For centuries after her death, Europe knew Hildegard of Bingen chiefly through a book she did not write. Around 1220 Gebeno, prior of the Cistercian abbey of Eberbach, cut her visionary books and letters down to an anthology of prophecies about the times to come, and his Pentachronon circulated into the seventeenth century. What the anthology kept was the prophet. What it left out was the thought underneath: an account of the whole created world with the human being at its centre, reached by a road the schools of her day did not recognise.
The road was vision. In the preface to Scivias, her first book, she writes that she had seen things since she was five — awake, not in dreams or in a frenzy. In 1141, at forty-two, a fiery light from an open heaven poured into her, and she understood at once the meaning of the Psalms and the Gospels, though not their grammar. She had learned a simple Latin in the cloister but was never taught the full course of the liberal arts, the curriculum of the schools; she called herself an unlearned woman and relied all her life on secretaries to correct her grammar while leaving her words alone. The Church of her day reserved preaching and the teaching of doctrine to ordained men, and her right to write rested on the claim that what she knew had not come from her.
Her parents, Hildebert and Mechtild, of the minor nobility of the Rhineland, had given her to the Church as a child. Later accounts call the gift a tithe, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the German national biography, makes her their tenth child; the records name only seven older siblings. She was placed with Jutta of Sponheim, a recluse enclosed beside the Benedictine monks of Disibodenberg. The life written after her death puts her there at eight, but Jutta's enclosure is dated 1112, when Hildegard was fourteen, and scholars still dispute the sequence. When Jutta died in 1136, the women gathered around her elected Hildegard their magistra, their superior.
Even after 1141 she hesitated: she writes that doubt, and fear of what people would say, kept her from writing until illness put her in bed. At a synod in Trier in the winter of 1147–48, Pope Eugenius III saw part of Scivias and told her to go on. From then on she wrote as someone who had been heard — to popes, to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and to an archbishop of Mainz, whom she told that church offices were being handed out for money. In 1150 she moved about twenty nuns to a house of their own at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, over the resistance of Kuno, the abbot of Disibodenberg. Between about 1160 and 1170 she made four preaching journeys, from Cologne and Trier to Bamberg and Swabia, speaking to clergy and lay people about the clergy's corruption.
What she saw added up to a system. Its central claim is that the human being, body and soul together, is built on the pattern of the cosmos, so that what a person does registers in the order of the world, and the order of the world registers in the body. The Book of Divine Works, begun in 1163 when she was sixty-five, sets the human figure among the spheres, the winds and the elements. She called the life that runs through plants, bodies and souls viriditas, greenness. The same correspondence governs her books on the powers of plants and stones and on the body's humours. Her thought moves by images explained, not by the question and objection of the schools, and late in life she turned on the schoolmen directly: in An Explanation of the Athanasian Creed, addressed to her nuns around 1170, she rebukes the masters who study Scripture for honour and money.
Heinrich Schipperges, the historian of medicine who wrote her entry in the German national biography, judged that her symbolic picture of the world was swept aside by the Aristotelian philosophy that came to rule the schools after her. Her wider recovery came in the twentieth century, when musicians recorded her chants, historians of medicine and of women read her books, and the New Age movement claimed her as its own. The Church had venerated her as a saint in local calendars since the Middle Ages without ever completing a canonisation. On 10 May 2012 Pope Benedict XVI entered her name in the catalogue of saints, and on 7 October 2012 he named her a Doctor of the Church.