St Hildegard of Bingen (c 1098 – 1179)

St Hildegard was a German Benedictine Abbess with a list of talents too great to list here – but described in a Wikipedia page about her … As well as her fame throughout Christendom as a visionary, a composer of music and lyrics, poetess and playwright, she is also known as a distinguished practitioner and writer in  medicine and the natural sciences.

Hildegard strongly believed in humankind’s intrinsic relationship with the whole of God’s creation in the Universe. As evil and disease had become part of human life through the Fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, she advocated the idea of ‘viriditas‘ – literally ‘greening’ human health and wellbeing by once more connecting ourselves with the natural world. This was not remotely in a ‘new age’ sort of way, but through reconciliation with God, with one another, and with the earth He created for us.

St Hildegard was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.