Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century

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In Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts, Margot E. Fassler unfurls the ways in which Christian theologians and scientists in the twelfth century thought about the universe, not only in their treatises and scientific calculations, but also in their ecclesiology, their visual arts, music, poetry, and drama. It is only through accounting for all these dimensions of understanding that a sense of the whole can be achieved, for this work, Fassler shows, the Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen and her Scivias, her collection of twenty-six religious visions, offer a unique and skillful guide. Fassler examines the connections between Hildegard's formation as a nun, the ways in which she would have experienced and understood the liturgy, and the medieval liturgy's cosmological underpinnings. Exploring how the Feast of All Saints, the day of the nuns' consecration, informs Scivias, Fassler leads readers through the six stages of creation, or the hexameron, as Hildegard understood them, beginning with her beliefs about time before time and matter before matter. Her hexameron is rooted in her own creation as a consecrated virgin, divinely commissioned to write down her visions, the most famous of which presents the universe as "a huge form, rounded and shadowy, and shaped like an egg" from which all emerges until that point at which, its God-given purpose fulfilled, it ceases to exist. Though this view of the cosmos, its creation and workings, is far removed from modern understandings, Fassler's analysis reveals how Hildegard's dynamic and systematic understanding resonates with contemporary issues in a surprising number of ways. To know Hildegard's views both as expressed in this treatise and in its illuminations and songs is to gain otherwise unattainable knowledge about the past and about medieval cosmological investigations in their multidisciplinary splendor"--