VIRIDITAS - FIRST WOMAN ECOLOGIST?

  

God speaks:

“I am the breeze that nurtures all things green
I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh with joy of life.
I am the yearning for good.”

SAINT HILDEGARD is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. “God desires that all the world be pure in his sight. The earth should not be injured. The earth should not be destroyed… As often as the elements, the elements of the world are violated, by ill-treatment, so God will cleanse them. God will cleanse them thru the sufferings, thru the  hardships of humankind”, she wrote 10 centuries ago.

She saw the earth as a living organism endowed with the same vital power that animates all life forms. It was a central theme in her life and work. Where she gained her knowledge of the natural world is open to debate but certainly some of it came from not only her awareness of the unity of all things from her mystical inspiration, but also from the pagan heritage of the time, then still very much alive in the Germanic world, particularly in the knowledge “de occultis operationibus naturae” (the hidden workings of nature), which would later be the object of witch hunts.

St. Hildegard’s Physica, the first German herbal treatise, and Materia Medica, in which she catalogs the properties of plants, trees, birds, fish, and stones, attest to her knowledge, competence, and concern for the physical world. Her Causae et Curae (originally called the Book of the Subtleties of the Diverse Nature of Creatures) echoes this conscious awareness wherein she discusses the physical processes for the human body and its interrelatedness to the natural world.

Her holistic healing abilities, which are studied to this day, show that she likely practiced a Middle Age version of biodynamic farming, an approach to agriculture in which the intrinsic properties of plants is known to create a balanced regenerative ecosystem, when practiced.  

For St. Hildegard, the earth was sacred. She helped the people of her day to better understand themselves
and the planet. She saw a spiritual kinship between humankind and the earth: “The soul is a breath of the living spirit, and with excellent sensitivity, permeates the entire body to give it life. Just so, the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it”.

Her idea of viriditas was foundational to her understanding the Holy Spirit, the vivifying breath that animates all living things. She saw that armed with our own viriditas, we can embark on the phenomenon of being “carried ever so lightly like a feather on the breath” of some greater life force.

 She felt  the whole earth was the place where God’s Spirit and our spirit meet to produce a holistic wellness for each individual  person as well as  a profound mutual relationship with the natural world.

One of St. Hildegard’s most enduring symbols was the  tree, which she used as a metaphor for the growth of the soul. “The soul is in the body, just like the sap is in the tree. Understanding grows in the soul, just like the greening of branches and the leaves of the tree. Therefore O person, you who think your understanding is good, understand what you are in your soul.” 

 There is a new book on the works of St. Hildegard, which I  recently received.  To quote the cover:

GREEN MASS is a meditation on—and with—twelfth-century Christian mystic and polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Attending to St. Hildegard's vegetal vision, which greens theological tradition and imbues plant life with spirit, philosopher Michael Marder uncovers a verdant mode of thinking. The book stages a fresh encounter between present-day and premodern concerns, ecology and theology, philosophy and mysticism, the material and the spiritual, in word and sound.

 Introduced with a foreword by philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and accompanied by cellist Peter Schuback's musical movements, which echo both St. Hildegard's own compositions and key themes in each chapter of the book, this multifaceted work creates a resonance chamber, in which to discover the living world anew.

The original compositions accompanying each chapter are available free for streaming and for download at www.sup.org/greenmass

The author, Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology, with books including Dust (2016), Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics (2018), and Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze (2020).

For followers of this great saint, I highly recommend the book. It proves that since St. Benedict, we Benedictines have been concerned with the care of our natural world.

Tree Frog photo:  Amie Garabaldi