Saints are often obscured by the patina of devotion; or hidden by images that fulfill our needs. For generations, this has been Francis of Assisi’s situation, patron saint of animals, often seen perched alongside birdbaths. Not as widely known as an object of popular devotion, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) suffers from a similar obfuscation amid her brilliance and complexity of person: it can be hard to do the historical person justice and easier to hold on to one facet--for instance, the mystic, the musician, the medical sage among many others.
From the Monastery to the City: Hildegard of Bingen and Francis of Assisi,edited and with commentary by Roger Haight, SJ (†19 June 2025), Alfred Pach III, and Amanda Avila Kaminski seeks to bring these two saints out of cloisters built of the images we have created for them. The editors/authors seek to present them in a new way for students and general readership that both respects their historical context and persons, and interprets them for our own day. To this end, the book is divided into two parts, one for each spiritual author: an historical introduction and discussion, excerpts from their texts (reprinted from contemporary translations with their helpful and solid scholarly footnotes included), and then for each a reflective essay about their importance for today, on the subjects of theology, ethics, and spirituality.
The general afterword for the series, “Past Light on Present Life,” acknowledges the “slipperiness” of the term “spirituality,” thus providing two definitions that inform the series and this particular volume: “spirituality is the way that people live in relation to what they consider to be ultimate” (163) and (more particularly) “Christian spirituality refers to the way that individuals or social entities live out their encounter with God in Jesus Christ by a life in the Spirit” (164). The series seeks to overcome the distancing brought about by a critical, historical analysis of texts as well as a bias that “classic” texts cannot speak authoritatively to life and the situation of the world today. The overcoming of these challenges necessitates creating a space in which historical persons might speak to readers through their texts and a retrieval as well as interpretation of past persons, past thought, past spirituality in a way that is fresh and inspiring for audiences today, especially Christians.
Accordingly, the editors have curated a set of each spiritual authors’ words, thoughts, and texts, effectively putting them into something of a dialogue with one another--drawing upon Hildegard’s commentary on Creation (from her The Divine Works) and from Francis’s rule texts, directives to early Franciscan followers, and (of course!) his Canticle of Creatures. The selection of texts allows Hildegard’s voice to be heard on creation, something Francis’s name often evokes. It likewise allows Francis’s practical ordering of a religious and spiritual life to emerge in a grounded manner--something we might more readily associate with a life Benedictine (such as that of Hildegard and her nuns at Rupertsberg) and its foundational rule text.
Sometimes the selection of texts, while allowing for encounter between the two authors in a way that is informative and deepening, perhaps obscures as much as it illuminates. For instance, Hildegard’s intense visionary experiences and her apocalypticism as well as her artistic endeavors generally do not appear. For instance, Francis’s own religious and spiritual experience also receives insufficient attention. I mention these two examples because, while the historical introductions go a considerable distance in eliciting a context for each religious writer, and the excerpts of their texts are deep, substantial, and fascinating, in some way, both the selections and (particularly) the interpretative essays skirt questions of religious and spiritual experiences on the part of both, perhaps out of a discomfort with the vagueness of “mysticism” as a category of spirituality. The interpretative essay on Hildegard elides the human faculty of the imagination with her visions, leading a reader to conclude that her visions were more akin to imagined scenes and images cultivated using the methods developed by Ludolph of Saxony and Ignatius of Loyola (63). Likewise, too, the interpretative essay on Francis discounts his personal experience in the interest of recovering what he “symbolizes” in terms of poverty, radicality, humility in the key of social analysis and liberation theology. (The author recognizes a debt to Leonardo Boff’s work on Francis and clearly indicates a neglective/exclusionary focus on social engagement in the footnotes [158]).
In the midst of many strengths in terms of historical reading and extracting texts which are informative and theologically deep, accomplishing many of the goals of this series, I find this skirting of religious and spiritual experience in the interpretative essays to exhibit a bias in our own milieu, a bias in ignoring or reducing the miraculous, the supernatural, as highlighted in recent historical work by Brad Gregory (History and Theory,45/December 2006) and (even more recently) Carlos Eire in his book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale, 2023). The authors and their essays have done so much to bring about an appreciation of Hildegard and Francis in ways that are stimulating and challenging in terms of creation, incarnation, liberation, and poverty, and yet neglect or bracket in some way the depth of their immersive experience in the mysterious life of a God who wanted to be known by a gifted abbess and a rich merchant’s son.
Despite my disagreement about how historical recovery and retrieval should be informed by contemporary concerns and when it should challenge them, this is an excellent book, one suitable for teaching and general readership seeking an entry into the minds, hearts, spirits of two remarkable figures who continue to be important today. Scholars, students, and other readers will find their visions expanded beyond the images in the niches these saints often occupy in our world and the loving veneer stripped away, encountering them in their context, in their own words, and accompanied by excellent scholarly commentary as well as an argument for their continuing, inspiring relevance in a world that grapples with ecological crisis and increasing poverty.