Hildegard von Bingen has featured on this blog before, and is not the first composer to have more than one piece considered. A single vocal line, and possibly an unfinished or incomplete idea, O cruor sanguinis is a short antiphon associated with the crucifixion. The short text reads:

O cruor sanguinis qui in alto sonuisti, cum omnia elementa se implicuerunt in lamentabilem vocem cum tremore, quia sanguinis Creatoris ui illa tetigit : ungue nos de languoribus nostris.

The stream of blood is evidently that flowing from the pierced side of the crucified, and the flow of that stream is well illustrated by the downward movement of several phrases. A listener is tempted to hear ‘in alto’ word-painted as well, coming at the high point of its phrase, though this is belied by an even higher melody point at ‘lamentabilem’.

Another commentator has linked the sounding of all elements that voice of woe to the earthquake when the veil of the temple is rent as the incarnate God gives up His life. To my mind there is another referent for blood which cries our to God from the earth, the blood of the first victim of homicide in the book of Genesis: Abel, whose very name means futility (it is the same word translated ‘vanity’ in the book of Ecclesiastes). When God challenges Cain, he is told that his brother’s blood ‘crieth unto me from the ground’ and indeed that is now ‘cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.’

The earth itself, the elements of creation, object to the initiation of human violence from human jealousy, and continue to object when that violence is perpetrated even against the Creator Himself. Nevertheless, as Hildegard’s prayer reminds us in its innocuously simple musical phrasing, even that blood which provokes such revolt can itself become a healing balm. That very blood flowing from the side of Christ is an anointing for healing our weakness.

And again, if you will bear with another linguistic point, that ‘languoribus’ feeblenesses may also mean apathy, possibly even accidie – a lack of care which is at the root of the capital sin of sloth – not really laziness but despondency leading to failure to act. If Christ can triumph even in the flow of blood as He is crucified, our own world-weariness cannot be allowed to make us give up on building up the kingdom of God, to the extent that we are able and in the particular ways we are severally called.

But we need grace to do this: the unction of the Spirit manifest in the sacraments which make present to us the very unguent that flow so poetically in Hildegards short (or incomplete) phrases of music. Ungue nos de languoribus nostris.