SCIENCE AND FAITH IN HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

Abstract

This paper focuses on the thinking of Hildegard von Bingen, an important woman who lived in the twelfth century and left several written works. In her medical-scientific and visionary works, it is possible both to identify her main intellectual influences and to understand her vision of man and the universe; therefore, much of the context in which she lived – from the conflicted transition from Platonic symbolic cosmology to the astronomy of Aristotle and Ptolemy – becomes clearer. In her time, philosophy began to have more defined contours of its own, detaching it from theology and even inquiring questions concerning faith, which bothered many. This article brings Hildegard's stance in the face of this dispute; she, as a Benedictine nun, even knowing and being influenced by important thinkers and valuing the role of knowledge for the practice of Religion, reverberates the typically monastic thought of distrust in the face of the valorization of dialectics and criticizes the posture of scholastic philosophers, emphasizing, in opposition to them, the humility and prominence of faith.