How Were Adam and Eve in Paradise? The Vision of Saint Hildegard of Bingen

The Feast of our First Parents is on Christmas Eve. They are among the Saints that Christ freed from Limbo when He descended into Hell.

From One Peter Five

By Robert Lazu Kmita, PhD

After the Fall: the Failure of the Masters and the Human Condition

When it comes to depicting Paradise and the state before Adam and Eve committed original sin, the paintings of recent centuries are many times laughable—when they are not simply scandalous. Even the most famous Italian masters seem unable to move beyond dubious nudes, a snake with legs, and some lush vegetation and exotic animals. Their failure is due to one of the most difficult questions fallen humanity has faced since the expulsion of our forefathers from Eden: how can one imagine and represent the unseen world of God, of the Holy Virgin Mary, of the angels, and of the saints?

We must admit that apart from the abstract discussions of the Holy Fathers and scholastic Doctors on the state of Adam and Eve before and after the Fall, we generally lack credible representations of Paradise. In such matters, Renaissance religious painting records no achievements, only resounding failures. Acknowledging this, we are forced to admit that whenever we try to picture Paradise and the condition of the first humans, we are simply limited. This, of course, was predictable. Not even the genius of Dante Alighieri helps us much, for aside from the luminous cascades in the final stage of his journey through the afterworld, we gain little from the vision sculpted in the golden words of the Divine Comedy. Everything remains far too vague. But if Paradise is the supreme goal of our Christian life, how is it that describing it is so difficult—if not impossible?

Evidently, this difficulty is one of the consequences of the Fall. Although we share human nature with our first parents, the difference between their immortal existence and our mortal one is so vast that representation becomes impossible. The reason, ultimately, is simple. Our passing existence in this world destined for destruction (by fire, as the Saints and Doctors tell us, following Saint Peter) is too strongly marked by its characteristics. For us, “real” means “material,” “solid,” “heavy,” “tangible.” In contrast, essences, intelligible forms, angels—even God—appear to us, unless we are true philosophers or mystics, as “volatile,” “unreal.” This is why we cannot imagine the blessed existence of eternal beings.

A single glance at Nicolas Poussin’s painting of The Ecstasy of Saint Paul is enough to understand how pitiful our attempts are to represent anything belonging to the preternatural or supernatural realm. Our present corporeality is in blatant contradiction with the condition of levitation: we are not made to fly but rather to move heavily, crawling across the surface of the earth to which we are “glued” by the coarse qualities of our mortal bodies. Not only do we lack the conditions of heavenly life, but we also lack the experience necessary to form credible representations. How can one represent—through sounds, colors, images, or through words—mystical ecstasy or life without death? Who among us can say he knows what these are? And no matter how enchanted we may be by the exquisite finish of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Ávila, it remains only a pitiful image of a state that surpasses human understanding.

Windows to Heaven: The Visions of Saint Hildegard of Bingen

The faith of the Church clearly teaches that the essence of our belief concerns not the visible things of this passing world but the invisible things of the eternal Kingdom of God. Do we truly have no successful, credible, fitting description of it? Certainly, we have the Holy Scriptures—for example, the visions of the prophet Ezekiel and, above all, the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Apocalypse of Saint John. From them we extract an important axiom: the representation of the unseen world—of Paradise—is possible only through symbolic language, full of mysterious meanings that must be interpreted carefully. For now, however, I want to draw attention to another representation, given to us by one of the most illustrious women in the history of our Church: Saint Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098–1179).

The legendary German mystic, endowed by God with extraordinary spiritual gifts, experienced remarkable visions—true windows into the invisible world. Reading her writings, we are for a moment carried by the images and words of her Scivias into the world before the Fall. In my view, this monumental work contains not only the mysteries of history but also the most significant representation—aside from Scripture itself—of the prelapsarian state of Adam and Eve.

Saint Hildegard’s visions depict everything significant that took place in Eden. From this majestic panorama, revealed in successive visions, I will quote only the moment when the serpent—possessed by the devil—tempts Eve. Despite its tragic outcome, it contains one of the most beautiful and profound images of the body of Adam’s companion. It all begins with the serpent’s breath upon Eve, which ultimately led to the Fall of both:

Wherefore in that bright region he blew upon a white cloud, which had come forth from a beautiful human form and contained within itself many and many stars because, in that place of delight, Eve—whose soul was innocent, for she had been raised out of innocent Adam, bearing in her body the whole multitude of the human race, shining with God’s preordination—was invaded by the Devil through the seduction of the serpent for her own downfall. Why was this? Because he knew that the susceptibility of the woman would be more easily conquered than the strength of the man; and he saw that Adam burned so vehemently in his holy love for Eve that if he, the Devil, conquered Eve, Adam would do whatever she said to him. Hence the Devil cast out both the cloud and the human form from that region because that ancient seducer cast out Eve and Adam by his deception from the seat of blessedness and thrust them into the darkness of destruction.[1]

Hildegard’s vision—validated by her sanctity and her title as Doctor of the Church—can be considered authentic. Through His German servant, God offered us a window through which we may look into Eden before the Fall. This gift is an immense privilege. Yet for it to bear fruit, we must receive it with the reverence due to something so rare and precious.

Sacred Images and Symbols: Windows to the Unseen World

First, I repeat: these visions are symbolic, not literal. A symbol is not a “sign,” a convention, a fable—something false. On the contrary, sacred symbols are, in a certain sense, the truest realities in this world, for an authentic symbol (such as the Holy Altar) stands in an ontological relationship to what it represents. In the case of the altar, it participates in the reality of Christ Himself—whose eternal solidity, immutability, and steadfastness it symbolizes.

Thus, the symbol connects us truly to the symbolized. I stress this to avoid the error of those who, misled by Saint Augustine’s use of Latin “signum”(“sign”) as a synonym for Greek σύμβολον (“symbol”), believe a symbol is arbitrary—and therefore unreal. Actually, sacred symbols are not human inventions but divine ones—just as all “substantial forms” (the spiritual essences of all things) are created by God.

Therefore, when I say that the images in the visions of Saint Hildegard are symbolic, I mean that they are representations suited to our current capacity for understanding—yet representations that stand in a consistent ontological relationship with the unseen spiritual realities they depict. They truly make present the realities they symbolize. Our need for sacred images and symbols stems from the fact that spiritual realities are barely conceivable to our minds, which are now bonded to a lower form of knowledge (in ancient prayers our fallen minds are described as filled with “earthly thoughts,” being “carnal,” “earthly”—in a word, “fallen”). This is why God offers us the possibility of ascending gradually through sacred images and symbols—visible things which, being from our natural world, are accessible to us, yet point to supernatural realities that we otherwise could neither know nor understand.

The structural details of all the characters in Saint Hildegard’s visions must be interpreted with great care. Because of the pitiful state in which we now exist our capacity for knowledge has been greatly diminished and impaired by our “fallen” condition. We are in no way able to imagine or conceive what the prelapsarian world was like. It was precisely this that made another visionary woman of our Church, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, refrain from bold speculation about her own mystical visions of Eden. Therefore, we must humbly accept that we cannot know the world as it was when God finally said of all creation that “they were very good” (Genesis 1:31). The difference between the world after the fall and the one before it is immense.

Knowing the condition of fallen humanity, God guides us through sacred symbolism—in Scripture, sacred art, and the architecture of the Temple (the Church)—so we might partially understand the mysteries of the unseen cosmos. In this same way we must understand Hildegard’s visions: as vast sacred dramas, faithful to Biblical Revelation, through which God reveals the entire history of the world—from its beginning to its end. Yet again: these images must be read with caution, mindful of their symbolic nature.

A Transparent Body and a Star-Filled Cloud

Regarding the state of human beings before original sin, as represented in the passage from Scivias quoted above, the key elements of the vision offer striking lights to our understanding. First of all, the image of Eve as a white cloud, somewhat transparent, is extraordinarily meaningful. It allows us to glimpse—however faintly, yet still quite concretely—what the Holy Apostle Paul, another great mystic and visionary, might mean when he speaks in 1 Corinthians 15:40 of “celestial bodies” in contrast to the “terrestrial,” mortal bodies we have now. Think, in simple terms, about what meaning lies in the statement “we are made of earth,” in contrast to the statement “we are made of heaven.” The image of Eve as a white, transparent cloud can give us—as far as possible—the most fitting representation for understanding what it means for a human person to have a “body made of heaven.” For is not the cloud the ordinary citizen of heaven? Clouds float in (or on) the heavens, do they not?

Obviously, Saint Paul’s suggestion in no way implies a denial of the biblical text in Genesis, which tells us clearly that God “formed man of the slime of the earth” (Genesis 2:7). What the great apostle most likely means to suggest is something else: the accidental qualities of the earth from which God made Adam is not the same as the earth from which we, the mortal ones, are made. We may return to Paul’s statement by understanding that there are terrestrial bodies (therefore “earthly slime”) and celestial bodies (therefore “heavenly slime”). One is the quality of the “earth” before the Fall, another is the quality of the “earth” after the Fall. Just as the entire cosmic nature suffered a transformation after the Fall of the first parents, so, too, human nature underwent a profound mutation (which can be explained—at least partially—in speculative-metaphysical terms).

Certainly, Adam and Eve possessed bodies from the very beginning: this is how man is constituted by divine design—a spiritual being, with an immortal soul, yet embodied. But the quality of the bodies of Adam and Eve before the Fall was entirely different from the quality of their bodies after the Fall. And we know only the latter—the mortal bodies. Yet the image of Eve’s transparent and volatile body—like a cloud—in Saint Hildegard’s vision speaks, symbolically, of the transparency of prelapsarian bodies: Adam and Eve had bodies radically different from ours. Moreover, we can easily speculate regarding the lightness of their bodies: we may imagine without difficulty their capacity to levitate or fly. After all, only clouds “fly,” do they not? But let us not believe that they would have flown as we might now, if, with these coarse, mortal, earthly bodies, we attempted to move through the sky like the superhero Superman. Nothing could be more foolish than such an image. Why? Because our present bodies, mortal and earthly as they are, are not made for such capacities. To regain them, they must be transformed by God Himself at the end of history into “heavenly” bodies, when the final resurrection occurs. Only then will we receive spiritual bodies, capable of what we can, in our current physical terms, only imagine as flight, in that new world which we cannot even conceive at present. Let us leave to children’s films—or to adults seeking sci-fi entertainment—the rather comic images of Superman flying…

The second key point in Saint Hildegard’s vision—of even greater and more dazzling beauty than the cloud-like body—is the visible presence, within Eve’s nature, of all her descendants in the form of billions of shining stars. Think for a moment: I, the one writing this, and you, the ones reading it—we were all already there, in potency, conceived from eternity in the infinite mind of God. In other words, we were contained within Eve’s nature, she who had just been taken from that very beautiful human form—Adam.

From the moment I first read Scivias until today, I have never ceased to marvel at the poetry and genius of this inspired representation of the unity of the human race within the primordial universal couple—Adam and Eve. I also remind you of one of the astonishing details of the supernatural icon of the Holy Virgin Mary of Guadalupe: the star-covered teal-blue cloak worn by the Queen of the Universe, the Holy Virgin Mary. All those stars are nothing else—as with the stars of the astronomical heavens—but symbols of the righteous in the eternal Kingdom of God. For let us not forget: just as Our Lord Jesus Christ is the New Adam, the Holy Virgin Mary is the New Eve.

We have already gained several meaningful insights regarding the state of the first parents in Paradise. We also have a suggestion regarding the terrible consequences of their Fall: it becomes relatively clear how original sin was transmitted from the first parents to their descendants, if we remember that we were all, in the form of those stars, contained within Eve’s maternal nature. Even more suggestive is the key expression Saint Hildegard uses when she shows that Eve carried in her body “the whole multitude of the human race, shining with God’s preordination” (“quae de innocente Adam omnem multitudinem humani generis in praeordinatione Dei lucentem in suo corpore gestans sumpta fuerat”). As is evident even in the English translation, the Latin phrase praeordinatione Dei is synonymous (for example, in Saint Thomas Aquinas) with the well-known notion of “predestination.” Since we have mentioned the Angelic Doctor, we must recall that the predestination of all created beings—that is, of all humans—belongs to the sphere of the divine Intellect and Wisdom.

Here I stop. When faced with such mysteries as that of predestination, it is always good to remind ourselves that silence is golden, while speech is only silver. And contemplation always entails a reverent and holy silence before God—the infinite, eternal, and absolute Holy Trinity.

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[1] Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, translated by Mother Columbia Hart and Jane Bishop introduced by Barbara J. Newman prefaced by Caroline Walker Bynum, New York: Paulist Press, 1990, p. 77.