Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Benedictine abbess, polymath, theologian, musician, and several other things, is probably most accessible to contemporary people through her numerous musical compositions.  On today's feast day we look at an article on her musical style by Nancy Fierro, professor of music at Mt St Mary's College in Los Angeles.  I've also included a representative video of her music. 









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Hildegard was a very expressive person.  She loved beautiful clothing, exquisite sounds, fragrant scents, and bright-colored gems.  As a composer, she expressed herself intensely both in the sound and in the words of her music.  The following are some musical features we can find in her compositions.  The style characteristics listed stem from my own observations and from the thoughtful analysis of musicologist Marianne Pfau.

Soaring
In contrast to the narrow scope of most chants in her day, Hildegard's music has a very wide range.  She uses extremes of register as if to bring heaven and earth together.  According to Pfau, by adding and omitting pitches and pitch groups in repetitions of melodic phrases, Hildegard stretches and contracts melodic phrases to create the "soaring arches" that we are familiar with in her music.

Leaps
Plainchant usually never employed intervals larger than a second or third.  Hildegard's music vaults upward and downward with wide intervals of fifths and fourths.  She traverses up and down the octave scale with as much ease as she moved between the mystical world and the world of mundane affairs.

Contour
Unlike the Romanesque curves of most plainchant melodies, Hildegard's melodies are more angular.  Often we hear rapid ascents in melodies with a slow falling decline.  The heights of her songs are like the spires of Gothic cathedrals shooting upwards in the sky.

Dramatic Flourishes
Hildegard's chants contrast neumatic and melismatic passages.  Neumatic passages are organized with two or three notes per syllable.  Melismatic passages use three or more notes per syllable...Combined with an ascending passage at the end of the piece, Hildegard uses melismas to anticipate the joy we will experience in arriving at our final celestial destiny.

  The first Christian missionaries in China were not the 16th-century Jesuits or the 19th-century Protestants.  They were preceded--by over a millenium--by monks of the Church of the East, commonly but erroneously known as the Nestorian church.  Traveling from the Near East over the Silk Road, a monk named Alopen and several companions reached Tang China in the year 630.  They were able to grow a substantial church, one which gained the admiration of the emperor and which flourished for several centuries.  Christianity became known in Chinese as the Luminous Religion of Daquin (the Roman Empire).  There was significant interaction with indigenous Chinese religions, especially Taoism. 

This is reflected in the text of the so-called Nestorian Stele.  Erected in 781, it was written by Jingjing, a monk whose Syriac name was Adam.  The text is in both Chinese and Syriac and contains information about the structure of the Church of the East in China and its teachings.  The  excerpt below is found in Not of This World:  A Treasury of Christian Mysticism, James S Cutsinger, ed, World Wisdom 2003, pp126-127.

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In the beginning was the natural constant, the true stillness of the Origin, and the primordial void of the Most High.  The Spirit of the void emerged as the Most High Lord, moving in mysterious ways to enlighten the holy ones.  He is Ye Su, my True Lord of the Void, who embodies the three subtle and wondrous bodies, and who was condemned to the cross so that the people of the four directions might be saved.

He beat up the primordial winds, and the two vapors were created.  He differentiated the gray emptiness and opened up the sky and the earth.  He set the sun and moon on their course, and day and night came into being.  He crafted the myriad things and created the first people.  He gave to them the original nature of goodness and appointed them as guardians of all creation.  Their minds were empty, they were content, and their hearts were simple and innocent.  Originally they had no desire, but under the influence of Satan, they abandoned their pure and simple goodness for the glitter and the gold.  Falling into the trap of death and lies, they became embroiled in the threee hundred and sixty-five forms of sin.  In doing so, they have woven the web of retribution and have bound themselves inside it.  Some believe in the material origin of things, some have sunk into chaotic ways, some think that they can receive blessings simply by reciting prayers, and some have abandoned kindness for treachery.  Despite their intelligence and their passionate pleas, they have gone nowhere.  Forced into the overturning wheel of fire, they are burned and obliterated.  Having lost their way for eons, they can no longer return.

Therefore my Lord Ye Su, the One emanating in three subtle bodies, hid His true power, became a human, and came on behalf of the Lord of Heaven to preach the good teachings.  A Virgin gave birth to the Sacred in a dwelling in the Western Empire.  The message was given to the Persians, who saw and followed the bright light to offer Him gifts.  The twenty-four holy ones have given us the teachings, and Heaven has decreed that the new religion of the Three-in-One Purity that cannot be spoken of should now be proclaimed.  These teachings can restore goodness to sincere believers, deliver those living within the boundaries of the eight territories, refine the dust and transform it into truth, reveal the gate of the three constants, lead us to life, and destroy death.  The teachings of the Religion of Light are like the resplendent sun:  they have the power to dissolve the dark realm and destroy evil forever.

The Lord set afloat the raft of salvation and compassion so that we might use it to ascend to the palace of light and be united with the Spirit.  He carried out the work of deliverance, and when the task was completed, He ascended to immortality in broad daylight.  He left twenty-seven books of scriptures to inspire our spirit, He revealed the workings of the Origin, and He gave to us the method of purification by water.  Thus we purify our hearts and return to the simple and natural Way of the truth.  This truth cannot be named, but its power surpasses all expectations.  When forced to give it a name, we call it the Religion of Light.  As with the Way, that which is sacred is not sacred unless it is highly sacred, and that which is the Way is not the Way unless it is the Great Way.

Today's feast of the Transfiguration, somewhat ignored by the Western churches, is of paramount importance in the Orthodox and Oriental churches.  This is because it is closely related to the doctrine of theosis, which lies at the heart of Eastern Christian spirituality.  On Mt Tabor, Jesus manifested the Uncreated Light, which Orthodox spiritual teachers maintain is God's divinity made visible to human eyes.  The Uncreated Light can also be manifested by Christians who have made substantial progress along the path to deification.  Probably the best-known example of this is St Seraphim of Sarov, the 19th-century starets whose illumination was described by his disciple Motovilov.

The significance of the Light during the actual Transfiguration is described in a sermon excerpted below by St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359).  Palamas, a monk of Mt Athos, defended the Athonite tradition of hesychasm against Barlaam of Calabria, a Greek from southern Italy whose theology was influenced by Roman Catholic scholasticism.  Barlaam held that the light experienced by Palamas and his brother monks was a created thing, if indeed it was not a product of self-delusion.  After a series of fiercely-contested theological debates, the Orthodox Church agreed with Palamas, and his opinions became part of official Orthodox teaching.  Palamas eventually became Archbishop of Thessalonica, where he delivered the following sermon. 

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Thus, the Light of the Transfiguration of the Lord  is not something that comes to be and then vanishes, nor is it subject to the sensory faculties, although it was contemplated by corporeal eyes for a short while upon an unconsequential mountaintop.  But the initiates of the mystery, the disciples of the Lord, at this time passed beyond mere flesh into spirit through a transformation of their senses, effectualized within them by the Spirit, and in such a way that they beheld what, and to what extent, the Divine Spirit had wrought blessedness in them to behold the Ineffable Light...

...That same Inscrutable Light shone and was mysteriously manifest to the apostles and the foremost of the Prophets at that moment, when the Lord was praying.  This shows that what brought forth this blessed sight was prayer, and that the radiance occurred and was manifest by uniting the mind with God, and that it is granted to all who, with constant exercise in efforts of virtue and prayer, strive with their mind towards God.  True beauty, essentially, can be contemplated only with a purified mind.  To gaze upon its luminance assumes a sort of participation in it, as though some bright ray etches itself upon the face...

...We believe that at the Transfiguration He manifested not some other sort of light, but only that which was concealed beneath His fleshly exterior.  This Light was the Light of the Divine Nature, and as such, it was Uncreated and Divine.  So also, in the teachings of the Fathers, Jesus Christ was transfigured on the Mount, not taking upon Himself something new nor being changed into something new, nor something which formerly He did not possess.  Rather, it was to show His disciples that which He already was, opening their eyes and bringing them from blindness to sight...

...Thus, this Light is not a light of the senses, and those contemplating it do not simply see with sensual eyes, but rather they are changed by the power of the Divine spirit.  They were transformed, and only in this way did they see the transformation taking place amidst the very assumption of our perishability, with the deification through union with the Word of God in place of this.

It is generally accepted that there is a degree of overlap between spiritual direction and psychotherapy, even while directors are strongly admonished in their training to refer directees to psychiatrists or psychologists when warranted.  Western psychotherapies, for the most part, are rooted in secularist presuppositions about how the world works.  They are not necessarily hostile towards religion, but enhancing one's relationship with the Divine is not a key point in the psychotherapeutic agenda.  Early in his career Freud remarked that "...much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness" (Studies in Hysteria). 

Recently, attention has been given to the therapeutic overtones found in Eastern Orthodox spiritual direction, especially as exemplified in that great compendium of Orthodox teaching, the Philokalia.  Christopher CH Cook's essay "Healing, Psychotherapy, and the Philokalia", excerpted below, may be found in Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, eds, The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford 2012), an invaluable guide to the Philokalia and its underlying theological and ascetical foundations. 

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If the Philokalia presents a school of therapy for the soul, designed to bring about its healing, it might well be argued that the Philokalia is a kind of manual for psychotherapy.  However, once the word "psychotherapy" is used, with all its more modern connotations of Freudian and post-Freudian therapies designed to explore the unconscious, and of the cognitive-behavioral therapies based on cognitive and behavioral scientific psychology, we realize at once how the Philokalia is both similar to and radically different from what we now call, in the Western world, psychotherapy.

On the one hand, the Philokalia shares with contemporary psychotherapies a concern with "inwardness" and with self-reflective awareness, a suspicion about the motives that lay behind apparently innocent or well-intentioned actions, and a keen attention to the content and processes of cognition.  Even some of the methods look very similar--especially those that betray a Stoic model of the passions (or in the case of contemporary psychology the emotions) as being fundamentally based upon thoughts (or cognition).  For example, the identification of thoughts/judgements that lead to fear might be a concern of both the cognitive therapist and the disciple of the Philokalia, remembrance of death is also effectively a cognitive strategy for changing patterns of thought, and ascetic discipline might be considered a kind of behavioral therapy orientated toward changing patterns of thought as well as lifestyle.  Even the philokalic injunctions to obedience and submission to an elder or spiritual guide find their parallels in the therapeutic relationship with a therapist, who is seen as having greater wisdom, knowledge, and experience in matters of the inner life. 

On the other hand, contemporary psychotherapies are based on very different theoretical frameworks and aim at very different ends.  While differences in theory might be surprisingly more superficial than they first appear, there are undoubtedly important differences.  The Freudian tripartite model of the psyche as comprising id, ego, and superego, for example, is not so very different from the Platonic model of appetitive, incensive, and rational parts of the soul, a model which influenced both Freud and the authors of the Philokalia.  Or again, both the cognitive therapist and the authors of the Philokalia emphasize the importance of a self-reflective awareness of thought processes which will lead to greater understanding of how to identify aberrant patterns of thought and develop healthy ones.  The scientific rationalism of the cognitive therapist is not necessarily so far removed from the philosophical and contemplative reasoning of the philokalic practitioner when consideration is limited only to matters of cognitive analysis.  But when consideration is broadened to include ultimate concerns, the atheistic assumptions of Freud and the cognitive-behaviorists contrast strongly with the philokalic world of personal spiritual forces which draw the human creature inevitably toward, or away from, a telos which is firmly located in the Divine.  Moreover, the end of human beings in relationship with God involves the authors of the Philokalia in a contemplative "unknowing" which ultimately transcends human rational thought.  this transcendence is completely lacking, at least from Freud and the more scientific cognitive-behavioral schools of therapy, if not from all of the schools of therapy which have emerged since the work of pioneers such as Freud, Skinner, and Ellis.

 As Christians, when we think at all of how the sacraments "work", we tend to have more or less vague notions that they somehow connect us to Jesus.  However, Jesus is part of a Trinitarian God, and the efficacy of sacraments means that they connect us to the Father, through the risen Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.  

For today's celebration of Trinity Sunday, we look at some insights into how the liturgy expresses Trinitarian theology.  They are contained in an essay by Roman Catholic theologian Susan K Wood.  It is found in the excellent reference The Cambridge Guide to the Trinity, Peter C Phan, ed, Cambridge University Press, 2011.  The excerpt below is found on pp 383-384. 

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The movement of God's saving action and our response are related to two essential liturgical elements, anamnesis and epiclesis.  Anamnesis, translated as "memorial", "commemoration," or "remembrance", actually has the much stronger meaning of making present an event or person from the past.  Anamnesis asks God to remember his saving work in Jesus Christ in order that the benefits of Christ's sacrifice may be made present to the faithful here and now.   These deeds are actually made present in the liturgy in the anamnesis, not as a repetition of his saving deeds or as a mere recollection of them, but as an actualization of them within the modality of sacramental sign.   The anamnesis is accomplished through the work of the Spirit, who "awakens the memory of the Church then inspires thanksgiving and praise." 

The epiclesis is a calling on the Spirit to transform the material of creation and make it salvific in its sacramental use.  Sacraments are effective because they are Christ's action, made present through the power of the Spirit.  Although we may think of the epiclesis primarily in terms of the Eucharist, most of the sacraments, as we shall see, have an epicletic moment.  The Holy Spirit brings us into communion with Christ, effects our spiritual transformation into the image of Christ, both individually and corporately, and constitutes Christ's eccesial body, the corpus mysticum.  Thus the Spirit is the bond of unity in the church and the source of empowerment for service and mission. 

The Father as the source and end of all blessings of creation and salvation is the source and goal of the liturgy, which reveals and communicates the divine blessing.  We receive these blessings through the incarnate Word of the Father, who, in turn, pours out the gift of the Spirit.  The liturgy offers adoration, praise, and thanksgiving to the Father by offering to the Father his own gifts, especially the gift of his Son.  The Spirit "recalls and makes Christ manifest to the faith of the assembly", "makes Christ present here and now", and "unites the Church to the life and mission of Christ". 

The end or purpose of all the sacraments is reconciliation with the Father and the Father's glorification (Eph 1:12; 2 Cor 3: 18, Jn 17).  The Latin word for sacrament, sacramentum, is a translation of the Greek word mysterion, which refers to God's plan for salvation (Col 1: 26-27).  This plan is the Father's plan "to reconcile to himself all things through Christ, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, who made peace through the blood of his cross" (Col 1: 19-20).  The paschal mystery is the keystone of the Christian mystery.  All the liturgical feasts and sacraments are referenced to the event of Christ's dying and rising and to this great pattern of reconciliation with the Father through Christ in the power of the Spirit.  Thus the liturgical year is not simply a memesis or imitation of Christ's life.  Christmas is primarily about God's Word becoming flesh and dwelling among human beings in order to bring salvation.  Sacraments are not just seven anthropological markers of lifetime passages such as birth, puberty, sickness, and marriage, but relate to the two fundamental sacraments, baptism and Eucharist, in their functions of reconciliation and building up the church as a messianic saving community.  Sacraments give access to participation in this plan of salvation, anamnesis (memorial) and epiclesis being essential to each of them.  Anamnesis recalls the saving event of Jesus' death and resurrection so that it is actually present today, and epiclesis makes it effective through the power of the Spirit.  As Louis-Marie Chauvet has noted, "the sacraments appear not as the somehow static prolongations of the incarnation as such but as the major expression, in our own history, of the embodiment (historical/eschatological) of the risen One in the world through the Spirit, embodiment whose 'fundamental sacrament' is the church visibly born at Pentecost." 

Aside from Pentecostals, many Christians tend to ignore the Holy Spirit.  And this is not a new phenomenon, since an orthodox doctrine of the Spirit was not fully developed until the late 4th century, clearing the way for a firm articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity.  English Anglican theologian Alister McGrath has, in fact, referred to the Holy Spirit as "the Cinderella of the Trinity". 

A prayerful solution to this oversight, offered in advance of the upcoming Pentecost Sunday, is the following Litany of the Holy Spirit, the effort of Episcopal priest Michael Marsh.   It appears on his estimable site Interrupting the Silence.

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O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
Have mercy upon us.

O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
Have mercy upon us.

O God the Holy Spirit, Sanctifier of the faithful,
Have mercy upon us.

O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, one God,
Have mercy upon us.

Spirit, intercede for us with sighs too deep for words,
Pray for us.

Spirit, intercede for the saints according to the will of God,
Pray for us.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us.

Blessed N. patron of our parish,
Pray for us.

Holy Spirit, who is equal to the Father and the Son,
Keep us in eternal life.

Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father,
Enter our hearts.

Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the Prophets,
Open our ears.

Holy Spirit, who enlightens and strengthens for your service,
Dwell in us.

Holy Spirit, who in the beginning moved and brooded over the face of the waters,
Move and brood over our lives.

Holy Spirit, who is God's life-giving breath,
Breathe in us.

Holy Spirit, who blew through the Valley of Dry Bones giving life,
Enliven us.

Holy Spirit, who overshadowed Mary that she might give birth to the Son of God,
Grace us to give birth to the divine in our time and place.

Holy Spirit, who rested on Jesus at his baptism,
Rest upon us and renew our baptismal life.

Holy Spirit, who as a tongue of fire rested on and filled the apostles,
Burn in us with the power of your love.

Holy Spirit, who descended on the day of Pentecost,
Unite us in the confession of one faith.

Holy Spirit, who descended on the day of Pentecost,
Empower us to serve you as a royal priesthood.

Holy Spirit, who descended on the day of Pentecost,
Encourage us to preach the gospel to all nations.

Come Holy Spirit,
Our souls inspire.

Spirit of understanding,
Come.

Spirit of counsel,
Come.

Spirit of fortitude,
Come.

Spirit of knowledge,
Come.

Spirit of piety,
Come.

Spirit of Godly fear,
Come.

With the fruit of love,
Fill us.

With the fruit of joy,
Fill us.

With the fruit of peace,
Fill us.

With the fruit of patience,
Fill us.

With the fruit of generosity,
Fill us.

With the fruit of gentleness,
Fill us.

With the fruit of self-control,
Fill us.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,
Send us the Advocate.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,
Send us the Spirit of Truth.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,
Send us the Holy Spirit.

V:  Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful,
R:  And kindle in them the fire of your love.

V:  Send forth your Spirit, Lord, and they shall be created,
R:  And you shall renew the face of the earth.

O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth who are present everywhere, filling all things, Treasury of Good and Giver of Life,
Come and dwell in us, cleanse us of every stain, and save our souls, O Good One.

Holy Spirit, you came as Christ own first gift for those who believe, that we might no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for us:  Complete his work in the world and bring to fulfillment the sanctification of all.  Amen.

Almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless and keep us, Amen.

In The Wisdom of the Desert Thomas Merton addresses the stereotype of the monk as spiritual superman, a kind of angel in a habit.  Merton's own life was human, at times all too human.  The desert fathers are relevant to us because, paradoxically, they sought solitude so that they could become themselves.  The excerpt is on pp 479-480 of  A Thomas Merton Reader, ed Thomas P McDonnell, Doubleday 1989.

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The desert fathers insisted on remaining human and "ordinary".  This may seem to be a paradox, but it is very important.  If we reflect a moment, we will see that to fly into the desert in order to be extraordinary is only to carry the world with you as an explicit standard of comparison.  The result would be nothing but self-contemplation, and self-comparison with the negative standard of the world one had abandoned.  Some of the monks of the Desert did this, as a matter of fact:  and the only fruit of their trouble was that they went out of their heads.  The simple men who lived their lives out to a good old age among the rocks and sands only did so because they had come into the desert to be themselves, their ordinary selves, and to forget a world that divided them from themselves.  There can be no other valid reason for seeking solitude or for leaving the world.  And thus to leave the world, is, in fact, to help save it in saving oneself.  This is the final point, and it is an important one.  The Coptic hermits who left the world as though escaping from a wreck, did not merely intend to save themselves.  They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage.  But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different.  Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.

This is their paradoxical lesson for our time.  It would perhaps be too much to say that the world needs another movement such as that which drew these men into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine.  Ours is certainly a time for solitaries and for hermits.  But merely to reproduce the simplicity, austerity, and prayer of these primitive souls is not a complete or satisfactory answer.  We must transcend them, and transcend all those who, since their time, have gone beyond the limits which they set.  We must liberate ourselves, in our own way, from involvement in a world that is plunging to disaster.  But our world is different from theirs.  Our involvement in it is more complete.  Our danger is far more desperate.  Our time, perhaps, is shorter than we think.

We cannot do exactly what they did.  But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God.  This is not the place in which to speculate what our great and mysterious vocation might involve.  That is still unknown.  Let it suffice for me to say that we need to learn from these men of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion, and strike out fearlessly into the unknown.