Maria Popova at Marginalia:
At seventy-six, Hildegard of Bingen — poet, painter, healer, composer, philosopher, mystic, medical writer — has just finished writing and illustrating her third and farthest-seeing book: The Book of Divine Works, chronicling seven years of prophetic visions. God had first begun speaking to her in “the voice of the Living Light” when she was three, but she never suffered the hubris of a self-appointed prophet — rather, she considered herself “a totally uneducated human being,” a “wretched and fragile creature,” who is merely a channel for divine wisdom. She may be the Western world’s first great crusader against dualism — in the sermons she delivered to priests, bishops, abbots, and ordinary people all over present-day Germany and Switzerland, she preached that “God is Reason,” that “Reason is the root” from which “the resounding Word blooms,” but also that “from the heart comes healing,” that we apprehend the world and its wisdom most clearly through the intuitions of the “inner eye” and “inner ear.”
Hildegard was fifty-six when she began receiving the vision that would become her Book of Divine Works. On its pages, between writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, between reckonings with the nature of eternity and the fundaments of love, she conceptualizes something the word for which would not be coined for another seven centuries: ecology.
more here.
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