"I'm 'Pride-in-one's-appearance!' I'm a bad dude! Grrrr, graaaah, I'm awwwwful! God is stupid! I'm just gonna stand here and enjoy combing my hair and not thinking about Christ's suffering! Because that's what pride means to me!" And he's got, like, crab arms and snake legs (?) and breathes a wind of daggers (???) or something.

And The Soul is like "yeah, groovy."

BUT THEN: "You're STUPID, Pride-in-one's appearance! You're STUPID and DUMB. God thinks you are a LAME and we all do too. I'm Distaff Modesty! I'm sooooooo great! Nobody's as pretty and smart as me and God is buying me an Audi for grad! You are stupid and bad and I am good and the best. Go away, stupid."

And The Soul is like "Coo'."

And then that happens like nine more times and the last one is the Devil, who gets to shout and yell and get up in all their plainchants. (And to be fair, this WAS written for music, and we all know how dopey, like, an opera, say, would be if there was no music and it was all down to the libretto. And actually! Imagine those lines above, which are surprisingly close to the real lines, sung with a tonne of melismata, like by R. Kelly. Now make him a monk. Amazing! Hallelujah! Eh? Eh?) And certainly you can imagine the procession and the costuming and the reassurance that everything'll be okay and The Soul will be saved, as opposed to when the Mongols have burned down the cow and Young Hans gots the megrims or whatever. I can see this going over on the medieval circuit. But woooooow, Hildegard was impervious to irony. I guess that's what happens when you spend your life in a broom closet. ( )