Visions of Eternity

Illustration: Valerie Letts

Love abounds in all,

from the depths exalted and excelling

over every star,

and most beloved of all,

for to the highest King

the kiss of peace she gave.

“Caritas abundat in omnia” - Hildegard of Bingen

Modern Medievalism

The 90s are back baby, and more mystical than ever. Fisheye lenses? Angsty guitar bands? Tiny sunglasses? Media overstimulation? I think I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the idea of cyclical time—basically I’m convinced that modern culture reiterates itself approximately every three decades. The 2020s is mimicking the 90s which mimicked the 60s which mimicked the 30s, the 2010s recalled the 80s which revisited the 50s which recalled the 20s, the 2000s were kind of like the 70s which maybe were similar to the 40s….. I have no sources for this but listen—if the theory made sense, I would be writing an article about that instead. The point here is that we’re at a point in time where our reliance on historical aesthetics is more transparent than it’s been in a while. 

I’ve noticed particularly in the last few years, to my great delight, an increased interest in medieval fantasy aesthetics and ideas. I haven’t seen it yet, but I was shocked to see a Dungeons & Dragons movie of all things receive a 90% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes. Witchy fashion is bigger than ever, medieval fonts are trendy, medieval-set dark fantasy movies like The Northman and The Green Knight are critically acclaimed, and I see some variation of this meme every other day:

We have new identifiers like witchcore, wizardcore, goblincore, and “goblin mode” was even Oxford Languages’ 2022 Word of the Year, despite being two words. Goblins are of course, as some of us know, not real, but fantasy does rely heavily on what are called “medievalisms.” I’ll get into what that means in a second, but my point is that there’s a clear collective draw right now to the aesthetics of the dark misty past, and I think that’s cool. 

Wizardcore

If you want to use a song as an alarm on the iPhone clock app, you need to buy it on iTunes, which I otherwise only do for stuff I can’t find on Spotify. One night in second year, I was particularly dreading my upcoming 8:30 am linguistics lecture, and was desperate to trick myself that instead of waking up to go to class, I was instead waking up to go on an exciting quest into a mystical world (Kingston Hall). I figured something medieval might set the right tone, so I searched the iTunes store for the only medieval composer I knew—Hildegard von Bingen—and bought the first song I saw (which ended up not even being written by her). This all leads to one particular song, Veni creator spiritus (Come, creator spirit), becoming the first thing I would ritualistically hear every morning for almost a year.

This past semester I took a course on 12th century medieval art, and it was the first time I got to learn about medieval history in a formal academic setting. It was exciting for me, so I made a real effort to absorb the readings, but neither Debussy nor Machine Girl playing in the background seemed to set the right vibe. Thus I declared a new quest: to properly explore medieval music. Hildegard still being the only medieval composer I knew the name of, I started with her—with an 8 hour album of her complete works as recorded by Sequentia, a medieval music ensemble. I knew a little bit about Hildegard from some flecks of reading I’d done (and Wikipedia), but otherwise the wider world of medieval music was largely a mystery to me.

I had some vague idea of what pre-Renaissance European music was beforehand; I figured like many European music traditions there was probably folk, religious, and courtly music. I assumed that the overall compositional structures would be quite different from say, Mozart, and I already knew that it followed different harmonic conventions than modern music does (i.e. modality rather than major/minor keys). As it would turn out, medieval music is a rabbit hole as deep as the earth, and so in order for me to share what I’ve learned it’s probably good to know a little bit about the period itself, as well as how it’s historically been perceived.

Basically, “the Middle Ages” was a term invented by Italian humanists during the Renaissance, as a means of distinguishing themselves intellectually from those that came before (Europeans misrepresenting history to claim intellectual superiority? No way…). Their division of recorded history into antiquity and modernity with a dark “middle age” in between was these humanists’ way of identifying themselves with the cultural glory of Ancient Rome and Greece. It was in the Renaissance that the idea of the medieval era as backwards, intellectually stagnant, and a “dark age” was created, and somewhat unfairly so. Regardless, it’s out of this framing, among other stereotypes, that emerge our modern concepts of medievalism.

Strictly speaking, the terms “medievalism” and “medievalist” are not the same as “medieval.” The term “medievalism” can maybe be compared to terms like “orientalism,” in that it essentially refers to ideologies (such as the belief in magic) and aesthetics (such as Gothic script) that we have come to associate with the Middle Ages. Generally you can see this in contemporary works by modern artists, writers, composers, etc. that have a “medieval” feel, without necessarily aiming for an accurate representation of the period. The most common place we find medievalisms is in fantasy media like Lord of the Rings, Snow White & The Seven Dwarves, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Dark Souls, the wise mystical tree meme— the list goes on. In fact, we seem somewhat incapable of making anything set in medieval times without including some kind of magical element. There’s also entire genres inspired by the “medieval” periods of Asia and Africa, but those are articles of their own and I’m not going to even try to get into them today.

I also feel obligated to mention the eclectic traditions of modern Wicca, which I feel like I would distinguish from everything else I’ve mentioned, though there are certainly ties between some Wicca traditions and medievalism. Despite our association of witchcraft with the Middle Ages, there’s a fundamental difference between fictional witches like The Wicked Witch of the West, and real people engaging in (ostensibly) real spiritual practices. Again, another rabbit hole I’m not going to go down.

Heal Our Feebleness

So with that out of the way, let’s talk about Hildegard. Hildegard von (“of”) Bingen, born 1098, was a German abbess, mystic, writer, philosopher, and composer. By the modern world she’s probably the best known medieval composer, and a pretty substantial amount of her work survives today compared to others of her era. She was a writer of sacred monophony, which is to say, religious (mostly) vocal music that centered around a singular melody, often with improvised accompanying melodies or an unchanging drone note. Vocal music was the most sacred of music in the Middle Ages, believed to be closest to an image of heaven that one could musically achieve, thus fostering one’s spiritual connection with the divine. In an age where religious salvation was at the centre of everyday life, Hildegard found spiritual purpose in her art. Matthew Hoch writes that Hildegard “believed that earthly intellectual and artistic achievements would pave the way to heaven, and she sought to learn and create as much as possible, all for the glory of God.”

Illumination from Hildegard’s own Scivias (1151) depicting her receiving and recording a vision.

We’re used to the idea now of “art for art’s sake,” but that wasn’t an idea so commonly accepted in the Middle Ages. For Hildegard von Bingen, art wasn’t just an expression of the self, it was a way of interfacing with the cosmic. In terms of modern listening, this is a contextual framework that, in my opinion, allows her music and other medieval religious music to be more properly appreciated today. Sometimes people today describe listening to a really good song as a “religious experience,” which is a fun linguistic nod to the Christian roots of our increasingly secular Western culture. That spiritual ecstasy of the Middle Ages isn’t gone, it’s just been redirected. I think a modern equivalent of that medieval feeling is still in all of us today. It’s the feeling of overwhelming emotion that can come out when we encounter the right art, when we feel connected to something universal.

So much of western thought and culture, and certainly our government institutions, were originally built on religious ideals. As we’ve grown away from those ideals, we’re still left with their hollow shells as the shaky foundation of our societies. A lot of contemporary Christian preachers love to talk about the “feeling of emptiness” that pervades so many people’s lives today, attributing it directly to the loss of God. As an ex-Pentecostal kid, I made it my entire personality for a while to dismiss that claim, training myself to be skeptical of any statement that felt like a manipulatory act of evangelism. It’s not that I ever fully truly didn’t believe in a God, but I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t need one, that I could live in a world without a divine purpose.

I guess it makes some sense then, that around the time I officially left the religion (in my mid-teens) was when I started really taking myself seriously as an artist and a musician. Following in my parents’ footsteps, I played music in church bands since I was like 13, so I’d been immersed in contemporary Christian music (Christian pop rock essentially, and pop-ified versions of hymns) since I was a baby. That music never really moved me though, not in any deep way. I never felt the religious ecstasy that everyone made it seem like I was supposed to be feeling from it. Contemporary Christian music always felt, ironically, a bit soulless to me—like it was trying too hard to follow popular music trends, while ignoring all the “worldly” parts that make popular music interesting. It felt like a trendy, marketable veneer of religion. Like bottled, simulated spirituality. CCM deserves an entire article of its own, but until it is written, here is a kind of interesting Adam Neely video if you’re interested in another take.

All this is to say that I think contemporary Christian music could learn something from someone like Hildegard von Bingen. My issue with the music of bands like Hillsong United is that it’s conservative to its core. And not conservative like “Brahms making traditionalist music in the style of Beethoven” conservative, I mean like “you can wear tank tops at school but straps must be 3 fingers wide” conservative. Hildegard on the other hand may have been a devout Christian but she was anything but conservative in her music. She wrote longer, more complex melodies than those that came before her, and her music was uniquely demanding of its performers, often spanning melodic ranges of two or more octaves with big leaps between adjacent notes.

Transcription of the antiphon O magne pater, from a 12th century codex written by Hildegard.

Hildegard’s music was aggressively passionate, and equally so are her lyrics. This is an English translation of the lyrics to another one of her pieces, O cruor sanguinis, written for the crucified Christ:

O stream of blood, to heaven’s height you cried,

when every element

enwrapped itself

within a voice of woe,

with trembling misery, for their Creator’s blood

had covered them:

Anoint us

and heal our feebleness.

One of the more iconic parts of Hildegard’s life were the intense visual-auditory visions she experienced—one of the inspirations for Grimes’ 2012 album Visions, by the way. (I thought I would be able to write a MUSE article without mentioning Grimes but I was wrong, sorry…). These visions are now believed to have been caused by migraines, but Hildegard believed that they were sent from God, and wrote extensively about them throughout her life. O cruor sanguinis gives a taste of the emotional viscerality of much of her poetry, here seeing her personify Christ’s blood itself and “every element” of the universe as crying out in “trembling misery.” The piece then ends with a direct address to the Creator, praying for healing. Hildegard’s highly evocative lyrics establish a connection to the divine through the material, the human. I like the emphasis on vocality in this piece, forming kind of a meta with the performers of the piece. By singing these words, they would in some sense embody that “voice of woe,” forming a union with the elements of the universe anointed by God’s healing blood.

As O cruor sanguinis, along with all of Hildegard’s compositions, would have had a specific time and place of performance within the highly ordered life of the abbeys and monasteries, we obviously can’t experience this piece in anything really close to the “original context.” But like an impressive feat of Incan architecture, or a beautiful piece of Ming dynasty lacquerware, appreciation of art isn’t entirely dependent on original context. I think it’s often good to learn all that you can about the context of a piece of art in order to be respectful, but I also think it’s valid that we find our own meanings in work created by cultures distant to us. If not to see ourselves reflected in it, then to give ourselves over to something unknown, and to find growth that way.

A Link to the Past

I think there’s a few things we could all learn from Hildegard von Bingen. Medieval culture was not monolithic, and even within one of the abbeys founded by Hildegard, I’m sure there would have been contrasting opinions about the importance of music within spiritual life. With public schools (like my former high school) regularly having their arts and music budgets cut, the debate over the societal value of art evidently is still occurring. I used to have kitchen debates with my old housemate, a Comp Eng student, about why I feel that arts programs are just as important to the enrichment of human life as STEM programs are. We used to go back and forth until we exhausted ourselves, him slinking back to his room to play guitar, and me slinking back to mine to stare at coloured pixels on a computer screen for hours.

I started this ramble of an article by talking about the cyclicality of time, and I want to mention that I think there’s a reason trends come back: we simply find ourselves faced with the same questions that were asked thirty, fifty, or a thousand years ago, sometimes just slightly inverted. I was talking to a friend recently about a mutual feeling we’ve had in recent years, of a creeping disillusionment with modernity. Personally, I suppose I do feel let down (in some cases betrayed), by the promises of technology. Could the current trend of medievalist and fantasy aesthetics maybe be some kind of reaction to that disillusionment? Because I know I’m not alone in wishing I could wake up in a world free of all this overstimulation and mass production and spiritual emptiness. That we could return to some imagined version of the past where life is slower, simpler, and a little more magical.

But of course, hindsight is 20/20, and obviously we can’t go back to the way things once were, nor should we (not that “the way things once were” is even a real thing). The reason we can learn these lessons from Hildegard von Bingen now is because she lived and died, and the world proceeded to change a lot between then and now. I think to embrace modern medievalism means to accept its fictionality to some extent. Medieval aesthetics bring us comfort because of how they’ve been romanticized over the centuries, with all the boring, ugly parts gradually forgotten and the fun, interesting parts inflated. The whole phenomenon is not dissimilar to my silly three decade rule. Obviously the 90s are not actually back, because what they experienced and were reacting to thirty years ago was an entirely different world, and the aesthetics and ideologies we’ve cherry picked from back then are just being reappropriated into a new context. That doesn’t make the revivalism invalid, I just think it’s good to be aware of the reality of it.

I grew up obsessed with The Legend of Zelda and The Hobbit. Those were the worlds of my childhood, and now medieval fantasy often feels like a return home for me. With the “real world” of my childhood being the suburban dystopia that is Whitby, Ontario, I grew up simultaneously afraid of and in love with the woods around my hometown. Since then I’ve always loved exploring new worlds, whether it be the suburban woods or the old downtown of Kingston. Being raised religious, I think I identified with the vague spirituality of worlds like Hyrule and Middle Earth, and so the spiritually intense medieval music of Hildegard von Bingen just touches a specific nerve for me that not a lot of other music does. In case you missed it, I made a playlist for this article and it’s embedded at the top. Whether or not you listen to it is your quest, not mine.

Finally, I’d like to say that if you’ve gotten nothing else from my articles this past year, I hope I could have introduced you to some cool music, and maybe even a new idea here and there. I’ve certainly learned a lot from some of the articles I’ve read on MUSE, and I hope to have contributed to that atmosphere of learning in my own meager way. I’m gonna miss writing about my monthly obsessions, but if you wanna hear me rant about music every now and then, you can follow me at @foster.mcaffee on instagram. Thank you MUSE, and thank you everyone who’s read my articles.

Valeas quam optime!

See you in the next life!