Sandy Curnow Reflection

John Henry and Hildegard

In a few days’ time on the Feast of All Saints, Pope Leo XIV will promote a very new member of that select group to be a Doctor of the Church. John Henry Newman was canonised as recently as 2019; to be named Doctor a mere six years later is extraordinary. He will be only the third English Doctor after St Bede in the 8th Century and St Anselm in the 12th. The Doctors are a pretty exclusive group in the Church – Newman will bring the number to only 38 in two millennia of Christian teaching.

And only four of them are women. 

The origin of a teacher as Church Doctor is medieval; in 1298 Pope Boniface VIII named four important figures in the early Church – Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory the Great – by that title. By definition, Doctors must first be saints whose doctrinal writings have special authority, and their works are considered to be both true and timeless (see Note 1 below).

The Doctors of the Church by Pier Francesco Sacchi (circa 1485-1528); Louvre Museum, Paris. Used with permission of Wikimedia Creative Commons.

The odds on Newman’s achieving such Catholic  distinction would have been very long indeed in 1825 when he was ordained a priest of the Anglican church. Later he was known as a distinguished and much loved clerical lecturer in Oxford. 

Twenty years later however, together with a number of his followers, he set Oxford and his appointments there aside to become a catholic and then a priest in Rome; after which he turned his extraordinary intellect to writing about the process of his understanding of spirituality. His work was widely published. Pope Leo XIII admired it and nominated him to be a cardinal. Newman accepted that appointment on condition that he did not have to be ordained a bishop first. Much of his thinking on the role of conscience and of the involvement of the laity in the Church was taken up in Vatican II, but at the time he was a figure of some controversy – his approach was at variance with that of Cardinal Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (another Anglican priest converted to Catholicism at much the same time). Manning vigorously supported the dogma of papal infallibility – he was a man of and for Church authority – while Newman believed in the concept of Church as true teacher, but argued for a more limited and more carefully defined interpretation. 

It is worth noting that catholic Lord Acton wrote to a Bishop Creighton at the time of the discussion on papal infallibility, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Newman’s concerns about where the concept of infallibility could lead a community were shared by many. In the century since his death, his nuanced thinking about the responsibilities of the individual and about the importance of education, especially the universities, has become increasingly celebrated. He foresaw the laity (read layman) as studying theology, but never that laymen would actually teach theology in Catholic institutions. Women as teachers of theology were not on his horizon. 

Yet, in the years since, more Doctors of the Church have been added. In 1970 the Pope took an unprecedented step and nominated two women – Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena – as Doctors. Both were reformers in the public sphere as well as mystics; in the 14th century Catherine dealt directly and publicly with popes, and was instrumental in bringing the Papacy back from Avignon to its religious (and political) independence in Rome, as well as negotiating peace treaties between warring states in her short lifetime. Teresa was active at another time of crisis in the Church; at the time of the Counter Reformation and after she had written her great treatise on spirituality, she set out to reform the lax practices of her Carmelite order and founded 16 convents and as many men’s foundations for the reformed order. A third female Doctor was a surprise to many; Pope John Paul II nominated Saint Therese of Lisieux – another Carmelite like Teresa. Her intense spirituality was of small things – she lived to the age of only 24, much of it as a nun – and seemed to offer a simpler way forward. Extraordinarily, Pope Francis canonised her parents as well: the only married couple who have been made saints.

The last female Doctor – there are now four women – is historically the earliest of them all, but in some ways the most recent to be considered. Hildegard of Bingen’s feast was only a few days ago. She lived in the 12th century and has been described as a visionary, theologian, polymath, composer, abbess in the Order of Saint Benedict, a physician, and philosopher. What an extraordinary list to have on one’s CV. Yet after she died in 1189 at the great age of 81 she was virtually forgotten in the wider world until she was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1970s. Her story was an extraordinary one.  As was not unusual at the time, she joined a men’s Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland-Palatinate area of south Germany, as a young teenager with Jutta, who was 6 years older. From early childhood she had visions, although her eyes were wide open ‘she never fell prey to ecstasy’. A growing group of women joined the two young nuns, twenty four years later Jutta died and the still young Hildegard was elected to lead them. She wanted independence for her group and when the Abbot refused, she went over his head to the Archbishop who approved the move of twenty of the women to a life of greater poverty at Rupertsberg. A monk, Volmar, acted as their confessor and became Hildegard’s scribe as she recorded her visions. The Pope heard of her writings and gave her papal approval and encouragement. Her Scivias (Ways of Knowing) became three great volumes of visionary theology; to which can be added about 400 letters to popes and emperors – including Barbarossa – and Abbots including Abbot Suger of St Denis in Paris, and St Bernard of Clairvaux – plus records of the many sermons she preached on four separate preaching tours (to clergy and laity) to cities hundreds of miles distant. Causes and Cures was a huge, early brilliantly organised medical text. 

From the Rupertsberg manuscript – Vision of the angelic hierarchy, 12th century, unknown author. Used with permission: Wikimedia Commons

She wrote over 70 musical compositions and curiously it was these which led to growing interest in her and the popularity of her work. ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ (her own description of herself) was the title of an album of her music recorded by Emma Kirkby and Gothic Voices released in 1982 which became one of the best-selling and most influential recordings of pre-classical music ever made. It is so beautiful.

Album cover depicting God’s creation of the world, 1152; author: Hildegard von Bingen. Used with permission of Wikimedia Commons

Hildegard had been popularly held to be a saint in local areas but this was confirmed only with her official canonisation in May 2012. Five months later Pope Benedict XVI named her Doctor in recognition of the originality of her teaching. 

The Hildegard story does not stop there. She had in her lifetime overseen a written collection of her works on 481 vellum folios, which became known as the Wiesbaden Codex. It was started towards the end of her life and contains almost all of her work including her letters, apart from her medical writings. It was a massive book weighing 15 kg and measured 30 by 45 cm in size. Not one easily carried in hand luggage. It dates from about 1200. Completed at her monastery at Rupertsberg it was kept there for 400 years until the nuns fled carrying it to safety over the Rhine to Hildegard’s second foundation at Eibingen during the looting of the Thirty Years War in 1620s. Another 400 years later, during the Second World War the book was sent from southern Germany east for safety to a bank vault in Dresden of all places. Miraculously it survived – only to become the property of the State in the Russian held sector of Germany at the end of the war. The authorities refused to return such a prize back to West Germany and its original home.

At this point the story of the book took an astonishing turn. Two women showed remarkable bravery when a plan was developed to rescue the text. Margarete Kuehn lived in the American sector of Berlin but worked as a distinguished scholar of manuscripts in East Berlin, officially collating German manuscripts from the Romans to AD1500. As part of the ruse, she sent for the Riesencodex (the giant book) from Dresden on the pretext of photographing it in her office in East Berlin. She then swapped it with an early printed book of roughly the same size, sent on purpose from the State Library of Wiesbaden near the convent of Eibingen in West Germany, and returned that one in the original heavy container to Dresden. Her ‘mistake’ was discovered only two years later, and put down to her seriously ailing eyesight. 

Getting the book out of West Berlin and into the western sector of Germany to Eibingen was another problem. This was the era of the Berlin Blockade by the Russians and the resultant Berlin Airlift by the Americans. Caroline Walsh was the wife of a senior American Airforce officer stationed in Berlin, and it was she who took the enormous risk and smuggled the bulky parcel out of West Berlin back through Russian held sector of Germany to the monastery in West Germany.  

St Hildegard Abbey, Eibingen

It stayed briefly with the nuns and now rests securely in the Wiesbaden State library.

By Sandy Curnow

Note:

1. Gregory was not always right. In a well-known sermon (591 CE) Pope Gregory incorrectly identified Mary Magdalen as the unnamed sinner who anointed Jesus’ feet. He claimed she was a repentant prostitute. This is not supported by Scripture. There were in fact three different Marys. It took the Church 1,500 odd years to officially explain in 1969 that he was wrong. It should be noted that artists’ portrayal of the Magdalen is almost always with the red hair of the Biblical Temptress, an error but a handy guide when naming Renaissance paintings. Mary Magdalen is so often portrayed as the repentant sinner and almost always with gorgeous red flowing hair. Pope Francis raised her reputation naming her the “apostle to the apostles”.