Question:
Answer:
In marked contrast to modern-day occultists, St. Hildegard would’ve attributed any healing power of gems to God alone. In addition, given that her science is more than eight hundred years old, I would thus not suggest treating your son’s condition with Hildegard’s recommendation, unless you have more recent confirmation that a particular recommendation has merit.
Also, I’m very sorry to hear about your son’s seizures and will be praying for his successful treatment/healing! Regarding St. Hildegard of Bingen, in order to classify something as occult or not, we need to begin by defining the term “occult.”
It comes from the Latin word occultus, which simply means “hidden.”
In St. Hildegard’s time, it did not have the modern connotation of something bad. It simply referred to anything that was hidden from the knowledge of man.
The classic example at the time of something that was “occult” was the operation of magnets. Nobody knew why they attracted certain metals, and so they said that this was something that God had hidden from the knowledge of man. However, this did not mean that magnets were bad or forbidden. It just meant nobody knew how they worked (something that would not be discovered until the 20th century, with the discovery of quantum mechanics).
I covered this topic in Episodes 105 and 106 of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, on St. Thomas Aquinas and the Occult. If you like, you can listen to those episodes by going to Mysterious.fm/105 and Mysterious.fm/106.
Hildegard did believe that many gemstones have properties that are not recognized by conventional medical science today. For example, she thought emeralds could be used to treat epilepsy.
It is not clear to me whether Hildegard would describe these properties as “hidden”/”occult.” She simply believed that the gems had these properties. If you asked her *why* they had these properties, I know that in many cases she thought that she could explain why, in connection with her theory of medicine. She thus would not regard these cases as involving anything hidden or occult. Even if she said she didn’t know why a particular gem had a particular effect, it would just be one more thing that God had hidden about nature–like how magnets operate. It would not mean that you couldn’t use the gem that God had created and given this property.
This is similar to how, in today’s medicine, we do not know the mechanism of action for many herbs and drugs. We know that they work, but we often don’t know how they work. That doesn’t mean we can’t use them.
The modern sense of “occult” began to develop around the 1630s, and it referred to various “hidden sciences” (i.e., “occult sciences”), such as magic, astrology, and alchemy. These were hidden (not practiced publicly) for various reasons, either because they involved things a Christian should not do (e.g., ceremonial magic involved summoning demons) or because of trade secrets (e.g., alchemists didn’t want other people knowing how they made various compounds).
Subsequent to this, the term acquired a negative connotation, but it unfortunately has not acquired an agreed upon definition, and today the term “occult” is often used for practices that people disapprove of, without really specifying what’s wrong with them. As a result, I don’t find the use of the term in the modern sense very helpful. I thus ask people who use it what they mean by it, and (more often than not) they don’t have a rigorous definition. They’ve just heard it used in connection with certain practices, but they don’t know why it applies to those practices and not others.
Consequently, I tend to avoid the term and simply say that certain practices (e.g., summoning demons) are wrong for Christians and should not be done. Whether other people apply the term “occult” to something doesn’t mean very much since it’s so subjectively and inconsistently used, and what’s ultimately important is not the term that is applied to something but being able to say what’s wrong about it and why it’s forbidden (e.g., demons should not be summoned because they are treacherous, destructive liars who will lead you away from God).
Bringing the discussion back to Hildegard’s treatment of gems, if she is correct that a particular gem has a particular healing property, then there is no reason not to use it, even if the mechanism of action is not known–just as with modern herbs and drugs whose mechanism of action is not known.
However, Hildegard’s science is 845 years out of date, and I would not assume that a gem actually has a therapeutic benefit that she attributes to it unless there was some more recent confirmation of this.
I thus would not suggest treating your son’s condition with Hildegard’s recommendations unless you have more recent confirmation that a particular recommendation has merit.Finally, the fact that Hildegard of Bingen is both a saint and a doctor of the Church is an indication that nothing she did is in fundamental conflict with the faith. She might or might not be correct that a gem has a therapeutic benefit, but there is nothing contrary to using a natural substance (an herb, a medicine, or a gem) to treat a medical condition if it really has that effect. If there was something wrong with this in principle, Hildegard would not have been canonized and would not have been declared a doctor of the Church.