate VII. NOUS PERVADED BY THE GODHEAD EMBRACING THE MACROCOSM WITH THE MICROCOSM
Her figure of the Church in the Scivias reminds us irresistibly of Boethius’ vision of the gracious feminine form of Philosophy. Again, the visions of the punishments of Hell which Hildegard recounts in the Liber Vitae Meritorum[48] bear resemblance to the work of her contemporary Benedictine, the monk Alberic the younger of Monte Cassino, to whom Dante also became indebted.[49]
Hildegard repeatedly assures us that most of her knowledge was revealed to her in waking visions. Some of these we shall seek to show had a pathological basis, probably of a migrainous character, and she was a sufferer from a condition that would nowadays probably be classified as hystero-epilepsy. Too much stress, however, can easily be laid on the ecstatic presentment of her scientific views. Visions, it must be remembered, were ‘the fashion’ at the period, and were a common literary device. Her contemporary Benedictine sister, Elizabeth of Schönau, as well as numerous successors, as for example Gertrude of Robersdorf, adopted the same mechanism. The use of the vision for this purpose remained popular for centuries, and we may say of these writers, as Ampère says of Dante, that ‘the visions gave not the genius nor the poetic inspiration, but the form merely in which they were realized’.
The contemporaries of Hildegard who provide the closest analogy to her are Elizabeth of Schönau (died 1165), whose visions are recounted in her life by Eckbertus;[50] and Herrade de Landsberg, Abbess of Hohenburg in Alsace, the priceless MS. of whose Hortus Deliciarum was destroyed by the Germans in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870.[51] With Elizabeth of Schönau, who lived in her neighbourhood, Hildegard was in frequent correspondence. With Herrade she had, so far as is known, no direct communication; but the two were contemporary, lived not very far apart, and under similar political and cultural conditions. Elizabeth’s visions present some striking analogies to those of Hildegard, while the figures of Herrade, of which copies have fortunately survived, often suggest the illustrations of the Wiesbaden or of the Lucca MSS.