As a rule, medieval mystics tend to be either descriptive, reporting their experience in vivid sensory imagery, or analytical, subdividing their experience into distinct stages so as to guide others along the same path. Hildegard combines both approaches. Some medieval mystics also see their experience as producing a supra-rational knowledge not available elsewhere, while others describe their experience as producing unearthly joy, an emotional reward, and a moral rebirth; still others see mystic union as combining cognitive and affective experience.
Hildegard is in the first category. She tells us that her visions yielded a grasp of the mysteries of the Christian faith she would not have gained otherwise. She is quite specific about her psychic state during her visionary experiences. Her view on that subject is atypical. Her visions, which she reports with a full range of the sensory analogies on which mystics call, occurred when her soul was in its normal psychic condition, without the suspension of her ordinary sensory functions. She distinguishes this state from one of rapture or hallucination. On the basis of her personal experience, Hildegard maintains that it is not necessary to have a special mystic aptitude or to undergo special ascetic practices in order to be a visionary. Any serious believer can be one: all that is needed is an observance of the monastic rule, attentive reading of Scripture, and devout participation in the liturgy. Of particular importance – and, here, Hildegard manifests a devotion increasingly popular in the twelfth century – is the reception of the Eucharist at mass. It is Eucharistic communion that, typically, triggers her visionary experiences.
From: Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 by Marcia L. Colish; The Yale Intellectual History of the West (John W. Burrow, William J. Bouwsma, and Frank M. Turner, general editors) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 226. Colish is Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.
