ON ST. RATHARD, PRESBYTER AND CONF., FOUNDER OF THE MONASTERY OF DIESSEN
IN BAVARIA.
Ninth century.
PRELIMINARY COMMENTARY.
The fame of his sanctity and cult from the miracles which followed; his age not sufficiently distinct; the various vicissitudes of the place.
Rathard, presbyter and confessor, at Diessen in Bavaria (B.)
J. B. S.
In that number of Saints, like several others of the same nation, Although passed over in the sacred Calendars, Blessed Rathard is to be reckoned, who are not known from the sacred Calendars or Martyrologies, nor whose deeds are celebrated by ancient Acts or monuments; almost this alone has been left to posterity, that, drawing his origin from the most illustrious family of Andechs, concerning which it has been treated more than once in this our work, having trodden underfoot the allurements of the world, and having been initiated into the priesthood, he wished no other heir of his goods than Christ the Lord, namely by founding in the town of Diessen, or old Damasia, a monastery of canons of the Order of St. Augustine, in which they record that he spent the remainder of his life so holily that after his death he became famous for many and those notable miracles. Whether he took up the regular habit of the said Order, there is no one who dares to define clearly enough, because namely the ancient accounts are altogether lacking, from which, besides the perpetual fame of miracles, anything certain could be dug out. Our Matthäus Rader gave a eulogy in his Holy Bavaria, volume 1, from page 86.
[2] From him and also from our Andreas Brunner in the Annals of the Bavarians, and from other more recent writers, the author of the Life gathered his material, from elsewhere his sanctity is sufficiently proved. the same, I think, Innocent Keferloher, dean of the monastery of Diessen, who composed the Acts of St. Ratho, given by Papebroch at the day XIX of June, volume III, from page 892. Further, that Life of ours had been sent many years before to Father Bolland with this title prefixed: The Life of blessed Rathard the presbyter, who first founded and governed the monastery of Diessen of the Order of regular canons of St. Augustine. In the year of the Lord 815. Whether that title agrees aptly enough with the things which the praised Innocent wrote in the Life of St. Ratho, let it be the judgment of others. I am not yet altogether led to believe what nevertheless seems to be insinuated there, that Blessed Rathard truly was a regular canon: that he governed the monastery and administered the rest in it as its true founder, there is no one who would not readily admit.
[3] Concerning the family of Andechs there is a difficulty almost as great; for if that took its beginning in Rattold, Whether he sprang from the family of Andechs, as Innocent himself confesses in the praised Life of St. Ratho; but Blessed Rathard was older than, or at least the contemporary of, Rattold, it is deservedly asked by what reasoning he can be reckoned to have been begotten from that Andechs head. Let there be given to Blessed Rathard only sixty years of life; if he died, as they themselves determine, in the year 815, he must have been born about the year 55 of the eighth century: and yet that already mentioned Rattold, the stock of the whole most illustrious family, whom they will have to have been the father of St. Ratho, who died in the year 954, was scarcely born then; the consequence is plain enough, from which also the Andechs genealogy of Blessed Rathard is rendered uncertain. Meanwhile, however, however these things may stand, we prefer that these be taken as mere doubts of ours, rather than that we should seem to wish to strive against the torrent; there will stand for our blessed Rathard his most constant fame of sanctity and of miracles, of whatever family at last he be said to have been.
[4] and whether his age agrees Nor would I pass over Bruschius, where, treating of the bishops of Augsburg, he speaks thus: Hauto, to others Hanto, count of Andechs, a Bavarian, the greatest enricher and donor of the bishopric of Augsburg, succeeded St. Symbert. He was still presiding in the year of the Lord 840 under Louis the Pious. They are therefore dreams which affirm that he presided only seven years. He had a brother of a most religious life also, Rathard the canon, who is read to be the founder of the notable Damasian monastery among the Bavarians. And this last is what pertains most closely to our matter, proved by those arguments which you will plainly understand from the narration presently to be subjoined. The various vicissitudes both of this our monastery of Diessen and of that of St. Ratho at Wörth scarcely cause any trouble. I could wish that the most famous devastation by the Hungarians, or, as others prefer, by Arnold surnamed the Bad, the Bavarian, were more clearly explained, whose epoch it is not hitherto ready to my hand to explain more distinctly.
[5] with the destruction of Bavaria by the Hungarians. The age of Blessed Rathard and the aforesaid destruction of Bavaria do not seem to cohere; for if it happened only forty years after the death of the said Blessed one, as is most expressly asserted in the Life, but he met death in 815, as Keferloher hints clearly enough against Rader, that monstrous devastation would have happened about the year 855, in which St. Ratho was not yet born, inasmuch as he first died in the year 954; yet that his monastery of Wörth was involved in that same calamity is the most received opinion of the writers. Who could reconcile these things aptly enough? But indeed this too must be pardoned to those men who are not so accustomed to arranging chronological reckonings. That the devastation of all Bavaria was real, that the vicissitudes of the monastery of Diessen were real, and likewise the repeated translations and depositions of the sacred body, you will clearly understand from the whole context. Have now the Life, such as it is, by which all the rest is explained.
THE LIFE
By the author Innocent Keferloher, Dean of Diessen, from a manuscript.
Rathard, presbyter and confessor, at Diessen in Bavaria (B.)
FROM A MANUSCRIPT.
In the year eight hundred and fifteen after the human race was received back by Christ, Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, holding power, blessed Rathard, born of the most noble and most holy family of the princes of Andechs, [The lineage of Blessed Rathard, the foundation of Diessen, his death and miracles] and initiated into the sacred rites of the priesthood, about to leave Christ the sole heir of his goods, by whom he might one day be written heir of the eternal kingdom, with Hauto his own brother, at that time bishop of Augsburg, that very one who succeeded St. Symbert, as promoter and helper, founded at Damasia, a town of upper Bavaria, situated on the lake of the Ammer, now commonly called Diessen, a building sacred to St. George the great martyr, and assigned it, with a monastery adjoined, to the regular canons of St. Augustine, who inhabit the place even today. He himself, after a life exercised in every kind of virtue, dying in the same place, covered with a lowly gravestone, was buried at the outermost corner of the church: although the virtue of holy Men can by no means be buried with their ashes. For straightway, from the benefits granted to those hastening from every quarter to his tomb, the sanctity of the Man diffused itself, like the radiance of the sun shining from the dawn.
[2] Forty years afterward, Conrad, Duke of Lorraine, The monastery is destroyed by the Hungarians: son-in-law of Otto, then king of the Germans, by a crime of treason — it is uncertain whether the rarer or the more destructive — the Hungarians being hired against his father-in-law, came down into Bavaria with so great a mass of barbarians that commonly they denied that they could be conquered, unless they were swallowed up by the earth or overwhelmed from heaven. For the rest, through the onset of this storm Bavaria suffered such disasters as she does not think that she has to this day mourned out. Certainly there is scarcely any company of holy men which does not groan at the memory of that most mournful time; even those who can show no annals, by report as it were handed on from hand to hand, recite from memory their destructions and burnings quenched by the tears of their forefathers, and even now cast reproach on the overthrowers of their fortunes. Into which lot of calamity indeed the monastery of blessed Rathard also came, which together with the Wörth monastery of blessed Rasso was levelled with the ground.
[3] Thereafter, the Hungarians being cut down to utter destruction on the Lechfeld, and when these were cut down to utter destruction, when the house of blessed Rathard had lain for no small time in neglect and squalor, a certain Udalric and Adelbert, presbyters of the number of holy men, set their mind to restoring the building of blessed Rathard: who, while they clear away the rubble and the ground, and level the soil, and open the earth for laying foundations, come upon a great stone; and wondered by what chance it had been brought into that place. It was the tomb of blessed Rathard, long since unknown after the overthrow of the church, and, with the church itself, in the same ruin, the very sepulcher of the blessed Man had also been buried.
[4] The presbyters, while they try to move the stone, and yet accomplish nothing, the body of the Blessed one is found, although helped by many, Udalric had recourse by prayers and vows to the counsel of the Godhead, and, the divine service being most holily performed, returns to the mass of the stone, and alone with no trouble lifts what before several could by no means move. Udalric, while he gazes on the head of the man lying there, terrified by the sight and astounded, left it closed, until, divinely admonished by a vision at night, the gravestone being removed, he uncovered the sacred remains of blessed Rathard, scattering heavenly odors on every side, and attended them with due veneration.
[5] whose translations are described, Thence the sick crept up, and among these a man seized in nearly all his limbs, and with the legs of his feet distorted, at the Paschal holy days, and, the defect of his body being amended, he ran back home joyful, sound and upright. Thereupon the prelate Hartwig placed the sacred limbs of blessed Rathard, brought forth from the corner of the church into the midst, in a more honorable tomb; the first and Anselm, prelate of Havelberg, with the good leave of Walter, pontiff of Augsburg, dedicated the restored building five hundred years ago, that is, in the year 1114, on the sixth of the Ides of August. Thereafter it stood nearly four centuries, three hundred and eighty years, until the twenty-second head and provost of the place, Conrad; who, the ruin of the crumbling walls being noticed, demolished the walls laboring under age, the second and raised up the building from the foundations, and brought the ashes of blessed Rathard, enclosed in a fitting sarcophagus, into the middle altar, after a certain Religious of ours had washed them with his own hands in water and wine, as he himself has left it attested of himself, in the year 1478.
[6] the third For the rest, the veneration of the blessed Man being increased, these very sacred bones we have seen set forth for public cult by the piety of our elders, when by the authority of the most reverend lord Peter, bishop of Adramyttium, vicar general of Augsburg, long afterward, that is, in 1620, they were laid up in the high altar. Until at last, the devotion of his sons in Christ toward the Blessed one overflowing, his sacred body was carried from the parish church of holy George into the regular church of his monastery lying next below, with solemn pomp and the common joy of the people. and the fourth. Where even now it is most religiously venerated. But the memory of Blessed Rathard is more especially and more solemnly celebrated on the sixth of the Ides of August, on which day that last translation of the blessed Man was made.
NOTE.
In this narration this occurs to be especially noted, that its author at the very beginning rightly corrected Rader, who in his eulogy marks, for the year 815, the year 850, "Louis the Pious holding power," who had already died in the year 840. But the things which are here recorded somewhat obscurely concerning the overthrow and restorations of the monastery you will find more fully explained in the Life of Blessed Ratho, cited more than once, volume III of June, page 898, from number 18. There may also be consulted the Chronicle of Diessen, published by Edmund Duell among the Miscellanea in 1724, book 2, from page 125.