Reading Guides, VOLUME 12

A History of the Church in 20 Biographies [ All Saints Day ]

Today is All Saints Day, the day on the Church calendar on which we celebrate the great cloud of witnesses that have gone before us.

 

How much do you know about the history of the saints? 

 

For All Saints Day, we offer the following history of the church in twenty biographies , of one saint from each century from the first century to the twentieth century.  (It’s too early to choose a saint to celebrate from the twenty-first century.) With each we offer a brief snippet of their lives, and a biography of each, most of which can be downloaded for FREE. Many of these saints lives and work intersect with those who went before them, and what emerges as we dig into these stories is a fuller and richer history of God’s presence and work among the people of God throughout the full span of our history.

Tenth Century:

All Saints Day Biographies

Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen, OSB (1098 – 17 September 1179), was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath.  She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most-recorded in modern history.  She has been considered by many in Europe to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

Hildegard’s fellow nuns elected her as magistra in 1136; she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. She wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs,  and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.  There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words.  One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. (via Wikipedia)

Hildegard of Bingen:
The Woman of Her Age
By Fiona Maddocks

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Eleventh Century:

All Saints Day Biographies

Anselm of Canterbury

Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1109), , was an Italian Benedictine monk, abbot, philosopher and theologian of the Catholic Church, who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. After his death, he was canonized as a saint; his feast day is 21 April.

Anselm composed dialogues and treatises with a rational and philosophical approach, sometimes causing him to be credited as the founder of Scholasticism. Despite his lack of recognition in this field in his own time, Anselm is now famed as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and of the satisfaction theory of atonement. He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by a bull of Pope Clement XI in 1720.   (via Wikipedia)

St Anselm
By Richard William Church

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