Hildegard of Bingen (born 1098, died September 17, 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary and polymath. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. She has been considered by many in Europe to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
Hildegard's fellow nuns elected her as magistra in 1136; she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs for women choirs to sing, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias. There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words. One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. She is also noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.
Although the history of her formal canonisation is complicated, branches of the Roman Catholic Church have recognised Hildegard as a saint for centuries. On May 10, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI extended the liturgical cult of St. Hildegard to the entire Catholic Church in a process known as "equivalent canonisation". On October 7, 2012, he named her as a Doctor of the Church, in recognition of her "holiness of life and the originality of her teaching."
The letter:
Serena lux ad te dicit: Dies noctem precellit et nox scientiam loquitur. Quomodo? Dies uidendo et audiendo probat in quo letandum et gaudendum sit, et nox plurimas optiones in multis utilitatibus habet et diem attendit. Sed et tempestas interdum precurrit, et postea pura dies apparet. Tu, filia Dei, in prima luce fuisti et in torculari calcata es, sed postea latitudinem uiarum ambulasti. Nunc preuide ne bonas uias derelinquas, quia Deus te uult et te scit, ita ut, si ad illum aspicis festinanter te adiuuat. Cum autem uanitatem seculi tangis, ad te superflue currit. Itaque in duabus partibus elige quod tibi bonum sit, quoniam, si Deum uidendo et audiendo inuocas non derelinquet te. Deus te adiuuet, ut dies in te clarescat et ut nox a te recedat, quatenus gemma in uirtutibus fias. Et sic in eternum uiues.
English translation (from a Swedish translation):
The clear light tells you: the day surpasses the night and the night announces it. How? By seeing and listening, the day tests what one should rejoice in, and the night has many choices among many useful things and pays attention to the day. But even a storm sometimes precedes the day, and then the pure day appears. You, daughter of God, were in the first light, and you were trampled in a winepress, but after that you have walked in spacious ways. Now take heed that you do not forsake the good ways, because God pleases you and knows you, so that if you turn to Him, He will help you quickly. For when you touch the vanity of the world, He flows to you in excess. Therefore, choose between the two options what may benefit you, because if you invoke God through seeing and hearing, he will not abandon you. May God help you, so that the day will become clear in you, and the night will turn away from you, so that you become a jewel among virtues. And so you will live eternally.
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