A World in God’s Light: The Final Great Vision of Hildegard of Bingen

                                                     Den énvingede (The One-Winged), Nis Schmidt

Introduction

Kerk & Leven (“Church & Life”) is the leading weekly Catholic magazine in the Flemish region of Belgium. Since October 2025, on the invitation of the chief editor of the local edition of the parish of Olen, Cis Marinus, I have been writing a reflective article every two weeks from a philosophical and theological perspective, exploring Christianity in a scientific age. 

25 March 2026

A World in God’s Light: The Final Great Vision of Hildegard of Bingen

In September 2025, I was invited by the Belgian Study Group Hildegard of Bingen to give a lecture for their annual Hildegard Day. In search of a suitable topic, I noticed that all the major works of Saint Hildegard of Bingen had already been translated into Dutch. Only her final great visionary work, the Liber Divinorum Operum (“The Book of Divine Works”), has not yet been translated into Dutch. This intrigued me. Is it a forgotten work?

The fact that The Book of Divine Works ran the risk of disappearing under the dust of history for a long time is mainly due to a convergence of historical circumstances. After the fall of the Roman Empire, much knowledge from classical antiquity had been lost in the West. It was mainly through the reconquest (the Reconquista) of Arab Spain (Al-Andalus) that, in the course of the 13th century, the works of Aristotle reached the West. This (re)discovery of Aristotle led to a true transformation in the Christian West. Great Church scholars such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus gratefully used Aristotle’s thought to establish the foundation of the impressive cathedrals of medieval theology. Hildegard’s mystical vision of the divine works did not fit into this Aristotelian-inspired transformation and was therefore skillfully pushed into the background.

At the heart of this majestic work lies the image of the cosmos as a living organism in which everything is interconnected. Hildegard offers an extensive commentary on the biblical story of creation. Remarkably, she does not read this story as a purely literal account, but as a cosmic vision expressing the unity of God, cosmos, and humanity. For Hildegard, the creation story is a revelation of divine wisdom that brings order and harmony into the world. The entire universe reflects God’s plan. Man is created in the image of God and, in turn, forms a microcosm that encompasses and summarizes the whole of creation. In Hildegard’s vision, Adam is connected both to heaven and to earth. The Fall, for her, represents a rupture in the original harmony, through which humanity becomes estranged from the original order of the universe.

This vision stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy of Aristotle, which would dominate medieval theology from the 13th century onward. Hildegard sees God, the entire cosmos, and the human being as one single reality: a sacred space in which everything has its place. She recognizes God in man and in humanity’s great responsibility for life, the well-being of the earth and the environment, and in the mysterious way in which the cosmos exists at all.

Hildegard’s thinking is profoundly organic: she does not see the cosmos as a mechanical system, but as a living, sacred body in which everything circulates and breathes. Images of flowing blood, breath, fertility, and light express that the world is a sacred space in which God is continuously at work. Her concept of viriditas (“greening power”) symbolizes this life force that animates everything. For Hildegard, the universe is not merely an ordered, knowable cosmos, but a holy, sacred space in which God is constantly active. In this sense, the cosmos is for her a temple: not a dead space, but a holy domain in which God and creation are inseparably connected. Man who lives well maintains this balance and participates in the divine work.

Thus, the cosmos as a sacred space becomes for us a space of sanctification in which man actively becomes a co-creator of God’s work. This vision resonates, among others, in the understanding of liturgy proposed by the Leuven theologian Dr. Joris Geldof, who views church buildings not merely as sacred spaces, but as spaces for sanctification.

Hildegard’s Book of Divine Works can be read as a comprehensive vision of creation that stands in stark contrast to the outlook of modern humanity, which sees itself as the measure of all things. A work of art that beautifully represents this modern vision is the sculpture Den énvingede (“The One-Winged”) by the Danish artist Nis Schmidt, which can be admired in the Abbey of Averbode. It is a bronze statue depicting an angel with only one wing. The sculpture refers to Thomas Aquinas, who states that man need two wings: the wing of faith and the wing of reason. Beneath the statue is a quotation from Pope Benedict XIV commenting on this idea: “Faith and reason are the two wings by which the human spirit rises to seek the truth. Perhaps it can no longer fly precisely because one wing, faith, has been broken off. With the other, reason, much can be achieved, but rising to the sustaining insights of human existence is no longer possible by that alone.”

For Hildegard, human beings are not passive spectators within God’s creation; rather, they are addressed and actively invited to become co-creators of God’s work. Humanity is fundamentally called to responsibility and plays an active role in preserving and sustaining the harmony of the universe, a harmony that depends on human moral and spiritual action. As a microcosm, human being reflect the structure of the entire creation and bear responsibility for maintaining that harmony. Sin and disorder are understood by Hildegard as disruptions of this cosmic balance.

The Book of Divine Works presents a cosmos that lives, breathes, and is animated, a cosmos in which human beings do not stand outside or above creation, but participate as a microcosm in God’s organic, sacred order. We are here to partake in the wonder of the universe and to respond to the divine call to understand ever more of this wondrous cosmos. In this interconnectedness of God, cosmos, and humanity, human beings are not only collaborators of the Creator; we are also invited to be co-workers, co-creators of God’s work. The Creator is still at work, to the very end. Cosmogenesis (the coming-into-being of the cosmos) is our shared service to God and to the world. In this, we show and bear witness to our gratitude for being here, the gift we leave behind when we depart this earthly life.

Hildegard’s visions have by no means lost their relevance, on the contrary. Whereas in the past we could hardly imagine that human beings might have any significant impact on the overall ecological balance of nature, it has now become painfully and urgently clear how profoundly we are disrupting the order and harmony of our environment and the global climate. Hildegard’s vision of our care and responsibility for the environment, the earth and the global climate, is a visionary message whose physical and spiritual necessity is increasingly becoming evident. It offers a strikingly аctual perspective on the current state of the world, marked by severe environmental pollution and climate change, in which humanity’s role is unmistakable. A new, more sustainable attitude toward nature is urgently needed. The spiritual, harmonious vision of Hildegard of Bingen in The Book of Divine Works can serve as a powerful source of inspiration in this regard.

 

Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2026). Een wereld in Gods licht: het laatste grote visioen van Hildegard van Bingen. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 25 March 2026, p. 4.