Sanctity, vision, science, ecology and the creativity of diagrams
I am likewise the fiery life of the substance of divinity. I flame over the beauty of the fields and sparkle in the waters, and I burn in sun, moon, and stars. And with an airy wind that sustains all things with invisible life, I raise them up vitally. For air lives in greenness and flowers, waters flow as if alive, the sun, too, lives in his light, and when the moon comes to her decline she is kindled by his light, as it were to live again… Thus I, the fiery force, am hidden in [the winds], and they take fire from me, just as breath continually moves a man, and as a windy flame exists in fire. All of these live in their essence and are not found in death, because I am life.
Nor is it “merely” natural, it can also be found in the soul:
Understanding in the soul is like the Veriditas of the branches and the leaves of the tree
It is, in fact, neither exclusively natural nor supernatural, but non-dual.
*
Dylan Thomas, being a Welshman and a poet, thus has an insight that bears a family resemblance to Hildegarde’s, but phrases it in a way that leaves the “force” neither personified nor otherwise… and thus with no necessary doctrinal implication:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Due to the idiocy of copyright, you’ll have to go elsewhere to read the whole, fine poem.
For Hildegarde, this “force” is also Christ — for he himself is the “the fiery life of the substance of divinity” — and his coming to earth a greening and freshening of a world until then barren of the love he brought.
*
Hildegarde was the abbess in charge of a small flotilla of nuns — but also a mystic, a visionary, philosopher, poet, painter and songstress…
Her song of creation, O Viriditas, bears comparison in spirit with St Francis‘ Canticle of the Sun. She writes to her “green” Christ and his “green” planet:
O greenness of God’s finger
with which God built a vineyard
that shines in heaven
as an established pillar:
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And o height of the mountain
that will never be dispersed
in the judgment of God,
you nevertheless stand from afar as an exile,
but it is not in the power
of the armed man
to seize you.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And she sets her words to the music of the times:
Indeed, her music is sung even today…
How’s that for a twelfth century statement of what we’d these days call “ecology”?
*
But all this risks getting far too ethereal, I have wandered far along my own epicycles from Jason Wells’ point, and methinks I should bring us back down to earth.
Dennis The Constitutional Peasant, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, meets King Arthur and complains, “What I object to is you automatically treatin’ me like an inferior.” It’s understandable — but so, perhaps, is king Arthur’s response: “Well, I am king.”
Two worldviews clash here — and in the ensuing debate, Arthurian myth meets contemporary politics:
Dennis’ Mother: Well how’d you become king, then?
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake,… [Angel chorus begins singing in background] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [Angel chorus ends] That is why I am your king!
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