OF all these saintly civilizers, St. Severinus of Vienna is perhaps the
most interesting, and his story the most historically instructive. {224}
A common time, 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, Alemanni,
Rugi, 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, in
tongue, and in 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 St. 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 St. 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 St. 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
merchandise. 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 (so men
believed) 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 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 Ædecon, 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 Cæsars,
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 Ligugé
(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 primæval 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 dæmons, as St. Antony had seen
them in Egypt; while near Trêves, 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 Trêves as a hypocrite and a
glutton, because he ate freely with his guests; and how his calumniators
took him through the forest to Trêves; 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 Trêves; 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
cœnobitic 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.