The Verdant and the Arid
'Illuminations: a Novel of Hildegard von Bingen' (Mary Sharratt, 2012)
To St Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098-1179), the world was animated by two oppositional cosmic forces. Viriditas (the ‘greening green’) represented the presence of an endlessly renewing vital energy, a God-given verdancy that teemed with colour and movement. Ariditas, meanwhile, represented all that was colourless, lifeless and, ultimately, godless. Though they were associated primarily with the natural world, Hildegard understood these forces as transcending all aspects of existence, including music, mathematics, literature and, above all, theology.
Mary Sharratt’s novel Illuminations follows a gently dramatised version of Hildegard’s life. After introducing her semi-feral childhood in the lush forests of the Rhineland Palatinate, the book then divides into three critical steps in Hildegard’s life. The first is her youth/early adulthood as a Benedictine nun, which she spends enclosed in a cell at Disibodenberg Abbey, doomed to serve as companion to the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim for an astonishing thirty years.1 The second follows the adult Hildegard, now free from enclosure and leader of a growing band of nuns, as she attempts to break loose from Disibodenberg and the institutional power of the miserable Abbot Cuno. The last section sees the middle-aged Hildegard setting out to construct her own nunnery at Rupertsberg, despite opposition from certain clerical authorities. Throughout these periods of her life, Hildegard repeatedly experiences her now famous visions (twenty-six of which are recorded in her text Scivias), which not only provide the inspiration for her vast and varied intellectual outputs but which also drive her relentlessly on towards spiritual transcendence.
Illuminations is a fine work of historical fiction, with Sharratt delicately balancing historical detail, pacy plotting and a feminist voice that rarely drifts into anachronism. Yet perhaps the most impressive aspect of the novel is Sharratt’s careful presentation of faith. Religious belief is not depicted as something incidental in the story, but is instead at the very heart of how Sharratt’s characters understand their world. Hildegard, Jutta, Cuno and all others are profoundly religious beings, people who are unable to think outside of Christian experience. Christian faith makes up their entire worldview, providing the philosophical, moral and even ecological lenses through which they view their existence.
That isn’t to say that they aren’t also cynical, worldly individuals. Much of Illuminations focuses on Hildegard’s machinations as she engages in an exhausting conflict with Church bureaucracy, and Sharratt doesn’t hesitate in showing the distinctly unspiritual role played by money and political influence in medieval Catholicism. Yet she also never pretends that Hildegard and her contemporaries were anything but God-fearing Christians. From Matins to Compline, these people quite sincerely believed that their lot in this life and the next was ultimately determined by God alone.
However, Sharratt goes further than this by adding a Hildegardian nuance to her presentations of medieval Christian faith. Religious belief is manifested in two distinct ways in Illuminations. On the one hand, we have the faith of Hildegard and later, as her influence grows, her followers. Her faith is grounded in a sense of warmth, of human contact, of sunlight and the flowering of the natural world. It is filled with energy, with life-giving, creative power that is evidenced in Hildegard’s cultivation of plants, writings and eventually an order of sisters. It is, in essence, viriditas.
‘Dancing around my garden sanctuary, I prayed to Mary, viridissima virga, the greenest branch, who made my plants grow so tall and beautiful.’
Sharratt matches Hildegard’s blooming, energetic faith with a bleaker interpretation of Christian faith, one based on seclusion, suffering and personal sacrifice. No single character embodies this view of faith more thoroughly than the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim. Jutta is a traumatised teenager when she voluntarily enters her cell at Disibodenberg. Here, she pours her trauma and guilt into an interpretation of Christian belief based on relentless self-deprivation. She starves herself, both of human contact and of physical nourishment, becoming a frightening, ghoulish figure long before her actual death. The aridity of Jutta’s faith is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the suggestion of her inability to menstruate, so starved is her body of the nutrients and warmth required to create life.
‘How she craved pain, how it thrilled her, weeping tears of blood. Our Savior died for the sins of the world - that was the true meaning of passion. Jutta mortified her flesh for her own self-indulgence.’
Ultimately, only one version of the faith can win out. Hildegard’s verdant spirituality sustains her through over two decades of seclusion, eventually gifting her the energy and determination to break free from Disibodenberg. Her reward is the new abbey at Rupertsberg, where she has a chance to lead her sisters to God through the cultivation of nature, the production of beautiful objects and the fostering of human community.
Jutta’s attempt to seek God through denying these things is, by contrast, disastrous. As her body wastes away, she becomes an increasingly unforgiving, venomous (and profoundly un-Christian) character. When a visiting hermit predicts that Hildegard will be remembered long after history has forgotten Jutta, the anchoress drops any pretence of saintliness and instead allows herself to be ruled entirely by spite - towards Hildegard, towards the other nuns, and ultimately towards herself. Jutta’s death is one of the saddest moments of the story, despite her nastiness, simply because it represents the inevitable failure that comes from following a version of faith rooted purely in ariditas.
As a genre, historical fiction must avoid two dangers. One is anachronism: the clumsy imposition of modern ideas onto historical characters in a way undermines the novel’s credibility and usefulness. The other is irrelevance, as the author seeks historical realism to such an extent that the characters dry up before the reader’s eyes, losing all sense of personal interest and appeal.
Sharratt’s nuanced depiction of faith (or faiths) is what makes Illuminations such a powerful historical novel. The author not only presents her characters as thinking in appropriately Christian terms, but also teases apart their Christianity to reveal to distinct worldviews, both operating within the same overall religious context. Thus she successfully creates an engaging, conflict-laden plot while remaining true to the historically Christian worldviews that her characters would naturally have held. Watching this balancing act take place, especially at a time when the past is being so regularly (and clumsily) opened up to politicised reappropriation, is a refreshing thing indeed.
It is unknown exactly how long Hildegard spent enclosed with Jutta at Disibodenberg. The Vita Sanctae Hildegardis (a biography compiled by several monks after her death, which drew on interviews with Hildegard herself) claims she spent 30 years enclosed, between the ages of 8 and 38. However, records show that Hildegard made her vows as a nun to the Bishop of Bamberg when she was 14, suggesting therefore that she spent (only!) 24 years in the anchoress’s cell. One solution to the confusion is that Hildegard may have entered the service of Jutta at 8, but that they were not actually enclosed together until 6 years later.
In either case, they were not alone for the entirety of this time, as others joined them within a few years to form a small community of nuns known as a Frauenklause. This community was led out of Disibodenberg by Hildegard after the death of Jutta in 1136.