Tags: the source of the visions of Saint Hildegard of Bingen: a cloud; quote in Latin, from a codex online; parallel text in English

‘Et ea quæ scribo in visione video et audio. ’

 (or the cloud from which Saint Hildegard got her visions.)


Water purification is what got me to peruse the holdings of the esoteric section of Lausanne’s main municipal library roughly twelve years ago. This is how I caught the bug, even though my interest in esotericism only really took off several years later, so that for roughly three years now, most of the books I have borrowed from Lausanne’s main municipal library belong to this section. With several thousand books at one point (i.e. before the great weeding out), the esoteric holdings of Lausanne’s central municipal library must have been one of the largest (if not the largest) of any non-academic library in Switzerland – probably because the University of Lausanne was, this in all likelihood until only very recently, one of the handful of universities where one could study esotericism as an academic subject.

In February of this year, after having found the items I had come to check at the municipal library, a book in French that had been put on display caught my attention: ... voilà comment DIEU guérit: la médecine de sainte Hildegarde de Bingen, nouvelle méthode de guérison par la nature, by the German Doctor Gottfried Hertzka [available in the USA as ‘Hildegard of Bingen’s Medicine’, Dr. Wighard Strehlow, Gottfried Hertzka, 1988]. Although the title made the book sound a bit like some mumbo jumbo, that it had been penned by a doctor and the fact that I had already worked a couple of months earlier on a rough translation of a vision of Saint Hildegard’s (surely, one of Europe’s most extraordinary women ever) prompted me to borrow it. Anyhow, with books borrowed from a library, there is no financial loss if the item proves to be a disappointment…

When I started reading through the book (on 16 Feb.), references to Saint Hildegard’s visions coming from a cloud but whilst she would be fully awake (all this in her own words), a process which according to Gottfried Hertzka* is akin to receiving the vision from some kind of TV screen in the sky, got me longing to find the specific passage in the original text in Latin.

It did not take me too long to find a translation in English (ctrl + f  ‘trembling’ to jump directly to the end part of the quote at https://westminsterabbey.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Selected-Writings-Hildegard-of-Bingen-Mark-Atherton.pdf), but for the Latin it was a different matter. True, I had managed to come across several references to a modern edition of the text (103R in Hildegardis Bingensis Epistolarium, Pt 2, L. van Acker ed., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 91A, published by Turnhout in 1993), but I wanted to find the source online…

After having come back from the university library with some books by (and on) Emanuel Swedenborg on Saturday of last week, the mere thought that the latter’s visions might have to be compared to Hildegard’s spurred me into wanting to give myself another try at finding the passage in Latin on the Internet.

Not only did I manage to find the passage in a nineteenth century work (starting from the last paragraph on the left side of https://archive.org/details/analectasanctae00hildgoog/page/n372), but after having decided to try my luck with the edition of her works published either during her own lifetime or not long after, the famous Wiesbaden Codex (also known as the ‘Riesencodex’ or ‘chain codex’), which I had stumbled across already in February, I eventually got to locate the passage in that codex, i.e. on 380v and 381r. Given that I cannot paste a screenshot of the text without having asked the permission to do so from the institution to which the codex and the scanned pictures belong (i.e. to the library of the Hochschule RheinMain, in Germany), I shall simply reproduce the text as it looks in the codex (sticking to the odd syntax at times of the Latin language; however, I did not reproduce the tildes or macrons) plus provide a very, very literal translation.

Enjoy – even if Saint Hildegard’s cloud was no TV set...

[The passage begins at the bottom of 380v.]
Lumen igitur quod video, lo[-]                                                             cale non est; sed multo et multo nube que[SIC]
[beginning of 381r] 
solem portat lucidior est nec altitudinem
nec longitudinem nec latitudinem in eo
considerare valeo, et illud umbra viventis
lucis mihi nominatur, & ut sol luna & stelle[SIC]
in aquis apparent ita scripturae sermones
virtutes, & quaedam opera hominum formata
mihi in illo resplendent. Quicquid autem in
hac visione videro seu didicero, hujus me[-]
moriam per longum tempus habeo, ita quod ali[-]
quando illud viderim & audierim, recordor &
simul video, audio, scio, & quasi in
momento hoc quod scio disco, quod autem non vi[-]
deo illud nescio quia indocta sum, sed tantum
litteras in simplicitate legere instructa
sum. Et ea que[SIC] scribo in visione video
& audio, nec alia [GAP FROM SCAR IN VELLUM] verba pono
quam illa quae audio, & latinis verbis
non limatis ea profere quemadraodum illa in vi[-]
sione audio, quoniam sicut philosophi scribunt,
scribere in hac visione non doceor, et ver[-]
ba in visione ista non sunt sicut verba que[SIC]
ab ore hominis sonant, sed sicut flamma co[-]
ruscans, et ut nubes in aere puro mota.
The light which I see pla[-]
ce not is; but far and far than a cloud which

the sun carries brighter is nor height
or length or width in it
gauge can, and it shadow of the living
light by me named, & just as the sun the moon & stars
in the waters appear so the scriptures sermons
and virtues, & certain works humans have shaped
on me in it shine. Whatever however in
this vision I shall have seen or learned, of this me[-]
mory for a long time I keep, so what[ever]
it I shall see and hear, recall &
simultaneously see, hear, understand, & almost in
this moment what I understand I learn, what however I do not
 see that I do not understand because I am unlearned, but only
words in simplicity to read having been taught
I have. And that which I write in vision I see
& hear, no other words do I put down
than those I hear, and in Latin words
not polished these to present how these in vi[-]
sion I hear, for as the philosophers write,
to write in this vision I am not taught, and words
in vision this are not like words which
from the mouth of man sound, but like a flame
trembling, or like a cloud in the clear air moved.


*In the original German text, here are (courtesy of a famous search engine) some of the words that made me want to find the original wording in Latin: ‘[…] Bilder und Texte all ihrer Schriften wortwörtlich entnehme, ohne dabei jemals in Ekstase, einen Dämmerzustand oder Halbschlaf zu verfallen. […] Dazu kommt noch, daß Hildegard selbst am Ende ihres Lebenswerkes ausdrücklich bezeugt und erklärt hat: « ... daß alle ihre Schriften, alles, was sie jemals geschrieben hat, ausschließlich ihrer himmlischen Mattscheibe (flimmernde Wolke voll Worte, Bilder und Töne) entstammten... »’.
Source: https://www.google.com/search?q="+Bilder+und+++"So+heilt+Gott%3A+die+Medizin+der&tbm=bks


This entry was published on the fourteenth day of June 2021.