Awe and wonder may be the oldest wellness practices we have — older than any supplement, older than any spa. Long before neuroscientists began measuring what a moment of wonder does to the human nervous system, a twelfth-century Benedictine abbess built an entire vision of health around it. Hildegard von Bingen understood awe not as a fleeting pleasantry but as a posture of the soul: the recognition that we stand inside something vast, ordered, and alive. Modern research is now catching up to what she intuited nine centuries ago — that regular encounters with wonder measurably change how we feel, how we treat others, and possibly how we age.
Why a Medieval Abbess Belongs in the Science of Awe
Psychologists define awe as the emotion we feel in the presence of something vast that exceeds our current understanding — a mountain range, a piece of music, a night sky, a birth. It is distinct from happiness or contentment. Awe reorganizes attention: the self becomes smaller, the world becomes larger, and for a moment the ordinary boundaries of our preoccupations dissolve.
Awe begins in attention: the greening world Hildegard called viriditas.
By that definition, Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) may be one of history’s most prolific documentarians of awe. From childhood she experienced luminous visions, which she recorded decades later in her theological masterwork, the Scivias. In its opening pages she describes a blazing brightness pouring through her “entire brain” and kindling her heart “like a flame” — language that strains, as the language of awe always does, against the limits of description. Late in life, in her famous letter to the monk Guibert of Gembloux, she explained that she perceived this radiance while fully awake, calling it the reflection of the Living Light. What is striking to a modern reader is not only what she saw, but what the seeing did to her: it produced humility, energy, clarity, and an almost inexhaustible creative output — music, medicine, natural science, theology — sustained into her eighties.
“O How Wonderful”: Wonder as a Spiritual Discipline
Hildegard did not treat wonder as a private luxury. She composed it into the daily life of her community. Among her more than seventy surviving musical works is the antiphon O quam mirabilis est — “O how wonderful is the foreknowledge of the divine heart” — a piece her nuns would have sung as part of the liturgy, rehearsing astonishment the way we might rehearse gratitude in a journal. Her soaring, unusually wide-ranging melodies were designed to lift the singer out of herself; scholars have long noted that her chant seems engineered for transcendence. In this sense the music of Hildegard of Bingen functioned as a wonder-practice: a scheduled, communal encounter with vastness.
Her natural science carried the same posture. In Physica and Causae et Curae, Hildegard catalogued plants, stones, rivers, and winds not as inert resources but as participants in a living, divinely ordered cosmos. Nothing in her universe was boring. A stalk of fennel, a green hillside, the flight of birds — each was a small window onto the whole. This is precisely the skill that awe researchers now try to teach: the capacity to find vastness in ordinary things.
What Modern Science Says About Awe and Health
The research on awe has grown rapidly, and its findings would not have surprised the abbess. In a study published in the journal Emotion in 2020, researchers at UC San Francisco, working with UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, asked older adults to take one fifteen-minute walk each week for eight weeks. Half received a simple additional instruction: seek out moments of awe. The “awe walkers” reported greater joy, compassion, and appreciation during their walks — and less distress in daily life — than those who simply walked. Even the selfies they submitted changed over the weeks: their faces grew smaller in the frame as the scenery grew larger, and their smiles measurably broadened. Same walk, same legs, different attention.
Related work has associated experiences of awe with lower levels of inflammatory markers, reduced stress, and a quieting of self-referential mental chatter — the rumination that so often accompanies anxiety and low mood. Researchers describe awe’s signature as the “small self”: a healthy shrinking of ego that paradoxically leaves people feeling more connected, more generous, and more alive. Hildegard would have recognized this immediately. Humility before the vastness of creation was, for her, not a burden but a medicine — one of the dispositions that keep body and soul in right proportion, a theme she returns to throughout her writing on discretio, the art of balance and right measure.
Viriditas: Where Wonder Meets the Greening World
For Hildegard, the natural world was the primary theater of wonder, and she gave its living power a name: viriditas, the “greening” life-force she saw coursing through plants, bodies, and souls alike. In the Liber Divinorum Operum, she renders a vision of divine life ablaze in meadows, shining in waters, burning in sun and stars — the whole cosmos wet with vitality. To stand before a green and growing world, in her understanding, was to stand before the visible signature of God’s aliveness. Awe was the appropriate response, and dryness of spirit — what she called the loss of greenness — was a genuine ailment.
In Hildegard’s apothecary, even a bitter herb was a small window onto the whole.
This is where her spirituality becomes intensely practical. If viriditas is the moisture of the soul, then wonder is one of the ways we water it. A person who has stopped noticing the world — who walks past the linden tree, the storm front, the night sky without a flicker of astonishment — is, in Hildegard’s terms, drying out. The remedy is not exotic. It is attention.
A Hildegard-Inspired Practice of Wonder
The beauty of the awe research is how modest the intervention is: fifteen minutes, once a week, with the intention to be astonished. Hildegard’s tradition suggests a few ways to deepen it.
Walk toward green. Choose a route with trees, water, or open sky. Hildegard’s sensibility says the greening world is where vitality shows itself most plainly — an intuition her tradition wove into meditation in nature long before “forest bathing” had a name.
Go as a beginner. Awe researchers advise approaching familiar places as if seeing them for the first time. Hildegard’s visionary habit was exactly this: the refusal to let creation become background noise.
Let music do the lifting. On days when the weather or the calendar refuses to cooperate, ten minutes with Hildegard’s own chant — vast, slow, unaccompanied — reliably produces the raised hair and welling eyes that researchers use as markers of awe.
End in moderation, not intensity. Hildegard’s counsel of discretio applies even here. Wonder is not a peak experience to be chased but a daily nutrient to be received. Small, regular doses — the weekly walk, the sung antiphon, the pause at the window — are truer to her rhythm than occasional grandeur.
Nine hundred years separate Hildegard’s scriptorium from the psychology lab, yet they have arrived at the same quiet conclusion: human beings are healthier when they regularly stand before something larger than themselves. The abbess simply adds what the lab cannot — that the vastness has a face, that the greening world is alive with intention, and that wonder is not merely good for us but is, in some sense, what we are for.
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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.