The Green Ties that Bind

'Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen' (Michael Marder, 2021)

At some, undefined point in 2024, I found myself succumbing to what I can only describe as a Hildegard Hype (Hildegardrummel?); that is, a sudden and intense obsession with the works of the medieval polymath and Benedictine abbess, St Hildegard von Bingen (c.1098-1179). Keen to get to grips with Hildegard’s unique theological worldview, I decided that I would attempt to read Michael Marder’s Green Mass - something I’d been putting off since 2021, when I first flicked through the book and was alarmed by what at first glance appeared to be an impenetrable writing style.

Three years later, and buoyed by both a fascination with Hildegard’s work and, I suspect, the intellectual hubris that followed the end of my PhD, I finally pulled Green Mass down from my bookshelf and dared to open it.

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It’s perhaps best to start with an overview of Green Mass, before we start to untangle its content. Marder, known for his work on the phenomenology of plant life, holds a long-running interest in rethinking how we understand the natural world and our relationship with nature. In Green Mass, he takes issue with Christian-Cartesian dualism, which (in broad terms) posits that man and nature are separate entities, distinguished by humanity’s rationality - which Catholic doctrine maintains is the basis of mankind’s unique link to God, the ultimate rational being. This view has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years from ecologically-minded thinkers, who see such an artificial division as the basis for mankind’s distancing of itself from nature, and thus the origins of our ruthless and ultimately self-destructive plundering of the natural world.¹

Marder enters this debate with a startlingly original line of attack: here, he employs the writings of a Catholic saint to critique the received worldview handed down over the centuries by Christian - and eventually secular - teaching. Hildegard, Marder argues, challenges the Cartesian dualism because she explicitly combines the natural with the sacred. An impressive polymath who adored the outside world (as might be expected of someone who spent several decades locked inside an anchoress’s cell), Hildegard was skilled at weaving nature into her religious worldview, using literature, music, medicine, herbology and botany as the media by which she achieved this. Marder suggests that, in doing so, Hildegard was breaking down the inherited wisdom of an imagined boundary between the material, earthly realm and that of the spirit, humanity, and God. By understanding nature in all its verdancy, Hildegard believed that we could catch glimpses of the divine.

Across nine chapters, each named after different eco-theological (and musical) theme, Marder shows us how Hildegard blended the natural world with the spiritual. Running throughout the book is Hildegard’s most famous concept - that of viriditas, or the ‘greening green’ that exists within all regenerative life. Viriditas, as she understands it, is an inherently holy idea, representing an animating spiritual energy present in nature (and humanity) that shows the presence of God in living things.

As Marder discusses, viriditas forms the basis of a wide range of natural metaphors employed by Hildegard to describe Christian theological teachings. For example, she carefully compares different aspects of Christianity to parts of a plant: Christ is the flower, the Eucharist the seeds, and Mary - who often takes a central role in Hildegard’s writing - acts as the branch from which the flower bursts, noting the linguistic similarity between the Latin ‘virgo’ (virgin) and ‘virga’ (branch). Likewise, the bread and wine taken at the mass is ultimately drawn from plant life, and so their consumption contributes to the continuation of the life-giving process, animated by the unseen force of viriditas.

Closely linked to viriditas is the concept of the sacred flame, a fire that represents the burning, energising passion of the Holy Spirit. Turning to scripture, Hildegard identifies this concept in the story of Moses and the burning bush, viewing the latter’s conflagration as a representation of divine energy. It is this warming energy that first animates both man and nature, in Hildegard’s view, kickstarting the endlessly renewing process of viriditas. Indeed, Marder even goes as far as to suggest that this heat represents the ‘animating principle’ (33) that is, in effect, the ‘soul’ or even ‘mind’ of the living organism.

This all has considerable ecological potential. Marder reads Hildegard’s work as holding a profoundly environmental message, arguing that she includes the natural world among those things that are held to be sacred within Christian morality - thus placing it alongside humanity. As Marder explains:

‘Hildegard intimates that the abuse of the earth and its issue, of the sky, water, animals, and even minerals, is not qualitatively different from the ill treatment of everything and everyone that is holy in Judeo-Christianity.’ (7)

This is game-changing stuff. According to Marder, Hildegard presents us with a Christian interpretation of nature that never denies humanity’s essential closeness to God, but also obliterates the arrogant assumption that nature is a lifeless (and Godless) resource to be exploited at will. One can find proof of God in the natural world, as well as the human. It’s there in the greening energy of plants, the budding of flowers, the sprouting of new shoots. As such, to reduce the life-giving viriditas of nature to a dry and deathly ariditas is an affront to God and the natural order of things. It is to extinguish the divine energy - the fire - that God breathes into all living things, human, animal, plant or fungi (don’t forget them!). Without this fire, existence itself cannot continue.

‘On Hildegard’s reading, the burning bush signifies a vegetal reconciliation of the one and the many, which is also that of matter and spirit.’ (96)

Admittedly, Marder takes a somewhat irregular approach to explaining this. One of the reasons it took so long to read Green Mass is because the author opts for a free-flowing writing style, rather than a more structured approach. The effect is meditative - what we read are Marder’s thoughts on Hildegard as they arrive, interspersed with lines from Hildegard’s own works and from scripture (Marder includes a fair amount of Latin, though he does mercifully translate it too). While there is something almost vegetal about the flow of Marder’s text, it doesn’t make for easy reading. The sentences may run as smoothly as long, spindly branches, but their content remains as dense as a thornbush.

Another way that Green Mass consciously engages with the Hildegardian style is to include, somewhat unexpectedly, a soundtrack. Among her many talents, Hildegard was a respected composer of monophonic sacred music, which she treated as another outlet for expressing her visionary theology. Channelling this, Green Mass includes nine short pieces of music, written and performed by the Swedish composer and cellist Peter Schuback, with each composition opening one of Marder’s chapters (the tracks themselves are accessible via the Stanford University Press website). The effect of this is certainly enjoyable, and the creative element of the compositions nicely complements Marder’s experimental writing style. Whether it adds anything to the reader’s understanding of Hildegard’s work is debatable, but it remains commendable as an act of cross-disciplinary exploration.

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Green Mass may be a tricky book to work through, but it remains an impressive achievement, displaying striking originality in both argument and presentation. More than that, it is also a profoundly positive work of philosophical analysis, one that looks back into history and finds an answer (or perhaps the roots of an answer) to the quandary faced by those who hold urgent ecological concerns but who also cherish the humanistic morality inherited from centuries of Christian and Christian-based teaching.

Strangely, I found Green Mass to be most effective not as a response to fears about climate change, but instead to those self-loathing ecological narratives that view humanity as a disease threatening the planet’s vitality. As the climate crisis has gathered energy and potency, we have seen the rise of a certain kind of discourse that sees humankind as inherently evil - a greedy monstrosity that will continue to pillage nature until it wipes itself out. It’s a discourse that, in its extremes, leads to proposed population culls, self-flagellatory climate doomerism, and billionaires plotting to escape Earth for a colonial fantasy on Mars. It’s a worldview that turns Cartesian dualism on its head, viewing humanity as a net negative and ultimately willing its destruction. Nature comes out on top - sometimes alongside a select few worthy (wealthy) humans.

Hildegard offers an alternative. She may not have been motivated by a twenty-first-century fear of climate collapse, but she nonetheless had a firm grasp of the importance of nature and humanity’s close spiritual link to the natural world. Through concepts such as viriditas, she was able to blend the spiritual value that she saw as inherent within humans with the rhythms of nature, erasing the imagined barrier between the two and uniting them as creations both animated by the fire of God. In Hildegard’s worldview, the human and the natural can co-exist because both are ultimately life-giving, regenerative creatures that have been placed on earth by the same power. Approaching her ideas from a scientific perspective, we might even consider that the needs of humans and the needs of plants and animals are more alike that we would normally recognise.

One doesn’t need to believe in a Christian God to see the value in Hildegard’s views (Marder keeps his own religions views, or lack thereof, secret from the reader). Nearly a millennium before the ‘One Health’ approach to climate management conveyed remarkably similar ideas to a secular, global audience, Hildegard understood the basic principle that humanity and nature share a common bond that breaks down any sense of Cartesian antagonism, whether pro-human or pro-nature. It is precisely this rejection of clumsy dualisms, Marder asserts, that transforms Hildegard from a twelfth-century woodland mystic into a profoundly modern ecological thinker.

1. See, for example: Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021)