Physica and Causae et Curae
Hildegard's c. 1150-58 natural-medical works on the powers of plants, animals, stones, and elements (Physica) and the causes and cures of human diseases (Causae et Curae)
Tradition: Twelfth-century monastic natural philosophy / medieval medicine
The plants, animals, stones, and elements have powers given by God for human healing — a complete medieval natural-medical encyclopedia
Physica and Causae et Curae are Hildegard's two natural-medical works, composed c. 1150-58 at her monastery of Rupertsberg between her three great visionary works. Physica (also called Liber Subtilitatum Diversarum Naturarum Creaturarum) is a natural-philosophical encyclopedia in nine books: plants (1), elements (2), trees (3), stones (4), fish (5), birds (6), animals (7), reptiles (8), and metals (9). For each natural substance Hildegard treats its physical-medicinal properties and its hidden spiritual significance. Causae et Curae (also called Liber Compositae Medicinae) is a four-book medical treatise on the causes and cures of human diseases — humoral pathology, the female body, mental disorders, and the relation between bodily condition and spiritual condition. Together the two works are the most extensive surviving natural-medical writings by any medieval author — male or female — and constitute a unique source for twelfth-century natural philosophy, monastic medicine, and the medieval understanding of the human body.
Author
Editions cited
- Physica (Liber Subtilitatum Diversarum Naturarum Creaturarum) and Causae et Curae (Liber Compositae Medicinae), composed c. 1150-58; modern critical edition Hildegardis Bingensis: Physica, ed. Reiner Hildebrandt (de Gruyter, 2010) and Causae et Curae, ed. Laurence Moulinier (de Gruyter, 2003); English trans. Priscilla Throop, Hildegard von Bingen's Physica (Healing Arts, 1998) and various Causae et Curae translations
School Embodiments
Hildegard's natural philosophy is firmly within the medieval Catholic framework: the natural world expresses the divine creative order, and natural science is a form of theological knowledge.
"Every herb, every stone, every creature has been given by God a power for the service and healing of humans, if rightly known and rightly used." (Physica, preface)
The doctrine of "hidden virtues" in natural substances — that minerals, plants, and animals carry powers known only to the careful observer — connects Hildegard to the medieval hermetic and natural-magical tradition.
"The hidden virtue of the emerald is in its greenness, which contains the principle of life itself; it is therefore beneficial against melancholy and against many diseases of the heart." (Physica, IV.1)
The visionary-prophetic framework Hildegard works within draws on the broader patristic tradition that informed both East and West.
"What I write of these natural things, I write not by my own learning but by the Living Light which has shown me their meanings." (Causae et Curae, prologue)
Hildegard is empirically realist about the natural world: plants and stones have real causal powers, observable through experience and applicable in medicine.
"Whoever has a headache should take fresh lavender and put it on the forehead; the heat of the lavender will draw out the bad humour." (Physica, I, on lavandula)
Hildegard's view of the natural world as alive with hidden virtues, intelligible to careful observers, has structural similarities to relational-animist ontologies (though Hildegard is firmly within the monotheist framework).
"The earth, like the body, has its own humours; rivers and rain are its blood, mountains its bones, trees its hairs; what we do to the earth, we do also to ourselves." (Causae et Curae, I)
Hildegard's "viriditas" — the green vitality that flows through all living things — anticipates process-philosophical accounts of life as continuous creative becoming.
"Viriditas is the green life-force given by God to all that lives — to plants, to animals, to the human soul. When it withdraws, life withdraws; when it returns, life returns." (Causae et Curae, II, on viriditas)
The medical prescriptions are pragmatic-realist: try this herb for this condition, observe what works, adjust accordingly.
"Whoever has the cough should take horehound and prepare it as I shall describe; let her observe whether it helps, and if it does not, let her try the next remedy." (Causae et Curae, III)
Internal Tensions
The textual transmission is difficult — neither Physica nor Causae et Curae survives in an authentic twelfth-century manuscript; the principal witnesses are thirteenth- and fourteenth-century copies that have been substantially edited. Modern Hildegard scholarship (Newman, Glaze, Sweet) has worked to reconstruct what is authentically Hildegardian. The works' modern reception — particularly the "Hildegard medicine" popular in late-twentieth-century alternative-medicine circles — sometimes claims more for the historical texts than the scholarship supports.
I. Time
The cyclical time of the medical-natural year — herbs gathered in their seasons, diseases following their courses, healing taking its temporal course.
Attributes
II. Space
The localised plant-and-animal world of the Rhineland; the human body as the small space within which the four humours play.
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III. Matter
The principal subject: every natural substance is a material carrier of medicinal-spiritual power.
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IV. Observer
The monastic healer (Hildegard herself and her successors at Rupertsberg) whose careful observation discloses the hidden virtues of natural things.
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V. Energy
Viriditas — the green vital force flowing through all living things — is the master concept.
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VI. Information
The discrete catalog of plants, stones, and animals with their properties; the systematic medical taxonomy of diseases and remedies.
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Physica and Causae et Curae resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 15 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
4 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.