The Book of Divine Works

This book claims that the human being stands at the centre of creation, body and soul answering to the order of the heavens, the winds and the elements, so that human conduct registers in the cosmos and the cosmos in the human frame — and that all of it is God's work unfolding through history. The picture most people know from Hildegard of Bingen's writings reads the book faithfully: a man with arms outstretched at the centre of a wheel of spheres and winds, the whole wheel held by a larger figure whose head rises above its rim. It was painted in the early thirteenth century, a generation after her death, for a copy now at Lucca. Hildegard began the book in 1163, at sixty-five, after a vision that she says left her trembling and ill, and she dated it pointedly: under the emperor Frederick, while the troubles of the papacy were not yet settled — the schism in which Frederick Barbarossa was backing rival popes against Alexander III. She says the writing took seven years; the last stages ran longer. The ten visions, in three parts, include a commentary on the opening of John's Gospel and another on the first chapter of Genesis, and close on a history of the Church that runs to the fall of Antichrist. Volmar, the monk who had taken down her visions since 1141, died in 1173 with the text unfinished, and she sent the manuscript to Ludwig, abbot of St Eucharius at Trier, to see it through. The earliest surviving copy, now at Ghent, was made in the scriptoria of her convent at Rupertsberg and of St Eucharius. The book ends with a warning that anyone who adds to its words or takes from them sins against the Holy Spirit, with one exception: the correction of letters and wording, the work her secretaries had always done on her Latin.