Hildegard of Bingen Quotes on Knowledge
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the Benedictine abbess whose visionary, theological, scientific, medical, and musical works supply twelfth-century intellectual life with one of its most polymathic figures, defended in Scivias (1141–51), the Liber Vitae Meritorum, and the Liber Divinorum Operum a comprehensive cosmological vision in which the structure of the created world, the moral order of the human person, and the divine providential plan are read as a single integrated manifestation of the Living Light. The companion natural-philosophical works (Physica and Causae et Curae) supply detailed accounts of plants, minerals, and the medical applications of natural substances drawn from the empirical practice of the Benedictine infirmary tradition.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Hildegard of Bingen:
“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth's greenings. Now, think.”
-
“Father, I am greatly disturbed by a vision which has appeared to me through divine revelation, a vision seen not with my fleshly eyes but only in my spirit. Wretched, and indeed more than wretched in my womanly condition, I have from earliest childhood seen great marvels which my tongue has no power to express but which the Spirit of God has taught me that I may believe." Steadfast and gentle fath”
Letter to Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 1146-47 -
“Now, O son of God, set in the valley of true humility, walk in peace without pride of spirit, which, like a precipitous mountain, offers a difficult, or near-impossible, ascent or descent to those who attempt to scale it, and on its summit no building can be built. For a person who tries to climb higher than he can achieve possesses the name of sanctity without substance, because, in name alone wi”
Letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176 -
“O dawn, you washed them away in a woman who was clean. O form of woman, sister of Wisdom, how great is your glory! For in you there rose a life unquenchable that death shall never stifle. Wisdom exalted you to make all creatures fairer in your beauty than they were when the world was born.”
Ad Vitam S. Ruperti Epilogus 6, Pitra 364. -
“Ad Vitam S. Ruperti Epilogus 6, Pitra 364.”
O dawn, you washed them away in a woman who was clean. O form of woman, sister of Wisdom, how great is your glory! For in you there rose a life unquenchable that death shall never stifle. Wisdom exalted you to make all creatures fairer in your beauty than they were when the world was born.