Loneliness and health are now spoken of in the same breath by the World Health Organization, and the language it uses is startlingly physical. In June 2025, the WHO Commission on Social Connection reported that roughly one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, and that loneliness and social isolation are associated with an estimated 871,000 deaths each year — about a hundred every hour. Loneliness has been quietly moved out of the category of unhappiness and into the category of health.
Eight and a half centuries earlier, a Benedictine abbess on the Rhine had already put it there. Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) had no vocabulary for social epidemiology. She had something arguably more useful: a single word for what happens to a living thing that is cut off from the current of life. She called it ariditas — dryness.
The modern diagnosis: isolation as a physical condition
Viriditas and ariditas. For Hildegard, dryness was never a substance added to a living thing. It was a severance.
The 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, gathered evidence that had been accumulating for two decades and stated the conclusion plainly: social isolation and loneliness are independent risk factors for several major health conditions. The associations it cites are not small. Poor social connection has been linked with a roughly 29% higher risk of coronary heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke. Among older adults, chronic loneliness and isolation have been associated with an approximately 50% increased risk of developing dementia.
Much of the meta-analytic work behind those figures belongs to the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, whose pooled studies produced the comparison that made headlines — that the mortality risk associated with chronic social isolation is on the order of smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. It is worth reading that comparison carefully. It is a statement about the size of an association across many observational studies, not a claim that loneliness and tobacco damage the body by the same mechanism. Association is not causation, and a great deal of this research is correlational. But the direction and the consistency of the findings have been enough to persuade public health bodies on two continents to treat social connection as a determinant of health rather than a matter of private happiness.
What is striking is how little of this would have surprised Hildegard. She would have disputed the physiology. She would not have disputed the premise.
Ariditas: Hildegard’s word for the withering
Readers of this site will know Hildegard’s concept of viriditas, the divine “greening” she saw running through creation like sap through a branch — the moist, generative freshness that makes a plant grow, a wound close, a soul flourish. What is less often discussed is that viriditas has an opposite, and that Hildegard named it. Ariditas is dryness, drought, barrenness: the shriveling that sets in when the flow of greening is blocked. In her theology the two are always in tension. The drama of her writing plays out between the forest and the desert.
Crucially, ariditas is not a substance. It is a severance. Nothing has been added to the withered branch; something has been interrupted. The branch is dry precisely because it is no longer joined to what was feeding it. Hildegard applies the image first to the soul separated from God, but her cosmology does not permit a tidy line between spiritual and bodily severance. In the opening vision of the Liber Divinorum Operum she has the divine voice declare, “I am the supreme and fiery force who kindled every living spark.” Life, in her account, is not a private possession each creature holds in reserve. It is a current that has to keep arriving. Whatever cuts a person out of that circuit — sin, sickness, silence, solitude imposed rather than chosen — produces the same withering.
That is a remarkably serviceable description of what modern researchers are measuring. The lonely person has not acquired a disease. They have lost a connection, and the body keeps the account.
Four hundred letters: connection as a discipline, not a mood
It is easy to picture a twelfth-century enclosed nun as the patron saint of solitude. The documentary record says otherwise. Hildegard’s surviving correspondence runs to nearly four hundred letters, edited in Latin as the Epistolarium and translated into English by Joseph Baird and Radd Ehrman. Her correspondents included popes and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Bernard of Clairvaux, some eighteen abbesses and thirty-eight heads of male communities, and a great many ordinary people who simply wrote to a woman they had heard was worth writing to. Abbots asked her whether they ought to resign. Laypeople asked her what to do with their grief.
The shared table was the oldest answer to isolation that Hildegard knew, and the Benedictine day was built around it.
Behind that correspondence stood the Benedictine architecture she had lived inside since childhood. The Rule of St. Benedict opens by dividing monks into four kinds and reserves its sharpest words for the gyrovagi, the wanderers always on the move and never settling. It answers them with the vow of stability — the promise to stay with these particular people, in this particular place. The workshop where the monk is to labor, the Rule says, is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community. Its chapter on good zeal asks the brothers to support one another’s weaknesses of body and behavior with the greatest patience.
This is the part the modern conversation tends to miss. Benedict does not treat community as a feeling that arrives when the people happen to be congenial. He treats it as a structure, with hours, obligations, and a great deal of patience built in — much like the monastic daily routine that governed Hildegard’s waking life. Connection, on this view, is not something you feel. It is something you keep.
Hildegard also knew the difference between solitude chosen and isolation imposed. Around 1178, after her community buried a man who had once been excommunicated, the prelates of Mainz placed her convent under interdict: no Eucharist, and no singing of the Divine Office. Her letter of protest treats the enforced silence as an injury — not an inconvenience but a severing of the community from the music that bound it together. She had spent a lifetime praising quiet; there is real healing power in silence when it is entered freely. Silence done to you is ariditas under another name.
Causae et Curae: where sorrow goes in the body
Hildegard’s medical writing takes for granted something modern medicine spent much of the twentieth century forgetting: that emotions are physical events. In Causae et Curae she describes grief, fear, and anger as forces acting directly on the humors, drying and disordering the blood, while joy makes them flourish. She traces melancholy itself back to the Fall, and she reads temperament as the particular mixture a given body has been dealt — the framework we explored in the four temperaments and in her medical compendium Causae et Curae.
Her mechanism was wrong. Her instinct was not. Contemporary research on the gut-brain connection describes a bidirectional network — neural, endocrine, immune — running between the digestive tract and the brain, with the vagus nerve among its principal cables. The great majority of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, and researchers at Harvard Medical School have described how inflammation in the digestive tract can alter that production and skew the signaling between gut and brain. Loneliness, stress, and grief show up in digestion; digestion shows up in mood. Hildegard would have found this entirely unremarkable. She never believed the soul and the stomach were filed separately.
Practicing viriditas in a disconnected age
Hildegard’s governing virtue was discretio — the discernment and moderation Benedict called the mother of the virtues. It is the right corrective here, because loneliness tempts people toward intensity: the grand gesture, the dramatic reconnection, the resolution to overhaul a social life in a weekend. Discretio counsels the opposite. Small, repeatable, reliable.
- Keep a table. Eating with other people is the oldest social technology there is, and the monastic day was organized around it. One shared meal a week, held to reliably, outperforms a great deal of good intention.
- Write the letter. Hildegard’s four hundred letters were not networking. They were attention, in durable form, addressed to one person. The modern equivalent takes ten minutes.
- Prefer rhythm to intensity. A standing Tuesday walk is worth more than an extraordinary evening you never repeat. Stability is a practice, not a mood.
- Go outside, and take someone. Viriditas was never merely metaphorical for Hildegard. Green things and good company are not competing remedies.
- Receive the guest. The Rule instructs that all guests be received as Christ. Hospitality remains the shortest available route out of one’s own head.
Persistent, heavy loneliness deserves more than a list of habits, and it is worth speaking with a physician or a mental health professional if it has settled in. But for the ordinary dryness of a disconnected season, Hildegard’s counsel is not complicated. Rejoin the circuit. Let something reach you.
A small ritual of the table
There is a reason the European tradition of bitters attached itself to the shared meal rather than the medicine cabinet. A digestive bitters taken before or after eating was a marker of the table — a pause, a small ceremony, something passed around. Hildegard’s own herbal, the Physica, catalogued many of the bitter and aromatic plants that later tradition gathered into formulas of this kind, and the logic behind them is the one she taught: what nourishes the body and what gathers people together are not separate projects.
If you would like to read how that tradition descends from her writings, we trace it at the Hildegard formula. Our own Hildegard’s Bitters is made in that spirit — a bitter, aromatic blend of botanicals she documented, meant for the end of a good meal with people you like. Traditionally, that is exactly where it belonged.
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. The information in this article is offered for historical and educational interest and is not medical advice. Consult a qualified healthcare provider about your individual circumstances, and seek professional support if feelings of loneliness or low mood are persistent.