A Living Light. Edward L. Risden
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turn to pleasure if one gets caught up in the world of the text. The language itself becomes a character, and I intend it to suggest a world rather different from ours in belief structure as well as time and place, but exhibiting many of our hopes and worries: a thoroughly spiritual world more tightly circumscribed. The action of the story takes place over perhaps several weeks; I hope my adjustment of historical timing will help the reader follow a psychological necessity with respect to where the action is taking place and how events connect to those past and those to come. The project began as a stage play. The premier of the play at St. Norbert College in November of 1992 was done, as I had hoped, in a very classical or Shakespearean fashion, with the focus on character interaction. A small theater with unusual capacity for effects allowed for some interesting experiments with lighting and staging and with projecting images similar to the illuminations from Hildegard’s texts on backdrops or parts of the stage either between acts or during the actual performance, so as to throw more symbolic weight on characters’ entrances and exits. The performance of the first production took about two and a half hours, including two brief intermissions between acts. To turn the play into a novella I have added connective matter and description, but have cut little dialogue and have largely kept the dialogue-based format; I have added a couple more of Hildegard’s visions, but have tried to keep the hypotactic movement characteristic of drama. I have kept the story short so that one may read it in a period of time not far beyond the length of a typical play or movie, aiming for intensity rather than breadth and for a focus on character rather than on description–the preference of many if not most readers of our time.
Historical Context
The eleventh and twelfth Centuries saw a great deal of change in the relationship between Church and lay authorities. In the mid-eleventh century the Holy Roman Empire and its German king controlled the papacy and most Church appointments, and churchmen often served in secular administrative capacities. Simony, the buying and selling of Church offices, occurred commonly. In the second half of the century a reform movement began, first to eliminate clerical abuses, but later to reverse the governmental order, so that secular governors fell subject to the Church and even kings subordinate to the Pope. Signs suggested that internal strife within the empire might break it up into separate kingdoms, until the excommunicated emperor Henry IV, in a difficult if politically astute move, submitted to Pope Gregory VII and begged forgiveness for having tried to wrest authority from his hands. Having thus restored his political position amidst a pious nobility, Henry set about to re-establish his influence and ultimately brought about Gregory’s fall from the papacy. Pope Urban II restored lost political clout to the papacy not only by calling for the First Crusade, but also by gradually undermining Henry’s authority. With the succession of Henry IV’s son, Henry V, an unstable balance developed between Church and state that would continue until, and even after, the dissolution of the empire. A generation later Frederick Barbarossa set about to restore imperial power, and after a back-and-forth struggle with Pope Alexander III, ultimately managed a firm-handed rule of Germany until his death while leading an army during the Third Crusade, in 1190. One must wonder if the continual struggle between ecclesiastical and secular authority did not provide the perfect opportunity for Hildegard to gain influence both among the powerful and among the common, since all were searching for means to understand, deal with, and even perhaps master the constantly changing circumstances. Hildegard’s voice rises above the confusion as one of piety, sanity, and even, somewhat oddly for her time and place, individuality.
Intellectually the twelfth century experienced a pre-renaissance, largely because of the circulation of Classical learning that the West had lost long before, but that it rediscovered through the Crusades and the Christian Reconquest of Spain: the Arabs had preserved Greek manuscripts and had added considerably to what the Greeks had accomplished. Expanded knowledge especially of the works of Aristotle led in the next century to Scholasticism, but already the Twelfth had begun to rely more on reason and empirical discovery than had the West since before the Fall of Rome. Arabic scholars had made particular advancements in mathematics, science, and medicine, and though the Europeans discarded neither all of their old vernacular learning nor their attachment to “magic,” they did benefit from the influx of knowledge and the expanding sense of the world that came with it. Such a climate would not have delivered Hildegard or others in similar walks of life to absolutely free expression, but it would at least have encouraged a greater number of her contemporaries to read, write, think, and communicate their thoughts to others, and it would have given them a rather larger understanding of the world.
While women had nominally little power, they would have had a greater likelihood in Hildegard’s time of gaining some education, and some noblewomen would have directed estates when their lords were off fighting in Crusades. By the end of the century we see the emergence of at least one important female literary figure, Marie de France, who, though she wrote secular tales, showed what a woman could accomplish given her opportunity to explore her voice. We find in Hildegard’s work nothing of secular Romance or commerce, but we do find, once she frees herself from a reluctance to speak, eagerness to share her visions, knowledge, artistic output, medical wisdom, and political opinion.
While Hildegard lived a century and a half before the first stirrings of the Renaissance proper, artistically and intellectually her age saw the building of the great Gothic cathedrals such as that at Chartres and the opening of the first universities, and it knew characters who have left lasting impressions on the world: Thomas á Beckett, St. Bernard, Abelard and Heloise, Marie de France, and Chretien de Troyes.
A Living Light
A Historical Novella in Three Chapters,Based on the Life of Hildegard of Bingen
Characters
Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess
Richardis, a nun and Hildegard’s confidant
Clementia, a nun
Irmengard, a nun
Keunegard, a nun
Sigewize, a mad girl
Adelheid, a nun
Kuno, Abbot at Disibodenberg
Volmar, a monk and Hildegard’s secretary
Guibert, a monk
Pope Eugenius
Henry, Archbishop of Mainz
Bernard of Clairvaux
Herman, Bishop of Constance
Hartwig, Archbishop of Bremen (Richardis’s brother)
Marchioness of Stade (Ricardis’s mother)
Spirit of Jutta, Hildegard’s deceased abbess
Frederick Barbarossa
Datta, Dayadva, Damyata, Dall, and Donau, entertainers
Rache, a revolutionary
Fear-of-God, a figure in a vision
Assorted nuns, priests, monks, soldiers, and folk
Chapter One
In the midst of a synod in Rome, around the middle of the twelfth century, the Pope met with a number of his trusted counselors to consider the matter of a German nun: her visions, her outspokenness, her effect on the flock. Once obscure, she had risen to prominence and even popularity among the people by her piety and through the vehemence and magnitude of her visions–as well as through her skill in healing and her ability to help people with their daily problems. Her current exposure, all the way to the the apex of Church power, placed at risk her public and private voice and perhaps even her life, but she had no choice: she lived at and for the will of the Church, at and for the will of God. The voices of the council, grave and formal as they discussed her case, buzzed in the warm Italian air.
Such review, common enough, had found for once an uncommon subject, the writings of one Hildegard of Bingen, abbess and mystic. Pope Eugenius called not only his usual advisors, but also representatives of her own region and in fact her own secretary, who had seen her in the full flight of recounting her visions for him to record: Volmar, monk and scribe, served devotedly, recording her speech with accuracy and