And I heard the Living Light, say to me: Therefore you see “an extremely bright light,” which signifies the Father, who is without the stains of illusion, failure, or deceit. And in the light is “the figure of a man the color of sapphire,” which represents the Son, who is without the stains f hardheartedness, envy, or evil, and who before time began, was begotten of the Father in divinity, but afterwards became incarnate in the world in humanity. And “it was all burning in a delightful red fire.” This was the fire without flaws of aridity, morality, or darkness, which represents the Holy Spirit, by whom the Only Begotten Son of the Father was conceived in the flesh, born of the Virgin and poured out his light and taught over all the world. And the bright light flooded through all the glowing fire, and the glowing fire bathed all the bright light and the glowing fire shone over the whole figure of the man so that the three were one light in strength and power.
This means that the Father, who is Justice, is not without the Son or the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit, who inflames the hearts of the faithful, is not without the Father nor the Son, nor the Son without the Father, nor the Father or the Son without the Holy Spirit, nor the Spirit without them. Thus these three persons exist as one God in one perfect divine majesty, and the unity of their divinity is inseparable, because divinity cannot be separated, since it always remains unchanged without any mutability. But the Father is revealed through the Son, the Son through creation, and the Holy Spirit through the incarnate Son. How is this? It is the Father who begot the Son before all ages; it is the Son through whom all things were made by the Father at the beginning of creation; and it is the Holy Spirit who appeared in the form of a dove at the baptism of the Son of God before the end of all time.
Scivas (known the Ways of the Lord) 2.2, as it appears in Hildegard of Bingen by Dr. Kujawa-Holbrook which can be purchased here.
The trinity is something I have always struggled with, and honestly dismiss at most opportunities. It is not that I have a problem with the idea of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, it is that we just do not know how to treat them. Christianity claims to be a monotheistic religion when, in practice, our denominational subsections shift the focus to one primary deity.
This explanation is, for the first time, something that makes sense to me. The melding that Hildegard provides, is something tangible for me to understand the inter-connectivity in a way that I have either been willfully ignorant of, or have never had explained to me in a compelling way. Last week, the post that kicked off this series, the quote I posted she spoke of God as something that cannot be, “divided or analyzed by words as human beings can.” While that is true, the way she states the trinity in this vision of hers, is incredibly compelling to me. Which is kind of ironic if you think about it, she cannot describe the full and richness of God, but the trinity is something we can almost touch.