VISIO QUARTA, cap. LI
The Soul's Four Winds
The soul is likened to the four winds that hold the firmament together, and it flies with four wings: sensuality, intellect, and the knowledge of good and evil.
For a person guides and sustains his whole self, as it were, with his own arms and legs, and is just as windy, so to speak, as the four principal winds with their collateral allies, placed in it, hold the entire firmament together, and each one of them helps the others for the strengthening of the sky. These things signify that the soul flies with four wings in a human being — namely, with sensuality, intellect, and the knowledge of good and of evil.
Two Wings of Desire and Discernment
Sensuality drives fleshly works while intellect discerns their worth, and the knowledge of good and evil reveals that salvation comes from God through the soul while honor is sought through the flesh.
For with sensuality it operates according to the taste of the flesh in a person, but through the intellect it discerns whether its works may please God or human beings. Through two other wings — namely, the knowledge of good and of evil — a person accomplishes every work in the soul, and by the diversity of these wings the character of the work becomes known, because salvation from God comes through the soul, but honor from human beings is sought through the flesh.
Ascent, Descent, and the Breath of Grace
Through the knowledge of good a person ascends to heaven, through evil is cast down, but when touched by grace and by sin, the soul sighs toward God like winds shifting between calm and storm.
And so at times a person ascends into heaven through the knowledge of good, and at other times is cast down to the earth through the knowledge of evil. But when a person, at some time inwardly touched by the grace of the Holy Spirit, has perceived himself to be weighed down in the soul by the weight of his own sins, doing penance for evil works, he sighs toward God; and just as winds now run about in a calm breeze, now in a great storm within the firmament, so a person is always occupied either with good or with evil.
The Body's Joints and Opposing Knowledge
Just as winds move through the bends of arms and joints, a person accomplishes all works through the opposed knowledge of good and evil working together.
How the movements of the winds are determined in the bends of the arms and in the joints of the shoulders or hands, and how just as the right and the left hand, the firmament, and the earth work together with each other in some respects, so too a person, through the knowledge of good and of evil — though they are opposed — accomplishes all their works.
Read the original Latin
Nam et homo cum brachiis et cruribus suis totum se regit et sustentat, et ventosus est, quemadmodum quatuor principales venti cum collateralibus suis omne firmamentum in illud positi tenent, et ut unusquisque eorum ad confortationem firmamenti aliis subvenit. Haec designant quod anima quatuor alis, scilicet cum sensualitate, intellectu et scientia boni et mali, in homine volat. Cum sensualitate namque secundum gustum carnis in homine operatur, per intellectum vero opera sua discernit, si Deo aut hominibus placeant. Per duas etiam alas, scientiae videlicet boni et mali, homo omne opus in anima perficit, quarum diversitate qualis sit innotescit, quia salvationem per animam a Deo, per carnem vero honorem ab hominibus expetit. Et sic interdum per scientiam boni in coelum ascendit, interdum etiam per scientiam mali in terram prosternitur. Sed cum homo aliquando gratia Spiritus sancti intrinsecus tactus, pondere peccatorum suorum in anima se gravari senserit, de pravis operibus poenitentiam agens, ad Deum suspirat; et quemadmodum venti modo in aura placida, modo in tempestate magna in firmamento discurrunt, sic homo vel cum bono vel cum malo semper occupatus est.
Quomodo in flexuris brachiorum et in juncturis scapularum vel manuum reflexiones ventorum determinandae sint, et quod sicut dextera et sinistra firmamentumque et terra sibi in aliquibus cooperantur, sic et homo per scientiam boni et mali licet contraria omnia opera sua perficiat.
Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works) companion
Don't stop at Day 30
All 317 chapters live in the free Chosen Portion app, paced for daily reading
Hildegard's practice of daily attention to God's work in creation becomes a paced daily devotional through all ten visions in the Chosen Portion app
- One vision passage a day, readable in under 10 minutes
- The complete Book of Divine Works plus Hildegard's other major works, free
- Progress tracking so a 317-chapter classic actually gets finished