§ 67. MONASTIC PROPHETS. 371
their time, saw visions, and Joachim was the seer of a new age.
Hildegard (1098-1179), abbess of the Benedictine convent of Disebodenberg, near Bingen on the Rhine, was the most prominent woman in the church of her day.1 What Bernard of Clairvaux was to France, that, though in a lesser degree, she was to Germany. She received letters from four popes, Eugenius, Anastasius, Adrian, and Alexander III., from the emperors Konrad III. and Frederick Barbarossa, from Ber nard and many ecclesiastics in high office as well as from persons of humble position. Her intercessions were invoked by Frederick, by Konrad for his son,2 and by Bernard. Per sons from afar were moved to seek her aid, as for example the patriarch of Jerusalem who had heard that a "divine force operated in and through her."3 Her convent was moved from Disebodenberg to Rupertsberg and she finally became abbess of the convent of Eibingen.
Infirm of body, Hildegard was, by her own statement, the recipient of visions from her childhood. As she wrote to St. Bernard, she saw them "not with the external eye of sense but with the inner eye." The deeper meanings of Scripture "touched her breast and burnt into her soul like a flame."4 Again she said that, when she was forty-two years old, a fiery light of great brightness, coming from the open heavens, transfused her brain and inflamed her whole heart and breast like a flame as the sun lightens everything upon which his
1 The name of H61oi'se was perhaps as widely known, but it was for her connection with Abelard, not for her works in the Church. The Latin form of Hildegard is Hildegardis. M. Paris, Luard's Ed., V. 195, in his summary of the events of 1200-1250, mentions Hildegard and Elizabeth of Thuringia as the prominent religious female characters of the period, but Hildegard died 1177. *Ep., XXVI. sq. ; Migne, 197, 185 sq.
8 Ep. , XXII. On the other hand, Hildegard asked Bernard to pray for her.
fanimam meant sicutjlammam comburens, Migne, 197, 190. St. Bernard, writing to Hildegard, spoke of the "sweetness of her holy love,1' and Hilde gard compares the abbot of Clairvaux to the eagle and addresses him as the most mild of fathers, mitissime pater.
372 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
rays fall.1 What she saw, she saw not in dreams nor in sleep nor in a frenzied state nor in hidden places but while she was awake and in pure consciousness, using the eyes and ears of her inner man according to the will of God.2 Eugenius III., on a visit to Treves, 1148, investigated her reve lations, recognized the genuineness of her miracles, and encouraged her to continue in her course.3 Bernard spoke of her fame of making known heavenly secrets through the illumination of the Holy Ghost.
It is reported by contemporaries of this godly woman that scarcely a sick person came to her without being healed.4 Her power was exerted in the convent and outside of it and upon persons of both sexes. People from localities as dis tant as Sweden sought her healing power. Sometimes the medium used was a prayer, sometimes a simple word of com mand, sometimes water which, as in one case, healed paralysis of the tongue.
As a censor of the Church, Hildegard lamented the low condition of the clergy, announced that the Cathari would be used to stir up Christendom to self-purification, called attention to the Scriptures and the Catholic faith as the supreme fonts of authority, and bade men look for salvation not to priests but to Christ.
She was also an enthusiastic student of nature. Her treatises on herbs, trees, and fishes are among the most elaborate on natural objects of the Middle Ages. She gives the properties of no less than two hundred and thirteen herbs or their products, and regarded heat and cold as very important qualities of plant life. They are treated with an eye to their medicinal virtue. Butter, she says, is
1 non visiones in somnis, necdormiens, necinphrenesi, nee corporeis oculis aut auribus exterioris, nee in abditis locis percepi, sed eas vigilans, circumspiciens in pura mente oculis et auribus interioris hominis, etc. Scivias, I. Prcefatio, Migne, 197, 384.
2 Scivias. See Migne, 197. 93. This is the chief collection of her visions. Migne. 197, 383-739. 3 Ep., I. ; Migne, 197, 146. 4 Migne, 197, 117.