Solutions to Thirty-Eight Questions

Monks in Brabant send thirty-eight puzzles about Scripture and the saints, and a visionary abbess answers them one by one.

by Hildegard von Bingen42 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: Solutiones quaestionum XXXVIII
First published: 1176(aged 78)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

The Cistercian monks of Villers, in Brabant, wanted to know how Scripture could say that God made all things at once and also that he took six days to do it. That was the first of thirty-five questions, later thirty-eight, that they sent to Hildegard of Bingen in 1176 through Guibert, a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Gembloux in the same region. Guibert and his abbot had set out in Lent to put them to her in person, got as far as Cologne and turned back; he sent the questions on by another hand and wrote, anxious, to ask whether they had arrived. The monks also asked whether there are real waters above the sky, how Paul was caught up into the third heaven, whether the fire of hell is material, and in what body Saint Nicholas appeared to the emperor Constantine, since it was not in his own. They put all of it to a woman who said that what she knew had come to her in vision, not from the schools. Hildegard was nearly eighty and often ill; Volmar, her secretary for thirty years, had died in 1173, and his successor had just died too. She answered anyway, and to the first question replied that God made the matter of heaven and earth together, at once, and that the six days are six works, each one's beginning and completion counted as a day. Some answers run long; others are brief to the point of evasion, and the question of why Saint Martin so often appeared as fire gets a single sentence. Whether the monks of Villers ever received the answers is not known.

Key concepts

What does 'six days, six works' mean in her reading of Genesis?

It means the six days count works, not stretches of time. Hildegard answers the monks' first question by saying God made the matter of heaven and earth together, at once, and then brought it to order in six works, each one's beginning and completion counted as a day. So the passage that says all things were made at once and the account of six days no longer contradict each other: one speaks of matter, the other of its forming.

What kind of question does a 'solution' answer?

A solution answers a difficulty in Scripture: two passages that seem to disagree, or a statement that is hard to picture or to square with what else is known. The task is to show how the text can stand as written, without discarding either side. The monks' thirty-eight questions are of this kind, and each answer is a reading that dissolves the difficulty rather than a new doctrine.

What are the waters above the sky, and why did the monks ask about them?

They are the waters Genesis places above the firmament, when God divides the waters below from the waters above. The monks asked whether real waters stand there, because the answer decides how literally Scripture's picture of the world can be read. The question belongs with the first one: both test whether the Bible's account of creation describes the cosmos itself or speaks of it only in figures.

What is original sin, as these answers presuppose it?

Original sin is the damage Adam's disobedience did to human nature, inherited by every descendant. It does not destroy the soul's reason or its freedom, but it clouds perception and bends desire, so that people see and want less truly than the first human did before the fall. Several of the monks' puzzles about the body, the soul and what follows death rest on that inheritance.

Themes of the book

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

Hard questions of Scripture, answered from vision

What can be said about the questions Scripture raises but does not settle, from the making of the world to the body of a saint? The answers claim that vision reaches where commentary stalls.

The monks asked the questions a careful reader of Scripture cannot avoid: how God made all things at once and yet in six days, whether there are waters above the sky, whether hell's fire is material, how Paul was caught up into the third heaven, in what body a saint appears. Hildegard answers from vision rather than from the schools, and her first answer sets the method: God made the matter of heaven and earth together, and the six days are six works, each beginning and completion counted as a day. Some answers run long, some are a single sentence.

biblical interpretation
creation
cosmology
matter
angels
afterlife
hell
punishment
resurrection
body
soul
embodiment
perception
ecstasy
knowledge
original sin
free will
human nature

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Within this work

passages held: 42
distinct concepts: 125
by passages held, corpus-wide: #673

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: “original sin” and “perception”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 3 concepts, joined by 3 pairings. 20 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
original sin	perception	2
faith	original sin	1
faith	perception	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)
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) you are here LA

— or open another of their works