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Columba aspexit, Hildegard of Bingen. In the seventh stanza of her Columba aspexit, Hildegard of Bingen calls St. Maximin both mountain and valley and tall building. Such dynamic language mingles …More
Columba aspexit, Hildegard of Bingen.

In the seventh stanza of her Columba aspexit, Hildegard of Bingen calls St. Maximin both mountain and valley and tall building. Such dynamic language mingles heights with depths, the divine with humanity and physical creation, throughout her sequence for that saint. St. Maximin, legend has it, was an early Christian disciple who sailed to France with Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection; he was the patron saint of a Benedictine monastery in the important German port city of Trier. Hildegard visited Trier during a preaching trip up the Moselle river to Metz in 1160, and probably composed Columba aspexit for the Trier monks. If that is the case, they received more than their money's worth from the "Sybil of the Rhine."
Hildegard's poetry for Columba aspexit pulses with mystical action. On the surface, the poem captures a single moment: St. Maximin is celebrating a Mass while the dove (the first line's columba) hovers by a window lattice. The imagery at every moment, however, is pregnant with motion; scriptural allusions call up physical actions as well as convergences between Old and New Testaments, and Hildegard's text shimmers between physical signs and their many levels of spiritual significance. Right from the opening moment, the dove of the Holy Spirit looks through the window she considered the portal of mercy in Christ. Maximin himself glows as he offers the Mass. His multivalent radiance simultaneously signifies his holy joy, the love of the Father (seen in the sun's rays), and the radiance of the temple that is Christ's body on earth, built in the flesh of the saint's pure heart. The third stanza expands the temple imagery to include references to the Old Testament Song of Solomon and the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. There follow two stanzas rich in allusions to the Catholic liturgies for the dedication of a church, in which St. Maximin represents the swift deer (of Psalm 42) rushing to the waterbrooks "flowing from the stone" -- the altar bearing Christ's bloody sacrifice. After offering the Mass at this altar, surrounded by incense-bearing "perfumers" and a choir of "rams," St. Maximin strides among the goat and elephant, signs of the peaceable kingdom to come. The same exuberance characterizes Hildegard's chant melody as well: though it follows the strict repetition structure of the sequence, it inhabits a wide and ecstatic vocal range, and continually rushes between the heavenly heights and the too-human depths.