Saint Hildegard was a German Benedictine abbess and writer, composer, playwright, philosopher, mystic, visionary, medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. She authored multiple theological, botanical, and medicinal works, as well as letters, hymns, and antiphons for the liturgy. St Hildegard is one of the most famous composers of sacred chant, as well as the most recorded in modern history; she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words. She has been considered by a number of scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany, and is one of four female Doctors of the Catholic Church.

St Hildegard articulated a vision of God as a pulsating life-force present in our lives. Viriditas is a guiding theme, throughout all of her works. It has been translated in various ways, such as freshness, vitality, fertility, fecundity, fruitfulness, verdure, or growth . In Hildegard’s understanding, it is literal and metaphorical for spiritual and physical health, which is visible in the divine word.

“The origin of Viriditas may be the union of two Latin words: Green and Truth. But like most Latin words, Viriditas does not easily translate into convenient, straightforward English. While being difficult to translate may be frustrating to some, there is beauty in this complexity. In much of her work, viriditas was “the greening power of God.” It was in everything, including humans.

This “greenness” was an expression of heaven, the creative power of life, which can be witnessed in the gardens, forests, and farmland all around us. And like those lands, she saw viriditas as something to be cultivated in both our bodies and our souls.

Hildegard believed viriditas was to not just be witnessed, but sought out. Hildegard spoke of this pursuit of viriditas through her metaphors of moistness, fruitfulness, and vigor of the soul. These attributes were how she saw life, signs of being alive, and of engaging in this living force of the creator.

She saw viriditas as the living part of the duality with ariditas, the “dryness”, “drought”, “aridity”, and “infection” that can arise when the flow of viriditas is blocked. She saw the tension between the life affirming and balance seeking attributes of viriditas and the barrenness and dryness of ariditas as motivation for constant inquiry into how to encourage the flow of greening power. Physical disease and spiritual decay were evidence of this lacking flow, a flow of greenness that penetrated every aspect of all life, and was a reflection of the Divine on Earth.

Regardless of how viriditas is translated, the word is full of life.”

— excerpts taken from Healthy Hildegard