Alex Grey and Hildegard of Bingen on the Divine Eye(s)

We are meditating, this first week of a New Year, on the team of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12^th century Christian mystic, and Alex Grey, a 21^st century Buddhist/Jewish artist. 

Grey’s recent and delicious painting honors “Greening Power” and prominently displays hands with eyes in them, all contributing, he hopes, to a re-greening of the Earth and human work that honors the Earth.

Other places where Hildegard paints the divine eye includes her painting on “The Six days of Creation.”  

Symbolist specialist Cirlot tells us that the ‘divine eye’ in the Egyptian tradition denotes “he who feeds the sacred fire or the intelligence of humans,” namely Osiris. 

Hildegard talks about “the living eye” while calling the Holy Spirit “a fire that penetrates everything” and God the Creator “a brightness that shines” and Christ, the “flashing forth that radiates” divine fire.

Creatures too “shine in their wonderful origin [and] glitter in the beauty of their fullness” thus that “heaven and earth are resplendent in their abundant making.”  

Notice her invoking of all creatures’ “wonderful origin,” surely another term for “original blessing.” 

She also celebrates the “original wisdom” with which humans are born. The tent we are called to set up in our life’s journey is the “tent of wisdom” and parallels the tent that Christ, or Wisdom incarnate, came to set up on earth (John 1).

Indeed, humans came to be by “the same flame…burning to a little clod of muddy earth lying on the ground [that] poured heat in it by way of greening power and because the earth is the fleshy material of humans” which nourished the first person “with its sap, like a mother who nurses her sons. And the flame breathed on it so that a living person arose.” 

In her marvelous painting I call “All Beings Celebrate Creation,” Hildegard painted two armies of angels that constitute the inner mandala of nine mandalas. The first were “full of eyes and wings and in each eye a mirror appeared and in the mirror the face of a person.” Burning like a fire, “all these armies were resounding with every kind of music.”

---

Adapted from Matthew Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, pp. 76-82, 95-99, 108-111.

And Fox, “Living Words and the Cosmic Christ” and “The God of Life and Light or the God of Religion?” in Fox, Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint For Our Times, pp.11-32. 

To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE

Banner Image: Helix Nebula, NGC 7293 or “The Eye of God.” Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and C.R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University). Wikimedia Commons.

---

---

Queries for Contemplation

What does God as a “Living Eye” mean to you? How do Hildegard and/or Alex Grey awaken that eye in you?

---

Recommended Reading

Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen

An introduction to the life and work of Hildegard of Bingen, Illuminations reveals the life and teachings of one of the greatest female artists and intellectuals of the Western Mystical Tradition.  At the age of 42, she began to have visions; these were captured as 36 illuminations–24 of which are recorded in this book along with her commentaries on them.
“If one person deserves credit for the great Hildegard renaissance in our time, it is Matthew Fox.”  – Dr Mary Ford-Grabowsky, author of Sacred Voices.

Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century

Matthew Fox writes in Hildegard of Bingen about this amazing woman and what we can learn from her.
In an era when women were marginalized, Hildegard was an outspoken, controversial figure. Yet so visionary was her insight that she was sought out by kings, popes, abbots, and bishops for advice.
“This book gives strong, sterling, and unvarnished evidence that everything – everything – we ourselves become will affect what women after us may also become….This is a truly marvelous, useful, profound, and creative book.” ~~ Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism.

---