In the works of Hildegard we are dealing with the products of a
peculiarly original intellect, and her imaginative power and mystical
tendency make an exhaustive search into the origin of her ideas by
no means an easy task. With her theological standpoint, as such, we
are not here concerned, and unfortunately she does not herself refer
to any of her sources other than the Biblical books; to have cited
profane writers would indeed have involved the abandonment of her claim
that her knowledge was derived by immediate inspiration from on high.
Nevertheless it is possible to form some idea, on internal evidence, of
the origin of many of her scientific conceptions.
The most striking point concerning the sources of Hildegard is
negative. There is no German linguistic element distinguishable in
her writings, and they show little or no trace of native German
folk-lore.[29] It is true that Trithemius of Sponheim (1462-1516),
who is often a very inaccurate chronicler, tells us that Hildegard
‘composed works in German as well as in Latin, although she had
neither learned nor used the latter tongue except for simple
psalmody’.[30] But with the testimony before us of the writings
themselves and of her skilful use of Latin, the statement of Trithemius
and even the hints of Hildegard[31] may be safely discounted and set
down to the wish to magnify the element of inspiration.[32] So far
from her having been illiterate, we shall show that the structure and
details of her works betray a considerable degree of learning and
much painstaking study of the works of others. Thus, for instance,
she skilfully manipulates the Hippocratic doctrines of miasma and the
humours, and elaborates a theory of the interrelation of the two which,
though developed on a plan of her own, is yet clearly borrowed in its
broad outline from such a writer as Isidore of Seville. Again, as we
shall see, some of her ideas on anatomy seem to have been derived from
Constantine the African, who belonged to the Benedictine monastery of
Monte Cassino.[33]
Hildegard lived at rather too early a date to drink from the broad
stream of new knowledge that was soon to flow into Europe through
Paris from its reservoir in Moslem Spain. Such drops from that source
as may have reached her must have trickled in either from the earlier
Italian translators or from the Jews who had settled in the Upper
Rhineland, for it is very unlikely that she was influenced by the
earlier twelfth-century translations of Averroes, Avicenna, Avicebron,
and Avempace, that passed into France from the Jews of Marseilles,
Montpellier, and Andalusia.[34] Her intellectual field was thus far
more patristic than would have been the case had her life-course been
even a quarter of a century later.
Her science is primarily of the usual degenerate Greek type,
disintegrated fragments of Aristotle and Galen coloured and altered
by the customary mediaeval attempts to bring theory into line with
scriptural phraseology, though a high degree of independence is
obtained by the visionary form in which her views are set. She
exhibits, like all mediaeval writers on science, the Aristotelian
theory of the elements, but her statement of the doctrine is
illuminated by flashes of her own thoughts and is coloured by
suggestions from St. Augustine, Isidore Hispalensis, Bernard Sylvestris
of Tours, and perhaps from writings attributed to Boethius.
The translator Gerard of Cremona (1114-87) was her contemporary, and
his labours made available for western readers a number of scientific
works which had previously circulated only among Arabic-speaking
peoples.[35] Several of these works, notably Ptolemy’s _Almagest_,
Messahalah’s _De Orbe_, and the Aristotelian _De Caelo et Mundo_,
contain material on the form of the universe and on the nature of the
elements, and some of them probably reached the Rhineland in time to be
used by Hildegard. The _Almagest_, however, was not translated until
1175, and was thus inaccessible to Hildegard.[36] Moreover, as she
never uses an Arabic medical term, it is reasonably certain that she
did not consult Gerard’s translation of Avicenna, which is crowded with
Arabisms.
On the other hand, the influence of the Salernitan school may be
discerned in several of her scientific ideas. The _Regimen Sanitatis_
of Salerno, written about 1101, was rapidly diffused throughout Europe,
and must have reached the Rhineland at least a generation before the
_Liber Divinorum Operum_ was composed. This cycle of verses may well
have reinforced some of her microcosmic ideas,[37] and suggested also
her views on the generation of man,[38] on the effects of wind on
health,[39] and on the influence of the stars.[40]
On the subject of the form of the earth Hildegard expressed herself
definitely as a spherist,[41] a point of view more widely accepted
in the earlier Middle Ages than is perhaps generally supposed. She
considers in the usual mediaeval fashion that this globe is surrounded
by celestial spheres that influence terrestrial events.[42] But while
she claims that human affairs, and especially human diseases, are
controlled, under God, by the heavenly cosmos, she yet commits herself
to none of that more detailed astrological doctrine that was developing
in her time, and came to efflorescence in the following centuries.
In this respect she follows the earlier and somewhat more scientific
spirit of such writers as Messahalah, rather than the wilder theories
of her own age. The shortness and simplicity of Messahalah’s tract on
the sphere made it very popular. It was probably one of the earliest
to be translated into Latin; and its contents would account for the
change which, as we shall see, came over Hildegard’s scientific views
in her later years.
The general conception of the universe as a series of concentric
elemental spheres had certainly penetrated to Western Europe centuries
before Hildegard’s time. Nevertheless the prophetess presents it to her
audience as a new and striking revelation. We may thus suppose that
translations of Messahalah, or of whatever other work she drew upon
for the purpose, did not reach the Upper Rhineland, or rather did not
become accepted by the circles in which Hildegard moved, until about
the decade 1141-50, during which she was occupied in the composition of
her _Scivias_.
There is another cosmic theory, the advent of which to her country,
or at least to her circle, can be approximately dated from her work.
Hildegard exhibits in a pronounced but peculiar and original form
the doctrine of the macrocosm and microcosm. Hardly distinguishable
in the _Scivias_ (1141-50), it appears definitely in the _Liber
Vitae Meritorum_ (1158-62),[43] in which work, however, it takes no
very prominent place, and is largely overlaid and concealed by other
lines of thought. But in the _Liber Divinorum Operum_ (1163-70) this
belief is the main theme. The book is indeed an elaborate attempt to
demonstrate a similarity and relationship between the nature of the
Godhead, the constitution of the universe, and the structure of man,
and it thus forms a valuable compendium of the science of the day
viewed from the standpoint of this theory.
From whence did she derive the theory of macrocosm and microcosm? In
outline its elements were easily accessible to her in Isidore’s _De
Rerum Natura_ as well as in the Salernitan poems. But the work of
Bernard Sylvestris of Tours, _De mundi universitate sive megacosmus et
microcosmus_,[44] corresponds so closely both in form, in spirit, and
sometimes even in phraseology, to the _Liber Divinorum Operum_ that
it appears to us certain that Hildegard must have had access to it
also. Bernard’s work can be dated between the years 1145-53 from his
reference to the papacy of Eugenius III. This would correspond well
with the appearance of his doctrines in the _Liber Vitae Meritorum_
(1158-62) and their full development in the _Liber Divinorum Operum_
(1163-70).
Another contemporary writer with whom Hildegard presents points of
contact is Hugh of St. Victor (1095-1141).[45] In his writings the
doctrine of the relation of macrocosm and microcosm is more veiled than
with Bernard Sylvestris. Nevertheless, his symbolic universe is on the
lines of Hildegard’s belief, and the plan of his _De arca Noe mystica_
presents many parallels both to the _Scivias_ and to the _Liber
Divinorum Operum_. If these do not owe anything directly to Hugh, they
are at least products of the same mystical movement as were his works.
We may also recall that at Hildegard’s date very complex cabalistic
systems involving the doctrine of macrocosm and microcosm were being
elaborated by the Jews, and that she lived in a district where Rabbinic
mysticism specially flourished.[46] Benjamin of Tudela, who visited
Bingen during Hildegard’s lifetime, tells us that he found there a
congregation of his people. Since we know, moreover, that she was
familiar with the Jews,[47] it is possible that she may have derived
some of the very complex macrocosmic conceptions with which her last
work is crowded from local Jewish students.
The Alsatian Herrade de Landsberg (died 1195), a contemporary of
Hildegard, developed the microcosm theory along lines similar to those
of our abbess, and it is probable that the theory, in the form in which
these writers present it, reached the Upper Rhineland somewhere about
the middle or latter half of the twelfth century.
[Illustration: From the LUCCA MS. fo. 1 v