Hildegard of Bingen, Epistle 47 to the

Prelates of Maim, in Oliver Strunk,

ed., Source Readings in Music History
(SRMH), rev. ed. by Leo Treitler (New
York and London, 1998)

23 Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard was born in 1098 to noble parents near Spanheim in the Rhineland.
She was dedicated to the Church from infancy and took the veil as a girl of
fifteen at the Benedictine cloister of Disiboden, where she became superior in
1136. In about 1150 she founded her own convent on the Rupertsberg, in the
Rhine Valley near Singen. She remained there until her death in 1179, attracting
a wide following through the fame of her prophetic visions. Known as the “Sibyl
of the Rhine,” her advice was sought by no less than popes, bishops, and kings.
She was a person of extraordinarily varied talents; the author of mystical works,
medical works, liturgical poetry set to music, and a morality play.
The excerpt translated here is from a letter she wrote near the end of her life
to the hierarchy of Mainz. They had ordered-as punishment for Hildegard’s
alleged burying of an excommunicated individual in the consecrated ground of
her convent’s cemetery-that the nuns of the convent be deprived of the sacra-
ments and that they be forbidden to celebrate the Office with music. Hildegard’s
letter, which recounts what she saw and heard in a vision, reveals at once the
pain of being deprived of the sung Office, and her view of music’s profoundly
spiritual nature.

FROM Epistle 47: To the Prelates of Mainz

And I saw something beyond this-as in obedience to you we have until now
given up the singing of the Divine Office, celebrating it only by quiet reading-
and I heard a voice coming from the living light, telling of those various kinds
of praise concerning which David speaks in the Psalms: “Praise him with the
TEXT: Patrobgia Latina 197, cols. 219-21. Translation by James McKinnon.
184 2 3 H I L D E C A R D O F BINCEN
sound of the trumpet, praise him with the psaltery and the cithara, praise him
with the tympanum and the chorus, praise him with strings and the organ,
praise him with the well-sounding cymbals, praise him with the cymbals of
jubilation. Let every spirit praise the Lord.“’ In these words we are taught
about inward concerns by external objects, how according to the makeup of
material things (the properties of musical instruments) we ought best to con-
vert and to refashion the workings of our interior man to the praise of the
Creator. When we earnestly strive so to praise, we recall how man sought the
voice of the living Spirit, which Adam lost through disobedience, he, who still
innocent before his transgression, had no little concourse with the voices of
angelic praise (which angels, who are always called spirits, thanks to the Spirit
who is God, possess by reason of their spiritual nature). Thus Adam lost that
likeness of an angelic voice which he had in Paradise, and thus he went to sleep
in that musical science with which he was endowed before his sin. And upon
awakening from his slumber he was rendered unaware and uncertain of what
he had witnessed in his dreams, when deceived by a prompting from the Devil,
and repudiating the will of his Creator, he became entangled in the darkness
of inner ignorance because of his sin. But God, who restores the souls of the
elect to their original state of bliss by the light of truth, wrought this in his
wisdom: that when the Spirit renewed, with a prophetic infusion, the heart of
however many, they recovered, by reason of this interior illumination, whatever
had been lost from that which Adam possessed before the punishment for his
derilection of duty.
But so that mankind, rather than recall Adam in his exile, be awakened to
those things also-the divine sweetness and the praise which Adam had
enjoyed before his fall-the same holy prophets, taught by that Spirit which
they had received, not only composed psalms and canticles, which were to be
sung in order to kindle the devotion of those hearing them, but also invented
diverse instruments of the musical art, which would be played with a great
variety of sound. They did so for this reason: so that the listeners would-as
much from the construction and sound of these instruments, as from the mean-
ing of the words sung to their accompaniment-be educated in interior mat-
ters, as said above, while being urged on and prodded by exterior objects. Wise
and studious men imitated these holy prophets and invented numerous types
of human instruments, so that they could make music for the delight of their
souls, and adapt what they sang by the bending of their finger joints, as if
recalling Adam who was formed by the finger of God (who is the Holy Spirit)-
that Adam in whose voice, before he fell, resided the sound of all harmony and
the sweetness of the entire musical art, and the power and sonority of whose
voice (had he remained in that state in which he was created) the fragility of
mortal men could not sustain.
1. Psalm 150.~.
Epistle 47: To the Prelates of Maim 185
But when his deceiver, the Devil, heard what man had begun to sing by the
inspiration of God, and that man was invited by this to recall the sweetness of
the songs of heaven, seeing that his cunning machinations had gone awry, he
was so frightened that he was greatly tormented, and he continually busied
himself in scheming and in selecting from the multifarious falsehoods of his
iniquity, so that he did not cease to disrupt that affirmation and beauty of divine
praise and spiritual hymnody, withdrawing it not only from the heart of man by
evil suggestions, unclean thoughts, and various distractions, but even (wherever
possible) from the heart of the Church, through dissension, scandal, and unjust
oppression. Wherefore you and all other prelates must exercise the greatest
care, and before you silence by your decrees the voice of some congregation
that sings the praises of God, or before you suspend it from administering or
receiving the sacraments, you must first air the reasons for doing this by the
most meticulous investigation.
And pay heed that you are led to take such action by zeal for the justice of
God, rather than by anger, by some unjust impulse, or by the desire for
revenge, and always beware of being circumvented in your judgments by Satan,
who deprived man of celestial harmony and the delights of Paradise. And con-
sider, that just as the body of Jesus Christ was born of the Holy Spirit from the
purity of the Virgin Mary, so too was the song of praise born in the Church
according to celestial harmony through the Holy Spirit; for the body is in truth
the clothing of the soul, which has a living voice, and thus it is fitting that the
body, together with the soul, sing praises to God through its own voice.
Whence the Prophetic Spirit proclaims symbolically2 that God is to be praised
on cymbals of jubilation and on other musical instruments, which clever and
industrious men invented, since all the arts that contribute to the utility and
need of mankind were discovered by some breath that God sent into the body
of man.3 Thus it is just that God be praised in everything. And since man sighs
and moans with considerable frequency upon hearing some song, as he recalls
in his soul the quality of celestial harmony, the prophet David, considering with
understanding the nature of what is spiritual (because the soul is harmonious)
exhorts us in the psalm, “ Let us confess the Lord on the cithara, let us play to
him on the psaltery of ten strings,“4 intending that the cithara, which sounds
from below, pertains to the discipline of the body; that the psaltery, which
sounds from above, pertains to the striving of the spirit; and that the ten strings
2. Persignzjicationem is translated “ symbolically” here; this is an obvious reference to the standard
allegorical treatment of musical instruments referred to above in note 3 of the reading from St.
Basil (pp. 12-13) and note 6 of the reading from St. John Chrysostom (p. 16). In most circum-
stances such symbolical reference to musical instruments implies that actual musical instruments
were not in use. However, by dwelling on the subject in the present reading, Hildegard creates
the impression that the playing of instruments in her convent might very well have been a
common practice, now forbidden by the Mainz hierarchy.
3. Compare Genesis 2.7.
4. Psalm 32(X4).1.
186 2 3 H I L D E G A H D O F UINGEN

refer to the contemplation of the L~w.~ Thus they who without the weight of
sure reason impose silence upon a church in the matter of songs in praise of
God, and thereby unjustly deprive God of the honor of his praise on earth, will
be deprived themselves of the participation in the angelic praises heard in
Heaven, unless they make amends by true regret and humble penitence.
5. There are three instances here of that symbolical treatment of biblical instruments referred to
above in note 2; each of them is met with again and again in the exegetical literature of the
patristic and medieval periods. The cithara (a type of lyre, with its sounding chamber at the
bottom of the instrument) was taken to refer to the more mundane virtues, such as self-denial;
the psaltery (probably understood by the Church Fathers as a triangular harp with its sounding
chamber on its upper member) was taken to refer to the more spiritual virtues such as the
practice of contemplation; while the ten strings of the psaltery were taken to refer to the Ten
Commandments.