Scivias

Hildegard's first book: the whole of history, from creation to the last day, told as twenty-six visions and their explanations.

by Hildegard von Bingen1,009 passages held

Latin, the original language

First published: 1151(aged 53)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Its claim to be heard rests on one ground: what it describes was seen, not studied. In 1141, forty-two years and seven months old by her own count, a nun at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg saw a fiery light pour from an open heaven into her head and chest, and understood at once what the Psalms and the Gospels meant — though not, she noted, their grammar. Hildegard of Bingen tells this at the start of the book, whose title is short for Scito vias Domini, "know the ways of the Lord". She had seen such things since she was five and had told almost no one. She insists that she saw them awake, not in dreams or in a frenzy, meeting the obvious objection before anyone raises it. Doubt and fear of what people would say, she writes, kept her from writing until illness put her in bed. Over the next ten years, with the monk Volmar and the nun Richardis von Stade helping her set it down, she built twenty-six visions into three books, each image described and then explained by a heavenly voice: the first runs from creation to the fall, the second through redemption and the Church, the third to the end of time. At a synod in Trier in the winter of 1147–48, Pope Eugenius III saw part of the unfinished work and told her to go on. She finished it around 1151 at Rupertsberg, the convent near Bingen to which she had moved her nuns in 1150. A copy made there with thirty-five painted miniatures was sent to Dresden for safety in the Second World War and has not been seen since; its pictures survive because the nuns of her abbey at Eibingen had painted a full copy on parchment between 1927 and 1933. The text itself first reached print in Paris in 1513, in an anthology in which the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples set the visions of three men beside those of three women.

Key concepts

Why is the universe shaped like an egg in Scivias?

Because the shape shows a cosmos held together in layers around the earth. In the third vision of the first book Hildegard sees the universe as an egg: bright fire on the outside, a dark layer beneath it, then pure ether and moist air, with the earth at the centre and winds and stars set among the layers. The voice then reads each layer as a sign of how God governs, warns and sustains the world.

Why does every vision in Scivias come with a voice explaining it?

Because the image alone is not the teaching. Each vision is first described as it was seen and then interpreted, detail by detail, by a voice from heaven, so the book's authority rests on two gifts: the seeing and the understanding. Hildegard presents neither as her own achievement; she says she saw awake, not in dream or frenzy, and grasped what Scripture meant without being taught its grammar.

What is the soul's pilgrimage through the body?

It is Hildegard's picture of the soul as a stranger living in the body as in a tent, on its way home. In the first book the soul, given life by God in the forming child, must make its way through a world of snares, drawn upward by its longing for God and downward by temptations that work through the body's desires. The body is its companion in that struggle, never simply its prison.

How does Scivias picture the Trinity?

As one light holding three: a brilliant light, within it a human figure the colour of sapphire, and a gentle glowing fire running through both. The second book's vision shows the Father, the Son made human and the Holy Spirit as a single radiance that cannot be split apart, and the voice presses the point that none of the three exists or acts without the others.

Why are the virtues shown as figures on a building?

Because Hildegard treats virtues as living powers, not private achievements. In the third book God's work of salvation rises as an edifice through history, and the virtues stand on it as figures who speak, each named and explained: they are God's strength at work in human beings who cooperate with it. A virtue in this sense is built into a shared structure, with its own place and task there.

Themes of the book

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

Creation, the fall, and the way back

What went wrong with the human being, and can it still be put right? Scivias answers with the whole of history, from the fall to the last day, and stakes everything on repentance staying possible at every point.

Scivias tells history as one arc: a creation made good, a fall through pride and the serpent's suggestion, an Incarnation that answers it, and a last judgment that closes it. Against any reading of sin as final, Hildegard insists that repentance stays open to the end, and she sets the soul's struggle in the body inside the same cosmic picture. What follows is a sober hope: evil is real and tempting, yet grace reaches further, and every human choice is weighed within God's providence.

creation
sin
evil
temptation
pride
repentance
redemption
incarnation
salvation
divine grace
divine justice
divine judgment
eschatology
divine providence
human nature
moral responsibility
faith
trinity

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The Church as mother, and the building of the virtues

Can a person be saved alone, or only inside a body of people, sacraments and trained habits? The second and third books answer with a mother who bears the baptised and a building raised through history.

In the second book the Church appears as a woman, a mother who receives the baptised and feeds them at the altar; in the third, the virtues stand as figures on a building that God raises through the ages. Against a purely private piety, Hildegard places salvation in a body of people, sustained by sacraments and by trained habits: humility against pride, chastity and obedience against self-will. The priesthood serves that building and answers to it, and the Holy Spirit is the power that keeps it rising.

church
sacraments
baptism
eucharist
priesthood
virtue
humility
chastity
obedience
holy spirit
scripture
justice

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Within this work

passages held: 1,009
distinct concepts: 776
by passages held, corpus-wide: #62

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: “incarnation” and “salvation”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
incarnation	salvation	38
repentance	sin	38
faith	salvation	30
repentance	salvation	30
salvation	sin	21
church	incarnation	18
faith	virtue	17
salvation	virtue	16
humility	virtue	15
faith	incarnation	14
incarnation	virtue	14
church	faith	13
faith	repentance	13
faith	sin	13
repentance	virtue	13
church	salvation	12
church	virtue	12
faith	humility	11
humility	salvation	10
sin	virtue	9
incarnation	repentance	7
humility	sin	6
church	repentance	5
humility	incarnation	5
incarnation	sin	5
humility	repentance	4
church	humility	2
church	sin	2

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 you are here LA
1170 An Explanation of the Athanasian Creed (Explanatio Symboli S. Athanasii)
One of the shorter writings of her last years, in which the visions give way to commentary on a text the Western Church already recited.
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