‘I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all the sparks of life. Death hath no part in me, yet do I allot it, wherefore I am girt about with wisdom as with wings. I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that glows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the water, I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind. I sustain the breath of all living. I breathe in the verdure and in the flowers, and when the waters flow like living things, it is I. I formed those columns that support the whole earth.... I am the force that lies hid in the winds, from me they take their source, and as a man may move because he breathes so doth a fire burn but by my blast. All these live because I am in them and am of their life. I am wisdom. Mine is the blast of the thundered word by which all things were made. I permeate all things that they may not die. I am life.’[72]

WIESB. COD. B. fo. 4 r Plate XIIa. MAN’S FALL AND THE DISTURBANCE OF THE ELEMENTAL HARMONY   WIESB. COD. B. fo. 224 v Plate XIIb. THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH

Hildegard thus supposes that the whole universe is permeated by a single living spirit, the figure of the vision. This spirit of the macrocosm, the Nous or ‘world spirit’ of the hermetic and Neoplatonic literature, the impersonated Nature, as we may perhaps render it, is in its turn controlled by the Godhead that pervades the form and is represented rising from its vertex as a second human face. Nature, the spirit of the cosmic order, controls and holds in subjection the hideous monster, the principle of death and dissolution, the Hyle or primordial matter of the Neoplatonists, whose chaotic and anarchic force would shatter and destroy this fair world unless fettered by a higher power.

With the details of the visionary figure we need not delay,[73] but we pass to the description of the structure of the macrocosm itself, to which the second vision is devoted (Plate [VII]). Here appears the same figure of the macrocosmic spirit. But now the head and feet only are visible, and the arms are outstretched to enclose the disk of the universe which conceals the body. Although the macrocosm now described is considerably altered from Hildegard’s original scheme of the universe, she yet declares, ‘I saw in the bosom of the form the appearance of a disk of like sort to that which twenty-​eight years before I had seen in the third vision, set forth in my book of Scivias’.[74] The zones of this disk are then described (Plates [VII], [VIII], and [XI] and Fig. [2]). They are from without inwards:

(a) The lucidus ignis, containing the three outer planets, the sixteen principal fixed stars, and the south wind.

(b) The ignis niger, containing the sun, the north wind, and the materials of thunder, lightning, and hail.

(c) The purus aether, containing the west wind, the moon, the two inner planets, and certain fixed stars.

(d) The aer aquosus, containing the east wind.

(e) The fortis et albus lucidusque aer, where certain other fixed stars are placed.

(f) The aer tenuis, or atmosphere, in the outer part of which is the zone of the clouds.