Editing Hildegard of Bingen (section)

===={{lang|la|Liber Divinorum Operum}}====
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| caption1          = Excerpt from a 12th century [[manuscript]], preserved in the [[Ghent University Library]]<ref>{{Cite web |title=Liber divinorum operum[manuscript] |url=https://lib.ugent.be/viewer/archive.ugent.be:0B56522C-9B29-11E1-8926-9B5B3B7C8C91#?c=&m=&s=&cv=17&xywh=-1620,-1,11437,6386 |access-date=26 August 2020 |website=lib.ugent.be}}</ref>
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| caption2          = ''Universal Man'' illumination, I.2. Lucca, MS 1942 (early 13th-century copy)
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Hildegard's last and grandest visionary work, {{lang|la|Liber divinorum operum}}, had its genesis in one of the few times she experienced something like an ecstatic loss of consciousness. As she described it in an autobiographical passage included in her {{lang|la|Vita}}, sometime in about 1163, she received "an extraordinary mystical vision" in which was revealed the "sprinkling drops of sweet rain" that she stated [[John the Evangelist]] experienced when he wrote, "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1).{{efn|Though [[John the Evangelist]] is traditionally considered the author of the [[Gospel of John]], modern scholarship considers that the gospel is anonymously authored.}} Hildegard perceived that this Word was the key to the "Work of God", of which humankind is the pinnacle. The ''Book of Divine Works'', therefore, became in many ways an extended explication of the prologue to the Gospel of John.<ref>"The Life of Hildegard", II.16, in ''Jutta & Hildegard: The Biographical Sources'', translated by Anna Silvas (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 179; Dronke, Peter. ''Women Writers of the Middle Ages'' (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 162–63.</ref>

The ten visions of this work's three parts are cosmic in scale, to illustrate various ways of understanding the relationship between God and his creation. Often, that relationship is established by grand allegorical female figures representing Divine Love ({{lang|la|Caritas}}) or Wisdom ({{lang|la|Sapientia}}). The first vision opens the work with a salvo of poetic and visionary images, swirling about to characterize God's dynamic activity within the scope of his work within the history of salvation. The remaining three visions of the first part introduce the image of a human being standing astride the spheres that make up the universe and detail the intricate relationships between the human as microcosm and the universe as macrocosm. This culminates in the final chapter of Part One, Vision Four with Hildegard's commentary on the prologue to the Gospel of John (John 1:1–14), a direct rumination on the meaning of "In the beginning was the Word". The single vision that constitutes the whole of Part Two stretches that rumination back to the opening of Genesis, and forms an extended commentary on the seven days of the creation of the world told in Genesis 1–2:3. This commentary interprets each day of creation in three ways: literal or cosmological; allegorical or ecclesiological (i.e. related to the church's history); and moral or tropological (i.e. related to the soul's growth in virtue). Finally, the five visions of the third part take up again the building imagery of {{lang|la|Scivias}} to describe the course of salvation history. The final vision (3.5) contains Hildegard's longest and most detailed prophetic program of the life of the church from her own days of "womanish weakness" through to the coming and ultimate downfall of the Antichrist.<ref>St. Hildegard of Bingen, [https://www.hfsbooks.com/catalog/title/?isbn=978-0813231297 ''The Book of Divine Works''], translated by Nathaniel M. Campbell (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018). {{ISBN|978-0-8132-3129-7}}</ref>