(A.D. 482.)
[Roman Martyrology and those of Germany. The life of S. Severinus
was written by his disciple, Eugippius, in the year 511, as he
states in a letter to Paschatius, the deacon. The following life is
extracted from Mr. Kingsley's "Hermits,"[34] with certain necessary
modifications. What has been once well done, the author is
unwilling to do again, and do in an inferior manner.]
In the middle of the fifth century the province of Noricum (Austria, as
we should now call it), was the very highway of invading barbarians, the
centre of the human Maelstrom, in which Huns, Allemanni, Rugii, and a
dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down, and round the starving and
beleaguered towns of what had once been a happy and fertile province,
each tribe striving to trample the other under foot, and to march
southward, over their corpses, to plunder what was still left of the
already plundered wealth of Italy and Rome. The difference of race, of
tongue, and of manners, between the conquered and their conquerors, was
made more painful by difference in creed. The conquering Germans and
Huns were either Arians or heathens. The conquered race (though probably
of very mixed blood), who called themselves Romans, because they spoke
Latin, and lived under the Roman law, were orthodox Catholics; and the
miseries of religious persecution were too often added to the usual
miseries of invasion.
It was about the year 455-60. Attila, the great King of the Huns, who
called himself--and who was--"the Scourge of God" was just dead. His
empire had broken up. The whole centre of Europe was in a state of
anarchy and war; and the hapless Romans along the Danube were in the
last extremity of terror, not knowing by what fresh invader their crops
would be swept off up to the very gates of the walled towers, which were
their only defence; when there appeared among them, coming out of the
East, a man of God.
Who he was he would not tell. His speech showed him to be an African
Roman--a fellow-countryman of S. Augustine--probably from the
neighbourhood of Carthage. He had certainly at one time gone to some
desert in the East, zealous to learn "the more perfect life." Severinus,
he said, was his name; a name which indicated high rank, as did the
manners and the scholarship of him who bore it. But more than his name
he would not tell. "If you take me for a runaway slave," he said,
smiling, "get ready money to redeem me with when my master demands me
back." For he believed that they would have need of him; that God had
sent him into that land that he might be of use to its wretched people.
And certainly he could have come into the neighbourhood of Vienna, at
that moment, for no other purpose than to do good, unless he came to
deal in slaves.
He settled first at a town, called by his biographer Casturis; and,
lodging with the warden of the church, lived quietly the hermit life.
Meanwhile the German tribes were prowling round the town; and Severinus,
going one day into the church, began to warn the priests and clergy, and
all the people, that a destruction was coming on them which they could
only avert by prayer, and fasting, and the works of mercy. They laughed
him to scorn, confiding in their lofty Roman walls, which the
invaders--wild horsemen, who had no military engines--were unable either
to scale or batter down. Severinus left the town at once, prophesying,
it was said, the very day and hour of its fall. He went on to the next
town, which was then closely garrisoned by a barbarian force, and
repeated his warning there: but while the people were listening to him,
there came an old man to the gate, and told them how Casturis had been
already sacked, as the man of God had foretold; and going into the
church, threw himself at the feet of S. Severinus, and said that he had
been saved by his merits from being destroyed with his fellow-townsmen.
Then the dwellers in the town hearkened to the man of God, and gave
themselves up to fasting, and almsgiving, and prayer for three whole
days.
And on the third day, when the solemnity of the evening sacrifice was
fulfilled, a sudden earthquake happened, and the barbarians, seized with
panic fear, and probably hating and dreading--like all those wild
tribes--confinement between four stone walls, instead of the free open
life of the tent and the stockade, forced the Romans to open their gates
to them, rushed out into the night, and, in their madness, slew each
other.
In those days a famine fell upon the people of Vienna; and they, as
their sole remedy, thought good to send for the man of God from the
neighbouring town. He went, and preached to them, too, repentance and
almsgiving. The rich, it seems, had hidden up their stores of corn, and
left the poor to starve. At least S. Severinus discovered (by divine
revelation, it was supposed), that a widow named Procula had done as
much. He called her out into the midst of the people, and asked her why
she, a noble woman and free-born, had made herself a slave to avarice,
which is idolatry. If she would not give her corn to Christ's poor, let
her throw it into the Danube to feed the fish, for any gain from it she
would not have. Procula was abashed, and served out her hoards thereupon
willingly to the poor; and a little while afterwards, to the
astonishment of all, vessels came down the Danube laden with every kind
of merchandize. They had been frozen up for many days near Passau, in
the thick ice of the river Enns: but the prayers of God's servant had
opened the ice-gates, and let them down the stream before the usual
time.
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 S. 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. S.
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 waggons 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 S. 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 S. 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 afore-mentioned
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 S. 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, Frederick 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 over much, 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' life belongs the famous story of his
interview with Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Italy, and brother
of the great Onulf 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 at 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 S. Severinus' 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 up 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. S. Severinus meanwhile foresaw that
Odoacer's kingdom would not last, as he seems to have foreseen many
things. 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 S. 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 S. 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, S. 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 indeed.
Eugippius relates many wonders in his life of S. Severinus. The reader
finds how the man who had secretly celebrated a heathen sacrifice was
discovered by S. Severinus, because, while the tapers of the rest of the
congregation were lighted miraculously from heaven, his taper alone
would not light. He records how the Danube dared not rise above the mark
of the cross which S. 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. Also he records the well-known story,
which has a certain awfulness about it, how S. 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.
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 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 Frederick--"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,
Frederick 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 most Holy Sacrament, 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 Frederick 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. Frederick, 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 S. 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 S.
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 waggon, 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 truth there can be no doubt. 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."[35] But even more
instructive, and more tragic also, is the strange coincidence that the
wonder-working corpse of the starved and bare-footed 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.
Relics, in the church of S. Severino at Naples.
Patron (but not sole Patron) of Austria, Vienna, Bavaria.