HvB Essay DRAFT 6 - Gnostic...

Analyse one or two examples of symbolic or sacred texts or images using the four senses hermeneutic.

Laura Shannon

Essay 2 – 13 April 2016

Canterbury Christ Church University – M.A. in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred

For this essay I have chosen to analyse an image from Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th-Century masterwork ‘Liber Scivias’, ‘Know the Ways’. Saint Hildegard was a Benedictine abbess, visionary, healer, philosopher, teacher, writer and composer, seen as the founder of scientific natural history in Germany (Newman 1997, Schipperges 1997, Throop 1998). It seems appropriate to apply the four senses hermeneutic to one of Hildegard’s images, since she would have been familiar with this exegetical method through her daily practice of lectio divina in the Benedictine tradition (Hildegard, Feiss, McNamara, and Benedict, 2005: 16).

I would like to begin with a brief overview of the four senses hermeneutic, and also to address some of the challenges of employing it in an academic context. I will then explore Hildegard’s image ‘The Trinity’ via the four senses, sharing my own subjective experience when we reach the tropological and anagogic levels, and in the spirit of uniting mind and body in the gnostic pursuit of wisdom, also making a slight detour to the realms of music and dance.

L. Shannon LS584 MMYMA4SYM 1

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)

The four senses hermeneutic

The hermeneutic of the four senses or four levels of interpretation has roots in the Hebrew method of scriptural study known as PaRDeS, a system of midrashic exegesis which also discerns four levels of meaning (Paintner 2014: 6). In this way, as Boyle (2000: 3) points out, this method of interpreting Scripture extends back ‘to Scripture itself’. The Hebrew hermeneutic was adopted by early desert Fathers and Mothers of the Church, including Origen and St Augustine, who originally articulated a threefold conception of God (Dunbar 1929: 263-9). This gave rise to the Christian prayer method known as lectio divina, practised widely in the desert monastic tradition as a way of understanding various modes of meaning in sacred texts. Lectio divina, whose four movements of lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio mirror the levels of the fourfold hermeneutic, was further refined by Saint Benedict of Nursia (Paintner 2014: 4). Its practice remains central to the Benedictine tradition, as Hildegard von Bingen affirms in her Explanation of the Rule of St. Benedict (Hildegard, Feiss, McNamara, and Benedict, 2005: 51-53).

The four senses interpretation became established among Christian scholars including ninth-century monk Walafrid Strabo, who articulated four levels of historia, allegoria, tropologia, and anagoge (Dunbar 1929: 271). In his twelfth-century book Scala Claustralium or ‘Ladder of Monks’, the Carthusian monk Guigo II called the four-part method ‘the ladder of four rungs by which we may well climb to heaven’ (Paintner 2014:5). Thomas Aquinas also referred to four distinct levels (Boyle 2000: 3-5). The development of the fourfold hermeneutic was also influenced by Neoplatonists, notably Proclus (Voss 2015: 2). It was known among later Christian Neoplatonists of the Renaissance such as Dante, who called it ‘polysemantic, that is, of many senses’ (Dante 1315: 3), and Ficino, who viewed it as a way to reconcile Christian and Platonist ideas (Snow-Smith 1993: 33-34).

The four senses hermeneutic as it has come to us comprises literal, allegorical, moral or tropological, and anagogical levels. In applying the fourfold hermeneutic to an image rather than a text in this essay I propose to follow Marie Angelo’s methodology of ‘imagining the image as a living presence…and learning of it through participating in it’ (Angelo 2005: 13). This echoes Neoplatonic understanding of the power of the symbol: for Iamblichus, the symbol was ‘the central link between the divine and human realms... the node on which the transcendent can meet the mundane’ (Struck 2004: 213). The mystery of this meeting lies at the very heart of the the fourfold hermeneutic.


Angela Voss explains the scholar’s engagement with the four senses hermeneutic as a means of ‘participation in the text or image, such that the subject-object divide is dissolved’ (Voss 2015: 2). She further describes it as

[A] process of deepening perception or unfolding consciousness, like the unpeeling of an onion, which gradually moves from the cause-and-effect, 'out there-in here' objectivity of our habitual mode of thinking to an increasing awareness of the unity of subject and object, until the kind of knowledge is reached which can only be described as spiritual in that it fully embraces both inner and outer, or psychic and material reality in a single act of perception. (Voss 2003: 2)

Snow-Smith (1993: 70) calls this process ‘a spiritual exercise to strengthen the soul in its ascent from the constraints of the terrestrial world to the freedom offered by a celestial reunion with God’ – however, she herself, in her analysis of Botticelli’s Primavera, employs the fourfold hermeneutic solely via the classically detached academic standpoint without any personal engagement. As Voss (2009:12-13) points out, this is a missed opportunity: because the tropological and anagogical levels concerns the mystery of initiation, the process ‘must, inevitably, be about [Snow-Smith’s] initiation, the implications of the symbolic meaning for her life.’

In seeking to follow the fourfold hermeneutic, therefore, it is essential not only to objectively analyse the image, but also to include the subjective response evoked in the viewer, as required by the tropological and anagogical levels.

Angela Voss (2009) presents the four levels of interpretation as a ‘methodology of the imagination’ with the potential to ‘teach students to begin to move from fact-accumulation to an awareness of a different kind of knowledge, one which arises at the interface of their soul with the world’ (Voss 2003: 1). This methodology offers ‘a deepening of consciousness, a way of laying out a process of transformation which leads to gnosis’ within an academic context (Voss 2015: 3).

The four senses interpretation recognised ‘that different modes of cognition are appropriate for different dimensions of reality’, so an authentic approach here inevitably ‘require[s] a willingness to release the hegemony of the rational mind.’ (Voss 2013:2) This is the model I shall attempt to follow.


Literal

Against a deep blue background, a large white radiant ring of six concentric circles surrounds a smaller sphere of 13-15 golden concentric circles. In the centre stands the sapphire-blue figure of a robed and barefoot man with long dark hair. His hands are raised at heart level, palms facing out. He faces the viewer with a direct and penetrating gaze, and a narrow silver aura surrounds and separates him from the golden sphere. We can better understand the literal appearance of this illumination by allowing Hildegard to describe it for us:

Then I saw a bright light, and in this light the figure of a man the color of a sapphire, which was all blazing with a gentle glowing fire. And that bright light bathed the whole of the glowing fire, and the glowing fire bathed the bright light; and the bright light and the glowing fire poured over the whole human figure, so that the three were one light in one power of potential. (Hildegard, Hart, and Bishop 1990: 161)


‘The True Trinity in the True Unity’

Hildegard von Bingen, Liber Scivias

Disibodenberg manuscript (1151)

Allegorical

In Dante’s words, the allegorical level reveals ‘truth hidden under a beautiful fiction’ (Dante 1304, in Snow-Smith 1993: 34). When we move from the literal to the allegorical level, we move beyond objective form towards the essential meaning the image seeks to convey. We are fortunate that Hildegard can explain for us the allegorical meaning of her vision, as recorded in Scivias: ‘The bright light... designates the Father; the figure of a man the color of a sapphire designates the Son; the gentle glowing fire without any flaw of aridity, mortality or darkness designates the Holy Spirit.’ Hildegard further explains that the father represents ‘justice’, the Son represents ‘the plenitude of fruition’, and the Holy Spirit ‘kindles the hearts of the faithful’ (Hildegard, Hart, and Bishop 1990: 161). We also know, from her medical masterwork Physica, that for Hildegard the gemstone sapphire ‘symbolizes a complete love of wisdom’ (Hildegard and Throop 1998: 142).

The artist1 has given us a sense of the force and power of the outermost white circle – the ‘radiant light’ of the Father – by allowing it to spill over onto the decorative border which contains the blue background, and also to fully surround and embrace the figure of Jesus through the opening at the top of the Christ figure. This overflow and interplay illustrate ‘the unity and inseparability of the Persons’ of the Trinity (Newman 1990: 31), indicating that Christ is ‘one with the Father and the Holy Spirit’ (Gutjahr 2011: 63), ‘inseparable in Divine Majesty’ (Hildegard, Hart, and Bishop 1990: 161).

Like desert mother Amma Syncletica, Hildegard counseled moderation and balance (Earle 2007: 30, 67) as part of ‘a wholesome moral life’ (Throop 1998: 6). The Trinity communicates this message of balance in a nonverbal way. Because gold and silver were considered hot and cold respectively (Hildegard and Throop 1998: 237-8), as well as signifying the pairs of opposites sun /moon and male /female, the presence of these two precious elements in Hildegard’s image can be seen to represent the harmonious balance between complementary forces.

The interpenetrating spheres serve to illustrate God’s words as Hildegard heard them in her vision: ‘Let no person ever forget to invoke Me, the sole God, in these Three Persons’ (Hildegard, Hart, and Bishop 1990: 162), while the ‘quivering lines suggest the vitality and energy of the living God’ (Newman 1990: 31). I believe that


1 It is not known fur certain whether Hildegard herself illuminated any of the manuscripts of her visions; scholars are divided on this point (see Maddocks 2001: 203-205).

Hildegard would have understood this ‘quivering’ vitality and energy in the form of music, particularly devotional song, which was an integral part of worship at her abbey.

Hildegard praises the Trinity in songs such as Te lucis ante terminum (in Hellauer 1997: 38) and Laus Trinitati (in Thornton 1995: 18):

Be exalted, father, through your son;be exalted through the kind spirit,with them, through him,one God with three names. Amen.

Praise be to the Trinity,who is sound, and life,and the creatrix of all things in their very life;and who is the praised one of the angelic host,and the wonderful radiance of secretsthat are unknown to men,and the life in all things.2

The hands of the sapphire figure are held upright in the ‘messenger attitude’ (Bonn 2013: 50), a posture also understood as ‘a prayerful position of receiving the will of God in obedience and awe’ (Gutjahr 2011: 63). This receptive step beyond literal meaning opens the viewer to potentially life-changing personal guidance, bringing us to the moral or tropological level, the ‘turn’ on the path towards self-knowledge.

Moral / Tropological

‘Tropological’ derives from the Greek ‘tropos’, ‘turning’; as Voss (2015: 5) explains, ‘here we reach the level of understanding which ‘turns’ the reader inward and demands reflection on the meaning of the text or image for their own life.’ Cornelius (2003: 4) simply states that here ‘[t]he soul turns towards truth.’

Hildegard sought always to guide those in her care towards this ‘turn’. She was known as an ‘[a]dmonisher, advising a change in ways’ (Schmandt & Kroker, 2014: 75), constantly urging her listeners towards correct moral behaviour. ‘As head of the


2 Hildegard was ‘by far the most famous composer of plainchant’, with more works than any other composer from the Middle Ages. A propos of her songs, it is interesting that ‘The principles of Christian rhetoric as set forth by St. Augustine [i.e., the fourfold hermeneutic] inform the monastic devotional practices for which the music was designed... thus the songs can be regarded as sonic analogues of the lectio divina’. (Campbell, Lomer, McGuire 2015: 1-3)

community, she had a special responsibility to insure the spiritual well-being of the nuns’ (Campbell, Lomer, McGuire 2015: 3). Hildegard was convinced that people have ‘responsibility not only for their private lives and personal happiness – not to mention their constant concern for the “salvation of their souls” – but for their fellow human beings as well, for their environment and the universe’ (Schipperges, 1997, p 80). For her, the moral level did not stop at the boundaries of the person, as only sustained, sincere effort from each individual could create a morally upright community.

In my case, the tropological ‘turn’ towards a more balanced way of life, in connection with others, the environment and the universe, turned out to be a key part of my personal experience of the image of the Trinity. In keeping with the gnostic approach I wish to employ in this essay, I would like to describe my experiences here.

At the time that I was immersed in background reading in preparation for this essay, I undertook an actual pilgrimage to Bingen, where I learned that ‘St. Benedict begins his rule by inviting us to listen with the ears of our heart ... this is the central movement of lectio divina: to encounter God in the center of our own beings [and to’ invite God to speak to us in an unmediated way’ (Paintner 2014: xi-xiii). With the ears and eyes of the heart, then, this is what I heard and saw.

On my pilgrimage to Bingen (8 December 2015) I viewed Hildegard’s large-scale illuminations, including the image of the Trinity, in the town museum, visited the main sites of her life and finally attended Vespers in the Abbey of St Hildegard, where approximately 50 Benedictine nuns continue to live by Hildegard’s teachings. The first notable personal experience occurred during the beautiful call-and-response singing by the nuns, which unexpectedly brought me into a timeless, endless state where despite the cold church I began to feel extremely warm. The image of the Trinity, with its radiant spheres of energy surrounding the central figure, came into my mind.

The second part of my personal experience began with a vivid dream the following night, where again I felt overcome by extreme heat, unusual for me. In the dream, I am in bed, swaddled in many layers of clothes so that my body has taken on a spherical shape like that surrounding the figure in the Trinity. I know it is time to awaken, to remove the layers and free the vibrational circles which are ready to radiate from my heart and body in intensely hot, spherical waves of energy as in the Trinity image. In my actual bed as I dream this, I am lying on my side, but in the dream I am lying as if ‘in state’ with my hands crossed over


my chest - an image of death preceding rebirth. The intensity of this dream woke me up. I immediately went to the open window and gazed out at the snowy forest, feeling the dream / revelation as a kind of literal opening to cosmic and natural forces in the wild fresh air of the starry winter night.

Dreams in this vein continued for some time thereafter, occasionally featuring the presence of Hildegard herself, explaining that the heat and light I was experiencing were part of a process of healing. For me this made perfect sense as I was still engaged in recovering from a disabling accident which had occurred the previous year. The light and heat itself had a specific radiance familiar to me from my Sufi meditation practice, known as the quality of qudus (Holy Spirit).

The third part of my personal experience began with the translation of these nighttime dreams or visions into my waking life and my work as a teacher of traditional dances. Not long after my visit to Bingen, as I was leading a dance circle of about 45 women, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the transcendent white light and extreme heat I had been experiencing in my dreams. My body began to pour with sweat. I felt a deep inner sense that this light was intended to reach the whole circle of women, and through them to touch others in their lives. Four of the women present later reported that at that moment they had felt an extraordinary and tangible heat flowing from me to them around the circle.

Months after these events, the dreams, visions, and experiences of revelation continue. Often there is a sense of oneness with landscape, nature, and the cosmos. In these ongoing encounters with the numinous, I have ‘received’ practical advice relating to my healing process, and have also ‘been given’ information to pass on to others.

Anagogic

The anagogic level ‘is about union, union of the act of perception with what is perceived, union of literal and symbolic, world and psyche’ (Voss 2003: 3-4). ‘Aν-αγωγή means “to lead” or “to carry upwards” or “to elevate”...’; thus for Dante, anagogic illumination ‘gives intimation of higher matters belonging to the eternal glory’ (Negri, 2001: 83).


I would say that the ongoing visionary experiences which began for me in Bingen3 certainly offered a glimpse of ‘higher matters belonging to the eternal glory’ and also changed me profoundly on the tropological and anagogical level. These visions defied all rational explanation, but I could recognise them in Hildegard’s description of her own process, whereby visions came to her ‘in the form of an intuitive feeling that instantly abrogated the laws of reason and produced [illumination]’ (Schipperges 1997: 10).

Beasley-Topliffe (2000: 71) states that the process of lectio divina ‘is only really completed when it begins to make a difference in the way we live.’ Initially finding myself speechless to describe what I had experienced, I discovered that many of those writing about the anagogical level seemed to speak for me, including Kallistos Ware (2002: 9), who describes the completion of the fourfold process thus: ‘In the innermost depths of my heart I transcend the bounds of my created personhood and discover within myself the direct unmediated presence of the living God.’

Those who write on the subject affirm that this kind of transcendent revelation is exactly what the anagogical level requires; this mitigates somewhat the sense of vulnerability I might otherwise feel when publicly describing such a private experience. Yet it is helpful to discover so many texts describing a process similar to mine, because although the anagogical level permits us to move beyond the rigid confines of objective intellect, we do not wish to abandon intellect altogether. As Voss (2015: 6) explains: ‘The human faculty of understanding has here united with the divine revelation through an act of affinity – it has been led to the condition of knowledge by which it ... resonates and merges with the source of being itself.’

As we enter this territory of mystical union, we must necessarily welcome the (re)union of mind and body as well as soul. Hildegard herself, or the God who spoke through her in vision, spoke tenderly of the intimacy of the relationship between wisdom and the one seeking it: ‘Let the one who sees with watchful eyes and hears with attentive ears welcome with a kiss my mystical words, which proceed from Me Who am life’ (Hildegard, Hart, and Bishop 1990: 165). Plotinus also speaks of a ‘kiss’ or ‘embrace’ (προσβολή) in the ‘final movement of the soul toward the One... beyond human reason, and beyond even undivided intellect’ (Struck 2004: 211-212).


3 These experiences would not have seemed strange to Hildegard, in whose time ‘[t]he distinction between the ‘medical’ and ‘visionary’ works is not as clear-cut as we might like to think. Hildegard’s medical and physiological ideas make up a great deal of her “Book of Divine Works”, and her so-called medical works were revealed by direct transmission from the Divine, in the same way her more theologically based visions were’ (Throop 1998, 2). One great advantage of the four senses hermeneutic is how it offers to reunite scientific and visionary aspects of the mind which in post-Enlightenment Western culture have become divided.

The striking ‘spherical energies’ embodied in my dream-experience recalled the mandala-like image of the Trinity itself, whose radiant spheres flowing or ‘quivering’ outwards from the human form may also reflect the key Neoplatonic concept of emanation: ‘The One radiates out from itself all that exists in the cosmos... Like the sun giving off light, it is undiminished by the outflow and produces the world out of an outflowing superabundance’ (Struck 2004: 207). This radiant power is described in Hildegard’s musical compositions in praise of the Holy Spirit and the energy she called viriditas: the ‘refreshing and rejuvenating, creative green life force whose radiance rose to the Divine Light’ (Schipperges 1997: 75). Her song O noblissima viriditas (Thornton 1994: 38) states simply: ‘You are held all around / by the embraces of the divine mysteries.’ This lyric aptly sums up the feeling of my revelatory experience in the dance circle.

Others too acknowledge the archetypal danced encounter with the divine. Plotinus speaks of ‘choral dance as the movement of the soul within the cosmos ... a moment of rapture in which the divided, embodied human subject to time and space, partakes of the utterly transcendent source of all existence’ (Plotinus 4.4.8, 33, 35, in Struck 2004: 211-212). Hildegard spoke of ‘the choral dances of heaven’ and characterised the hieros gamos of God and Sophia/Wisdom as ‘tripudium, a festal dance: God and his partner join in eternal cosmic play, which expands to embrace all creation in the symphonia of the saints and angels’ (Newman 1997: 49).

I will allow Hildegard the last word on the subject of the anagogical level, in an exhortation which perfectly tallies with my vision:

Be not lax in celebrating.Be not lazy in the festive service of God.Be ablaze with enthusiasm.Let us be an alive, burning offering before the altar of God.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I concur with Voss that the four senses hermeneutic has the refreshingpotential to transcend stale divisions between objective and subjective, rational and non-rational, intellectual and intuitive in a ‘turn’ or ‘tropos’ from separation to unity. Thus the fourfold method ‘may just begin to revolutionise the assumptions of an


academic method which separates knowledge from knower, thought from being, conception of reality from its experience’ (Voss 2003: 5-6).

As my experience indicates, the fourfold hermeneutic can be a way of bringing right and left hemispheres of the brain back into balance: in McGilchrist’s terms, inviting ‘the unifying tendency of the right hemisphere’ to dance with the left hemisphere’s ‘mechanistic view of the world’. This synthesis of both hemispheres, as set out for us step by step in the four senses hermeneutic, allows a progression from intuitive apprehension ‘via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytical understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone.’ (McGilchrist 2009: 206, italics mine).

In Hildegard’s own words, ‘Divinity is in its omniscience and omnipotence like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended’ (Fox 2001: 30). These words aptly describe her image of the Trinity, with its distinct Persons in indivisible oneness, and this image can be seen in turn as an illustration of the four levels themselves: discrete entities simultaneously forming an inseparable whole, where ‘all divisions are transcended and embraced, as all four levels become contained in one’ (Voss 2003: 3-4) in a way which we can fully experience but perhaps never fully understand.


References

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Campbell, N. M., Lomer, B. R.and McGuire, K. C. (2015). ‘The Symphonia and Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen’ at http://www.hildegard-society.org/p/music.html (Accessed: November 15, 2015).

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