St. Hildegard’s Viriditas
The green and glorious healing force of life
Open Causes and Cures, St. Hildegard of Bingen’s medical treatise, and you find that it begins thus:
Book 1
Before the creation of the world, God was, and is, without beginning. He was, and is, light and splendor. And he was life.
The treatise begins with cosmology, moving from the creation of the world to that of the angels, the fall of Lucifer, the creation of the soul, the elements and the firmament, and so on, to our more usual physical aspects of sky and earth. Book 2 considers the Fall of Adam, the creatures of the earth, and begins to explore imbalances, understood in the context of the elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. In short, this part of the book is Hildegard’s version of the Genesis Creation stories, serving as the foundation for understanding the nature of disease, and essential concepts of health and healing.
And Causes and Cures moves onward, into five books total, detailing maladies and what to do about them, and various aspects of the nature of things in relation to men and women and health.
God begins Causes and Cures because God is Life, the underlying subject of medicine.
- Dr. Victoria Sweet
As we enter deeper into Hildegard’s text, and the landscape of medieval medicine, we find ourselves in a nuanced world. Winds and elemental forces are not only divine and seemingly abstract, but are actual winds and elements within the agriculturally-centered daily and seasonal life of men and women of Hildegard’s time, 12th century Europe. Like the foods we eat or the composition of soils when we garden, they form the building blocks and energies that make or break health. The simple act of stepping outside and feeling the sun on our skin and the warmth in our bodies, the brush of wind and the air entering and leaving our lungs, the brush of dew on our clothes and the moisture in our breath, reveals just what we are working with when tend to healing.
Perhaps the concept that captures the imagination most when we meet St. Hildegard and her medicine is that of viriditas, often defined these days as the greening power of nature. In her writings viriditas refers to “greeness,” a color, or as a substance “formed in the earth and matured by the sun” (as described by Gregory the Great) manifesting as green sap in plants. Unique to Hildegard, this notion of viriditas as a substance was applied not just to plants but to people as well.
In people, viriditas not only serves as a metaphor pointing to such spiritual qualities as truth, integrity, penance, and abstinance, but also as a physical generative essence, originating from the earth. It can show up in specific ways:
Hildegard writes:
Just as a tree does not bear if it lacks viriditas, so an old woman who does not have the viriditas of her flowering [menses] can no longer bear children.
and:
Adam was virile because of the viriditas of earth, and strong because of its elements.
These are just a few expressions of Hildegard’s viriditas. In time, I’ll share more. For now though, let’s consider viriditas in our own lives, outside our front doors. Where I live, viriditas is in full generative exuberance. The plants surge upward, visibly taller and broader by dusk than they were at dawn. The trees are in movement, with successions of blossom sweeping through the landscape. Some weeks I see only pink blossoms, other weeks they are white , then yellow awakes. Leaves are new green and vibrant.
The birds are in full abundant song, the deer wander through, the does ripening with fawns. On the ground, bitter and mineral-rich herbs share their juicy goodness. These are all flowerings of viriditas, a substance that may indeed truly rise from the earth, infusing and vitalizing the plants and the trees, and the other creatures of the land.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, we know warmth and sun and rain, expressions of the elements that make up viriditas. We on our Island have left our woodstoves and cozy indoor corners, and are gardening, playing, resuming long walks with friends, and delighting in the gifts of nature. The Spring calls us to new ventures, renewed activity, inspiration, just as it calls to the myriad animals, plants, insects, birds, and other beings around us. All is active, all is busy, all is joyful.
Head outside and engage with the fullness of your senses. What do you hear, feel, smell, taste? What moves through you? Where does your body feel most alive? Where do you know hope? The earth is rejuvenating, and proclaiming the truth - all is new!
In the medieval mind of St. Hildegard of Bingen, in which the workings of the seasons and the earth and the year mingle with liturgy, prayer, and our human efforts, no real separation exists between the psyche and the spiritual, the garden of the human body, and the body of the garden. All derive from God, and all, in their rightness turn toward him, and are fed.
In the rightness of food, rest, proper action, virtue, compassion and attentiveness, obstructions fall away, and we - humans and more - can discover renewal within and around ourselves. This is the movement of viriditas, engaged in its daily miracle of life.
And this is the source and nature of healing - of helping another, and being helped in turn. This is how we release our outrage and anxieties and despair, and our imprisonment to what seem to be unending sorrows. God’s creation in its sweet and potent intimacy, can move even that which seems to be most intractable. God himself, the gardener, gently lifts us, enmeshed as we may be in all our anguished rigidity, and places us in new soil before him. He will nurture us like the precious seedling we are, if we, like a seedling, will allow it. Surrender opens us in the most unexpected moment, and the astonishment of actually being able to forgive can unfurl us into a new heaven and into ornate leaf.
It can happen in an instant, this divine mercy, within the surging, cleansing, rejuvenating river of viriditas, and the Heaven in Earth that is Spring. Here in the river, like a sunflower in adoration, we find ourselves in wild devotion.
And, in such a life, we know the wonder and wellness of it
.
Resources
Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky - Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine by Victoria Sweet
Hildegard’s Causes and Cures - translated by Priscilla Throop
Herbs With Kids
Read my recent article, “Herbs With Kids - Springtime!” It’s not too late to harvest some of the herbs mentioned to make an herbal vinegar!