The allegorical figure of Ecclesia, the
virgin Holy Mother
Church, was one of
Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098-1179) most frequent visionary images. She appears
no less than five times in her first visionary work, Scivias, for which Hildegard later supervised the creation of a
deluxe illuminated manuscript, the Rupertsberg Codex. Though the original has
been lost since its evacuation to Dresden
in 1945, it survives in black-and-white photographs and a hand-executed
facsimile crafted by the nuns at the Abbey of St. Hildegard in the 1920’s, from
which the images that accompany today’s post come.[1] The visual
images of Ecclesia in this manuscript are vast, powerful, and often extraordinarily
hybridized, with a variety of non-human elements grafted on, each with its own
allegorical significance. Sometimes, as in the image for Scivias II.5 (Fig. 1), of the virginal orders of her mystical body,
the monumental quality of flaming gold wings rising from Ecclesia’s shoulders
and of the silver mountains comprising her lower body inspires awesome wonder.
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| Figure 1 |
There is another image of Ecclesia, however, that is gruesome and disturbing—her rape by the Antichrist in Scivias III.11 (Fig. 2). Hildegard describes her (e)sc(h)atological vision of the last days:
And I saw again
the figure of a woman whom I had previously seen in front of the altar that
stands before the eyes of God; she stood in the same place, but now I saw her
from the waist down. And from her waist to the place that denotes the female,
she had various scaly blemishes; and in that latter place was a black and
monstrous head. It had fiery eyes, and ears like an ass’, and nostrils and
mouth like a lion’s; it opened wide its jowls and terribly clashed its horrible
iron-colored teeth. (…) And behold! That monstrous head moved from its place
with such a great shock that the figure of the woman was shaken through all her
limbs. And a great mass of excrement adhered to the head; and it raised itself
up upon a mountain and tried to ascend the height of Heaven. And behold, there
came suddenly a thunderbolt, which struck that head with such great force that
it fell from the mountain and yielded up its spirit in death. And a reeking
cloud enveloped the whole mountain, which wrapped the head in such filth that
the people who stood by were thrown into the greatest terror.[2]
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| Figure 2 |
Appearing in the lower register of the
image, Ecclesia’s upper body is the golden orans figure familiar from earlier
in the manuscript. Her lower body, however, has been replaced with a brutal
assortment of bruising reds and scaly browns, capped with the monstrous and
grotesque head of the Antichrist leering out from her genitals, his phallic ear
erect for penetration. Such grotesque hybrids become common in the marginal art
of gothic manuscripts, where the gryllus, for example, in the lower margin of
Psalm 101 in the Ormesby Psalter (Fig. 3) might seem to echo the genital mask
in Hildegard’s image. Indeed, the little prayer-book of Marguerite that Michael
Camille examined in his seminal Image on
the Edge offers a telling comparison: a woman’s book whose pages “are
pregnant in the sense that they teem with gynaecological promise even within
the detritus of fallen, decomposing life.”[3] There is, however, a
crucial difference between Marguerite’s prayer-book and Hildegard’s Scivias: far from being on the margins,
Hildegard’s Antichrist is found at the very center of the Church, inside her,
taking over her womb and thus corrupting her mission: “I must conceive and give
birth!” (as she announces in Hildegard’s vision of the Church and Baptism in Scivias II.3).
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| Figure 3 |
Hildegard describes this violent hybridized
rape as the consequence of “fornication and murder and rapine” committed by
Ecclesia’s own ministers, their “vile lust and shameful blasphemy (…) infused”
in them by the Antichrist’s “voracious and gaping jaws” (Scivias III.11.12-13). Madeline Caviness has suggested that
Hildegard’s radical alteration of “existing iconographic codes” in this image
was so threatening as to render it obsolete from successive periods of medieval
art, yet provocatively resonant “with numerous self-images of contemporary
feminist artists, who fragment and mask their bodies to repel the male gaze.”[4]
Richard Emerson, likewise, finds the visual image to be far more radical and
disturbing than the mostly conventional account of the Antichrist offered in
the vision’s commentary (Scivias
III.11.25-40), whose innovations can be understood as the product of the
conventionally symbolic exegetical imagination of twelfth-century monastics.[5]
One of Hildegard’s extraordinary contributions to the Antichrist tradition is
to portray the fiend as a sexual subversive and criminal—and to move that
subversion from the margins into the very heart and womb of Mother Church
herself.
-Contributed by Nathaniel Campbell
Notes
[2]
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans.
Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (Paulist Press, 1990).
[3]
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The
Margins of Medieval Art (Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 54.
[4]
Madeline Caviness, “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once’,” in Voice
of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman
(University of California Press, 1998), pp. 110-124, at 117-8.
[5]
Richard K. Emmerson, “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s
Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and
Visionary Experience,” Gesta 41:2
(2002), pp. 95-110.
Images
Fig. 1: Scivias II.5: The Orders of the Church
(Ecclesia). Facs. of Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS 1 (Rupertsberg Codex,
lost), fol. 66r. Source: Abbey
of St. Hildegard
Fig. 2: Scivias III.11: The Five Ages and the
Antichrist born of the Church. Facs. of Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS 1
(Rupertsberg Codex, lost), fol. 214v. Source: Abbey
of St. Hildegard
Fig. 3: Gryllus,
in detail from lower margin of Ormesby Psalter, Ps. 101: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 366, fol. 131r. Source: Bodleian
Library
