In the twelfth century, Hildegard von Bingen, a Benedictine abbess in the Rhineland, decided that the existing words were not enough. She had things to name that Latin could not quite hold—not mystical things beyond language, but specific things, things with edges and functions and places in an order she could see clearly. So she made new words. She called God Aigonz. She called an angel Zuuenz. From there she built a small vocabulary of several hundred nouns, organized into a list beginning with the divine and moving downward through ranks of being.
This is the part of Hildegard’s work that is most disarming, because it is so hard to categorize. It is not quite art, not quite philosophy, and not quite linguistics. The standard interpretation, that Lingua Ignota was a devotional exercise, a secret script, or a kind of private game, never quite satisfies, because the discipline behind it is too evident. She was not playing. She was doing what she did everywhere: insisting on precision. Insisting that the right name for a thing was not a luxury but a necessity, because to name something wrongly was to place it wrongly within the order of things, and the order of things was not decorative. It was structural. It held.
She was, by the traditional account, the tenth child of a Rhenish knight, handed over to the Church in infancy as a family tithe—the ecclesiastical ten percent. What kind of mind emerges from that beginning? Not a mystical one, exactly. The impulse behind Lingua Ignota is too orderly and taxonomic, too interested in getting the hierarchy right. Not a scientific one, in any sense we would recognize. Something else: a mind for which naming and knowing were the same act, and for which the failure to name precisely was not an intellectual shortcoming but a kind of damage to the world itself.
She had a word for what the damage threatened. She called it viriditas—greenness, vitality, the power of living things to be fully themselves. And if you want to understand Hildegard von Bingen, viriditas is where you have to start, because it is the thread that runs through everything she wrote and composed and built. Without it her work looks like a collection of impressive achievements in separate fields, when it is actually one thing seen from different angles.
A Mind Without Disciplines
We come to her now through categories she would not have recognized. She appears in histories of medicine, music, mysticism, and of proto-feminism. She appears on reading lists for courses in natural science, theology and in the philosophy of mind. Each of these framings captures something real and misses something essential. The person who emerges from the disciplinary accounts is a kind of medieval polymath, extraordinarily gifted, moving with unusual ease between areas of inquiry that were not yet formally separated. She is admirable, somewhat anomalous, and finally a little mysterious: a mind that seems to exceed its context.
But Hildegard did not experience herself as moving between fields. She was not a polymath in the sense of having mastered several distinct disciplines. She was a person for whom the distinctions did not yet exist. Medicine, music, vision, governance, and language were not separate territories she traveled between; they were different expressions of a single truth she was always in the presence of. The mystery is not how she managed to think so broadly. The mystery is what it felt like to think from inside a world where breadth was not an achievement but an assumption, and what we lose when we can no longer imagine that feeling from the inside.
Viriditas: The Greening Power
Viriditas appears first in her medical writings, in Physica and Causae et Curae, where she describes the living body as a system in constant negotiation with its environment. She does not think of illness as invasion or malfunction. She thinks of it as a slow drift out of proportion, a gradual shift in the balance of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness that eventually tips the whole system into distress. What causes the drift is not a pathogen but a way of living: poor food, inadequate rest, sustained emotional strain, exposure to harsh conditions over time. The body is not a machine that breaks. It is a process that loses its rhythm.
Recovery, accordingly, is less a correction than a restoration. She praises spelt for its capacity to “make good flesh and good blood,” and describes wormwood, taken with cooked wine and honey, as simultaneously checking melancholy, clearing the eyes, strengthening the heart, warming the stomach, and purging the intestines. One plant, one preparation, multiple systems restored at once. The language throughout is one of tendency and balance. What a good remedy does is assist the body in returning to what it already knows how to be.
The greening power
This is where viriditas enters. She describes it as the greening power: the force that makes a plant push upward through soil in March, that makes a human body repair itself after illness, that makes a community of people living in right relation to one another grow in clarity and purpose over time. It is not a metaphor for biological vitality. It is, in her understanding, the same force operating at different scales. The plant’s green upward push, the body’s return to health, and the community’s moral flourishing are not analogous to one another. They are instances of one thing.
If the greening power is real
The temptation is to read viriditas as poetic shorthand, a way of gesturing toward connections that Hildegard could feel but not quite explain. That reading is available, but it dissolves the most demanding thing about her work. The distinction between metaphor and claim matters because it determines what counts as medical knowledge. If viriditas is merely a metaphor, if plant growth and human health are similar but separate, then the botanical remedies are interesting folk medicine, the moral claims are theology, and the connection between them is poetic at best. But if viriditas is real, if the greening power actually moves through plants and bodies and communities as a single force, then medicine, moral philosophy, and natural history are not separate inquiries. They are different ways of studying the same phenomenon.
For example, to understand how wormwood behaves in the body is to understand something about how vitality flows through living systems. To understand how a community loses its moral clarity is to understand something about how that flow gets interrupted. The disciplines are not separate. They are different angles on viriditas.
Hildegard von Bingen’s Music
In her musical compositions, the same logic governs a different medium. Her melodies extend far beyond the narrower ranges common in much medieval chant, ascending and descending in long arcs that require sustained control and careful breath management from the singers. She was not composing for ease of performance. She was composing for what the physical discipline of singing teaches the body—and, through the body, the mind.
In Ordo Virtutum, one of the earliest surviving musical dramas in Western history, the virtues sing and the devil does not. This is not a theatrical choice. It is a structural argument. Harmony, in her understanding, is what alignment feels like from the inside. When the body is in proportion, when the community is in right relation, when the soul is oriented toward what is true, the result is not just health, peace, or clarity. The result is something like music. And when alignment fails, what you get is not discord but silence: the absence of the capacity to participate in the order that sound both reflects and reinforces.
The same argument, made visually
Her illuminations make the same argument visually. In the image known as the Cosmic Egg, one of the illustrations from Scivias, concentric rings enclose living forms within luminous boundaries. Flames circle the outer rim. Stars are held within layered bands. Light passes through defined spaces. The image arrives before the text, so you see the order before you read about it, and the sequence is deliberate. Hildegard understood that some things could be shown more precisely than they could be said. Which is why she also understood that the failure of language to name things precisely was not a philosophical problem but a practical one. If the word slipped, the understanding slipped. If the understanding slipped, the practice slipped. And if the practice slipped, viriditas diminished, and things that should have been growing began to wither instead.
Governance as Diagnosis
This is why the letters matter as much as the medical texts and the musical compositions. She wrote to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa warning him that pride and disorder weaken a realm gradually, eroding its stability through accumulation rather than rupture. She wrote to bishops and abbots in the same language she used to describe melancholy: as a condition that develops slowly, that reverberates through the whole system, that resists correction when it has been allowed to deepen too long.
There is something worth pausing on here. Hildegard was not a political theorist, and her letters are not systematic. She was an abbess writing to powerful men, often at their request, and her influence depended entirely on their willingness to receive what she said. Several of them didn’t. Barbarossa, for his part, ignored her warnings and pressed ahead with the schism she had cautioned against. The logic of viriditas did not automatically translate into political persuasion, and pretending otherwise would make her more tidy than she was.
What the letters show, even accounting for that, is that she was applying the same diagnostic eye to governance that she applied to the body. Excess, neglect, and imbalance destabilize communities slowly, just as poor diet weakens a body. The deterioration is gradual, the correction requires patience, and the underlying question is always the same: what would allow this system to flourish rather than diminish?
What We Lost When Knowledge Was Divided
We have no equivalent question. This is the loss that Hildegard von Bingen’s work makes visible, if you look at it from the right angle.
The division of knowledge into disciplines produced real gains in narrow domains. But something was also lost, and it is harder to name than the gains, because the loss is precisely the ability to hold things together, to see viriditas as a single phenomenon operating across scales rather than as a family of metaphors that happen to point in the same direction. We can describe the connection between emotional state and physical health, but we describe it as a connection, as a relationship between two things that are otherwise distinct. Hildegard did not describe a connection. She described a single process that expressed itself differently in different media.
Lingua Ignota was her attempt to preserve that precision in language, to ensure that the names did not lose their grip on what they were naming as the world grew more complex and the categories multiplied. She failed, in the sense that the language did not survive as a living tongue. But the attempt remains, along with the texts, the music, and the illuminations—a record of what it looked like to hold everything together before we forgot that was possible.
