Hildegard’s Prophetic Enchanted Ecology
Andy Sinats, Victoria, BC
Volume 40 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: July 21, 2025
The Editor:
The vision that would become her Book of Divine Works. On its pages, between writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, between reckonings with the nature of eternity and the fundaments of love, she conceptualizes something the word for which would not be coined for another seven centuries: ecology.
Long before Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” before John Muir insisted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Hildegard places at the center of her cosmology the notion of viriditas, from the Latin for “green” — a greening life-force pervading the world, mirrored in the virtues that enlush the soul.
Human beings, she writes, are “co-creators with God” in the operations of nature. We must cooperate with one another in the task of protecting and nourishing this interconnected creation, and we must do so by integrating the rational and the intuitive in us.
(See related articles: “10 Years Later, Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ More Relevant than Ever” and “We Must Weep and Struggle with Those Who Suffer From the Damage Inflicted on the Earth” both found under the Other Feature Tab)
Andy Sinats, Victoria, BC