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Thirty-Eight-Year-Old Hildegard's Role In The Reformation

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In 1136, thirty-eight-year-old Hildegard was passed the role of abbess after the death of Jutta in her forty-fifth year. It was during her year as an abbess that she decided to share her visions with the world. Each time Hildegard had a vision she became more ill, therefore, she believed keeping these visions to herself and not sharing them had made her more ill. As a young woman, she had a stormy prophetic vision, which she described as “fiery light.”
“I saw an extremely strong, sparkling, fiery light coming from the open heavens. It pierced my brain, my heart and my breasts through and through like a flame which did not burn; however, it warmed me. It heated me up very much like the sun warns an object on which it is pouring out rays.” …show more content…

She painted it and set it to music, which is why she speaks about her paintings, visions, and mandalas as “illuminations.” In Hildegard's teachings, she teaches about the Cosmic Christ and the image of God in all things. She teaches about the workings of the physical environment as a hidden meaning of the principles of God. Hildegard’s role in the Reformation is one that is compared to the prophets of the Old Testament. She speaks for God by transmitting only the words that she has received from he himself. There are two central themes that continue to reoccur within Hildegard’s visions, they are the work (opus) and the word (verbum). Through her visions Hildegard structures the teachings of the cosmos, which is the idea that nature mysteriously affects the course taken by the world, which is its history. Through visions Hildegard saw and felt the divine qualities of everything in her natural environment. She felt God’s spiritual characteristics in “fire and water, clouds and streams, the sun and stars, winds and storms, the moon and the night, a spring, a meadow, and the flowers.” To people today, Hildegard’s visions would be considered abnormal, but to those that lived through the Middle Ages, Hildegard’s visions

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