The Living Light...

"The light that I see is not spatial, yet it is far brighter than a cloud surrounding the sun. I cannot discern height or breadth in it, and I call it "the shadow of the Living Light.... At one and the same time I see and I hear and I know, and in an instant I learn what I know....

"In the same light I sometimes, not often, see another light, which I call "the Living Light." I can say much less about how I see it that in the case of the other light, and while I am gazing at it all sadness and all pain are taken from me, so that I am like an innocent girl and not an old woman.... My soul drinks in as from a fountain what I see and hear at that time in the vision, and that fountain remains always full and inexhaustible.

"My soul never lacks the first kind of light, what I call the shadow of the Living Light. I see it like the dome of heaven in a bright cloud and I behold it without stars. In this light I see what I often speak about, and from the flash of the Living LIght, I give answer to those who ask questions of me...."

Saint Hildegarde of Bingen
in Bernard McGinn, Ed.
The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism
NY: Modern Library, 2006, p. 333-334