An Explanation of the Athanasian Creed

A farewell to her own nuns that turns into a commentary on the creed: Hildegard's account of the Trinity, written for her house alone.

by Hildegard von Bingen47 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: Explanatio Symboli S. Athanasii
First published: 1170(aged 72)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Before she sets out for her nuns how she reads the creed — one God in three persons, whose work is a world made for the sake of the human being — Hildegard of Bingen reminds them how they came to have a house of their own. She had found the place — the burial place of Saint Rupert near Bingen — through visions and miracles, she tells them, and moved there with her superiors' leave. Later she went back to Disibodenberg, the monastery she had left, and told its abbot, in the words of the light that spoke to her, that her daughters' land and alms belonged neither to him nor to his monks, and that anyone who tried to cut them down would be a robber. The monks gave way and the settlement was put in writing. Then she turns to what the nuns will do when she is gone: they will mourn her, she says, and she charges them to keep charity among themselves and to stay in the place they chose. On one scholar's reading, the occasion was a letter from Volmar, her secretary and the nuns' provost: writing for a community anxious about her age, he set the teaching she had received against the empty disputes of the schools. The address to the nuns is dated to about 1170, the closing section to about 1168, her seventieth year. The text she chose was the Athanasian Creed, a long Latin statement of the Trinity, its persons distinct but undivided, that the Middle Ages credited to Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop who fought Arius. She reads it as a story running from creation through the Incarnation to the Church, and she breaks off to rebuke the masters and teachers of the people, who study Scripture for honour and money while heretics sit among them unanswered. The work survives in the great Wiesbaden manuscript of her works and in a manuscript now in Vienna.

Key concepts

What does 'distinct but undivided' mean for the Trinity?

It is the creed's rule for speaking of God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three persons, not to be confused with one another, yet one substance, not to be divided. Hildegard reads the rule not as a puzzle for disputation but as the shape of God's action: one work, carried out by three who are never apart, from creation to the Church.

Why does the creed compare Christ to a soul and body?

Because the creed says that as the rational soul and the flesh are one human being, so God and man are one Christ. The comparison lets a reader grasp the Incarnation from the inside: two natures without mixture, one person without division. It also shows why the creed's story centres on the human being, the one creature that is itself a union of spirit and matter.

Why does the creed insist the Son is equal to the Father?

Because it is aimed at the teaching of Arius, that the Son was a creature, made by the Father and less than him. Against that the creed says the three persons are coeternal and coequal, none before or after, none greater or less. The stakes are practical: if the Son were a creature, the one who became human could not restore what God had made.

Why read a creed as a story rather than a list of doctrines?

Because the creed's God is known through what God does. The exposition runs from creation, through the Incarnation, to the Church, so each clause about the Trinity becomes a moment in one history made for the human being's sake. A doctrine read this way cannot be held at a distance: the reader is inside the story it tells, as the creature it was told for.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One God in three persons, and a world made for humanity

How can God be one and three at once, and why should that matter to anyone who is not a theologian? She answers by reading the creed as the story of a world made for the human being.

She reads the creed not as a list of propositions but as a story: the one God in three persons, distinct but undivided, makes a world for the sake of the human being, becomes human in the Incarnation, and gathers humanity into the Church. Against the empty disputes of the schools, she knows the Trinity by what it does. What follows is a high estimate of the human creature, rational, body and soul together, the one for whom the world was made.

trinity
divine unity
divinity
eternity
creation
incarnation
christology
human nature
rationality
soul and body
analogy
biblical typology
salvation
covenant

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A house to keep, and teachers who fail it

What holds a community together once the one who founded it is gone? Her charge to her nuns and her rebuke of the masters give the same answer: charity kept, and truth defended rather than sold.

The book opens with a history, not a doctrine: how she found the burial place of Saint Rupert through visions, and how she told the abbot of Disibodenberg, in the words of the light, that her daughters' land was not his. She charges her nuns to keep charity among themselves and stay in the place they chose, and she breaks off from the creed to rebuke masters who study Scripture for honour and money while heretics sit among them unanswered. Doctrine and community stand or fall together.

religious authority
obedience
humility
charity
church
heresy
moral responsibility
justice
prophecy
virtue
faith

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Within this work

passages held: 47
distinct concepts: 124
by passages held, corpus-wide: #661

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “creation” and “trinity”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 12 pairings. 31 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
creation	trinity	5
divine unity	trinity	5
christology	incarnation	3
creation	human nature	2
creation	incarnation	2
divine unity	incarnation	2
incarnation	trinity	2
christology	creation	1
christology	salvation	1
creation	divine unity	1
human nature	incarnation	1
salvation	trinity	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1146 The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (Epistolae)
Not a book but a correspondence, gathered in her own house and ordered by rank, popes first; the place on this shelf where the visions meet the politics of the Church.
LA
1151 Scivias
The first of her three great visionary books, begun at Disibodenberg and finished after she had moved her nuns to Rupertsberg; The Book of Divine Works, completed some twenty years later, is the last.
LA
1170 An Explanation of the Athanasian Creed (Explanatio Symboli S. Athanasii) you are here LA
1173 The Book of Divine Works (Liber divinorum operum)
Where Scivias and the Liber vitae meritorum follow salvation, vice and virtue, this third of her visionary books takes in the whole cosmos.
LA
1176 Solutions to Thirty-Eight Questions (Solutiones quaestionum XXXVIII)
An outgrowth of her letters, with Guibert of Gembloux's covering letter still at its head: the one work on this shelf whose subject was chosen by someone else, question by question.
LA

— or open another of their works