Hildegard: Women's Role In The Church

Hildegard was born into a noble family at Bermersheim in 1098, but her childhood is mostly unrecorded until she left her home to go a Benedictine monastery in Disibodenberg. There, seven year old Hildegard was instructed in spiritual discipline under Jutta of Spanheim. Eight years later, fifteen year old Hildegard decided to follow the Benedictine way of life. Around that time, the monastery became a double monastery, due to the number of women joining Hildegard and Jutta. The monastery continue to grow, so when Jutta dies in 1136. Five years after Jutta’s death, Hildegard receives a vision of Christ telling Hildegard to share the visions that she had been receiving as a child.
Hildegard acknowledged later that she did indeed have visions

as a child, and continues to have visions throughout her life, but she had not shared them, and had no desire to do so. It was only due to the persuasion of a monk, Vollmar, that she wrote them down. Upon doing so, an illness believed to be associated with the visions left her in good health. Her visions may not seem significant in the face of the Holy Bible, but she relied on them heavily, out of necessity.
Hildegard had no choice but to use her visions to teach theology to the women under her care, as women were forbidden to study theology at universities, revealing a massive discrepancy in the church's treatment of men and women.

To forbid somebody to study theology is, essentially to forbid them from pursuing the knowledge of God. Why the church would institute such a mandate may seem beyond the comprehension of modern churches, but it has its roots in the belief that women ought not to teach men, stemming from 1 Timothy 2:12. This verse proclaims that Paul does not “permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” Paul’s letter to Timothy will be integral to the church’s treatment of women, and it is referenced to Hildegard in an attempt to get her to submit to the Catholics view of

women.
Hildegard, however, had no interest in such submission. Despite her lack of theological training, she went on to teach the women under her care, relying heavily on her visions to supplement her lack of training. She went so far as to claim authority under Christ, and did such a tremendous job that the church eventually verified her teachings “in spite of the prohibitions against women teaching men” (94). Beyond that, she also formed friendships with the like of Pope Eugenius III and Archbishop Henry of Mainz. Pope Eugenius was in fact, just one of four popes she would befriend, after his death in 1153 she became acquainted with Pope Anastasius (1153-54), Pope Adrian (1154-59), and Alexander III (1159-81). Befriending popes and archbishops, and even a German emperor would prove to very useful to Hildegard when people would question her controversial views on women.
Her prominence in the church led her abby to rapidly expand to the point where the nuns moved to Rupertsberg against the abbots will.

She set a trend of doing things against the will of her superiors, something she displays during her confrontation with the clergy of Mainz. He wished to exhume the body of an excommunicant buried on the grounds of her monastery. She verified that the man had been reconciled to the church before his death, but the clergy paid no heed. As a result, Hildegard hid the grave, which lead to the bishop putting her convent under interdict, meaning that “the nuns could not sing the divine office or receive communion or any other sacrament” (94). Hildegard promptly asked her friend, the Archbishop Philip of Cologne to step in for her. He succeeded in lifting the interdict. These loyal and powerful friends made her a fearsome enemy, which was unusual at the time. She held great prominence and power in the church, something few women had ever done, and the difficulty she had in achieving such status speaks loudly to the church's opinion of women.
The lack of theological training made available to Hildegard and the hesitancy of the bishop of Mainz to accept her word demonstrate a belief that women are inferior to men. They should be teaching, nor should they be trusted. Were this not so, Hildegard would have no need to request that her powerful friends speak on her behalf, but she has no shame in doing so, and proudly making her authority under Christ

known.
Hildegard continued to challenge the church’s standards for women, not only in her action, but in her teachings. She professed that women and men were equal in Christ and that “woman may be made from man, but no man can be made without woman” (96), and told a negligent bishop of a vision of “pure knowledge as a female figure dressed in the bishop's pallium.” Such rhetoric implied that not only can a women teach, but a woman of knowledge and character can teach better than a man of inferior knowledge and character.
These views of women would also impact the way she ran her convent. Mistress Tengswich, another abbess, took offense when she discovered that the virgins under Hildegard left their hair unbound while wearing silk veils and gold crowns. Tengswich challenges these practices by going back to 1 Timothy. She draws attention to chapter two verse nine, in which Paul expresses a desire for women to “dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes.” This verse, and the aforementioned 1 Timothy 2:12, provided the church with a foundation to suppress women in the church. They are to be silent and covered, lest a man see or hear a women.
Hildegard believes that such ideas pertain only to married women, and claims that “a woman, once married, ought not to indulge herself in prideful adornment of har or persons, nor ought she lift herself up to vanity, wearing a crown and other golden ornaments, except at her husband’s pleasure” (129). Even Hildegard, progressive as she was, could not completely shake the notion that a woman’s beauty should be for her husband. This also ties into the unfortunate idea that a woman’s value is somehow tied to her virginity. In one of the records of her visions she says that “the blessed virgins have chosen the Word as their bridegroom. They have seized the Word with faithful devotion as a true man in marriage and as true God in chastity.” (104) The fact that this is said by somebody whose ideas about gender roles and equality are as forward thinking as Hildegard’s were shows how harsh the traditional churches views were.
To say that virgins have chosen the Word as bridegroom implies that somehow, married women cannot be as dedicated to the bridegroom of Christ because they have an earthly husband. This is further perpetuated when Hildegard says that they take the Word “as true God in chastity.” That brief phrase carries weighty implications about the nature of sex, even in the context of marriage. If only those who are perfectly chaste can embrace the Word as God, then all married women are immediately placed in a much lower status in the eyes of God, which seems to be discontinuous with 1 Corinthians chapter 7, where marriage is seen as a way to guard against sexual immorality. It may be preferable to abstain from marriage, but for some people, to abstain from marriage would increase their temptation and possibly their sin. Paul also does not explain why it would be better to abstain from marriage. Single life has far fewer attachments and no responsibilities to anybody other than God. The person is more free to go where he is called, and not concern himself with other affairs. This, among many other reasons, could have played into Paul’s views on marriage. He does not claim that maintaining chastity is a primary goal of the faith, or a reason to avoid marriage. Regardless, it seems as though the the church in 12th century had their own views on why Paul would prefer to abstain from marriage, hence the high emphasis on virginity.
This emphasis on virginity is repeated in Hildegard’s letter to the aforementioned Mistress Tengswich, in which Hildegard proclaims, “She [a virgin] stands in the unsullied purity of paradise, lovely and unwithering, and she always remains in the full vitality of the budding root.” In the same letter, Hildegard also says that “virgins are married with holiness in the Holy Spirit and in the bright dawn of virginity.” These kinds of claims make it abundantly clear the virgins are special in the eyes of God, and the to be anything else is to be sullied, unlovely, and withering. Such a view of women ties an exorbitant amount of their value to their sexuality, and is demeaning to any woman who decided not to join a convent. That women’s worth is suddenly negligible.
In a modern adaptation of Hildegard’s story, she and Mistress Tengswich argue over the attire of Hildegard’s virgins. That conversation is immediately followed by Hildegard’s offer for dinner, which Tengswich refuses so that she may fast. Where intentional or not, this severe juxtaposition of women and food hardly remains unnoticed. Tengswich is abstaining from food so that she may pursue holiness after condemning Hildegard for indulging in worldly pleasures such as beauty. In doing so, women, particularly virgins, are compared to food, and purity tied to abstinence. This theme seems to dominate the church of the 12th century, and all of Hildegard’s best efforts could not reform it (94).
Hildegard of Bingen was a visionary women who pushed the church to free virgins from the restrictions placed on them. She embraced the beauty of women, despite having a more traditional view of chastity. Her prominence and authority in the church put her in positions to challenge the tradition, which she embraced. Her struggle reveals the church’s oppression of women, from their inability to teach, to their untrustworthiness, to their sexuality, and it is a tragedy that the church refused to reform during her lifetime.