Books: The Hermits

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Then the wild German horsemen swept around the walls, and carried
off human beings and cattle, as many as they could find. Severinus,
like some old Hebrew prophet, did not shrink from advising hard
blows, where hard blows could avail. Mamertinus, the tribune, or
officer in command, told him that he had so few soldiers, and those
so ill-armed, that he dare not face the enemy. Severinus answered,
that they should get weapons from the barbarians themselves; the
Lord would fight for them, and they should hold their peace: only
if they took any captives they should bring them safe to him. At
the second milestone from the city they came upon the plunderers,
who fled at once, leaving their arms behind. Thus was the prophecy
of the man of God fulfilled. The Romans brought the captives back
to him unharmed. He loosed their bonds, gave them food and drink,
and let them go. But they were to tell their comrades that, if ever
they came near that spot again, celestial vengeance would fall on
them, for the God of the Christians fought from heaven in his
servants' cause.

So the barbarians trembled, and went away. And the fear of St.
Severinus fell on all the Goths, heretic Arians though they were;
and on the Rugii, who held the north bank of the Danube in those
evil days. St. Severinus, meanwhile, went out of Vienna, and built
himself a cell at a place called "At the Vineyards." But some
benevolent impulse--Divine revelation, his biographer calls it--
prompted him to return, and build himself a cell on a hill close to
Vienna, round which other cells soon grew up, tenanted by his
disciples. "There," says his biographer, "he longed to escape the
crowds of men who were wont to come to him, and cling closer to God
in continual prayer: but the more he longed to dwell in solitude,
the more often he was warned by revelations not to deny his presence
to the afflicted people." He fasted continually; he went barefoot
even in the midst of winter, which was so severe, the story
continues, in those days around Vienna, that wagons crossed the
Danube on the solid ice: and yet, instead of being puffed-up by his
own virtues, he set an example of humility to all, and bade them
with tears to pray for him, that the Saviour's gifts to him might
not heap condemnation on his head.

Over the wild Rugii St. Severinus seems to have acquired unbounded
influence. Their king, Flaccitheus, used to pour out his sorrows to
him, and tell him how the princes of the Goths would surely slay
him; for when he had asked leave of him to pass on into Italy, he
would not let him go. But St. Severinus prophesied to him that the
Goths would do him no harm. Only one warning he must take: "Let it
not grieve him to ask peace even for the least of men."

The friendship which had thus begun between the barbarian king and
the cultivated saint was carried on by his son Feva: but his
"deadly and noxious wife" Gisa, who appears to have been a fierce
Arian, always, says his biographer, kept him back from clemency.
One story of Gisa's misdeeds is so characteristic both of the
manners of the time and of the style in which the original biography
is written, that I shall take leave to insert it at length.

"The King Feletheus (who is also Feva), the son of the
aforementioned Flaccitheus, following his father's devotion, began,
at the commencement of his reign, often to visit the holy man. His
deadly and noxious wife, named Gisa, always kept him back from the
remedies of clemency. For she, among the other plague-spots of her
iniquity, even tried to have certain Catholics re-baptized: but
when her husband did not consent, on account of his reverence for
St. Severinus, she gave up immediately her sacrilegious intention,
burdening the Romans, nevertheless, with hard conditions, and
commanding some of them to be exiled to the Danube. For when one
day, she, having come to the village next to Vienna, had ordered
some of them to be sent over the Danube, and condemned to the most
menial offices of slavery, the man of God sent to her, and begged
that they might be let go. But she, blazing up in a flame of fury,
ordered the harshest of answers to be returned. 'I pray thee,' she
said, 'servant of God, hiding there within thy cell, allow us to
settle what we choose about our own slaves.' But the man of God
hearing this, 'I trust,' he said, 'in my Lord Jesus Christ, that she
will be forced by necessity to fulfil that which in her wicked will
she has despised.' And forthwith a swift rebuke followed, and
brought low the soul of the arrogant woman. For she had confined in
close custody certain barbarian goldsmiths, that they might make
regal ornaments. To them the son of the aforesaid king, Frederic by
name, still a little boy, had gone in, in childish levity, on the
very day on which the queen had despised the servant of God. The
goldsmiths put a sword to the child's breast, saying, that if any
one attempted to enter without giving them an oath that they should
be protected, he should die; and that they would slay the king's
child first, and themselves afterwards, seeing that they had no hope
of life left, being worn out with long prison. When she heard that,
the cruel and impious queen, rending her garments for grief, cried
out, 'O servant of God, Severinus, are the injuries which I did thee
thus avenged? Hast thou obtained by the earnest prayer thou hast
poured out this punishment for my contempt, that thou shouldst
avenge it on my own flesh and blood?' Then, running up and down
with manifold contrition and miserable lamentation, she confessed
that for the act of contempt which she had committed against the
servant of God she was struck by the vengeance of the present blow;
and forthwith she sent knights to ask for forgiveness, and sent
across the river the Romans his prayers for whom she had despised.
The goldsmiths, having received immediately a promise of safety, and
giving up the child, were in like manner let go.

"The most reverend Severinus, when he heard this, gave boundless
thanks to the Creator, who sometimes puts off the prayers of
suppliants for this end, that as faith, hope, and charity grow,
while lesser things are sought, He may concede greater things.
Lastly, this did the mercy of the Omnipotent Saviour work, that
while it brought to slavery a woman free, but cruel overmuch, she
was forced to restore to liberty those who were enslaved. This
having been marvellously gained, the queen hastened with her husband
to the servant of God, and showed him her son, who, she confessed,
had been freed from the verge of death by his prayers, and promised
that she would never go against his commands."

To this period of Severinus's life belongs the once famous story of
his interview with Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Italy, and
brother of the great Onulph or Wolf, who was the founder of the
family of the Guelphs, Counts of Altorf, and the direct ancestors of
Victoria, Queen of England. Their father was AEdecon, secretary at
one time of Attila, and chief of the little tribe of Turklings, who,
though German, had clung faithfully to Attila's sons, and came to
ruin at the great battle of Netad, when the empire of the Huns broke
up once and for ever. Then Odoacer and his brother started over the
Alps to seek their fortunes in Italy, and take service, after the
fashion of young German adventurers, with the Romans; and they came
to St. Severinus's cell, and went in, heathens as they probably
were, to ask a blessing of the holy man; and Odoacer had to stoop
and to stand stooping, so huge he was. The saint saw that he was no
common lad, and said, "Go to Italy, clothed though thou be in ragged
sheepskins: thou shalt soon give greater gifts to thy friends." So
Odoacer went on into Italy, deposed the last of the Caesars, a
paltry boy, Romulus Augustulus by name, and found himself, to his
own astonishment, and that of all the world, the first German king
of Italy; and, when he was at the height of his power, he remembered
the prophecy of Severinus, and sent to him, offering him any boon he
chose to ask. But all that the saint asked was, that he should
forgive some Romans whom he had banished. St. Severinus meanwhile
foresaw that Odoacer's kingdom would not last, as he seems to have
foreseen many things, by no miraculous revelation, but simply as a
far-sighted man of the world. For when certain German knights were
boasting before him of the power and glory of Odoacer, he said that
it would last some thirteen, or at most fourteen years; and the
prophecy (so all men said in those days) came exactly true.

There is no need to follow the details of St. Severinus's labours
through some five-and-twenty years of perpetual self-sacrifice--and,
as far as this world was concerned, perpetual disaster. Eugippius's
chapters are little save a catalogue of towns sacked one after the
other, from Passau to Vienna, till the miserable survivors of the
war seemed to have concentrated themselves under St. Severinus's
guardianship in the latter city. We find, too, tales of famine, of
locust-swarms, of little victories over the barbarians, which do not
arrest wholesale defeat: but we find through all St. Severinus
labouring like a true man of God, conciliating the invading chiefs,
redeeming captives, procuring for the cities which were still
standing supplies of clothes for the fugitives, persuading the
husbandmen, seemingly through large districts, to give even in time
of dearth a tithe of their produce to the poor;--a tale of noble
work which one regrets to see defaced by silly little prodigies,
more important seemingly in the eyes of the monk Eugippius than the
great events which were passing round him. But this is a fault too
common with monk chroniclers. The only historians of the early
middle age, they have left us a miserably imperfect record of it,
because they were looking always rather for the preternatural than
for the natural. Many of the saints' lives, as they have come down
to us, are mere catalogues of wonders which never happened, from
among which the antiquary must pick, out of passing hints and
obscure allusions, the really important facts of the time,--changes
political and social, geography, physical history, the manners,
speech, and look of nations now extinct, and even the characters and
passions of the actors in the story. How much can be found among
such a list of wonders, by an antiquary who has not merely learning
but intellectual insight, is proved by the admirable notes which Dr.
Reeves has appended to Adamnan's life of St. Columba: but one
feels, while studying his work, that, had Adamnan thought more of
facts and less of prodigies, he might have saved Dr. Reeves the
greater part of his labour, and preserved to us a mass of knowledge
now lost for ever.

And so with Eugippius's life of St. Severinus. The reader finds how
the man who had secretly celebrated a heathen sacrifice was
discovered by St. Severinus, because, while the tapers of the rest
of the congregation were lighted miraculously from heaven, his taper
alone would not light; and passes on impatiently, with regret that
the biographer omits to mention what the heathen sacrifice was like.
He reads how the Danube dared not rise above the mark of the cross
which St. Severinus had cut upon the posts of a timber chapel; how a
poor man, going out to drive the locusts off his little patch of
corn instead of staying in the church all day to pray, found the
next morning that his crop alone had been eaten, while all the
fields around remained untouched. Even the well-known story, which
has a certain awfulness about it, how St. Severinus watched all
night by the bier of the dead priest Silvinus, and ere the morning
dawned bade him in the name of God speak to his brethren; and how
the dead man opened his eyes, and Severinus asked him whether he
wished to return to life, and he answered complainingly, "Keep me no
longer here; nor cheat me of that perpetual rest which I had already
found," and so, closing his eyes once more, was still for ever:--
even such a story as this, were it true, would be of little value in
comparison with the wisdom, faith, charity, sympathy, industry,
utter self-sacrifice, which formed the true greatness of such a man
as Severinus.

At last the noble life wore itself out. For two years Severinus had
foretold that his end was near; and foretold, too, that the people
for whom he had spent himself should go forth in safety, as Israel
out of Egypt, and find a refuge in some other Roman province,
leaving behind them so utter a solitude, that the barbarians, in
their search for the hidden treasures of the civilization which they
had exterminated, should dig up the very graves of the dead. Only,
when the Lord willed that people to deliver them, they must carry
away his bones with them, as the children of Israel carried the
bones of Joseph.

Then Severinus sent for Feva, the Rugian king, and Gisa, his cruel
wife; and when he had warned them how they must render an account to
God for the people committed to their charge, he stretched his hand
out to the bosom of the king. "Gisa," he asked, "dost thou love
most the soul within that breast, or gold and silver?" She answered
that she loved her husband above all. "Cease then," he said, "to
oppress the innocent: lest their affliction be the ruin of your
power."

Severinus' presage was strangely fulfilled. Feva had handed over
the city of Vienna to his brother Frederic,--"poor and impious,"
says Eugippius. Severinus, who knew him well, sent for him, and
warned him that he himself was going to the Lord; and that if, after
his death, Frederic dared touch aught of the substance of the poor
and the captive, the wrath of God would fall on him. In vain the
barbarian pretended indignant innocence; Severinus sent him away
with fresh warnings.

"Then on the nones of January he was smitten slightly with a pain in
the side. And when that had continued for three days, at midnight
he bade the brethren come to him." He renewed his talk about the
coming emigration, and entreated again that his bones might not be
left behind; and having bidden all in turn come near and kiss him,
and having received the sacrament of communion, he forbade them to
weep for him, and commanded them to sing a psalm. They hesitated,
weeping. He himself gave out the psalm, "Praise the Lord in his
saints, and let all that hath breath praise the Lord;" and so went
to rest in the Lord.

No sooner was he dead than Frederic seized on the garments kept in
the monastery for the use of the poor, and even commanded his men to
carry off the vessels of the altar. Then followed a scene
characteristic of the time. The steward sent to do the deed shrank
from the crime of sacrilege. A knight, Anicianus by name, went in
his stead, and took the vessels of the altar. But his conscience
was too strong for him. Trembling and delirium fell on him, and he
fled away to a lonely island, and became a hermit there. Frederic,
impenitent, swept away all in the monastery, leaving nought but the
bare walls, "which he could not carry over the Danube." But on him,
too, vengeance fell. Within a month he was slain by his own nephew.
Then Odoacer attacked the Rugii, and carried off Feva and Gisa
captive to Rome. And then the long-promised emigration came.
Odoacer, whether from mere policy (for he was trying to establish a
half-Roman kingdom in Italy), or for love of St. Severinus himself,
sent his brother Onulf to fetch away into Italy the miserable
remnant of the Danubian provincials, to be distributed among the
wasted and unpeopled farms of Italy. And with them went forth the
corpse of St. Severinus, undecayed, though he had been six years
dead, and giving forth exceeding fragrance, though (says Eugippius)
no embalmer's hand had touched it. In a coffin, which had been long
prepared for it, it was laid on a wagon, and went over the Alps into
Italy, working (according to Eugippius) the usual miracles on the
way, till it found a resting-place near Naples, in that very villa
of Lucullus at Misenum, to which Odoacer had sent the last Emperor
of Rome to dream his ignoble life away in helpless luxury.

So ends this tragic story. Of its substantial truth there can be no
doubt. The miracles recorded in it are fewer and less strange than
those of the average legends--as is usually the case when an eye-
witness writes. And that Eugippius was an eye-witness of much which
he tells, no one accustomed to judge of the authenticity of
documents can doubt, if he studies the tale as it stands in Pez.
{238} As he studies, too, he will perhaps wish with me that some
great dramatist may hereafter take Eugippius's quaint and rough
legend, and shape it into immortal verse. For tragic, in the very
nighest sense, the story is throughout. M. Ozanam has well said of
that death-bed scene between the saint and the barbarian king and
queen--"The history of invasions has many a pathetic scene: but I
know none more instructive than the dying agony of that old Roman
expiring between two barbarians, and less touched with the ruin of
the empire than with the peril of their souls." But even more
instructive, and more tragic also, is the strange coincidence that
the wonder-working corpse of the starved and barefooted hermit
should rest beside the last Emperor of Rome. It is the symbol of a
new era. The kings of this world have been judged and cast out.
The empire of the flesh is to perish, and the empire of the spirit
to conquer thenceforth for evermore.

But if St. Severinus's labours in Austria were in vain, there were
other hermits, in Gaul and elsewhere, whose work endured and
prospered, and developed to a size of which they had never dreamed.
The stories of these good men may be read at length in the
Bollandists and Surius: in a more accessible and more graceful form
in M. de Montalembert's charming pages. I can only sketch, in a few
words, the history of a few of the more famous. Pushing continually
northward and westward from the shores of the Mediterranean, fresh
hermits settled in the mountains and forests, collected disciples
round them, and founded monasteries, which, during the sanguinary
and savage era of the Merovingian kings, were the only retreats for
learning, piety, and civilization. St. Martin (the young soldier
who may be seen in old pictures cutting his cloak in two with a
sword, to share it with a beggar) left, after twenty campaigns, the
army into which he had been enrolled against his will, a conscript
of fifteen years old, to become a hermit, monk, and missionary. In
the desert isle of Gallinaria, near Genoa, he lived on roots, to
train himself for the monastic life; and then went north-west, to
Poitiers, to found Liguge (said to be the most ancient monastery in
France), to become Bishop of Tours, and to overthrow throughout his
diocese, often at the risk of his life, the sacred oaks and Druid
stones of the Gauls, and the temples and idols of the Romans. But
he--like many more--longed for the peace of the hermit's cell; and
near Tours, between the river Loire and lofty cliffs, he hid himself
in a hut of branches, while his eighty disciples dwelt in caves of
the rocks above, clothed only in skins of camels. He died in A.D.
397, at the age of eighty-one, leaving behind him, not merely that
famous monastery of Marmontier (Martini Monasterium), which endured
till the Revolution of 1793, but, what is infinitely more to his
glory, his solemn and indignant protest against the first
persecution by the Catholic Church--the torture and execution of
those unhappy Priscillianist fanatics, whom the Spanish Bishops (the
spiritual forefathers of the Inquisition) had condemned in the name
of the God of love. Martin wept over the fate of the
Priscillianists. Happily he was no prophet, or his head would have
become (like Jeremiah's) a fount of tears, could he have foreseen
that the isolated atrocity of those Spanish Bishops would have
become the example and the rule, legalized and formulized and
commanded by Pope after Pope, for every country in Christendom.

Sulpicius Severus, again (whose Lives of the Desert Fathers I have
already quoted), carried the example of these fathers into his own
estates in Aquitaine. Selling his lands, he dwelt among his now
manumitted slaves, sleeping on straw, and feeding on the coarsest
bread and herbs; till the hapless neophytes found that life was not
so easily sustained in France as in Egypt; and complained to him
that it was in vain to try "to make them live like angels, when they
were only Gauls."

Another centre of piety and civilization was the rocky isle of
Lerins, off the port of Toulon. Covered with the ruins of an
ancient Roman city, and swarming with serpents, it was colonized
again, in A.D. 410, by a young man of rank named Honoratus, who
gathered round him a crowd of disciples, converted the desert isle
into a garden of flowers and herbs, and made the sea-girt sanctuary
of Lerins one of the most important spots of the then world.

"The West," says M. de Montalembert, "had thenceforth nothing to
envy the East; and soon that retreat, destined by its founder to
renew on the shores of Provence the austerities of the Thebaid,
became a celebrated school of Christian theology and philosophy, a
citadel inaccessible to the waves of the barbarian invasion, an
asylum for the letters and sciences which were fleeing from Italy,
then overrun by the Goths; and, lastly, a nursery of bishops and
saints, who spread through Gaul the knowledge of the Gospel and the
glory of Lerins. We shall soon see the rays of his light flash even
into Ireland and England, by the blessed hands of Patrick and
Augustine."

In the year 425, Romanus, a young monk from the neighbourhood of
Lyons, had gone up into the forests of the Jura, carrying with him
the "Lives of the Hermits," and a few seeds and tools; and had
settled beneath an enormous pine; shut out from mankind by
precipices, torrents, and the tangled trunks of primaeval trees,
which had fallen and rotted on each other age after age. His
brother Lupicinus joined him; then crowds of disciples; then his
sister, and a multitude of women. The forests were cleared, the
slopes planted; a manufacture of box-wood articles--chairs among the
rest--was begun; and within the next fifty years the Abbey of
Condat, or St. Claude, as it was afterwards called, had become, not
merely an agricultural colony, or even merely a minster for the
perpetual worship of God, but the first school of that part of Gaul;
in which the works of Greek as well as Latin orators were taught,
not only to the young monks, but to young laymen likewise.

Meanwhile the volcanic peaks of the Auvergne were hiding from their
Arian invaders the ruined gentry of Central France. Effeminate and
luxurious slave-holders, as they are painted by Sidonius
Appolineris, bishop of Clermont, in that same Auvergne, nothing was
left for them when their wealth was gone but to become monks: and
monks they became. The lava grottoes held hermits, who saw visions
and daemons, as St. Antony had seen them in Egypt; while near
Treves, on the Moselle, a young hermit named Wolflaich tried to
imitate St. Simeon Stylites' penance on the pillar; till his bishop,
foreseeing that in that severe climate he would only kill himself,
wheedled him away from his station, pulled down the pillar in his
absence, and bade him be a wiser man. Another figure, and a more
interesting one, is the famous St. Goar; a Gaul, seemingly (from the
recorded names of his parents) of noble Roman blood, who took his
station on the Rhine, under the cliffs of that Lurlei so famous in
legend and ballad as haunted by some fair fiend, whose treacherous
song lured the boatmen into the whirlpool at their foot. To rescue
the shipwrecked boatmen, to lodge, feed, and if need be clothe, the
travellers along the Rhine bank, was St. Goar's especial work; and
Wandelbert, the monk of Prum, in the Eifel, who wrote his life at
considerable length, tells us how St. Goar was accused to the
Archbishop of Treves as a hypocrite and a glutton, because he ate
freely with his guests; and how his calumniators took him through
the forest to Treves; and how he performed divers miracles, both on
the road and in the palace of the Archbishop, notably the famous one
of hanging his cape upon a sunbeam, mistaking it for a peg. And
other miracles of his there are, some of them not altogether
edifying: but no reader is bound to believe them, as Wandelbert is
evidently writing in the interests of the Abbey of Prum as against
those of the Prince-Bishops of Treves; and with a monk's or
regular's usual jealousy of the secular or parochial clergy and
their bishops.

A more important personage than any of these is the famous St.
Benedict, father of the Benedictine order, and "father of all
monks," as he was afterwards called, who, beginning himself as a
hermit, caused the hermit life to fall, not into disrepute, but into
comparative disuse; while the coenobitic life--that is, life, not in
separate cells, but in corporate bodies, with common property, and
under one common rule--was accepted as the general form of the
religious life in the West. As the author of this organization, and
of the Benedictine order, to whose learning, as well as to whose
piety, the world has owed so much, his life belongs rather to a
history of the monastic orders than to that of the early hermits.
But it must be always remembered that it was as a hermit that his
genius was trained; that in solitude he conceived his vast plans; in
solitude he elaborated the really wise and noble rules of his, which
he afterwards carried out as far as he could during his lifetime in
the busy world; and which endured for centuries, a solid piece of
practical good work. For the existence of monks was an admitted
fact; even an admitted necessity: St. Benedict's work was to tell
them, if they chose to be monks, what sort of persons they ought to
be, and how they ought to live, in order to fulfil their own ideal.
In the solitude of the hills of Subiaco, above the ruined palace of
Nero, above, too, the town of Nurscia, of whose lords he was the
last remaining scion, he fled to the mountain grotto, to live the
outward life of a wild beast, and, as he conceived, the inward life
of an angel. How he founded twelve monasteries; how he fled with
some of his younger disciples, to withdraw them from the disgusting
persecutions and temptations of the neighbouring secular clergy; how
he settled himself on the still famous Monte Cassino, which looks
down upon the Gulf of Gaeta, and founded there the "Archi-
Monasterium of Europe," whose abbot was in due time first premier
baron of the kingdom of Naples,--which counted among its
dependencies {245} four bishoprics, two principalities, twenty
earldoms, two hundred and fifty castles, four hundred and forty
towns or villages, three hundred and thirty-six manors, twenty-three
seaports, three isles, two hundred mills, three hundred territories,
sixteen hundred and sixty-two churches, and at the end of the
sixteenth century an annual revenue of 1,500,000 ducats,--are
matters which hardly belong to this volume, which deals merely with
the lives of hermits.

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