Hildegard von Bingen: In the Heart of God

“I am also the fiery life of the essence of divinity. I flame above the beauty of the fields, and I shine in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. With the airy wind I quicken all things with some invisible life that sustains them all.”

From the outermost edge of the firmament Hildegard contemplates the wheel of creation in the heart of God. A revolving sphere, a cosmological instrumentum, inhabited by Man, whose measurements and proportions are described, along with the internal motions of his body and soul.

This is the scenario presented in the Liber Divinorum Operum and depicted in the extremely refined miniatures of the Lucca Codex. A long sequence composed of ten scenes that invites humanity to complete the journey from earth to heaven by following the way of virginitas, toward the reconstruction of the self, culminating in the mystic marriage in which male and female are reunited in Caritas in God’s heart.