ABSTRACT
At first glance there seems to be little to recommend the thesis that the thought and writings of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) influenced fourteenth-century Dominicans such as Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c.1329), John Tauler (c. 1300–1361), Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366), Margaret Ebner (c. 1291–1351), Adelheid Langmann (c. 1312–1375) and Christina Ebner (1277–1356). The Benedictine Hildegard lived by a different monastic rule and according to a more ancient spirituality than did the Dominicans who adopted the Rule of St. Augustine and their own constitutions to define their way of life and spirituality. Benedictine monasticism sought to reestablish the “garden of Eden” or rather to create an ordered society which foreshadowed the kingdom to come. Dominicans, although inspired by the Western monastic tradition and greatly influenced by the Cistercians, saw the monastic way of life as preparation for an active ministry. The friars went forth to preach and hear confessions, and the nuns often engaged in counseling and spiritual direction. Hildegard wrote voluminously on all sorts of topics, whereas the Dominican nuns wrote autobiographies, monastery chronicles and personal letters while the friars preached homilies or wrote theological tracts. Scholars have written of Hildegard as an apocalyptic prophet with, as Barbara Newman puts it, a “startling lack of interest in her own subjectivity” (17). On the other hand Dominicans produced numerous documents showing their abiding interest in the details of the personal spiritual life as a lived experience upon which they could reflect theologically. All of them, men and women, were concerned with their personal relationship with Christ. The nuns, and even some of the friars or chaplains, understood themselves almost exclusively in ecstatic bridal mystic categories. Margaret and Christina Ebner as well as Adelheid Langmann each wrote an autobiography (entitled Revelations) which dealt primarily with her own relationship with Christ. They interpreted this personal and passionate relationship with Christ in terms of the love shared between the Bride and the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs.
