Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard Von Bingen (31 page)

“Little Hildegard,” he said, with a grimace that was probably meant to be a smile. “Let me do this one good thing. We grow old.”

Not awaiting my answer, he hobbled away, abandoning his chest of gold.

As summer waxed, so did the fortunes of Rupertsberg. Heinrich, Archbishop of Mainz, bequeathed to us a mill at the Binger Loch and also a toll tower on its island in the Rhine, both of which would generate a steady, lasting income. Prior Helengerus sent us a written charter in which he agreed to return part of our dowries and promised that Disibodenberg would not revoke Volmar against our will. This wasn’t to say that Cuno had given in to me, but rather that he had allowed his prior to arrange the sort of compromise that made him appear munificent.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1151 seemed to be the shining pinnacle of my existence when all my dreams came true. In September, I would turn fifty-three, and instead of bowing to the inevitable decline of advancing age, I seemed to flourish like the orchards encircling our monastery. Such good fortune abounded that I confess I succumbed to the sin of pride.

Despite our every obstacle, my daughters and I had established a self-sufficient monastery with its own mill, its herds and flocks, its stables and crops, its fishpond and vineyards. Our every workshop boasted running water, and our newly finished dormitory could accommodate fifty nuns. Before the first snows came, we would have latrines with working sewers and a bathhouse with a steam bath. Like guests drawn to the banquet table, daughters of the nobility entered our house, enriching us with their dowries. We gained more than a dozen new postulants.

Our new home was no hermitage but a landmark, crowning the hill where the Nahe joined the Rhine. Ships from far and wide sailed past our ramparts. How could people fail to marvel at how Rupertsberg had sprung up in the space of a few years? A great monastery founded by women—not by an emperor, bishop, or prince—was unprecedented in the German lands, a miracle. Pilgrims flocked to us, many of them unschooled souls who could not read a word of my writings, but who had heard of my visions and the restorative powers of the medicine we practiced in our hospice. In defiance of Cuno, who said I was only a magistra and subject to him, nearly everyone addressed me as abbess, from my own daughters to the writers of the letters that flooded in as Rupertsberg’s reputation spread through the land.

Blessing begat blessing. That summer I completed
Scivias,
the fruit of a decade’s work. We sent copies to my great patrons Pope Eugenius, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Heinrich, Archbishop of Mainz. Everything in my world seemed perfect and complete. We only needed to finish construction on our new church, and then, the following spring, the archbishop would come to consecrate Rupertsberg, our hard-won paradise.

Upon a glorious August morning, I read through my correspondence. Since Volmar was busy with other matters, Richardis sat with me in his stead, taking dictation in her flowing hand. My soul seemed as expansive as the sun streaming through the open window. Thus, I could regard the unflattering letter with good humor.

“Cara, listen,” I said, before reading aloud the pointed epistle from a certain Magistra Tengswich, superior of the sisters at Andernach, a Benedictine house about fifty miles north.

We have heard about certain strange and irregular practices that you countenance. They say that on feast days your virgins stand in church with unbound hair when singing the psalms and that they clad themselves in white with silken veils so long that they sweep the floor. It is even rumored that they wear crowns of gold filigree, into which are inserted crosses with a figure of the Lamb in front, and that they adorn their fingers with golden rings. And this despite the express prohibition of Saint Paul, who writes in the First Book of Timothy: “Let women comport themselves with modesty, not with plaited hair, or gold, or pearls, and costly attire.”

O worthy bride of Christ, such unheard-of practices far exceed the capacity of our weak understanding, and strike us with no little wonder. Although we feeble little women rejoice in your fame and success, we still wish you to inform us on some points relative to this matter.

I had to laugh at the barbs rendered all the sharper by their ironic guise of humility.

“A sharp-witted woman, this Tengswich,” I said. “A pity her intelligence isn’t put to better use than attacking us, her sister Benedictines. What shall we write back to her?”

I expected Richardis to share my mirth, but my friend appeared preoccupied, her eyes rooted on her writing desk.

“She is right,” she said quietly. “About Saint Paul’s admonition.”

“That pertains to married women, not virgins. Why should consecrated women, in the shelter of their own cloister, hide away their beauty as though it were something shameful?”

My mind raced ahead, seeking out the right words for my reply to Tengswich. “Cara, please write this for me.” I closed my eyes as the words flew from my tongue. “These words,” I dictated, “do not come from a human being but from the Living Light:
O woman, what a splendid being you are! For you have set your fountain in the sun and have conquered the world.
”

Writing down my dictation, Richardis flushed, as though I had chosen those words specifically for her and, in a way, I had, for there she sat in the full stream of sunlight, which illuminated her beauty. Though she was twenty-seven, she didn’t look a day over nineteen. This was our gift, the secret jewel of sworn maidenhood, freed from the burden of constant pregnancies. When my mother was only a few years older than Richardis, she had lost nearly all her teeth to childbearing.

Our mortal lives were so brief, I reflected. We did not live for ourselves alone. Every abbess sought a protégée. Even Jutta, in her own tortured way, had tried her best to pour her learning into me. My dream was that Richardis would take the abbess’s staff when I departed this world. My visions, my writings, my music, this abbey, my entire legacy, would become hers, she who was my soul’s companion. I smiled at her fondly only to see that her hands were trembling, spilling ink onto the parchment.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Hildegard, I ask your leave to return to my homeland in Saxony. The sisters of Bassum Abbey have elected me as their superior.”

“My dear, is this a jest? How could they elect you having never laid eyes on you?”

“Such things are not unheard of,” she said. “I’ve served you for many years. Now I may serve others.”

I realized she was dead earnest.

“This is your mother’s doing,” I said. “Bassum is in your brother’s archdiocese, is it not? Your brother is archbishop and she would have you be an abbess. An exalted rank to match the exalted position of your family. Another gem in your mother’s crown.”

“How dare you mock her?” My friend turned on me in genuine anger. “You would be nothing without her! This abbey would not exist. You would still be at Disibodenberg under Cuno’s heel.”

“Why?” I asked her. “Why would you want to leave after everything we’ve endured together?” My heart raced through my memories of her muteness and then the miracle of her speech, of how she had raised me from the deepest abyss when I thought I would be damned for heresy. “Cara, I built this house for
you.
”

My voice tore at this admission. Of course, I had built Rupertsberg for all my daughters and the glory of God. Yet at the still center, at the axis of the wheel around which everything revolved, was Richardis, my vision of Caritas made flesh. My Anima, my soul.

Her eyes filled with tears, as mine did, but she folded her arms and turned her back to me, her stubbornness reminding me of how she had erected a wall of silence to thwart her mother. It stabbed my heart to see her throwing that same defiance at me.

“Did you think I would always be the pale moon reflecting your sun?” she asked me.

“This is your mother’s will, not your own!” To my horror, I found myself shouting at her. Softening my voice, I added, “Don’t let her meddling tear us apart.”

She set her jaw. “How can you be so sure it isn’t my will?”

“You can’t leave. I need you here.” I gulped for breath, still not believing any of this. “My dear girl, let’s speak no more of this. Write to your mother and tell her you refuse.”

“I’m not a girl anymore. And my mother grows old. She would have me in Bassum, close to home. After all she has done for you, how can you deny her this?”

“Your mother bought the office for you.” My voice grew cold and quiet. “This is simony, a sin against God. I forbid it.”

She laughed, as though in shock. “Didn’t you once promise me that you would never hold an unwilling girl as your prisoner? Now you act like Cuno, the one you fled. Guda was right. Ambition has swollen your head and made you hateful.”

“Guda?” Annoyance and bewilderment swirled around me in an unholy dance. “What does Guda have to do with any of this?”

Richardis’s face went as red as blood.

“She wrote to Mother. She said she worried that our friendship was impure.”

At first I could not believe it. Then a white-hot rage gripped me. I could have smashed the precious window glass.

“You know that’s a lie. I love you as Paul loved Timothy.”

She wept, her face looking pale and exhausted. “Hildegard, you have been kind. You were a friend to me when my own mother despaired of me. But the time has come for you to let me go. I’ve helped you finish
Scivias.
There are other illuminators among the new postulants to replace me.”

I kept shaking my head. “No, no, no. You can’t.”

Hurt blazed in her eyes. “You think you can stand in my way? The archbishop will release me, even if you don’t.” Walking away from me, she had reached the door when she turned to me again. Her head was bowed, her voice leaden. “Adelheid is leaving, too. She has been elected abbess of Gandersheim.”

The summer of our triumph bore the bitter fruit of loss. My heart turned upside down, a cup emptied of its life-sustaining fluid. For fifteen years I had shared my life with this young woman, my confidante through every victory and humiliation. Then, like a bolt of lightning striking down from a clear summer sky, came this. The girl who had come to me as a mute and then opened my heart was prepared to shake the dust from her sandals and walk away. The shock left me floored—I simply couldn’t grasp how my dearest friend could so abruptly announce her wish to leave.

Had the warning signs been there all along, I asked myself, evidence of a cooling in her regard for me, which I had been too blind to see? Perhaps she resented my rule over her as superior, or perhaps she even had ambitions of her own that her mother was only too happy to help her fulfill. Maybe she had become weary of living in my shadow. Or had Richardis, at the age of twenty-seven, finally outgrown me? That thought made me sag and feel impossibly old.

To think her mother would act so rashly behind my back. I tried to calm myself long enough to piece together the sober facts. At some point after leaving Rupertsberg, Guda had written a dire letter, full of lies and exaggerations, to the margravine, her aunt. The margravine, taking the message to heart, had then decided to withdraw from Rupertsberg her two remaining kinswomen—Richardis, her daughter, and Adelheid, her niece. The abbeys she had selected for them were the most elite in Saxony. But having never set foot in those houses, Richardis and Adelheid could not expect to be elected abbesses without strings being pulled and gold changing hands. I could not fathom a more blatant case of simony. Bassum was a Benedictine house of high esteem, established nearly three centuries ago. Gandersheim, Adelheid’s destination, was a convent for vowesses rather than nuns—secular noblewomen who made simple vows of chastity and who lived under an abbess’s spiritual guidance while still holding on to their wealth and possessions.

Tengswich of Andernach, among her other allegations, accused me of snobbery in soliciting novices of the aristocracy, whose dowries would secure Rupertsberg’s financial underpinnings that had hitherto been so precarious. I wondered what the good Mistress Tengswich would make of the ladies of Gandersheim.

My thoughts whirled back to the black heart of my anguish.
Why
was Richardis leaving me? Surely it was not in blind service to her mother’s ambition. I remembered how her face had gone dark as she divulged Guda’s insinuations. Had Richardis been persuaded to believe that my love for her was something monstrous?

There seemed little point in standing in Adelheid’s way if she was determined to leave, and so I granted her permission to sail on the next barge north. On our Rupertsberg landing, she knelt before me and kissed my hands until I raised her to her feet.

“A good tree is known by its good fruit,” she said, tears glittering in her eyes as she spoke to me before the assembled nuns. “Mother, never will I forget the years you spent so gently educating me. May our friendship never be cast into oblivion. May God, who is love, make our love strong.”

So sincere were her words that I gave her the kiss of peace and every benediction, even though I ached to lose Adelheid after thirty-eight years of friendship and sisterhood.

How much harder it was to allow Richardis to vanish from my life without at least trying to make her see reason. My heart broke to remember how I pleaded with her.

“You are a pure soul climbing your way to perfection,” I told her, endeavoring to speak as an abbess rather than a needy older woman who thought she would die if she lost her young friend. “How can you be happy in a faraway place, among strangers your mother has bribed, instead of here where everyone cherishes you?”

As she paced back and forth, I saw how conflicted she was. Though she repeated her mother’s arguments, that it was time for her to return to Saxony and be abbess of Bassum, her voice was hollow and deadened.
You love this place as much as I do,
I wanted to cry out.
You have blossomed here.
Underneath that brittle shell, she was still Cara, my beloved friend, if only I could reach through to her.