We live in an age that treats rest as a weakness — something to be minimized, optimized, or quietly apologized for. Yet nine centuries ago, a Benedictine abbess on the banks of the Rhine understood what our own exhausted culture is still struggling to relearn: rest is not the absence of life but one of its deepest sources. The spiritual meaning of rest runs through the whole of Hildegard von Bingen’s work — her medicine, her theology, and the monastic rhythm that ordered her days. For Hildegard, sleep was never mere idleness. It was one of the ways body, soul, and spirit were knit back together, night after night, within a cosmos she saw as charged with divine vitality.
Why Rest Was Sacred in Hildegard’s World
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) lived by the Rule of St. Benedict, which wove each day into an unhurried braid of prayer, work, study, meals, and sleep. Nothing in that rhythm was accidental. The monastic day assumed that human beings flourish within limits — that the hours of darkness belong to restoration just as surely as the hours of light belong to labor. When the community rose in the small hours to sing and then returned to bed, even the interruption of sleep was held inside a larger order of reverence.
A monastery garden at night: in Hildegard’s world, the hours of darkness belonged to restoration as surely as daylight belonged to labor.
In her medical and visionary writings alike, Hildegard treated the human person as a microcosm of the larger creation. As the moon waxes and wanes, as the seasons turn between growth and dormancy, so the body moves between waking and sleep. To rest, in her view, was to participate in an order written into creation itself — not to fall out of usefulness. For modern readers who measure their worth in productivity, this is a quietly radical idea: the night is not lost time. It is appointed time.
Sleep in Causae et Curae: A Medieval Science of Slumber
Hildegard was one of the very few women of the Middle Ages to write treatises on medicine, and her Causae et Curae (“Causes and Cures”) gives sleep serious, sustained attention. Modern scholars have taken notice. A 2021 historical review in the journal Sleep Medicine examined her writings on sleep and dreams and found a strikingly thorough treatment for the twelfth century: Hildegard described sleep as both a passive and an active process, compared the alternation of sleeping and waking to lunar cycles and the turning of the seasons, warned her readers against both too little and too much sleep, and considered the causes of insomnia and troubled dreams along with possible remedies drawn from her herbal tradition.
In the second book of Causae et Curae, she went further still, tracing human frailty — including the melancholy that unsettles both body and mind — back to the Fall of Adam. Whatever one makes of her theology, the insight beneath it is remarkably whole: for Hildegard, a sleepless night was never only a medical event. It was a disturbance in the entire person, and its healing had to address body, soul, and spirit together. Nine hundred years before anyone spoke of the mind-body connection or sleep hygiene, an abbess in the Rhineland was writing about sleep as a matter of both physiology and inner life.
Viriditas by Night: Rest as the Soul’s Greening
At the heart of Hildegard’s vision lies viriditas — the “greening power” she saw coursing through all living things: the sap rising in spring orchards, the vigor of a healthy body, the freshness of a soul alive to God. Its opposite she knew as well — ariditas, the dryness of the withered branch, the parched field, the burned-out life. Anyone who has pushed through months of short nights and long days knows exactly what that dryness feels like from the inside.
Seen through this lens, rest becomes something far richer than recovery. The natural world that Hildegard observed so closely does its quiet greening in darkness and dormancy — fields lie fallow, orchards rest through winter, and the garden renews itself in the night hours no gardener witnesses. She understood the human creature to be woven into that same rhythm. Sleep is where our own greening happens: the still, unseen season in which vitality returns. To surrender to it nightly is, in a real sense, an act of trust in the goodness of the created order — a small, recurring sabbath of the body.
Discretio: The Right Measure of Sleep
If viriditas names the energy of life, discretio — discretion, or right measure — names its wisdom. Rooted in the Benedictine tradition, discretio is the art of moderation: neither excess nor deprivation, but the fitting measure in all things. Hildegard applied it to food, to work, to fasting — and, notably, to sleep. Her warnings cut in both directions: too little sleep depletes the body’s vital moisture and strength, while too much dulls and weighs it down. Balance, not indulgence and not heroic self-denial, was her constant counsel.
It is hard not to hear the modern echo. Contemporary sleep research likewise associates both chronically short and excessively long sleep with poorer health — a bell curve of benefit whose sweet spot sits in the middle, more or less where a medieval abbess placed it by observation and tradition alone. Discretio also speaks to how we approach rest: not as another optimization project with rings to close and scores to chase, but as a humble, steady practice of enough.
Day and night in right measure: Hildegard’s discretio applies as much to rest as to work, food, and fasting.
A Hildegard-Inspired Evening Rhythm
How might her wisdom shape an ordinary evening today? A few practices, drawn from her world and adapted to ours:
- Keep a true threshold into evening. The monastic day ended deliberately, not by collapse. Choosing a consistent hour when work and screens are set aside honors the same instinct — a modern echo of the cloister’s quiet hours.
- Eat lightly, early, and attentively. Hildegard’s dietetics prized warm, simple, digestible evening meals. A settled stomach has always been a friend to settled sleep.
- Tend digestion the traditional way. European herbal tradition, Hildegard’s included, has long taken bitter and aromatic herbs before or after the evening meal — herbs traditionally used to awaken and settle digestion. Gentle allies like valerian belong to the same tradition of evening calm.
- End with gratitude rather than a feed. The day’s last thoughts matter. A short, unhurried review of the day — what was given, what can be released — is a very old practice that costs nothing and asks only a few quiet minutes.
None of this is complicated, and that is rather the point. Hildegard’s counsel on rest is not a program to master but a rhythm to rejoin — the same rhythm the moon, the seasons, and the garden have kept all along. In a culture that wears sleeplessness like a badge, choosing rest is a small act of dissent, and, in her eyes, of reverence.
If you would like to bring a small piece of Hildegard’s tradition into your own evenings, her digestive wisdom lives on in the Hildegard Formula — a blend of bitter herbs she documented, prepared as Hildegard’s Bitters, available on Amazon. Taken before meals, bitters are traditionally used to support healthy digestion — one modest, time-honored thread of the whole cloth of rest and balance she wove.
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.
Continue exploring Hildegard’s contemplative rhythm: rest’s closest companion is quiet itself — see our reflection on the healing power of silence.
Rest was only one hour among many in the Benedictine day. For the full shape of that day — and why Hildegard treated a steady rhythm as a spiritual matter — read about the monastic daily routine.