Editing Hildegard of Bingen (section)

===Visionary theology===
Hildegard's most significant works were her three volumes of visionary theology: {{lang|la|Scivias}} ("Know the Ways", composed 1142–1151), {{lang|la|Liber Vitae Meritorum}} ("Book of Life's Merits" or "Book of the Rewards of Life", composed 1158–1163); and {{lang|la|Liber Divinorum Operum}} ("Book of Divine Works", also known as {{lang|la|De operatione Dei}}, "On God's Activity", begun around 1163 or 1164 and completed around 1172 or 1174). In these volumes, the last of which was completed when she was well into her seventies, Hildegard first describes each vision, whose details are often strange and enigmatic, and then interprets their theological contents in the words of the "voice of the Living Light."<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Beuys |first=Barbara |year=2020 |title=Mit Visionen zur Autorität |magazine=[[Damals]] |language=de |issue=6 |pages=22–29}}</ref>

===={{lang|la|Scivias}}====
[[File:Meister des Hildegardis-Codex 004.jpg|thumb|left|The Church and Mother of the Faithful in Baptism. Illustration to {{lang|la|Scivias}} II.3, fol. 51r from the 20th-century facsimile of the Rupertsberg manuscript, {{Circa|1165}}–1180.]]

With permission from Abbot Kuno of Disibodenberg, she began journaling visions she had (which is the basis for {{lang|la|Scivias}}). {{lang|la|Scivias}} is a contraction of {{lang|la|Sci vias Domini}} ('Know the Ways of the Lord'), and it was Hildegard's first major visionary work, and one of the biggest milestones in her life. Perceiving a divine command to "write down what you see and hear,"<ref>"Protestificatio" ("Declaration") to Hildegard of Bingen, ''Scivias'', translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 59–61.</ref> Hildegard began to record and interpret her visionary experiences. In total, 26 visionary experiences were captured in this compilation.<ref name="ReferenceA" />

{{lang|la|Scivias}} is structured into three parts of unequal length. The first part (six visions) chronicles the order of God's creation: the Creation and Fall of Adam and Eve, the structure of the universe (described as the shape of an "egg"), the relationship between body and soul, God's relationship to his people through the Synagogue, and the choirs of angels. The second part (seven visions) describes the order of redemption: the coming of Christ the Redeemer, the [[Trinity]], the church as the Bride of Christ and the Mother of the Faithful in [[baptism]] and [[confirmation]], the orders of the church, Christ's sacrifice on the cross and the [[Eucharist]], and the fight against the devil. Finally, the third part (thirteen visions) recapitulates the history of salvation told in the first two parts, symbolized as a building adorned with various allegorical figures and virtues. It concludes with the Symphony of Heaven, an early version of Hildegard's musical compositions.<ref>SCIVIAS.</ref>

In early 1148, a commission was sent by the Pope to [[Disibodenberg]] to find out more about Hildegard and her writings. The commission found that the visions were authentic and returned to the Pope, with a portion of the {{lang|la|Scivias}}. Portions of the uncompleted work were read aloud to [[Pope Eugenius III]] at the Synod of Trier in 1148, after which he sent Hildegard a letter with his blessing.<ref>Letter 4 in ''The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen'', translated by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 34–35.</ref> This blessing was later construed as papal approval for all of Hildegard's wide-ranging theological activities.<ref>Van Engen, John. "Letters and the Public Persona of Hildegard," in ''Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld'', ed. [[Alfred Haverkamp]] (Mainz: Trierer Historische Forschungen, 2000), pp. 375–418; and [[Kathryn Kerby-Fulton]], "Hildegard of Bingen", in ''Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition'', c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 343–69, at pp. 350–52.</ref> Towards the end of her life, Hildegard commissioned a richly decorated manuscript of {{lang|la|Scivias}} (the Rupertsberg Codex); although the original has been lost since its evacuation to Dresden for safekeeping in 1945, its images are preserved in a hand-painted facsimile from the 1920s.<ref name="Rupertsberg MS images" />

===={{lang|la|Liber Vitae Meritorum}}====
In her second volume of visionary theology, {{lang|la|Liber Vitae Meritorum}}, composed between 1158 and 1163, after she had moved her community of nuns into independence at the Rupertsberg in Bingen, Hildegard tackled the moral life in the form of dramatic confrontations between the virtues and the vices. She had already explored this area in her musical morality play, {{lang|la|Ordo Virtutum}}, and the "Book of the Rewards of Life" takes up the play's characteristic themes. Each vice, although ultimately depicted as ugly and grotesque, nevertheless offers alluring, seductive speeches that attempt to entice the unwary soul into their clutches. Standing in humankind's defence, however, are the sober voices of the Virtues, powerfully confronting every vicious deception.<ref>Hildegard of Bingen. ''The Book of the Rewards of Life''. translated by Bruce W. Hozeski (Oxford University Press), 1994.</ref>

Amongst the work's innovations is one of the earliest descriptions of purgatory as the place where each soul would have to work off its debts after death before entering heaven.<ref>Newman, Barbara. "Hildegard of Bingen and the 'Birth of Purgatory'," ''Mystics Quarterly'' 19 (1993): 90–97.</ref> Hildegard's descriptions of the possible punishments there are often gruesome and grotesque, which emphasize the work's moral and pastoral purpose as a practical guide to the life of true penance and proper virtue.<ref>Newman, Barbara. "'Sibyl of the Rhine': Hildegard's Life and Times," in ''Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World'', ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 1–29, at pp. 17–19.</ref>

===={{lang|la|Liber Divinorum Operum}}====
<!--[[Liber Divinorum Operum]] redirects here-->
{{multiple image
| direction         = horizontal
| total_width       = 450
| header            = 
| footer            = {{lang|la|Liber divinorum operum}}
| image1            = Archive-ugent-be-0B56522C-9B29-11E1-8926-9B5B3B7C8C91 DS-37 (cropped).jpg
| alt1              = 
| 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>
| image2            = Hildegard von Bingen Liber Divinorum Operum.jpg
| alt2              = 
| caption2          = ''Universal Man'' illumination, I.2. Lucca, MS 1942 (early 13th-century copy)
}}

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>