52 - Nun
24 november 2004
Hildegard von Bingen
Liber Scivias, a manuscript by Hildegard von Bingen
Cosmic Man
Cosmic Egg
In 1098 Hildegard von Bingen was born into a noble family of Bermersheim (Rhinehesse) and was educated from the age of eightat the benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. Her education consisted mainly in learning how to sing and mastering various approariate crafts.
In 1136 Hildegard became the abbot of this monastery and founded new monasteries on Rupertsberg near Bingen and in Eibingen. As a highly sensitive person with a deeply inquisitive nature and scholarly disposition, she wrote numerous treatises on theology, natural sciences, medicine and general knowledge. She also became known as author of musical compositions and religious songs.
Early in her life a divine voice instructed her to note down her mystical experiences. Her profuse literary activity made her well known, revered and famous already during her life time. Emperors, popes and noblemen were in correspondence with her. What attracted and attracts people even today, (after 900 years of her birth, is her vision of a harmonious universe, in which each element has its well-defined place: the stones and the stars, the clouds and the flowers, the animals and the human beings in its centre, all pay a perfectly concordant role in the symphony of the universe. Conflicts occur when the human beings play a discordant sound and thereby disturb the harmonious cosmic network of friendship, mutual concern and care for the other. Critically she looked down upon sick people who do not want to be cured but are enchanted with their plight, or those who have lost the vision for the beauty of nature. Even emperors and popes, interlocked in struggles for supremacy, were not spared of criticism from her side, and she condemned the bloody crusades as the dark sides of the human being. Hildegard died at the age of 81 at the Rupertsberg monastery.
What a powerful mind Hildegard von Bingen must have had that her mystical experiences, her writings and her musical compositions are still relevant today!
(Hildegard von Bingen, mystic and church reformer, concerned with the plight of the human being in universe, lived from 1098 to 1179.)
Posted by jacob at 03:00 pm to 52 - Nun | Religion | Comments (1)