Sam Harrelson

Greening Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Crisis

On many mornings, I find myself sitting beneath the black walnut tree in my backyard, contemplating how an ancient abbess’s wisdom speaks to our ecological crisis. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century mystic, healer, and visionary, loved to talk about viriditas, the “greening” life-force of God in creation. She lived in a world where forests were alive with divine Light, and every medicinal herb carried a spark of God’s vitality. As a PhD student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, I’m continually amazed by how Hildegard’s medieval insights resonate with what I call the Ecology of the Cross, or a theological framework that challenges our modern extractive paradigms with a vision of kenosis, interdependence, and sacred entanglement. In this post, I want to weave together Hildegard’s greening spirituality with the Ecology of the Cross, exploring how her ancient ontology can inform a Christian ecological lens today.

Hildegard’s Viriditas: Greening Power and Divine Immanence

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess who saw the natural world lit up from within by God’s presence. Surrounded by the lush Rhineland forests, she perceived God’s “living power of light” energizing all creation, a verdant force she famously named viriditas, or greenness or greening power. In Hildegard’s theology, viriditas is the Holy Spirit’s life flowing through plants, animals, and elements, infusing them with vitality and growth.

“The greening power of the earth is the viriditas, which is the living light of the Holy Spirit… It is the love of God that flows through all creation, bringing forth new life and growth,” Hildegard wrote.

This was no poetic flourish for her; it was a literal cosmological principle. In her mystical visions, the entire universe even appeared as a tree, “verdant with God’s wisdom” and pulsing with divine life. For Hildegard, God was not a distant clockmaker but immanent in nature – present in the sap of trees, the humors of the human body, the cycles of the cosmos. All creation, she believed, is “alive with God’s presence” and thus sings a song of praise back to its Creator.

Crucially, Hildegard’s spirituality was deeply non-dualistic. She did not split spirit from matter. One commentator notes that she held a “theandrocosmic” ecology of life – a holistic view of reality as a dialogue between God (theos), humanity (anthropos), and the cosmos. This means Hildegard saw everything as interconnected as the health of the soul, the health of the body, and the health of the Earth were all of a piece. Indeed, Hildegard was a renowned healer in her time as a botanist and physician who composed texts on herbal medicine and the human body. She left behind volumes of wisdom on topics ranging from healthcare and natural remedies to music, ethics, and theology.

Her medical work (such as Physica and Causae et Curae) catalogued plants, stones, and animals, not just for their physical properties but for their spiritual virtues. In Hildegard’s eyes, studying nature was a way to understand God’s ongoing creative work. Healing a body with herbs and prayer was part of healing the ruptured relationship between humanity and creation. Divine immanence for Hildegard meant that the Creator’s power “flows through all creation,” so caring for creation was nothing less than an act of love for God. She warned that when we harm the earth, we harm ourselves, because we are inextricably part of this sacred web: “When we destroy the earth, we destroy ourselves,” she wrote bluntly. It’s hard to imagine a more ontologically rich affirmation of interdependence from the Middle Ages.

The Cross as Tree of Life: A Paradigm of Kenosis

Centuries before terms like “ecotheology” existed, Hildegard and her fellow medieval mystics were already linking the Cross with creation. In Christian symbolism, the cross of Christ has long been understood as a kind of Tree of Life. The New Testament itself refers to the cross as a “tree” (xylon in Greek which also refers to “clubs” throughout the Gospels interestingly enough) on which Christ was crucified (Acts 5:30; 1 Pet. 2:24). Early Christians couldn’t miss the irony of a wooden instrument of execution becoming the cosmic tree of redemption. Hildegard expands this imagery with her vision of the verdant universe. We might say her viriditas concept lets us imagine the cross not as dead wood, but as a tree greening with new life by God’s power. In one of my favorite poetic images, “even the cross, that ruined tree, bears sap enough to green the nations”… in other words, through the cross’s wood flows the viriditas of God, bringing renewal out of death.

This brings us to what I call the Ecology of the Cross. At its heart, this framework re-imagines the cross as more than a ticket to individual salvation; it is a paradigm of kenosis, interconnection, and humble participation in the wider community of creation. The Greek word kenosis refers to Christ’s “self-emptying” love (Phil. 2:5–8). On the cross, according to Christian faith, God-in-Christ empties Himself by pouring out divine love in utter vulnerability, even to the point of death. Traditionally, Christians see this as the path to resurrection and new life. But what if we also view it through an ecological lens? Ecology of the Cross suggests that the cross is “an ecological gesture of descent: a humble participation in the mutual vulnerability of the world”. In Jesus’ self-emptying sacrifice we see a model for how we humans should relate to the more-than-human world with radical humility instead of domination, willing to relinquish our privilege and power for the sake of healing relationships.

Such a kenotic ecology directly critiques modern extractive paradigms. Our industrial-technocratic society has often approached nature with an attitude of grasping and exploitation, the very opposite of self-emptying. Forests are logged and burned for profit, rivers are dammed and polluted for convenience, animals are driven to extinction for consumption or farmed for extracting nutrients in non-sustainable and ethically horrible ways. Creation bears the wounds of these extractive systems. In fact, we can literally see it in the trees: “forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet”. The cross, in an ecological sense, is present wherever life is suffering under unjust exploitation and wherever sacrificial love is bringing forth healing. The Ecology of the Cross invites us to recognize that the pattern of Christ’s cross, death and resurrection, is woven into Earth’s own rhythms. As I’ve written elsewhere, “the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift”. Every fallen forest that sprouts green shoots from its stump, every species brought back from the brink by compassionate conservation, every community that sacrifices for environmental justice… these are cruciform moments, little enactments of resurrection life.

Sacred Entanglement: Communion Beyond the Human

One of Hildegard’s gifts to us is a vision of sacred entanglement in a cosmos where everything is enfolded in everything else through God’s love. She spoke of the elemental interconnectedness of the four elements, the celestial bodies, and the human being (microcosm mirroring macrocosm). Modern science, with its talk of ecosystems and quantum entanglement, is catching up to this ancient intuition that “all beings are entangled in webs of relation”. Hildegard would agree wholeheartedly. And Christian theology adds: all those relations are grounded in God. Nothing exists outside the divine dance of communion. Significantly, Hildegard’s cosmology didn’t isolate humanity from nature; instead, she saw humans as integrated participants in the community of creation, “a world – everything is hidden in you,” she imagines God saying to each person, for the whole cosmos lives inside of us as we live inside it. This has profound ethical implications… if we and the earth are truly part of one living network sustained by God’s viriditas, then our calling is to nurture that network, to tend and befriend it, not to dominate or ignore it.

The Ecology of the Cross builds on this kind of sacred interconnectedness. It emphasizes that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it – through roots and branches, through crucifixion and renewal. In Jesus’ crucifixion, God doesn’t pluck souls out of creation; God enters into creation’s deepest pains to transform them from within. The Cross is God with us, with all of us, including the sparrows, the soil, and the stars. This is a profoundly metaphysical statement as it suggests that at the heart of reality (the metaphysical core of existence) there is a cruciform love that ties all things together in a bond of shared being. As theologian Catherine Keller might put it, there is an apophatic entanglement at work – a holy interweaving we only dimly perceive but are nevertheless a part of. Or as philosopher William Desmond would say, standing before a living tree draws us into “the between,” that threshold where mystery breathes through being. Such moments can feel sacramental. Indeed, in a sacramental worldview the material world mediates God’s presence. A forest can be a temple, a river can whisper divine truth. Hildegard, composing her ethereal chants to the viriditas of the Spirit, understood this well. The whole world was her monastery’s cloister garden, alive with God.

For those of us drawn to Christian ecotheology, to speak of sacred entanglement is to affirm what the Gospel has hinted all along: that Christ’s reconciliation “extends to all things” (Col. 1:20) and that creation itself eagerly awaits liberation (Rom. 8:19-21). We find ourselves, then, in a spiritual lineage that runs from saints like Hildegard straight to the present. “From the prophets to Jesus’ parables to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas… our tradition is rich with ecological wisdom,” as I’ve noted before on Thinking Religion. The task now is to live into that wisdom.

Kenosis, Viriditas, and Living in Communion

Bringing Hildegard’s mysticism into conversation with the Ecology of the Cross enriches both. Hildegard gives us the vibrant language of greening and the assurance that caring for the earth is an act of love for God. The Ecology of the Cross, for its part, gives us the challenging ethic of kenosis and the call to empty ourselves of pride, greed, and the will-to-dominate so that we can truly serve and commune with our neighbors, human and non-human. Together, these threads form a kind of cruciform ecology of grace as an approach to the environmental crisis that is both deeply spiritual and vigorously practical. It asks us to reimagine what sacrifice means. Instead of the destructive sacrifices demanded by extractive capitalism (where we sacrifice forests and futures on the altar of consumerism or chauvanism), we are invited into the life-giving sacrifice modeled by Christ and celebrated by Hildegard and a sacrifice that gives up self for the sake of renewed life for others. This could look like deliberate simplicity and restraint (a kenotic lifestyle that “lets go” of excess consumption), or like actively bearing the cross of ecological work in its many forms, whether that is replanting a clear-cut area, advocating for environmental justice in our communities, or tending a backyard garden as if it were an altar.

My own theological perspective is rooted in this integration of ancient wisdom and new vision. I’m convinced, as are many others, that our spiritual narratives and our ecological actions are inseparable. When Hildegard urges us to “participate in the love of God” by caring for creation, she is echoing the kenotic love poured out on the cross – a love that holds nothing back, not even life itself, for the sake of beloved creation. This perspective reframes Christian mission: it’s no longer only about saving souls, but about healing relationships across the web of life. It also reframes metaphysical and ontological questions. We begin to ask: What is the nature of being, if not being-with? What kind of world is this, if the Creator chose to wear its flesh and suffer its pains? Such questions lead us into what theologian Thomas Berry called The Great Work of our times and to rediscover ourselves as part of a sacred Earth community and to act accordingly.

In the end, Hildegard’s viriditas and the Ecology of the Cross converge on a message of hopeful, humble participation. Even in a time of climate upheaval, mass extinction, and social fragmentation, we’re invited to see the world with new eyes “to help people see differently and to recover the rooted wisdom of scripture and tradition,” as I often remind churches. We are invited to step into what the Benedictine tradition would call ora et labora, or prayer and work, on behalf of creation, joining our hands and hearts to the greening, healing work God is doing. The Tree of Life stands not as a mere symbol, but as an ongoing reality with the cross planted in the earth, drawing all things into divine communion. Hildegard’s lush visions and the Cross’s stark call both beckon us toward a future where humans live with reverence among our fellow creatures, where we embrace our creaturely limits and gift, and where, by God’s grace, the desert places of our world can bloom again.

As the farmer-poet Wendell Berry has said (in a line that often echoes in my mind when I gaze at a thriving green tree stump): “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how. By the greening power of God and the self-emptying love of Christ, may we learn how as well.