In attempting to interpret the views of Hildegard on scientific
subjects, certain special difficulties present themselves. First is
the confusion arising from the writings to which her name has been
erroneously attached. To obtain a true view of the scope of her work,
it is necessary to discuss the authenticity of some of the material
before us. A second difficulty is due to the receptivity of her mind,
so that views and theories that she accepts in her earlier works
become modified, altered, and developed in her later writings. A third
difficulty, perhaps less real than the others, is the visionary and
involved form in which her thoughts are cast.
But a fourth and more vital difficulty is the attitude that she adopts
towards phenomena in general. To her mind there is no distinction
between physical events, moral truths, and spiritual experiences. This
view, which our children share with their mediaeval ancestors, was
developed but not transformed by the virile power of her intellect.
Her fusion of internal and external universe links Hildegard indeed
to a whole series of mediaeval visionaries, culminating with Dante.
In Hildegard, as in her fellow mystics, we find that ideas on Nature
and Man, the Moral World and the Material Universe, the Spheres,
the Winds, and the Humours, Birth and Death, and even on the Soul,
the Resurrection of the Dead, and the Nature of God, are not only
interdependent, but closely interwoven. Nowadays we are well
accustomed to separate our ideas into categories, scientific, ethical,
theological, philosophical, and so forth, and we even esteem it a
virtue to retain and restrain our thoughts within limits that we
deliberately set for them. To Hildegard such classification would have
been impossible and probably incomprehensible. Nor do such terms as
_parallelism_ or _allegory_ adequately cover her view of the relation
of the material and spiritual. In her mind they are really interfused,
or rather they have not yet been separated.
Therefore, although in the following pages an attempt is made to
estimate her scientific views, yet the writer is conscious that such a
method must needs interpret her thought in a partial manner. Hildegard,
indeed, presents to us scientific thought as an undifferentiated
factor, and an attempt is here made to separate it by the artificial
but not unscientific process of dissection from the organic matrix in
which it is embedded.
The extensive literature that has risen around the life and works of
Hildegard has come from the hands of writers who have shown no interest
in natural knowledge, while those who have occupied themselves with the
history of science have, on their side, largely neglected the period
to which Hildegard belongs, allured by the richer harvest of the full
scholastic age which followed. This essay is an attempt to fill in a
small part of the lacuna.