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Bingham oh lord my inmost heart1/14/2024 In his reply, he cloaks himself in the timeless condescension of the bigwig: “The press of business forces me to respond more briefly than I would have liked.” Still, Hildegard’s conviction impresses him: “When the learning and the anointing (which reveals all things to you) are within, what advice could we possibly give?” As it turned out, Bernard’s approval was superfluous, for Hildegard also secured the blessing of Pope Eugene III. The letter begins with protestations of humility, seeking recognition for her newfound calling, but by the end it radiates the fearsome certitude of a prophet in the pulpit:īernard must have been taken aback by this letter from an unknown nun. In 1146 or 1147, when she was in her late forties, she wrote a letter to the French cleric Bernard of Clairvaux-a leading figure in the Cistercian Order, an architect of the Knights Templar, a propagandist of the Crusades-in which she disclosed that she had been experiencing religious visions. Disibod, the Irish bishop for whom the monastery is named: “You hid yourself out of sight / drunk with the smell of flowers in the windows of the saints / reaching towards God.” Something of the ambience of the place seeps into Hildegard’s hymn to St. In her teens, she was enclosed with two other nuns at the monastery, seemingly destined for a life of anonymous devotion. One sector, consisting of scattered blocks and fragments of walls, is marked with a sign, in German: “Area of the Hildegard Convent (12th Cent.).” This, according to one guess, is where the nun, theologian, poet, and composer Hildegard of Bingen spent about forty years of her eight-decade life. I half expected to come across Caspar David Friedrich painting at an easel. When I searched out the site, last May, I was the only visitor. Disibodenberg, a nine-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland region of western Germany, is a majestically dismal ruin, its roofless buildings overrun by ivy and interspersed with stands of oak, ash, and beech.
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