Building on Patrick Nugent's summary of McGinn, here, for what
it's worth, is a brief bit from Sack's chapter on Hildegard in _The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_:
"Singer (1958 [mentioned by McGinn]) in the course of an extensive
essay on Hildegard's visions, selects the following phenomena as most
characteristic of them:
"In all a prominent feature is a point or a group of points of
light, which shimmer and move, usually in a wave-like manner, and are
most often interpreted as stars or flaming eyes. In quite a number of
cases one light, larger than the rest, exhibits a series of concentric
circular figures of wavering form; and often definite
fortification-figures are described, radiating in some cases from a
coloured area. Often the lights gave that impression of _working_,
boiling or fermenting, described by so many visionaries...
"Hildegard writes:
"The visions which I saw I beheld neither in sleep, nor in dreams,
nor in madness, nor with my carnal eyes, nor with the ears of the flesh,
nor in hidden places; but wakeful, alert, and with the eyes of the spirit
and the inward ears, I perceive them in open view and according to the
will of God."
Sacks recounts one of her visions filled with "falling stars" and
writes that our "literal interpretation would be that she experienced
a shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their passage
being succeeded by a negative scotoma..."
But, always the humanist, he concludes that her visions "provide
a unique example of the manner in which a physiological event, banal,
hateful, or meaningless to the vast majority of people, can become, in a
privileged consciousness, the substrate of supreme ecstatic inspiration."
It's interesting that Hildegard's contemporary and protege,
Elisabeth of Schonau, whose visions of the BVM's assumption helped cement
the details of that non-scriptural event, suffered the same sort of poor
health as Hildegard, though no migraines that I know of. And, like
Hildegard, she too had a male, clerical intermediary who helped her write
down some of her revelations, lending more support to the notion that
visions are experiences, whatever their origin, processed by the cultural
and literary conventions of the day. Hildegard's heavenly revelations =
our alien abductions?
John Shinners
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|