Touched… Encounter with Hildegard of Bingen

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.

15 October 2025 

Touched... Encounter with Hildegard of Bingen

It was the first time we truly met, in the summer of 2012, thirteen years ago now. I had already heard quite a lot about her and had read about her as well. Gradually, I had grown curious to meet her in person. But it never quite happened. Busy obligations kept burying my intention again and again.

Until, unexpectedly, the opportunity arose. Earlier that year, in the month of May, Hildegard had been canonized by the then Pope Benedict XVI, and I had come into contact with the Study Group Hildegard of Bingen. They turned out to be urgently looking for a translator to publish a book about Hildegard in Dutch (originally written in German), on the occasion of her planned proclamation as a Doctor of the Church later that year, in October. I could not have wished for a better opportunity. During the quiet summer months, my teaching duties were on hold, and I finally had the time to truly devote myself to our meeting.

The book in question focused mainly on Hildegard’s second major work, the Liber Vitae Meritorum (The Book of the Meritorious Life), and through this work I came to know her much better. Hildegard of Bingen: a Benedictine abbess from the 12th century, astonishingly active across a wide range of fields: religion, cosmology, the sciences, music composition, poetry, botany and herbal medicine, linguistics, medicine, to name only the most prominent, and I am surely forgetting several more. Hildegard is like a diamond, multifaceted; as you turn it, you continually discover new faces and sides that had previously gone unnoticed. A versatile woman who cannot be confined to a single category.

What fascinates me so deeply about Hildegard is that she offers us an unexpected window onto an ancient, symbolic world, one that seemed lost, just before the rise of a more rationalist worldview that would gain a strong momentum from the 13th century onward. A new intellectual era dawned in the 13th century, with great Doctors of the Church such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, a century in which anything resembling mysticism gradually became suspect and was forced into the margins. Historically oriented theologians will no doubt point out that Hildegard’s thought cannot be understood outside the context of the 12th century in which she lived, and that her world cannot simply be transposed to our own time. And, as a child of a rationalist, scientific age, I am the first to agree with them.

Yet I cannot help myself. I find her mystical visions beautiful and captivating. Her holistic view of humanity and the world, of thinking and healing, health and well-being, offers a welcome counterbalance to an overdose of rationality and, for me, restores something of the much-needed equilibrium with a more spiritual life. For that is what Hildegard is ultimately about: balance. In her vision, health, both physical and psychological, can exist only when there is harmony between all bodily, cosmic, and spiritual forces.

More and more, in our hectic and overstretched times, we experience a great need for a grounded and deeply lived spirituality. Not vague or “airy” notions, but a spirituality that touches the existential foundation of human beings: what drives people, what makes “their eyes shine,” what enables them to persevere and continue despite everything. A sustaining foundation that equips people to face the unexpected suffering life can bring.

What appeals to me so strongly in Hildegard is that, unlike many mystics, her focus is not on a mystical union or merging of the individual soul with God. At the heart of her mystical vision lies precisely the interconnectedness between human beings and creation. The human person, confronted with finitude and fragility, with life and death, is an integral part of nature. It is a mysticism firmly grounded in the world. By seeing nature as creation, we come to treat it more and more as a precious gift to be cared for attentively. Not only to preserve it for future generations, but also to protect ourselves from self-destruction, a vision that resonates in Laudato Si’ by the former Pope Pope Francis on climate change and care for the environment and the earth.

Hildegard’s words are, for me, a balm for the soul. Unparalleled, as when she writes about love of neighbor: “I, however, am the dew from which life springs, by which blossoms bear fruit. […] I am God’s dearest and most beautiful friend, and God reveals His secrets to me. Everything that belongs to God is also mine, because I wear His bridal garment. I bind wounds with linen, just as the Son of God heals them with His tunic.”

A beautiful encounter that has truly touched me.

 

Originally published as: van Biezen, A. (2025), Geraakt... Ontmoeting met Hildegard van Bingen. In Kerk & Leven, edition 0485, 15 October 2025, p. 4.