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Presented by Rachael Kohn
on Sunday 29/02/2004
Romancing Hildegard of Bingen
Summary:
Medieval Christendom's most remarkable nun, Hildegard of Bingen, was a multi talented woman, a visionary, and a power broker amongst German royalty and the Church. Australian author Mary O'Connell has brought this 12th century woman to life in a novel that closely follows the true-life story of Hildegard.
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Rachael Kohn: She was known as ‘Sybil of the Rhine’, a visionary in 12th century Germany, consultant to popes, kings and bishops. She was Hildegard of Bingen.
Hello, this is The Ark, and I’m Rachael Kohn.
If you’ve ever wanted to know more about this uniquely influential mediaeval nun, but never fancied doing the research, now’s your chance. Mary O’Connell has written an historical novel that’s so faithful to the real life of Hildegard that it’s a bit like a BBC docu-drama. It’s called The King’s Daughter: Hildegard of Bingen, a Mediaeval Romance. And its careful descriptions show Mary O’Connell’s fascination with the mediaeval world of Hildegard von Bingen.
Mary O’Connell: Well I first met Hildegard in 1991 when I was studying at UNSW and doing a history degree, and there was a mediaeval history component looking at spiritual histories, and I didn’t know who Hildegard was, and I’m always interested in women’s histories, and it was at that period that a lot of work was being done and translations in English about Hildegard, and then a friend introduced me to her music.
In Germany, in England and in America, and in Australia, people have recorded her music. She wrote about 70 songs, we call them songs, but a lot of them were short antiphons, to fit into the divine office. She had a huge creative period of music and she was a great lover and supporter of music in its role as a spiritual aid.
Rachael Kohn: And that was pretty unusual for a 12th century nun.
Mary O’Connell: It’s very unusual, the amount of permission she was given to speak, and that’s another reason why she was fascinating.
Rachael Kohn: Well your story, The King’s Daughter, really turns on Hildegard’s efforts to move her community from Disibodenberg in Germany, about 30 kilometres north Bingen, to Rupertsberg on the banks of the Rhine, but there’s all kinds of resistance to her. Is she too successful for her own good?
Mary O’Connell: Yes she could be too successful. She’s certainly potentially very successful because she had just been given permission to continue writing by the Pope himself. So with papal approval, it was all systems go for the abbey that she was a member of, to get to business. And then she announces, ‘Well actually I’m not staying here, I’m off.’ And she was about 48 at the time, she’d been there since she was 8. They didn’t want her to go, there’s no way they wanted her to go, and everyone looks at cynical motives for the monks, but I think partly too, they did love her.
Rachael Kohn: Well you do allude to the fact that they would have liked to keep hold of her dowries.
Mary O’Connell: Yes, oh yes. Yes, that’s right. She had attracted a lot of women and mostly noblewomen, that was the Benedictine way, and so they had come with money and possessions and lands, and this would have all been part of the riches of the abbey, and yes, there would have been that reason to not let her go.
Rachael Kohn: An important figure in this story is the Archbishop of Mainz, Henry, whose personal behaviour might come as a surprise to some readers who aren’t aware that the clergy were not exactly celibate in those days.
Mary O’Connell: Yes. It is only in 1123 that the Lateran Council, I’ve actually put that fact in my book because I knew everyone would go ‘What?’ forbad priests to marry, and so it wasn’t right from the 4th century AD that we have a celibate priesthood, we don’t, we have what’s only a 12th century firm ruling and it will take many years before they would drive the fact that priests had wives or mistresses out.
Rachael Kohn: And his mistress was a very important woman.
Mary O’Connell: Very, very. Another fabulous woman really. Rikkarda, the Marchioness Rikkarda whose daughter was in the convent with Hildegard, we know that the Marchioness was his friend, and we know that she worked with him to promote the cause of Hildegard. There is nothing in the historical record about a deeper relationship, but as I was writing, it came to the fore. It just feels so much of the truth, and I checked with historians who said that Yes, noble clergy, very high up, they wouldn’t have deprived themselves.
Rachael Kohn: Of a beautiful woman’s company.
Mary O’Connell: Yes, of the feminine.
Rachael Kohn: Well Hildegard is perhaps more present in the story by her absence a lot of the time. She’s on her sick bed, and yet she plays an important role in the lives of those immediately around her. You write of Richardis and Volmar. Now they were real historical figures who were very much a part of her life.
Mary O’Connell: Yes. Interesting, the absence. At some stage it was a fear of mine to record the consciousness of a saint, of a woman who had psychic and spiritual abilities, who wrote not about her inner life. We get fragments of the inner life later; in her 70s she begins to open up.
Rachael Kohn: Hildegard?
Mary O’Connell: Hildegard herself, yes. Yet these illnesses were very powerful ways of getting what she wanted, and that was originally what attracted me. The story became much bigger than that, but originally I was attracted to the idea of a woman without social power who needed to have big changes wrought in her life, who couldn’t get it through debate, negotiation, requests, and then went on to her sick bed. It’s an old technique of the powerless.
Rachael Kohn: Interesting. Well Richardis, who is the daughter of the Marchioness, is an important figure in Hildegard’s life, and is recording the visions of Hildegard; is that right?
Mary O’Connell: Yes, and Volmar as well. They worked together, and Hildegard wrote a lot of her own stuff. She’s literate, she’s not just a channeller, she’s a recorder,. She writes her own story. Volmar and Richardis are there because they have more of a classical education, and they can assist her in the complexity of Latin.
Rachael Kohn: Well Richardis lets her down in the end, and leaves to become the abbess in another monastery. Now this sends Hildegard into paroxysms of grief, and I thought sent her into some very bad behaviour, very bad temper, she’s certainly a demanding woman.
Mary O’Connell: Yes. She felt bereft because I think she had a very close, independent relationship on this beautiful woman who’d seen as her spiritual daughter, who had probably had a lot of confidence that Hildegard didn’t have, and a lot of knowledge of the world, and then she leaves, and there is this rage, yes, you hear the rage, the way she thunders in those letters to poor old Henry.
Rachael Kohn: And they are authentic letters that you quote?
Mary O’Connell: Yes, they are authentic letters.
Rachael Kohn: Well she certainly didn’t hold back in condemning Henry for what she sees as his part in Richardis’ leaving.
Mary O’Connell: Yes, I think she felt betrayed by everyone who had previously supported her. She had relied upon the support of these high noble connections to get her out of the Disibodenberg, and to move to her to her own community, and she’s barely there and they pull the rug out from her.
It didn’t kill Hildegarde, it may be one of those necessary tragedies in our lives where the beloved leaves us, and we have to go on. And she said it herself, that (it sounds a negative lesson) ‘I learnt not to trust people as much as I must trust God’, but I think that lesson when the beloved leaves, and you have to go on with your own chosen spiritual life, and a life of great work and achievement, may be a necessary part of everyone’s journey. At least Hildegard’s journey, at least my journey.
Rachael Kohn: Well it’s interesting, because one of the themes in your book, The King’s Daughter is that tension between the material world, the real world of human politics and needs and so forth, and on the other hand, the higher calling of God.
Mary O’Connell: Yes. Yes, and the real world which people use that expression nowadays, is not the real world. The real world is the world that Volmar and Hildegard and Elisabeth and all the people around Rupertsberg were busy cultivating, the inner world, the world of healing and love and work.
Rachael Kohn: It sounds like you’re a budding mystic. Well you quote from Hildegard’s writing and her letters. And there were hints about her musical compositions. You don’t actually talk much about, or bring it into the text of your book, but you do make allusions to the nuns’ dancing, which is certainly not what one imagines of the cloistered life in the 12th century.
Mary O’Connell: Yes well I think we have to lighten up about our perceptions of the 12th century. It is a time of renewal and renaissance. We have this very dark image of the Middle Ages, which may be consciously or unconsciously due to perceiving ourselves as better than, and that we had an Enlightenment, so previously it must have been dark. But it wasn’t dark. Their churches were really decorated, that white-grey interior, that’s much later.
Twelfth century churches were painted like Hindu [temples], the brightness of what one associates with India. And there was a lot of singing, there were a lot of holidays, they had more holidays than we do. I try to emphasise that, because I knew there’s this impression of The Name of the Rose, this dark, terrible period of repression, and it always rained, and women never spoke and people died. And in fact if you got past child mortality, you had a good chance of doing your three score years and ten in the 12th century. We are in a period of growth and joy, and Hildegard herself was a good fan of joy, at about rejoicing, but of course in the spirit of the Lord.
Rachael Kohn: Yes, and when she was well enough to rejoice.
Mary O’Connell: Yes, when she was well enough to rejoice.
Rachael Kohn: Now her beloved Richardis dies actually at a young age, but Hildegard did go on to those three score and ten, and beyond.
Mary O’Connell: Yes, she did. She hit the 80 mark. Yes she did. She’s amazing. And so did Volmar I believe, he hit his 80s. They were just productive, hard-working people who kept going. Because quite a lot of the popes lived to 92, so again it’s part of our perception that everyone dies young in the mediaeval period, but they don’t.
Rachael Kohn: Well the subtitle of your book The King’s Daughter is ‘Hildegard of Bingen, a Mediaeval Romance’, but it’s not a romance in the sense of two people falling in love, is it?
Mary O’Connell: Well there’s a lot of people in love in that book, so it’s a romance inasmuch as that pattern of the lover and the beloved is there in so many of those relationships in our beautiful Theo and his great devotee, adoration of Henry, and in Hildegard’s love for Richardis and Volmar’s love, Elisabeth’s love for Volmar. There’s almost all of those characters have a love which may be hidden to them, but if it’s not hidden to them, and they follow it, it brings them through. So for me that’s a classic romance. There are many quests going on in this book and some are successful, and some are not.
Rachael Kohn: At the end of your book, after the references, after the acknowledgements, there is one page of Volmar in his orchard, and it’s full of tears, indeed there are a lot of tears in this book. What’s the meaning of that last vision?
Mary O’Connell: I grew to love Volmar, so much. And he’s struggling for his own spiritual attainment, and at the end it’s hidden, it’s tucked away in the book, Volmar receives the divine blessing which is what he’s been serving all these years, because Hildegard is a receiver direct of divine energies and divine wisdom and divine love. So in the end, Volmar, whom I grew to love, he receives it too in his own orchard that he’s help build, and it’s about this receiving the golden-ness.
He’s crying, but he’s crying with gratitude because he’s got there, and it’s Hildegard’s amantisimus which is her word for Christ, in which she says, the most loving one, so she doesn’t even refer to Christ by name, it’s not necessarily Christ, it is amantisimus, the most loving one, the most beloved person, is her experience of the divine. And so Volmar has it too.
Rachael Kohn: Do you feel that Hildegard is, despite her 1,000 years distance from today, is a very potent Christian symbol that speaks to people today?
Mary O’Connell: I think she must be, because there wouldn’t be all these books, or this translation of her work and her music is really flourishing.
It’s partly due to her interest as a woman being so strong, speaking so powerfully in a period we have been led to believe was totally patriarchal. It’s also the story of her struggle and her success and her achievements, her right to speak. She’s not always confident, she speaks confidently but she has anxieties and fears. In that way she is an attractive figure.
You know, a success story can be quite boring, you don’t necessarily relate to it. But the fact that hers is so marked with struggle helped me relate to her, and feel affection for her and a great affection for the world and the people that she was living with.
Rachael Kohn: Mary O'Connell is the author of The King’s Daughter, Hildegard of Bingen, published by Handmaid Press.
The Ark is heard every Sunday evening at 10 past 7, and every Wednesday afternoon at 2.15. Join me again next week at this time for The Ark.
THEME
Guests on this program:
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Mary O'Connell
is a writer and historian. She was born in New Zealand and now lives in Sydney where she is completing a PhD on an Australian 20th century visionary, Eileen O'Connor (1892-1921), who co-founded Sydney's Brown Nurses.
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Publications:
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The King's Daughter: Hildegard of Bingen, a Medieval Romance.
Author: Mary O'Connell
Publisher: Handmaid Press, Sydney, 2003
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Further information:
Musical Items:
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CD Title: Canticles of Ecstasy
Artist: Sequentia
Composer: Hildegard of Bingen
Label/CD No: Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472 77320 2
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Presenter & Executive Producer:
Rachael Kohn
Producer:
Geoff Wood
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Owen Harries
transcripts & audio available
Olympic Odyssey
with Peter Thompson
on Big Ideas
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