and when Datta made his trusting dive, they failed to catch him, and he and they tumbled together to the ground.
Dayadva: Father!
Crowd: He is hurt! Help him!
Dayadva: Father, why did I let you do it? What will we do?
Damyata: The great lady on the hill, surely she will help him.
Dall: Come, let us take him quickly to the abbess. She is a healer. Come, hurry! Help us, all of you!
The folk, sorry for their failure, but sorrier yet that they had got pulled into street acrobatics, dutifully lifted him and carried him up the hill to the nearby abbey to seek the help of the Great Lady on the Hill.
So their world brought them toward Hildegard’s gate.
Above the town, at Disibodenberg Abbey in a long, bright hallway, the nuns sang the Ordo Virtutum, number 7, the “Song about the Virgins,” a sober but joyful prayer, composed by Abbess Hildegard for their instruction and spiritual pleasure. The song drifted along like a breeze, as gentle to the singers as a waft of lilacs.
Irmengard: Lovely song.
Clementia: So long as we praise God and not ourselves.
Adelheid: So gloomy, Sister: can we not enjoy the song for the song?
Clementia: The song should guide us to God, not to ourselves and the dust of this world. Youth flies to pleasure rather than to Heaven.
Richardis: And may we not fly to both, joy in ourselves to be pleasures to God?
Clementia: Quite right, and wise for one so young. But let us not guide those younger yet astray.
Richardis: The devil flees such music; its coolness balms the soul and sends evil rushing from the flood of praise. So the song serves both God and us.
Adelheid: Thank you, Sister. I would learn and praise better.
Richardis: Then listen closely to Sister Clementia and heed her warnings; she will help you clear your path to heaven (Aside, to Adelheid she whispered then.) And be sure to enjoy the lovely songs!
As they paused from their singing to talk and enjoy the afternoon, Hildegard and Sister Keunegard joined them, walking arm-in-arm. Hildegard took great care with her charge, for the poor young woman, tall, thin, and pale, hung ever on the brink of madness.
Keunegard: Praise, O praise, let us sing the song, the song, O cry whelps and mongrels at His coming, O cry dust and ashes, slave and king, blood and bone, tree and leaf.
Richardis: How is she today, Mother Hildegard?
Hildegard: God save her, not at her best. Yet even in her dark hours, she sings God’s praise. Maybe we should all be so ill.
Keunegard: O do sing, O pulchrace facies, O pulchace.
To please God and Keunegard, the nuns sang, and Sister Clementia guided them outside, leaving Hildegard and Sister Richardis alone to talk. Fast friends since the day the younger woman’s wealthy family had placed her under Hildegard’s instruction, they often sat or walked together in the garden to talk and solve the world’s problems.
Nuns: O pulchrace facies,
Deum aspicientes et in aurora aedificantes,
O beatae virgines, quam nobiles estis.
Hildegard and Richardis watched Keunegard as Clementia led her out.
Hildegard: I believe she will be all right now that she is singing. She does love to sing. Please keep an eye on her, my dear. (Richardis followed Keunegard and Clementia, and Hildegard worries aloud.) Poor Keunegard, she suffers so with doubt and longing, doubting what she hears, longing for confirming visions. Lord, I believe; help now my unbelief. How can we know the source of our visions, self or God? If self, even then they draw me to God, thus surely not Infernal. Finally, we know only God and dust. The rest is empty as air.
Richardis (returning, smiling): Keunegard seems fine now. We may leave her under Clementia’s watchful eye, who would scare a lion into soft hymns.
Hildegard: I wish I knew what to do to help her. I do not want to discourage: her voices may come from God, and how well I know the silencing eye of authority and the choking muzzle of self-doubt.
Richardis: And yet you know your own visions, know them true. Do they not give some guide in hers?
Hildegard: I believe . . . I believe in my own visions because they burn upon my inner eye. How can I judge the burning of another’s eye or the ringing in another’s ear? Because I am an abbess, am I also a judge? I would open my heart to compassion and leave judgment to the Lord.
Richardis: But we must live holy and praise God, not defame Him among ourselves or others.
Hildegard: Maybe we praise by being. How can I silence another when I cannot silence myself, and would not? We must risk the voice of Satan to hear the voice of God. Prophecy weighs soul and body, circumscribes itself and pierces the heart—and damn the ill consequence. An hour after, I may not know myself what I have really seen, what may be God and what disease.
Richardis: Dearest Abbess and friend, you do know the truth of your visions. I have seen you in their midst, and I have seen them burn you, coming as they will, at His will. Do you not feel them even now, for poor Keunegard’s sake? Can you offer her no respite from ill dreams?
Hildegard: Perhaps I would deny mine for my sake even as I would deny Keunegard’s for hers. Believe me, they burn. But you are right: a moment’s memory turns them noonday clear. Hotter to hold than a fire-tongs, noisier than a dawn sky trumpeting spring rain they come, and sometimes ease thereafter. I see them now. The hand of God dips into my heart, and ever as the eye pants after His glory, He speaks: “Know the ways of the Lord; know His beauty.” And the trembling soul wakens with the beating of His voice to see the earth give birth to the morning sun, for so His spirit rises, a living fire, till my heart explodes in waves of embers that flood the paling sky, take shape, and fall again as God’s joyous tears.
As Hildegard fell silent, allowing herself a moment’s freedom to enter into the passions and sorrows of vision, footfalls pattered along the walkway, and Volmar, Hildegard’s secretary, burst upon them breathless, his feet pattering rapidly on the stones.
Volmar: News from Rome, holy Abbess: the Pope has graciously approved your work and would have you complete it. God be praised! You should have seen his face, lean and grave as a death mask, fit to grace a cathedral door to admonish all to holiness, and Kuno, of course, the old crab, scuttled about humphing and wishing for himself a cardinal’s robe and red enough in the face to match it when the Pope himself praised and blessed your visions.
Hildegard: Dear Brother, please slow down and catch your breath. We have time to hear about Rome and your travels. But you look thin. Are you well?
Volmar: Thin from joy and pale from awe at the holy city, a city such as you have never seen, Sister, splendid, bright with gold, churning with pomp: who could eat in such a place? And the caravans of pilgrims, constant as the rush and flood of the Tiber!
Hildegard: Then praise be to God you are free again of gold and pomp, and we have pilgrims enough here among the poor and sick who need our care.
Volmar:
