ON BL. EELKO LIAUKAMA, ABBOT OF THE MONASTERY OF LIDLUM IN FRISIA, OF THE PREMONSTRATENSIAN ORDER.
YEAR 1332.
PrefaceBl. Eelko, Abbot of Lidlum in Frisia, of the Premonstratensian Order.
[1] West Frisia, counted among the Belgian provinces, is divided into three districts, Oostergo, Westergo and the Seven Forests, enriched formerly, while the orthodox faith flourished there, with illustrious Abbeys and monasteries, Three Blessed Frisians of the Premonstratensian Order are venerated in March: and ennobled by men illustrious for holiness. Now in this month of March the Premonstratensian Order supplies our work with three bearing the title of Blessed and honored with some Ecclesiastical cult. Of these, Blessed Frederick, Abbot of the Garden of Blessed Mary in Oostergo, is venerated on the 3rd of March, and Blessed Eelko, Abbot of Lidlum in Westergo, on this 22nd, and the third, Dodo, at Hascha in the Forest district, has his natal day on the 30th of March. Now the house of Liaukama, from which Eelko was born, from the Liaukamas was among the more ancient and more noble families of all Frisia, from which some set out far from their country to recover the Holy Land. Ubbo Emmius, in book 6 of the history of Frisian affairs, at the year 1099, among the Frisian nobles who, besides the rest of the multitude of commoners, having received the Cross according to custom, having set out for Palestine, Sicco died at Nicaea. followed the standards of Peter the Hermit, lists Eelko and Sicco Liaukama, and says that Sicco fell fighting bravely at Nicaea: that Eelko, stirred by the valor and memory of his kinsman Sicco and by the words of Peter the Leader, so bore himself everywhere that he, together with Feico Botnia, was set over a wing of three thousand horsemen with the approval of all: Eelko that the same, when Nicaea was taken, being ordered to command the garrison there, preferred to set out for Palestine with the rest for the sake of showing his valor, wounded at Jerusalem, and there, while Jerusalem was being besieged, struck by a dart, he scarcely escaped death by the long care of physicians. But when Baldwin held power, he with some others, having received a most honorable leave, returned to Frisia, returned to Frisia, and was received with many honors by all the Orders. Then that Eelko, touched with remorse for having departed from a King most devoted to him, fell into sickness from that thought: and could not be prevented from preparing himself to go back to Palestine together with Botnia, who was induced to it by his prayers: that Epo Liaukama, the son of Eelko's brother, added himself to these as a companion: and that these three came to Joppa after a difficult voyage, and there on the same day on which they had landed Eelko expired, as if in a fated place, afterwards dead at Joppa, and his body was carried with great pomp to Jerusalem, the King himself leading the funeral for honor's sake, buried at Jerusalem, and was entombed in that city: and so Botnia with Epo, from grief at the loss of their companion, also sought home again a little afterwards. All these things were put into writing by Eelko's servant. Epo, So Ubbo Emmius: and things conformable to these have been sent to us from Frisia.
[2] Born of this family, this Blessed Eelko the Abbot, an emulator of the heroic virtues of the earlier Eelko, seems by his patronage also to have procured a noble spirit for the later Liaukamas: various others, of whom another Sicco, Scelto, Aggo, a third Sicco, and another Epo are praised by the same Ubbo. After these and others, the last of this family was Jarich Liaukama, a strenuous champion of the orthodox faith, the last, Jarich, who defended Groningen for the Catholic King as its most senior Colonel, until he was compelled by hostile force to surrender it. He presided thereafter as supreme governor over the cities of Zutphen and Paderborn: and at length, full of days and of merits, at the age of eighty-three, an outstanding protector of the orthodox religion, persisting in the midst of a depraved and heretical nation, heir to the faith and the virtues of his ancestors, he departed from this life in the year 1643. having died piously in the year 1643, A Priest of our Society, Gerard Othonis, who lived with him for some years and was present at his death, and who, after very many labors endured and prisons suffered in Frisia and other provinces infected with the heretical stain, now lives with us, still vigorous after the Priesthood received fifty years ago, wonderfully proclaims the steady and constant mind of the said Jarich Liaukama in the orthodox faith, and his perseverance in good works up to his most happy death: while he lived, the said Priest was accustomed every year to celebrate in his house with great solemnity the annual feast of Blessed Eelko, and to offer the most holy sacrifice of the Mass: the feast of Blessed Eelko, and there is kept there an image of the said blessed Abbot, painted with rays, as is usually done for the other Saints, with roses placed in his lap: about which one reads below in the Acts; which we give as written by Sibrandus Leo, an image, who, having professed the religious life in Blessed Eelko's monastery of Lidlum, was driven out thence by the heretics and ended his life in exile in the year 1588, leaving his lucubrations on the foundation of the monasteries of Lidlum and of the Garden of Blessed Mary the Life written, and the Lives of the Abbots of both monasteries. We have these works of his, not yet printed, from which we give the Life of Blessed Eelko: which our Heribert Rosweyde inserted in the Legendary of the Saints in the Belgian tongue, often reprinted: judging that he should be placed among the chief and rarer Saints, of whom for March he selected only fifty-three, and in the picture of the Saints of March placed before it he is called S. Eelko, Abbot: which title of Saint is prefixed to his Life and repeated in the general Index. Chrysostom Vander
Sterre in his Birthdays of the Saints of the Premonstratensian Order adorns him with this eulogy: "The tenth day before the Kalends of April. In the village of Boxum in Frisia, his commemoration among others. the passion of the Blessed Eelko, Martyr and Abbot of the monastery of Lidlum, of the Premonstratensian Order. Who, being zealous for the glory of God and for the integrity of collapsed discipline, was cruelly slain by the hands of the impious and died, and as a glorious victor flew to the palm of martyrdom; whose sanctity and precious death God deigned to make illustrious with miracles." Thus Chrysostomus, who, out of his reverence for Blessed Eelko, when he was Abbot of the monastery of S. Michael at Antwerp, also imposed the name Eelko upon his own religious at profession. A greater encomium from the Acts is produced by Jean le Page in book 2 of the Premonstratensian Library, page 583; Dionysius Mudsart in his Belgian Ecclesiastical History at the years 1325 and 1332; Peter Waghenar on Persons of the Premonstratensian Order Illustrious for Sanctity, page 217—all of whom adorn Eelko with the title of Blessed. Waghenar also published among his poems this epigram, page 462:
"The impious race burdens Eelko with false reproaches, Not well taught to bear salutary sounds. The stars of the Father in pity send rosy flowers: Do not the stars thus sufficiently absolve him of reproaches?"
Other verses about him were published by Martin Hamconius in his book on Illustrious Men of Frisia. His murder and his zeal for piety are also described by Ubbo Emmius in book 13 of his History of Frisia, page 197; Maurice du Pré in his Brief Annals of the Premonstratensian Order at the year 1332; and various other writers of the same Order or of Frisia.
LIFE
By Sibrandus Leonius. Eelko, Abbot of Lidlum in Frisia, of the Premonstratensian Order (B.)
BY SIBRANDUS LEONIUS
[1] In Western Frisia, called Westergo, between the two villages of Tiedmarum and Osterbierum, In the monastery of Lidlum, built by Sibo and Tziallingius a Donia, at the place of Lidlum, very near the German Ocean, there lived Sibo, a man abounding in riches and unmarried. He, moved by fervor of spirit, with the Spirit urging him on, having set aside the riches of the world, determined to dedicate himself and all his possessions to God the Best and Greatest, erecting a church from his own dwelling. But since he seemed unequal in resources for building a monastery, he gained as a partner in his plan Tziallingius a Donia of Bonnetorp from Vinson. These two, kindled together with the same zeal, built a small monastery. Meanwhile, the monastery of the Garden of the Blessed Virgin, of the Premonstratensian Order, in Oostergo, begun by the Lord Frederick, a most pious man, was being advanced with the greatest prudence by his successor Entetus. While this man, together with all his community, pursued the rigor of religion and the hard and strenuous life according to the statutes of the Order, he stirred the hearts of many to imitate his example, as we have mentioned above concerning Renicius, Vibrandus, and Goslicus, most warlike men, in the Life of the aforesaid Frederick. Sibo, emulating their example and relying on the counsel of his companion Tziallingius... approached the venerable Father Lord Entetus, Abbot of the Garden of the Blessed Virgin, and demanded the rule of a purer life. Entetus, striving in every way to extend the progress of the Premonstratensian religion, readily complied: he received him with his companions into the common society, clothed them in the white garment, and after deliberation with his community, first designated Felmarus as their Abbot, in the year of the Lord's Incarnation one thousand one hundred and eighty-two...
[2] The twelfth Abbot, Blessed Eelko Liaukama, The twelfth Abbot of this monastery was a distinguished man, Eelko Liaukama, who, upon his election, was confirmed by Abbot Poptetus, who presided over the election. He, born of the noble Liaukama family, imbibed the seeds of piety from his very cradle; advancing in these, he was honored with the priesthood. Shortly afterwards, elected Pastor of the church at Tuitgum, he stood forth as a model of the highest probity; he erected the principal vaulted hall with a basement from the foundations. Designated as Abbot, he attended the sacred offices day and night, walking barefoot in the winter season; devoted to mortification, afflicting his body with fasting, he resisted the devil, who appeared with glowing iron, through the constancy of his faith. He gave to the church ecclesiastical ornaments, which we have seen, distinguished with gold. Necessarily sustaining a war against noble and valiant men from Echna in the name of both monasteries, vexed by warlike tumults, he incurred great expenses, maintaining more than one hundred and eighty mercenaries, apart from the Lay Brothers of his own Order; and he suffered great loss from the armed men. Nevertheless intent on building, he built and completed the Abbatial house on Mount S. Michael with enormous labor; he incorporated the churches of Tuitgum, Sexbierum, and Spannum into the monastic jurisdiction of Lidlum. In his admonitions he used the greatest sweetness of words; in correction, according to the circumstances of the time, he was somewhat sterner. Gentle and strong in governance. For as the fervor of religion was gradually weakening, with the devil promoting everything toward the worse, he was many times compelled to censure wickedness.
[3] Adorned with these virtues, he pleased God in all things, but displeased the impious and brought upon himself great envy, which, growing worse day by day, erupted into a wicked and putrid ulcer, from which in due time came forth the pus and gore of foul murder. It was the custom in all the monasteries throughout Frisia to cultivate their principal possessions of fields, granges, and allods He frequently visits the Lay Brothers dwelling in the farms, with the labors of Lay Brothers and laymen; whence they were called Munckhuysen ("monk-houses"). Whatever surplus of dairy products, livestock, and grain these had beyond what was needed for their sustenance, they faithfully and obediently brought to their monastery; and from this there was great prosperity in the monasteries.
"You are lanterns, not one only—except in name—but truly seven lanterns shining in a dark place. In your midst Nicholas zealously strives, so that like burning and shining lamps you may continue to shine and burn, and that, like gold tested and purified in the furnace of these tempests, you may sit secure, as you have sat until now. He himself has hitherto shaken the flame of fire from this furnace, like that other Angel in Daniel chapter 3, and has made the midst of the furnace like a blowing wind of dew, so that the fire has not touched you at all, nor grieved you, nor brought you any annoyance. He is in your midst, that he may strive henceforth to do the same always. Our Nicholas also holds in his right hand seven stars—namely the seven most illustrious Magistrates of your sevenfold republic; stars indeed, not planets; heavenly bodies, not wandering but fixed; stars, not falling but firmly clinging to the Firmament of their ancestors. And that they may be forever firm, Nicholas holds them fixed in his right hand; he holds them in his right hand lest any forgetfulness of such illustrious stars ever steal upon him; he holds them in his hand so that, like the sun, he may impart his splendor to them; he holds them in his hand, finally, so that he may always bear them before his eyes and under his protection. This angel of ours, then, fashioned indeed by this slender labor of mine, yet equipped with the outstanding wings of his life, virtues, and prodigies—where should he fly but into your bosom? He is in your midst; you would not allow him to fly elsewhere even if he wished; indeed, even if he were flying away against my will, you would receive him in your bosom. He holds you in his hands; why should not you also hold him in your bosom and heart in return? You have him already, I know well; you have him most deeply stored in your bosom and heart, and that you may henceforth hold him somewhat more attentively than hitherto, this very slight work of mine ultimately aims. You will see him anew in these pages doing lofty and nothing but the greatest things; you will hear him anew persuading useful and salutary things for the fatherland, and foretelling those very things which experience now reports—which indeed you have long since both seen and heard and experienced; indeed, you can never see, hear, and experience enough of them. May therefore the honor and dignity of our Nicholas and of all of you together grow, aided and promoted by this very slight labor of mine; and may he himself persevere as your patron in heaven, and you as patrons of our Society on earth, as both have always been until now. Fribourg of the Aventicans, August 15, 1636.
Your most humble Chaplain,
PETER HUGO OF LUCERNE, S.I."
He was a native of Lucerne and professed of four vows in our Society; he flourished for many years with the distinction of an outstanding preacher. In his writings he is said to have used singular diligence and accuracy, especially in this Life, which was also translated into Italian at Rome, so that, more conveniently understood, it might prepare the way for a future canonization—future, I say, which the Reverend Father Nicholas Wysing, who, acting as Reviewer of books at Rome by the command of the Very Reverend Father General, treated the matter as Procurator, asserted had been brought to such a point that nothing further was required beyond the act of the Pontifical declaration. The same Father Nicholas composed a commentary on the deeds done by the Venerable Nicholas and sent it to the Rector of our College at Lucerne, in which he frequently cites the author of this Life. Therefore this will suffice for us for the present, until that other commentary sees the light—which is perhaps deferred to the time of the completed canonization. Following the dedicatory epistle in this place was the approbation, both of Walter Mundbrot, who then governed the Society as Provincial of Upper Germany, and of Jacques Schuler, Vicar General for the Bishop of Lausanne, Jean de Watteville.
PREFACE
To the Benevolent Reader.
"The Life and deeds of Nicholas of Flüe, hermit of the Unterwalden region in Switzerland, depicted on this paper, I offer to you, benevolent Reader, with a rude and unpolished brush indeed, yet without artifice. He himself led a life cultivated for God amid the rough terrain of uncultivated forests and mountains. If I have encompassed his life in a more uncultivated style than you might wish, consider that a woodland muse comes forth from the forests and mountains. I have only wished to labor so that you may esteem the matter itself, not the words; for I did not judge that so great a matter needed any blandishment of words to be esteemed. It has pleased me to divide this little work of mine, such as it is, into three parts. The first sets forth those things that concern the ordinary life of Nicholas, at home and in military service. The second follows the prodigious hermit and seer from the beginning of his more austere manner of life until his death. The last, finally, treats his posthumous glory among men, decreed for that hermit either by divine or human agency—among men, I say; for the glory which God himself has prepared for him among the blessed, 'eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man.' I add nothing more to the preface; I proceed to the matter itself."
We, content to have indicated this division in the margin—since the brevity of the chapters as defined by the author compels it—have introduced a new arrangement conformable to the other Acts of this work. Therefore, have here in order the catalogue and titles of the chapters as noted by the author.
PART I.
1. The time and birthplace of Nicholas.
2. The family and parents of Nicholas.
3. Prognostics of his sanctity before his birth.
5 The Life of Nicholas, written long ago by various authors.
6 Nicholas is celebrated by the encomiums of his countrymen.
7 Nicholas has foreign encomiasts as well.
8 What is to be thought of Nicholas altogether, in the judgment of Peter Canisius.
9 Nicholas is commended even by the adversaries of the Catholic faith.
10 The posthumous miracles of Nicholas, divided into paragraphs.
1 At the tomb of Nicholas the blind are given light.
2 The deaf hear.
3 The lame walk.
4 The dying rise again.
5 Sufferers from headache, epilepsy and frenzy are cured.
6 Those suffering from the stone, strangury and hernia are freed.
7 Poisons and sorceries are driven away.
8 Women in childbirth are helped.
9 The fevered are restored.
10 Pains of mind or body are eased.
11 Finally, various diseases are cured.
and with standards raised they set out for Italy against the enemy by forced marches; and having overtaken the rear guard of the enemy, they crushed them with an immense and prodigious slaughter, drove them from the most strongly fortified cities they had taken, and, having wrested from them all their plunder—especially the Roman plunder—expelled them from all Italy. That same sacred plunder, lest it contaminate their hands and hearts, they carried back to Rome and reconsecrated to its former divine worship, and so returned to their Alps as glorious victors. This accomplishment made them not only famous and formidable to the whole world, but also particularly commendable to its highest magistrates, both sacred and secular. The Supreme Pontiff, certainly, by way of gratitude, thenceforth enrolled them as Protectors and Defenders of the Roman Church and wished them to be so named. This title was afterwards, around the year 1512, extended by the authority of Pope Julius II to the remaining confederated Cantons of the Swiss as well. Louis the Pious likewise, who then presided over the Empire, not only permitted them henceforth to use and live by their own laws, institutions, and magistrates on account of their successful exploits throughout Italy, and adorned them with other privileges and immunities, but also liberally bestowed upon them the insignia and standards which they still use in war. Such, indeed, were the fruits that the Alps once bore, which afterwards received our Nicholas at his birth into their bosom.
[3] So happy a lot was given by God to the valleys of the Unterwalden, that the fatherland of so great a man should be Unterwalden. Comprised under this nomenclature, derived from the multitude of forests, is that part of the Swiss Alps among the Unterwaldians which is more to the south, and is bounded on the east by the territories of the people of Uri and Schwyz, on the south by those of the Bernese, and on the west and north by the territories and extensive dominions of the people of Lucerne. It contains fertile valleys and rich pastures. The Kernwald forest divides the entire territory into two Unterwaldens, namely the Upper and the Lower, each of which abounds in pleasant and populous towns, villages, hamlets, and inhabitants. They relate that formerly, at various times, very many Roman citizens—whom the fury and tyranny of the Roman Emperors against their subjects, especially those faithful to Christ, had proscribed or driven from the city—settled in these places. The inhabitants also hold it as certain that S. Beatus, the Apostle of Switzerland, sent to these shores by S. Peter, as I have said, bestowed his labors principally on these lands, or certainly on the neighboring ones; that he eliminated dragons from the deep caves of the neighboring cliffs by divine power; and that, having entered those same caves from love of the solitary life, he chose them as his permanent dwelling and inhabited them until the ninetieth year of his age; and that at last from the same place he sent his blessed soul to heaven through the hands of the heavenly spirits, who had attended him in human form as he was dying. And accordingly the people of Unterwalden sucked in the Roman religion from their own ancestors, exiles from Rome for the sake of that same faith, or from the Apostles sent by the supreme authority of St. Peter and brought thither, and so drank it in that, constant in it, all of them even today lead their lives as Catholics. Our Nicholas, then, was born among the Upper Unterwaldians, not far from the village which is called c Sachseln, Nicholas is born: in a hamlet subject to the Parish Priest of Sachseln and to the Bishop of Constance, a place obscure and uncelebrated from the density of the Forests, which he made celebrated and illustrious both formerly while living, and now also by very many miracles after his death.
CHAPTER II.
[4] But if pedigrees too count for anything, and if it profits anything
— — to be reckoned by a long Blood-line, and to show the painted faces Of one's ancestors. — —
the family of our Nicholas was certainly very ancient and illustrious, if not in blood, at least in virtue. His ancestors were once called von Leonine-Bridge, or Leopontini and Leopontii: of an ancient and noble, perhaps because they drew their origin from the ancient race of the d Lepontii, which is recorded to have once fixed its seats on this side of the sources of the Rhine and the Rhône and to have been among the first peoples of Switzerland. At length, this name having been abolished by age, the same rock gave them a surname which gave both a seat and pastures to their flocks, so that to this day they are surnamed from that rock. They were, moreover, for more than four hundred years of such esteem among their Unterwaldians that they held magistracies among them, often even the highest. Prudence, virtue and experience in affairs made them commendable among their people more than abundance of learning or of riches. The lot of the ancient Patriarchs fell to them, who were accustomed to hold rule among flocks and herds, but a pastoral family: more used to sheepfolds than to courts, and shepherds at once of flocks and of peoples. Who does not know from the sacred pages that that great Prince and head of his nation Abraham, and after his example his sons and grandsons, learned in the pastures what they should say in the council or the assembly? Was not Moses too, that wondrous leader of a vast people, a shepherd? Did not that renowned and most holy King David exchange the shepherd's crook for the sceptre and crown? This was once a custom not wholly unknown even to Rome, once so proud: for by the Roman Senate Quinctius Cincinnatus was called from the plough-handle to the Dictatorship, and, having happily and usefully discharged that magistracy for not a few years, was permitted to return to it. So too the ancestors of our Nicholas were both countrymen at home among the oxen and sheep, and in the forum judges, praetors and consuls. And God added to them also this grace, that not only in the outward manner of living and of governing the commonwealth, but also in virtue, piety and the other endowments of the mind, they were followers of the ancient fathers. The same faith that those had once, the same piety, the same love of right and equity, was supremely at heart with them: they drew out their life on a sparing and frugal diet; they were accustomed to make gain only for necessity, not for abundance, to harm no one, to oblige and do good to all. They diligently exercised works of piety toward God above all and toward the poor, the vicars of God: lavish in prayers, most tenacious worshippers of the sacred rites of the Church and of their ancestral religion: worthy, in fine, that their name should become famous far and wide even to posterity through so great a descendant of their stock. His father was Henry of Flüe, and his mother Hemmana, or Hemma Robert, neither in any way degenerate from ancestral virtue; who, on the twelfth day before the Kalends of April of the aforesaid year, which is wont to be sacred to St. Benedict, first beheld this their blessed son, and, having given thanks to God, the fertile Fount of all gifts, with eyes and hands raised to heaven, dedicated him as it were as the firstfruits of their chaste marriage.
CHAPTER III.
[5] There are some who would call into doubt what I am about to assert in this chapter, struck, as I indeed think, by nothing else but the incredibility of the portent and the rarity of the example, so that they distrust a thing otherwise attested by not a few arguments. For my part, to say what I think, I would neither reprove these, nor yet condemn of falsehood those who, having received what follows from the mouth of the blessed man himself, consigned it to posterity attested either by living voice or also in writing. And these things are certainly of such a kind that the portentous life of Nicholas which followed can lend them credit, as true prognostics of his sanctity. But if we also seek examples, a vast choir of those Saints will present itself to us whose sanctity God preluded with prodigies before their birth. I will pass over those who were foreseen and foretold long before they were conceived; by a rare privilege of the Saints, those likewise who, given by God to parents made fruitful only by a miracle, afterwards led a wonderfully holy life; I will bring forward from them only a second or a third, whom, still enclosed in their mother's womb, God endowed beyond common nature and custom both with other prodigious gifts and also with the use of reason. Among whom those two ancient prophets Jeremiah and John the Baptist rightly lead the column, and above all our Savior and his spotless Mother, who, no one can deny, were already then possessed of reason and of holiness in their mother's womb. For the rest, God made others also, while still in their mother's womb, not indeed Saints like the foregoing, but yet illustrious with signs of future sanctity. The records of Cluny relate that St. Gerard e, not yet born, struck his parents and the others standing by them with clear voices and groans. St. Vincent was heard from his mother's womb, as from a pulpit, barking at the vices of mortals. The Annals of the Franciscan family relate that James of the March of Ancona f, a man of eminent sanctity, consoled from the womb with living voice his own mother, while still pregnant and fleeing from robbers, and admonished her not to fear, to keep on her way at a slow pace, she would reach home unharmed.
[6] In the number of these, then, must be reckoned our Nicholas, to whom God willed to unlock the eyes of the mind before he could open the eyes of the body: for he saw, as he himself g testified, in his mother's womb the heaven marked out in beautiful order with its lights: he saw among the rest one star more august and far more brilliant than the others, whose rays spread themselves far and wide through the whole world in every direction; which same, or certainly one like it, he asserted had appeared presented to his eyes again quite often afterwards in the desert: he saw also within those same narrow confines a mountain or august rock, he is forestalled with the use of reason: whose summit raised itself up to heaven: he saw, finally, there also that sacred oil, anointed with which the athletes of Christ come forth stronger for their final struggle and triumph over their enemies. All these things this little child saw, he showing them who once showed to Moses on the mountain the bush burning without being consumed, to Joseph in a dream the sheaves and the eleven stars together with the sun and moon bowing in adoration of him, who finally showed to the three Magi the star announcing the Savior's birth. Nor have I any doubt that the presages of such great portents were also disclosed to him by God, and that they were so great that out of modesty and lowliness of mind he avoided revealing them to others. He recounted, as once Joseph the Patriarch did, with simple voice and mind, the portents of his future life that he had seen, but he left the interpretation to us. The light of the star spread into all the corners of the earth portended that the innocence and purity of his life would shine to the whole Christian world: that rock, unbroken against all the assaults of storms, however violent, intimated his invincible strength in adversity and the outstanding palms to be won from his enemies; the oil, finally, which is reserved for the last struggle, foreshadowed the perpetuity of his good beginning and purpose, which alone is crowned. And these things God willed him to foreknow miraculously before he was born, that the remembrance of these prognostics might one day fortify his mind more solidly for things so arduous. But of these, enough already: for what follows will have equal, nay greater, admiration, and a confirmation of what we have said.
CHAPTER IV.
[7] The first care of his excellent parents, after his mother had brought him forth into the world, was that he should be reborn as quickly as possible to God and to heaven; and that they should see to it that he whom they had already entered in the roll of their sons should be entered also in the number of the sons of God. And it happened that at that same time the parish of Sachseln, to which the house where Nicholas was born was subject, was under an interdict from the divine offices for certain causes,
indeed it even lacked a parish priest; at baptism he recognizes the parish; whence this kernel of sanctity of ours had to be carried, stripped of its maternal husks, to the nearer village of Kerns and there dipped in the waters of the sacred font, according to the institution of our Savior—which the stone basin of the Kerns baptistery testifies to this day in its inscribed words. He received the name Nicholas not without a singular nod and will of God, so that how glorious a victor and triumphator over all the calamities of this life he was to be, and an outstanding follower of the holy Nicholas in many things, might be foreshadowed even by his name. Certainly S. Nicholas, scarcely born, when he was first washed with the waters, is said to have risen up spontaneously, erect on his own infant feet, and to have stood a long time leaning on them alone without any human assistance. So also our infant, namesake of S. Nicholas, scarcely born, began to continue those prodigies which, as has been said, had their beginning in his mother's very womb.
He himself was accustomed later to confess to intimate friends, to whom he more readily opened his rarer secrets, among other things, his parents and godparents, that at first sight he had recognized both his mother and the midwife, and had not needed any teacher or experience, by whose guidance a young boy gradually comes to a knowledge of them. Likewise, that the road by which he was carried from his paternal home to the church at Kerns to be dipped in the baptismal font, with its hills and windings, he had already then learned; and finally, that the faces of the Priest and of those who lifted him from the sacred font as godparents, he had retained in memory from that time and distinguished from the appearances of others. Only one man among the bystanders, whom gray hair marked as an old man, had been present, of whose identity or memory—who he might have been—he afterwards had none.
Our Nicholas was therefore present at his baptism both in body and soul; he recognized his parents, whom very many, already adults, often pretend not to recognize; he recognized those who conferred upon him the first fruits of blessings, whose entire harvests others often spurn. And these so precocious recognitions of this infant, which he himself, as I have said, candidly confessed he had drawn from God so early, suggest to me, weighing the whole matter with more mature reflection, far higher conjectures concerning him as well. For he who, still hiding in his mother's breast, was able to contemplate the stars of heaven, and who, scarcely born, recognized his parents, godparents, and patrons, seems credibly and much more likely also to have recognized divinely illuminated: God, the fount of the stars and of all blessings. What shall I say of the other mysteries? At that very time he was divinely aware of the muddy road by which he was carried to the sacred font; who, therefore, would doubt that he learned far greater things from baptism itself—what stains that salutary water washes away, to what place it establishes men before God, by what merits the water is raised to such sublime and heavenly effects, and six hundred other secrets of God, with which God deigned to imbue and prepare that still-infant soul, as with certain preludes to future contemplations?
CHAPTER V.
[8] Our Nicholas, therefore, born and reborn in this manner, from his very cradle began to be raised in the bosom of his excellent parents and to spend his boyhood under their holy and diligent discipline. He had no other teachers or guides than God and his guardian Angel; hence, although he remained devoid of all literary learning, yet he absorbed heavenly and divine teachings early. he passes through boyhood in holiness, Those who observed his character called him the Mirror of Boyhood. Nothing childish in the child: the boy represented a grave man. Whatever virtues are accustomed to adorn and commend boyhood were at their summit in him. Most observant of his parents, he considered nothing more important than to comply with them in all things and to engrave their counsels upon his innermost heart. He was never heard to stain his tongue with falsehood, which is otherwise a bad habit in boys. Nothing was more courteous, more pleasant, or more upright than he toward all persons; whence he was both loved and admired by all. Nothing wanton or frivolous in him. Among his household members, brothers, especially, and sisters, he was harmonious and most zealous for peace, and was never troublesome or hateful to anyone, except to one doing wrong. These, while still a boy, he was accustomed modestly to reprove for their faults, sweetly to invite to sounder counsels, and by the singular innocence of his voice and life to advance in the service of God. So Nicholas spent his first age unblemished and wholly innocent, piously brought up. which the skilful and solicitous care of pious parents greatly promoted, as it usually does: for nothing can be more effective for this purpose. For as tender shoots, that they may one day flower and bear fruit, require the timely and diligent hand of the gardener, and those whose care a slower and lazier hand neglects are easily trampled down, degenerate and unfruitful: so those parents can hope for the richest fruits from their children whose labor sweats over forming or shaping them to good fruit while they are still like wax and tender: lest a taller and more wanton age, already accustomed to boyish licence (which parents themselves for the most part grieve and complain happens), should at length wholly spurn and detest a severer hand.
CHAPTER VI.
[9] Such a boyhood of Nicholas as I have described in a few words was followed by his youth, far more wonderful still: for together with his age his virtue and uprightness took the amplest increase by days and hours. Strenuously finishing his work, Toward labors, according to the will and nod of his parents, he was ready, enduring and constant beyond the custom of his age. At the very first dawn, condemning the feathers, he labored to go out to the fields, to practise the cultivation of the fields or meadows, to lead the flocks of cattle or herds to pasture, to gather in the crops of grain and hay, and in short to carry out strenuously whatever work his still weaker strength could bear. And while his hands and his whole body were wearied by these rustic toils, his mind meanwhile was accustomed amid his labors to look up to heaven, to sigh, to be flooded from above with divine consolation. When the work in the meadows was done, and the rest were preparing at evening to go home, he of set purpose drew out his work somewhat longer than the others, so that he might follow them alone at no great distance, and meanwhile converse more attentively with God. he is accustomed to withdraw to pray, Indeed, often, after the example of Christ the Savior, on the way back he would furtively withdraw from the company of his parents and household, and thence, turning aside from the common path, he would seek some more secret place, where, enticed by the greenness and density of the trees, kneeling on the ground, he poured himself out wholly to God. Though this did not escape his parents, they nevertheless dissembled it, lest they should in any way hinder his piety. He had already then begun to love and to frequent that valley, at once shady and full of streams, adjoining his father's house: in which one day he was to fix his seat in complete solitude, which God also even then, having singularly chosen it for this, showed to the pious youth by various portents.
[10] For when one day in that same place he was attending to God more earnestly or more quietly, and learning the place destined for him, he seemed to himself to see a huge mass, which from that little hill on which his chapel was afterwards set raised itself gradually into the air, so that at length it hid its summit among the stars. That spectacle presented the appearance of a most beautiful and at the same time most strongly fortified tower. It ravished both the eyes and the whole mind of the pious youth, and filled it with such an abundance of heavenly delights that from that hour he began to burn within with a most ardent desire for the eremitic life; for, divinely taught, he readily understood that that life was depicted for him by this august mass. For what else would a tower in solitude, nay solitude in the tower itself, portend? It raised its summit above the clouds into heaven, because this way to heaven was being marked out for him: a way safe, pleasant, fortified: which the pleasantness and fortification of the tower also indicated. And thenceforth he began to frequent solitude more, to avoid the throng of people, he is kindled with love of solitude: to hate crowds. And although at this time a vehement love, as I said, drew him to solitude rather than invited him, yet he carefully took heed not to decide anything within himself by an immature counsel, intending to explore the divine will in this matter more surely. Meanwhile he did not withdraw a finger's breadth from his obedience to his parents, nor did he ever ask that he be indulged in anything regarding his customary labors.
[11] Yet this love of the solitary life conceived beforehand already then began to work in him to this effect, that he gradually began to moderate and diminish the measure of his food: he fasts four times a week. whence, while still under age, he consecrated first only the sixth day of the week, soon also the fourth, finally the second and the Sabbath, to a severe fast. He had heard, to be sure, that S. Nicholas, once Bishop of Myra, while still an infant, abstained even from his mother's milk on the day of Mercury and of Venus, and afterwards kept those same days perpetually as fast days: and that the other Nicholas, of Tolentino, in the seventh year of his age began to keep the day of the Moon and of Saturn with abstinence from food. Lest, therefore, he should seem to have received the name of such great men in vain, he resolved to merit it, as it were, by imitating them in this very thing, and to make himself worthy of it. The whole circuit of the spring fast he passed refreshed only once a day, moderately, with nothing but dry bread and a few dry fruits. Many disapproved of this excessive severity of his toward himself at so tender an age, and reproached him that so great an abstinence was beyond his strength: that in youth the body ought to be increased by food, not diminished by fasting; that he was so making himself unfit for labors and hastening his death. But he was accustomed modestly to reply to those who thus reproached him that God so willed, at whose sole nod he had instituted this form of living: that he would bring it about that the body suffered no harm from that frugality. Let them set before their eyes the three boys in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, for whom cheap vegetables and drinks of cold water had increased their strength and the grace of their form beyond the other youths who were nourished on royal delicacies. Let certain countrymen of ours, Swiss of this age, look into this mirror, whose god is their belly, who have nothing but meat ever in their mouths, and who trample down all the laws of abstinence.
Annotations* Rather, the fifth.
CHAPTER II.
Nicholas leads an upright life in marriage and military service; he is exercised by demons and refreshed by various visions.
CHAPTER VII.
[12] Now our Nicholas, having passed beyond the years of puberty, was advancing as a robust young man to the age of manhood, Preferring celibacy. at which time most people, upon the advice of more prudent persons, make decisions concerning the state of the rest of their lives. Nor was there need of much deliberation for an unlettered man to practice those things to which he had grown accustomed as a youth; but this, however, had come to be deliberated in this matter: whether he should live as a celibate or bind himself with the bonds of matrimony. For the man of God, most zealous for a higher life, was not unaware that God is not offended by marriages entered into by those who are not impeded by any vow of state or sacrament of definitive devotion voluntarily undertaken. Yet the plain words of that divine Orator inclined him in another direction, who said in 1 Corinthians 7: "I wish all to be as I myself am. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. I wish you to be without care. He who is without a wife is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please God. The virgin thinks about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit. She will be happier if she remains thus, according to my counsel; and I think that I too have the spirit of God." The spotless mind of the most chaste young man was also drawn by the most reliable examples of many persons of both sexes, from both the Old and the New Testament, whom perpetual celibacy had made more commendable to both God and men—and especially of those who, from love of the desert, with which he too burned ardently, as has been mentioned above, had never bound themselves to marriage. yet he yields to those who urge marriage, Nevertheless, the prayers of parents and relatives, which he was not accustomed to oppose, urged the virginal young man from another quarter to take up that yoke—although they themselves did not wish by their counsels to prescribe anything to his freedom in this matter. After the matter, so uncertain, had been long and much debated within himself, and much more in his solitary consultations with God, since he had also sensed that he was being driven to this by an inward divine impulse, he at last willingly yielded to the judgment and will of his parents, and married the maiden offered to him from the honorable Wyssling family, Dorothy by name—allured by the hope of offspring, not by the enticement of pleasure.
[13] From the rigor of his former life he relaxed nothing, even in marriage itself. and from his wife Dorothy becomes the father of ten children Nothing was holier than this husband, nothing more chaste. They lived together wholly of one mind: the wife in nothing hindered her husband in his piety, and in turn the husband again and again spurred his wife to the summit of virtue. He himself quite often rose at midnight from the marriage bed, and, the partner of his bed assenting, made for the neighboring mountain, a whole hour distant, to pour forth prayers in the church of S. Nicholas. Hence the spouses, fruitful in virtues, obtained from God fruitfulness of offspring also: for God made them parents of ten children, of equal number of either sex, all of whom the pious Parents labored day and night with the greatest zeal and piety to form to every rule of a holier life. The firstborn of the sons, John, while his father was still living, held the highest Magistracy in Upper Unterwalden; whom, after some years, Walter, the third-born, succeeded in the same dignity. Nicholas, the youngest of the sons, while he applied himself to letters at Basel and at Paris, was presented with the highest laurel of Philosophical studies; then in his native country he served as Parish Priest until the year one thousand five hundred and three, in which he piously closed his last day. Dorothy, the first of the daughters, married to an honorable man of Lower Unterwalden, bore him honorable children also. The names of the rest, although they have fallen from the memory of men, we do not doubt live eternally, well known to God.
[14] He renders strenuous service in war: The Swiss nation was always martial and warlike, nourished and accustomed to arms almost from boyhood, in which they were exercised most frequently at that time when, with God's favor, they asserted themselves into the liberty which they still enjoy. It was not then free for each to enlist or not; but, enrolled under fixed standards, when the necessity of the Fatherland demanded and these were brought out in public at the nod and by the authority of the Magistrates, they were compelled to put aside the toga and put on the military cloak, again a soldier in the year 1460 and instead of the plough-handle and the mattock to wear out the spear and the sword. When, therefore, about the year of the Lord 1436, some controversy or other had arisen between a the people of Zurich and those of Schwyz, and this could not for some years be settled firmly even by many and the highest mediators, at length in the year one thousand four hundred and forty-four the matter was committed decisively to war and arms. Most of the Cantons followed the side of Schwyz against Zurich, among whom were the Unterwaldians also. Stubborn Bellona held their hostile minds and hands on both sides for seven years, when at length, exhausted by many defeats on both sides, they laid down their arms through the intervention of great men. Our Nicholas, following his standards, is said to have taken part in this war: for although by nature he was a lover of peace rather than of war, and of a milder disposition, yet he held it a crime to resist the Magistrate when he called, and, out of love of peace alone, not to succor the Fatherland in peril.
He was present also in the year 1460 at that expedition on the occasion of which the Swiss, provoked to arms, by an almost bloodless war added the County of b Thurgau to their dominions. He was vigorous of hand in the fight, he pressed on and helped the victory with all his strength; yet he skilfully admonished that the conquered enemy should be spared, that victory should be used with moderation, he prevents a monastery from being burned. and that they should abstain from laying waste the estates. He always acted as patron of widows and orphans even on enemy soil: he himself was the consolation of captives: again and again he dissuaded his fellow-soldiers from unjust plunder: with one hand he always wielded the spear, with the other he always turned the beads of prayer: so that he waged no warfare but a holy one, free of every stain, even as a signal example to posterity.
This among other things is read to have happened to him in particular in that Thurgau expedition which I have mentioned. Diessenhofen is a town in Thurgau situated on the banks of the Rhine c, beside which lies a monastery of sacred Virgins, called the Valley of S. Catherine: thither the enemy had hidden themselves in their flight: when the Swiss, having overtaken them, had already decided to destroy them with flames together with the monastery, our soldier, after pouring forth prayers before an image of the Crucified, interposed himself; he interceded for the enemy and for the sacred place, put out the flames already prepared, promised and prophesied that shortly the enemy would of their own accord withdraw from there, and that that place would thereafter for many centuries stand renowned for piety and religion. His prayers prevailed, and the event shortly answered to the prophecy: for both the enemy left the place a little afterwards, and it was a joy to his comrades to have abstained from violating the sacred place. These battles having at length been happily concluded, as I said, when our Nicholas had returned home twice a victor, he thereafter abstained from profane camps, being shortly to enlist in a holier warfare. At which time without doubt he was present at several conflicts, not indeed in body but in mind, as the things I shall say hereafter about his prophetic spirit will easily show.
CHAPTER IX.
[15] The worldly summits of honors which others canvass with the greatest zeal our Nicholas seriously and perpetually turned from and spurned: Fleeing honors he preferred to lie hidden rather than to stand out, to rule himself alone rather than others, to judge himself rather than others. He considered deeply that the tumults of the forum are enemies of a quiet mind; he weighed the dangers of falls from the heights: that the station is surer on the plain or below than at the summit; that judges are one day to be judged by a stricter judgment and condemned to a heavier penalty. He saw that those who rule others are for the most part led and ruled by very many and those the worst passions of the mind; that the mind is now driven by favor, now goaded by envy, at other times corrupted by money, at others by vain flatteries; that blood often triumphs over truth and equity; and finally that there is neither measure nor end of prevarications in the higher offices. Whence he looked up from below rather to the heavenly dignities, and canvassed rather the honors of heaven, in preference to these of clay and perishable. There, he had learned, nothing slippery is to be feared, the mind cannot be driven astray by them; and therefore he busied himself to be great not among men but before God. The whole Assemblies of that Commonwealth often came together with common wishes and votes, he refuses the Consulship: and urged, and pressed, and asked and besought him, whose good faith and diligence they had tested in lesser offices, to take on the highest magistracy among his people; they proclaimed him fit and worthy. But he did not evade, but wholly refused, rejected, showed a heart of adamant to those who adjured him, and counted as enemies those who pleaded for him in this business; some proclaimed his prudence, others the innocence of his life, others other gifts of God and nature worthy of command: he, knowing that all these are easily lost by command, obstinately preferred to go without command rather than without them; and at length his mind, tenacious of its purpose, prevailed, so that they finally ceased to be troublesome to him.
[16] Yet they often troubled in private the man who fled troubles in public: fortunate in settling quarrels, he was the asylum of his country: the highest and the lowest desired their affairs to be managed by his counsel, they held his counsels for oracles: and so, acting as consul among his household gods and domestic fields, with less loss than in the council-house, he meanwhile avoided vain honors and pomp. Nor indeed was it so very wonderful that a man accustomed to be taught daily by God was so alien from all human pomp as to detest honors and public offices, whose dangers and ruins God had often shown him by manifest prodigies. A lawsuit was once being pleaded in the court, at which Nicholas was present by reason of his office. The parties on both sides were heated, each put forward its right and strenuously repelled injury; he discerns unjust judges. and when at length it came to the sentences to be pronounced by the judges, and the eyes and faces of all hung intent upon it, our Nicholas too, intent on the Judges, eagerly awaited the decision of the case, and severely admonished those whom he had perceived to waver that they be fair assessors of so great a matter. And behold a huge prodigy: flames burst forth whence words were expected: sulphurous, fetid flames, as if they were vomited from some Etna, or rather from hell, were thus thrust out from the mouth and tongue of some of the judges. Astonished at this spectacle, Nicholas, who alone beheld the smoking mouths of the judges, began to search out so unwonted a thing with a deeper inquiry: that these flames were without doubt the tokens of corruption, that unjust favors, stirred up by gifts secretly received, smoked from an inflamed breast, that these vanishing ardors were preludes of the eternal fires with which unjust prevaricators were one day to be tortured by the just judgment of God. d And from that very time he spurned the dangers of such dignities far more zealously than before, since he saw that evil judges carry hell about in their breast, whose betraying fires coming forth from the mouth he had so clearly beheld. So indeed God for himself
taught the chosen soul to flee from manifest losses to salvation, so that she might the more freely take flight thither, where he was at length planning to draw her.
CHAPTER X.
[17] Nicholas still held that course of life among his household, wife, and children which I described above; he gave the days to labors and the nights to prayers and divine meditations, Intensely devoted to piety yet he labored zealously to conceal and dissemble this from his household. It was his custom at evening, at the usual hour of rest, to retire to bed with the rest of the family and to rest a little; but soon, having interrupted his sleep, when he observed that all the rest were the more deeply oppressed by it, he would leave the bedchamber quietly and without noise, fall upon his knees, and temper the entire cold of the remaining night with the most fervent conversations with God. Meanwhile he was bathed in the most abundant consolations from God, which, overflowing even into his body, restored his strength far better than sleep and rendered him more vigorous and stronger than the rest for the work before dawn.
But the fatal enemies of the human race bore it most grievously that one man—rude, common, and rustic—should experience so many divine favors, excel in so many virtues, and lead so innocent a life. His perpetual vigils, abstinences, and alms were suspect to them; he suffers hostile demons; they interpreted Nicholas's progress as their own contempt and indeed their ruin; they feared that by his example he would draw many after him and would at length snatch an enormous prey from the jaws of hell. Therefore, at first by secret tunnels they strove either to overthrow him entirely or at least to undermine him; they craftily suggested various things by which he might either be retarded from his piously and religiously undertaken exercises, or turned entirely from his proposed journey to heaven. But when he himself remained unshaken against all their hidden assaults, so that they could never drag him even to the slightest impatience, they finally determined to attack him by open and violent warfare. They would beat him, push him, and afflict him in various ways, so that they might stir his bile even once. But in vain; the invincible athlete of God laughed at their insults and by the greatness of his soul bravely eluded the harassments of his body. He had once retired to the country, accompanied by his eldest son, for the purpose of inspecting or tending the livestock. While his son in the stable was busily occupied with the care of the animals, Nicholas himself was laboring outside, beyond the pens, to tear down and uproot the regrowing obstructions of thorns and briars that were harming the pastures. and he himself is hurled through the thorns by them, The fierce enemy seized this occasion for doing harm: he appeared without warning, seized the innocent man by the middle, lifted him aloft, and with enormous force through the thickest thorn-bushes to the lower-lying meadows about thirty paces distant hurled him, flung away. Nicholas, struck down by so grievous a fall, lay almost lifeless, torn in his whole body and dripping with blood; while meanwhile his son, having finished the work of the stable and coming out, seeks his father at the work in which he had left him; he calls out, and at length, after long seeking him, finds him half-dead and badly cut by the briars in the place where the devil had cast him. The pious son lifts his beloved father from the ground, cherishes him, puts him on his shoulders, carries him panting into the cottage to the hearth, and gradually calls back by warmth the departing soul into the cold and languishing limbs, until at length the brave athlete, coming to himself, turned to his son with a calm and serene brow: Well, he said, and in the name of the Lord; how cruelly has my antagonist laid me low? But truly this was the will and the permission of God, without which the beast of hell could not even have touched me. And from that time he not only did not fear his threats and attacks, but even spurned them with a brave heart.
[18] Once while he was working in his field, his little daughter was sitting not far off, who, suddenly terrified, began to cry out, to shout, his little daughter is terrified. and to implore her father's help. Asked what she shuddered at so greatly, she said: Behold, a black mastiff is here, having only one eye in its forehead, which is trying to swallow me with its jaws wide open. To her Nicholas, recognizing Cerberus, said: Do not, little daughter, do not be afraid: he can bark, he cannot bite: he has the will to harm, he has not the power. At this word the specter at once vanished from her eyes. The same battles with the foulest enemy our Nicholas, ever a glorious victor, had to experience frequently: which most of those men fought before him who excelled others in innocence and holiness of life and conduct. We know that our Savior himself was not only challenged to single combat by the same enemy, but also carried up out of the desert and borne to the loftiest brow of the mountain or of the temple of Jerusalem; and that when the enemy had not the power to throw him down from there, he nevertheless urged him, promising him safety, to cast himself down. We know also the very ancient contests of Job, once a man of the greatest endurance, against the same enemy, in which, stripped not only of all his fortunes and his children, but also of his flesh, nay almost of his own life, he was nevertheless superior to the same enemy. What need is there to enumerate more with more words? The Pauls, Antonys, Ignatii, Francises, Margarets, Anastasias, Bibianas, innumerable other Saints, for whom grievous conflicts with this enemy were divinely decreed? Were they therefore not Saints? Did they therefore displease the divine Godhead? You err, you err from the truth, whoever so judge. God wills that those whom he loves be proved through all perils: he does not spare in this life those whom he has decreed to spare eternally. Correct, therefore, wretch, whoever you are, your opinion, lest you expect in the future eternity the fights which you do not desire to experience here.
[19] He is moved to flight from the world Those men certainly please God, nor is there reason for them to distrust their salvation, who, following the common manner of living, have yet learned, after the example of our Nicholas, to act rightly and to be upright in all things. But nonetheless this is the custom of the all-powerful God, that those whom he has determined to join to himself as singular friends by a closer and more familiar union, he calls also to a sublimer and more perfect institute of life, so that, freed from profane things, they may commit themselves wholly to God. And this very will of his he knows how to insinuate in various ways to those whom he pleases. For the reluctant he drives on with terrors, the ready and willing he invites with blandishments, others he draws by the voice and leading of pious men, others finally he snatches to himself by unwonted illuminations of the mind. Of the number of these singular friends of God was our Nicholas also, whom God willed to possess wholly alone, and by whom he willed to be possessed wholly before others. He therefore at times clearly taught him by splendid portents how great obstacles fleeting and perishable things throw in the way of perfect love of God, how vain are the pursuits of men who busy themselves with earthly affairs, and finally with how great favor heaven will attend those to whom the earth has become wholly worthless. Once when he had sent out his own flocks and herds into his pastures to graze, by a wonderful sight, he chose apart for himself, after his custom, as I said, a place suitable for pouring forth prayers to God; where, sitting on the ground, he poised himself toward heaven with the whole impetus of his mind, and, wholly forgetful of the earth on which he sat, absorbed in the contemplation of things above the moon, he remained for some time. In that ecstasy of mind God showed him a portentous lily, of snowy color, and breathing out far and wide a fragrance nothing less than ethereal. It came forth from the very mouth of Nicholas, as if born in his entrails, and with its flowers stretched on high seemed to touch the vault of heaven. When he had enjoyed long enough the beauty, fragrance and height of this so unwonted growth, and had marvelled greatly at its most wonderful rising and origin, the flocks grazing here and there gradually came near the man of God, and among them a horse, which he kept as nobler and sleeker than the rest, happened to stray in front of him. When, therefore, he had called back his gaze from the heavens and cast his eyes down upon this horse, suddenly that lily too of its own accord began to call back its head from heaven, to bend into an arc, and to incline toward the beast in such a way that at length, seized by its teeth and violently pulled out of the mouth from which it seemed to have sprung, it was wholly consumed. Then indeed the holy man turned into himself, weighed the matter more deeply, was disturbed in mind, confounded, rebuked himself. Is it so, then? a lily? and the most beautiful lily to go to ruin? which came forth from my mouth? which touched heaven? O the fragrance! O the whiteness! The horse has squandered it. Indeed I now at last perceive how the matter stands. I love too much these squanderers of divine sweetness, these disturbers of holy quiet. Too dainty are these beasts, which now graze not on grass but on lilies. The garden must be closed, the wild beasts shut out, so that these lilies may grow not toward these fleeting things but toward heaven and God. From that very hour, therefore, he began to consider more frequently and more seriously by what means, these empty things being deserted, he might cleave to God alone.
[20] At another time, when again he was wandering meditatively through out-of-the-way places, he saw at a distance a man coming toward him, notable in form, comely with white hair, grave in his gait. He meets an Angel pretending to be a beggar: He advanced slowly, and meanwhile sang most sweetly and delightfully. The sound of the singer was varied: he began the song with one single voice, soon a harmony of three distinct voices was heard, which at length, returning to the first harmony, was finished with the single voice repeated. When at length that aged man came nearer to him, leaving off his singing, he began to uncover his head, to bend his knee, and with a groan to ask an alms. Nicholas without any hesitation opens his purse and gives liberally what he had been asked. He in turn renders infinite thanks to Nicholas with a reverent and lowly bearing, and at the same moment vanishes from his eyes, and leaves him alone, flooded with a great sweetness of mind. And then at length Nicholas recognizes the beggar, falls to his knees and to groans; venerates the fount of all good things; adores him One in nature, Three in persons; assents to the mystery; admires, instructed by a subtle knowledge, the one God in the one voice, the three persons in the trio; rejoices that the alms has been surrendered into the hands of God; grieves at this one thing, that he had not given himself wholly as an alms to that richest and most liberal beggar. Then, pursuing his way in the same wilderness, he was again divinely instructed by another prodigious spectacle. He seemed to himself to see and to approach a village, sparse indeed and thin in dwellings and inhabitants, yet he found it distinguished by a lofty palace, he is taught what is the way to heaven; which occupied the pleasanter spot of the village. The beauty of the castle drew to itself the mind of the admiring man, and invited him to enter. Without delay: he approaches the place, passes through the open doors, and at the very first entrance comes upon stairs, and beneath the stairs a fountain: he marvels at both, for the stairs, though they were ample and magnificent, were yet ascended by only ten steps, and the fountain, from a perennial and abundant but hidden source, poured forth not water but honey mixed with wine and oil. Then, having climbed the stairs, he was still more astonished by a bowl full of the liquor drawn from the fountain below, which stood on the topmost step as if prepared for quenching thirst. There was added also a voice, which clearly repeated that saying of the Savior: If anyone thirst, let him come hither and drink: John 7. The pious onlooker meanwhile was amazed at the fewness of the guests: for he saw scarcely a few flocking together, enticed by the sweetness of that nectar and by the liberal voice of the one inviting. At length, with this so portentous spectacle,
when he had sufficiently long delighted his eyes and mind, and had also liberally bathed his eager throat with that nectareous liquid, going outside into the neighboring field, he encountered there innumerable throngs of men wandering promiscuously about the field. Like ants, people of different sorts were running about, occupied with different businesses; all, however, anxious, were gaping only at gain. Some were busy building fences, others were joining the banks of a river with a bridge, and both groups were cleverly demanding tolls from passersby. There were many who, in a more pleasant occupation, were playing on flutes, drums, and strings, who nevertheless were also extorting payment from the dancers; still others, strenuously intent on other labors, were devoted to profit. While Nicholas was astonished at these things, a divine light suddenly appeared and so illuminated him that he easily understood what all these portents meant. In that perennial spring he contemplated God, the inexhaustible spring of all good; in those three most sweet streams of the one and the same spring, he drew in the Trinity of Persons; in the ten steps of the stairway he read the Decalogue; he gathered that the cup of divine knowledge was offered to those who had traversed and ascended the stairs of the Decalogue; that many, indeed all mortals, were invited to these precious delights, yet few came running—indeed almost none; that commonly men seek mere vanities, rubbish, and temporal gains, and that all their zeal and all their efforts tend finally to that end. Whence a new spur was added to him for utterly abandoning these fleeting things and plunging himself entirely into those perennial streams.
[21] At another time, when he was occupied with some domestic tasks or other, he is commanded to serve God alone he received three grave men coming to him, similar in appearance, equal in stature, and seemingly of the same age. The first of them, turning seriously to Nicholas, said: "Does it please you, Nicholas, to dedicate and surrender yourself entirely, body and soul, to our power and judgment?" To this Nicholas responded with his whole heart's affection: "I make the surrender of my entire self to the one and only all-powerful God, and to no other; to whom I have long desired to serve with all the powers of both body and soul." Then those three men, with a beaming and cheerful countenance, seemed to put their heads together as it were, to smile, and to nod approval; and the first again consoled the holy man with these words: "If, therefore, you have definitively devoted yourself entirely to the service of the one God, do what you are doing, and firmly persist on the path you have begun. For when you have completed the seventieth year of your age, to die at age 70, freed from the prison of the body and from all the miseries of the world, you will fly to heaven, there to receive the reward owed to your labors. Meanwhile many contests will arise, demanding much endurance and much strength to fight through. But take courage, soldier: you will conquer, you will triumph over whatever hostile force shall befall: and although now we leave you nothing but a cross laid upon your shoulders in memory of us, yet the time will come when we shall receive you with a gladder embrace, accompanied by many others (namely those whom you will draw with you by your example): these you, like the standard-bearer of a great army, will lead in that eternity, and he is divinely encouraged once, carrying before them a banner which the picture of a bear's f paw will mark, as the symbol of your perseverance and strength." And with these words those men ceased to be seen, leaving in the heart of Nicholas a vast desire to serve him alone, who had already quite often declared his will in this matter to him by so many indications. Instructed by God with these and other frequent illuminations, our Nicholas, when at length on a certain occasion he was making for a certain g farm of his on foot, and meanwhile, his mind rapt into God as was his custom, was urging that this one thing be shown him at last, by what rule of living he might live and please God alone: and again. behold, suddenly a most beautiful cloud began to roll down from heaven toward him, from which a voice descending answered him to this effect: That he was seeking in vain, and was being troubled with a vain anxiety of mind, while he was in doubt about the institute of his life, as though, relying on his own wit and his own strength, he could undertake and accomplish so arduous a thing. Why rather, said that voice, do you not cast away all these cares together with the whole world? Why do you not at length offer yourself gladly and willingly to the nod of God, as you have long since undertaken to do? Do you not know that a prompt, free and liberal sacrifice is most acceptable to God? Shake off, therefore, all hindrances, throw yourself wholly upon God, and whatever he himself shall at length determine about you, embrace it with your whole heart. Having heard these things, the holy man began now wholly to loathe his former life, to spurn riches, wife and children; to meditate the renunciation of all things, to canvass the solitary life, and at length with skilful and circumspect inquiry to search out the means of embracing it, as we shall presently set forth more fully.
AnnotationsCHAPTER III.
Nicholas seeks the desert with the consent of his wife: then, when he is to live as a solitary in his native land, a cell and oratory are built by the Unterwaldians.
PART II. CHAPTER I.
[22] And now the world and all worldly things had so wholly lost their value for Nicholas, and the desire of the heavenly life had so prevailed with him, About to renounce the world and his wife, that he judged the compass of the whole globe too narrow for him to dwell in, and for the rest loved and canvassed nothing but the ampler spaces of the heavens for passing the remainder of his life. He decided, therefore, having renounced all things, to leave his country and hide himself in the desert, whence at last, unknown to all, he might have the freest excursions to the fields of heaven above. There was one single bond with which he saw himself still bound, and which alone he saw that he neither wished nor could break without crime: that bond was the bond of marriage, by which he was still held fast, and which alone drew him back from his conceived purpose. But at length he loosed that too, not indeed in an unlawful or violent way, but in that by which he had learned that the disciples of Christ our Savior also had once severed the same bond. That most illustrious Teacher had bidden his disciples, among other things, to leave their wives also: they left them, as many Saints have done, and did not thereafter return to them by right of return. They left them, I say, they did not repudiate them, they did not desert them unwilling, but willing and consenting. This very thing, then, Nicholas also resolved to attempt, mindful of the words which the Vessel of election wrote to the Corinthians, and which Nicholas interpreted more modestly and more soundly than many do now. S. Paul permitted spouses to defraud one another, but with the consent of both, that they might give themselves to prayer and abstinence. But, many object, he permitted it for a time, not for ever; and he bade them afterwards return together again. You err, my man, whoever you are: he indulged them to abstain for a time, he did not command it; he indulged them afterwards to return together again, he did not order it: But this I say, he says, by indulgence, not by command: he counselled continence to spouses, therefore, for a time, that they might give themselves more holily and more readily to piety toward God. But what if they resolve to do it for their whole life? does the Apostle forbid this? He neither forbids nor commands it; but he permits and counsels it to those who do not fear the danger of incontinence from it, and who, helped by God, desire nobly to curb and tame all lust.
[23] Nicholas knew that, following this counsel of Paul, great flocks of spouses had once lived perpetually continent within marriage itself by mutual consent: the Foster-father and the Mother of God; he asks her consent, Valerian and Cecilia; Julian and Basilissa; Marcian and Pulcheria; the Emperor Henry II and Cunegund; Boleslaus V, Prince of the Poles, called for that reason the Chaste, and Cunegund, emulator of the former; King Conrad, son of the Emperor Henry IV, and Matilda; Alfonso II likewise, King of the Asturians, who, observing continence with his wife, merited the name of the Chaste; Charles the Fat and Queen Richardis. He had heard also that Pharaildis, niece of Pepin, was a perpetual virgin in wedlock; Edward III likewise and Edith, spouses and virgins; Etheldreda, Queen of the East Angles, twice a wife, perpetually a virgin; and very many others besides, to whom in marriage itself the love of continence was more at heart than that of marriage a. Moved, then, by the illustrious example of these, Nicholas at length began to disclose the matter to his wife, and to solicit her mind to perpetual continence. It does not please me, he said, O wife, to live any longer as hitherto, and to struggle against God who draws me; it pleases me to live henceforth in secret, far from my country, far from my children, far also from you, my wife. This is wholly the will of God, shown to me hitherto by many arguments, which even you know it is wrong to resist. I therefore adjure you again and again that I may be allowed to do this with your leave and your consent: if I obtain this very thing from you, I shall count it the greatest of the benefits you have ever conferred upon me. He added then also this, that there was no reason for her to be much distressed about the burden of the children and the care of the household. The children had now for the most part grown up and matured so far that they did not need a father's care: and the household estate, by God's benefit, was in so abundant a condition that it could easily be preserved by the work and industry of a diligent mother of the family. Nay, he said too that he found by experience that the more he advanced daily in divine things, the more useless he was made for human ones. These and the like things he suggested quite often to his hesitating wife; for she too had prudently asked for time to deliberate, and had judged that so grave a business could not and ought not be decided without the counsel of kinsfolk and of other men of understanding. At length all, as many as had examined the matter with mature judgment, agreed that the divine pleasure must be yielded to, and he obtains it. and that this must be granted to the singular friend of God, that, freed from all cares, he might most freely enjoy God alone.
At last even his wife herself yielded and renounced her right willingly and voluntarily, and gave her right hand to her dearest husband, not without flowing tears, granting him free power to go wherever he wished. It is incredible to say with what a sense of inner delight this consent flooded Nicholas: he seemed to himself to have already placed one foot among the stars, and nothing else appeared that could place any obstacle in his way so as to prevent him from very soon embracing with open arms the plan of a more sublime life which he had long since conceived.
CHAPTER II.
[24] Having obtained his wife's permission, therefore, in the manner we have described, he began to look around for a desert suitable for his plan of life and to deliberate anxiously as to which one he should rather pursue and where—within or outside his fatherland. About to depart from his fatherland, In his native soil itself perfectly suitable solitudes presented themselves, but meanwhile various considerations came to mind which called him to a foreign place, where he might live not only alone but also unknown. He reflected that in his homeland there would not be lacking detractors who would form diverse judgments about this matter and spread various reports: some, as usually happens, would interpret it well; more would interpret it badly. With some he would not escape the name and stigma of rashness, with others of ostentation; his own household and friends would accuse him of being idle and lazy; finally, all this could be avoided by distance alone, which would deprive everyone of all sight of him and, as usually follows, even of his memory. Wherefore, in the seventh month of the year one thousand four hundred and fifty-seven, now past his fiftieth year, he announced to his relatives and household a fixed day for his departure, on which he would bid them a final farewell. They came in numbers on the appointed day, and first admiring, then also approving the man's resolution, he bids farewell to his people, which they could not oppose, they were nevertheless variously affected in their hearts. He stood before them, having put off his old garments, clad only in a long tunic of rough cloth, barefoot, with head uncovered, and his hands armed with a staff. His garb and his entire countenance, and above all his speech, breathed something divine. To embrace each one, to pray well for each, to exhort all to virtue and the fear of God; to bid them, laying aside anxiety about him, to take earnest care only of their own salvation: so it would come about that in heaven at length they would again enjoy each other's sight and converse more securely and more gladly. How many sobs thereupon, how many groans and tears received his words, cannot be expressed in speech; each one lamented his bereavement, that he was losing the common parent, a holy man, a mirror of all uprightness: they cried out that without him life too would be grievous to them, that together with him the favor of the divine Godhead too was departing from the country. But he, having consoled each one, began gradually to tear himself away from them with gentle and sweet words, and on the same day to take the road toward Alsace.
[25] He went alone, with no companion, without wallet, without provision for the journey, as though he had never possessed anything, and having crossed the Jura mountains, as though he had left nothing behind at all. Never did he think himself richer, never happier, and now at last he hoped that he could perfectly possess God the Creator, since he rejoiced that he was wholly freed from all things. At that time Mount Jura, having turned aside from Liestal: which others call Jurassus, separated the Swiss from the Sequani and Raurici toward the West b; this mountain (since our Nicholas had resolved, as I said, to make himself wholly an exile from his country) he crossed with wonderful eagerness of mind, on that side where it belongs to the dominion of the renowned Republic of Basel, which afterwards, about the year one thousand five hundred and one, joined to the other Cantons of Switzerland by a perpetual league, increased our country with a signal increment, and walled it in with a firmer defense than the mountains themselves. Having entered those borders, then, our traveller came at about evening twilight to the town of that dominion which lies midway between Basel and Mount Jura c, which the natives call Liechstal. And when he was now beholding that town close at hand, it is wonderful to say with how great a terror he was struck and suddenly drew back his foot: he reveals himself to his host, for the roofs, towers, walls appeared tinged with the color of blood, and whatever, in short, was to be seen of the town seemed to glow red either with flames or with blood. Nicholas gathered from this that he was being divinely warned by this prodigious appearance of the town not to set foot within it; wherefore, going by another road to a certain neighboring farmstead, he was received in a friendly and most courteous manner by the farmer. When the offices of mutual greeting were finished, among various talk exchanged back and forth, the farmer began modestly to inquire about Nicholas's country and stock, and about the purpose of his journey and of his life, and Nicholas to recount in order the whole course of his vow and of his life: I seek, he said, a desert outside my country, that in it I may find a better country, and therefore I have turned aside to you here from my journey, that, helped by your counsel and judgment, I may carry out the salutary purpose of my mind. Wherefore, if you can show me a place suitable for such a purpose, whether near or far from these lands, you will hold me bound and obliged to you forever before God, the best and greatest. Lead, then, where you will; go before, I will follow my guide: for it does not please me to stay among men even this very night, but in solitude.
[26] Here now the farmer began to wonder at the sublimity of the vow, to praise the eagerness and readiness of his mind, to look up to the perfection of his piety; this one thing only he did not sufficiently approve, that he had gone out of the borders of his country, since he was a native of Switzerland. and when he urged his return, That kind of men was for the time being hated by foreign nations; wherever at length he came, foreigners would interpret it as an exile forced on him in punishment of some offense, would impute to him the name and stigma of a fugitive. Besides, in his own country there were many solitudes very well suited to the service of God, where, separated from the din of men, he could give himself to holy quiet at his pleasure. He advised his return thither whence he had come; in his judgment he would do so by the nod and will of God. Nicholas listened attentively to him admonishing so seriously, and, having given thanks, answered that he would take that night for deliberation: and that then at length he would readily comply with whatever God should suggest; and at the same time, having asked leave, he departed. But soon, on the road itself, not far from there, night overtook him. Turning aside from the road, therefore, he chose under the open sky a more hidden corner to pass the night: where, casting himself into most fervent prayers, he anxiously and solely asked to be instructed by God whether return or the continuation of the journey begun pleased him more. Nor did he, wearied himself, cease to weary God with prayers, until sleep crept upon his solicitous and anxious breast; he decides to obey. and when he had yielded to it a little while, he suddenly felt himself surrounded by a bright light from heaven. By its brightness he began to be touched as by a lightning-stroke, and thence to feel grievous pains in his bowels, as if a knife driven into his belly were raging within his very vitals and wholly disemboweling him: and from that hour he felt neither any hunger any more, nor thirst. He felt himself likewise as if bound with a ship's rope and violently drawn back into his country: whence he saw clearly enough the divine will concerning himself, which accordingly he meditated obeying most promptly at the very first dawn.
CHAPTER III.
[27] God is wont, indeed, to make the virtue of those whom he loves more closely the more earnestly attested and proved; divinely encouraged on his return, to test in various ways for whom they live, for God or for themselves; whether they are ready to go wherever God draws them, or are prepared without choice, at home or abroad, among friends and enemies, among the known and among strangers, to obey God and not themselves. By these same tests he willed also to prove the will of our Nicholas made conformable to every nod of God: whence, having scarcely called him out of his country, he soon called him back to the same place from which he had readily gone away: and taught him to despise what he had feared before, namely the judgments and unfavorable talk of men. Returning, then, to his native land by the same road by which he had left it, Nicholas took care with all zeal of this one thing alone, that his return should not become known to any of mortals, and above all of his kinsfolk: that he should not touch even with the tip of a finger, or aim at with a slight desire, anything of his possessions which he had left with great spirit. he lives in a suitable place, Entering, therefore, in the more secret Alps of farther Unterwalden d a hidden and dense thicket of briars, he resolved to lay there the apprenticeship of his solitary life, nay, if it pleased God, to complete its whole course. These thorns and brambles were more acceptable to him than any rose-garden and than golden and cedar lodgings. The bare ground furnished a bed for his tired body, and the hard rock a cushion; a very tall and shady larch, for a roof, kept off the heats of the day and the sudden rains. He had no furniture, no spring, no means of prolonging life. From the moment at which he condemned his father's house, he had taken absolutely nothing of food or drink in going and returning, without food and drink. and yet he felt his strength not at all diminished thereby. He hungered for nothing, he thirsted for nothing: by the sole contemplation of divine things he both fed his body and fattened his soul. Meanwhile he endured there many grievous attacks of the infernal enemy: who assailed him the more bitterly and hostilely the more suspect those first lessons of a new life were to him. Yet our unconquered recruit repelled all assaults and conquered bravely, more practised by these battles than a veteran of earlier ones; so that he could not be overcome by any stratagem of the crafty enemy, by any force, by any arms.
[28] He had now spent eight days in that thorny cave, no one knowing it, without any food, intent on God alone: when behold, hunters, wandering by chance through those haunts and catching wild beasts (as nothing is hidden, By the information of hunters, nothing impassable to that kind of men), are led by the scenting of their dogs to this very thicket in which the man of God was. They come upon the man, in the garb I described above, prostrate on the ground, rapt in prayer, bathed in tears: they stop, they are astonished, and at length, having recognized him, they nevertheless shrink from addressing or disturbing him. When the hunt was finished, they go straight to Peter, Nicholas's own brother: they disclose the whole matter to him, make the place known by sure indications, and advise him that, for testing the truth more surely, he himself, if he wishes, should hasten to the spot. He, without any delay, at once rose, hastened, searched diligently the hiding-place pointed out, and at length, having found it, rushed in where an opening offered. Did the great love with which he embraced his brother drive him to disturb his desired and long-sought quiet? What, found by his brother, he said, is this, my brother? What do I see? What do I learn of you? Is this, then, the life which you have long canvassed? a life so deathly? so inhuman? You are mistaken, my brother; I will not bear it; remember that you are a man. This is to kill the body, not to subdue it. For what else will this fasting, what this so great want of all things, what so monstrous a rigor bring at last, but present death? Relax, therefore, brother, from this purpose of your mind. What you have begun is above man. So may heavenly spirits live, free of a bodily frame; man, certainly, compacted of flesh and blood, cannot live so. Nicholas, with a calm and cheerful brow and tongue, he persists in his purpose; his brother objecting these and other like things with a sincere and simple mouth and mind, to be at rest
he commanded, and to set aside superfluous anxieties of mind: that it was now the eleventh day since he had taken absolutely no care for his body, had admitted nothing of food or drink; that he had felt no discomfort from this, no fainting; that he wished, if he could, to persevere thus until the onset of some infirmity should counsel otherwise. And having said these things, he dismissed his brother, struck with the novelty of the matter, and sent him home.
[29] Lest, however, he should seem to wish to tempt God rashly, since, having been once discovered, he was being visited from all sides, which he consults with the parish priest, he secretly summoned a Priest to himself through an intermediary—a man of known prudence and probity. This was Oswald Isner, the Pastor of the parish of Kerns. To him Nicholas faithfully laid open his whole soul: how long he had already gone without any food while remaining healthy; with what longing he had burned from his earliest childhood for such a life as, being entirely devoid of bodily nourishment, would afford him greater opportunity both to bid the world a final farewell and to cling to God alone. He did not wish, however, to stand on his own judgment or decision, but asked that, having examined the matter prudently and maturely, the Priest should at last pronounce his own opinion concerning it: he would follow whatever he should advise. Then the pious Priest marveled at the unaccustomed and prodigious affair, more carefully observed the face and hands of the holy man, and explored his feet and arms with his fingers. He saw indeed that the entire face had grown pallid, the cheeks had wasted away with emaciation, it is approved. the lips, harsh with dryness, had cracked; the whole body was no longer sustained by flesh or any fluid, but by mere bones clothed only with skin. Yet in the desiccated body he perceived the spirit to be vigorous and the powers intact in the exhausted limbs. Nothing of liveliness, nothing of health was lacking to this image of death. Whence he prudently concluded that nothing vain, nothing superstitious lurked here; that a man could not be sustained for so long by the winds and blasts of empty air; that this was the work of God alone, who had disposed something above nature concerning this man. He therefore advised Nicholas to continue the abstinence he had begun, and to rely on the aid of God alone in this matter, as long as God himself should supply the strength and such a spirit. The holy man seized with a brave and cheerful countenance the advice given according to his desire, and continued the fast he had begun, unharmed from that time forward for the rest of his life and always constant in strength.
CHAPTER IV.
[30] The fame of Nicholas, lying hidden in these lurking-places, grew daily among the inhabitants, and the number of visitors increased, not without great annoyance to the holy man, who grieved that his longed-for quiet was so often disturbed. He aspired, therefore, with all his desire to more hidden retreats, Having moved to a more suitable place, where he might live either unknown to all or at least known to fewer: whence he began to survey all the caves of that wilderness, to search all its corners and slopes, that he might at length find a place where, hidden, he could withdraw himself more from men. This at length the most kind Lord showed his servant by a prodigy: for when, wandering through pathless and out-of-the-way places, he happened to look up at the sky and besought God's guidance in this business, he saw four most brilliant rays, like lighted torches, glide downward and dart into a certain valley, which the natives call f the Margin; perhaps because its slope is girt by a higher and, as it were, circular margin. Wonderfully gladdened by so great a spectacle, the holy man went with hurried step into the valley designated from heaven for his rest, never to withdraw from it. Now that place is midway between the southern Alps of Unterwalden, namely those of Sachseln
and of S. Nicholas, as they call them, distant by an almost equal space from the g villages of Sarnen, Kerns and Sachseln, horrid with darkness and denseness, bearing nothing but forest trees, brambles and thickets, wet and marshy from the confluence of waters from the surrounding mountains. A rapid torrent, or, if you prefer, a river, called the Melcha, flows through the middle, from which the valley itself also takes its name: which the force of the waters, rushing with its din over the precipitous rocks, throws into confusion far and wide: you might rightly call it a valley of tears, and a place most suited by nature and situation to a more austere life. There, where Nicholas, a man most loving of solitude, resolved to fix his seat and a firm foothold, he began, with the help of his neighbours, to erect a wooden hut woven of brushwood and roofed with straw, and in it to pursue with great spirit and fervour the manner of life he had begun. Meanwhile there were various opinions about him among the country people, various and differing talk: they secretly weighed all his actions: they watched all the ways, so that no one could approach him unobserved, and no one return from there.
[31] And when, after watches of this kind kept for almost a year, they held it for certain that all his pursuits and his whole manner of living had now been thoroughly explored, the people an oratory, and that no guile or pretence lay beneath, and that he was driven by no vain spirit: they came together at length in a common assembly, that each might give counsel openly as to what should be determined about the man of God. There was no one of them all who did not stand for him, and say the best things he had seen of him. And when mention arose of erecting a chapel there where he lived, which would be convenient for the sacred and pious retirement both of himself and of the inhabitants flocking thither, although some advised postponing the work and a longer trial of the man, yet the better part prevailed: so that they decided to undertake, at the common expense, the labors being distributed man by man, a work acceptable to God. Vying with one another, therefore, they gather the material necessary for the chapel, they bring stones, mortar, timber, they labor strenuously by turns, and do not leave off the work until it is completed. To the chapel, at length, remarkable not for size but for its beauty and its three altars, they add a new little hut: from which there was open to the holy man both a view into the church and an entrance for pouring forth prayers to God: both of which, venerable for age and religion, are piously visited and frequented even today. and has a cell built. That hut is built, after the usual fashion of the country, of fir beams joined at the four corners with rough work h, narrow and also low: its length somewhat exceeds ten feet, its breadth does not equal as many: its height of six feet did not answer to the tall stature of Nicholas, so that, standing upright on his feet, he was compelled to stand only with his head bent somewhat toward his breast: it admits the daylight by two little windows. His furniture was the same as in the former cave, that is, none: for a bed a hard board, and for a pillow a stone, still seen at the side of the cell and honored with great affection of piety by those who flock there. With this building, finished at length about the year of the Lord 1468, Nicholas was liberally presented by his countrymen, and at the same time began to inhabit it with a great sense of piety.
CHAPTER V.
[32] Nicholas's little church now awaited the final hand of the Bishop, by which it might be dedicated with solemn rite to God and the Saints according to custom, This being duly consecrated, and so, wholly released from profane uses, be designated only for sacred and divine ones. Lest, therefore, the Unterwaldians should seem willing to fail in their duty and help in this respect too, by a common decree of the people they appoint envoys to Hermann, sprung from the most noble blood of the Landenbergs, for the time Bishop of Constance (to whose most ample care of sacred things Unterwalden is subject), to ask that, the Bishop of Constance. sending his consecrator into those parts, he would see to it that the church which they had built above all for Divine worship and for the use of their fellow-townsman be consecrated to God. Without delay, Thomas, Bishop of Ascalon, Vicar of Hermann of Constance in Pontifical offices, was sent into Switzerland in the following year, namely one thousand four hundred and sixty-nine, and dedicated that chapel with the solemn and customary auspices on the 5th of the Kalends of May i. And from that time the fame both of that wilderness and of the man of God himself began to become still more celebrated. Many flocked there daily, many adorned that sacred place with gifts sent from elsewhere. Certainly Bishop Hermann himself sent from Constance to Nicholas, for adorning the newly consecrated little church, no small quantity of silver, and the Archdukes of Austria send gifts. and a pair of brass candlesticks of extraordinary size for the altars. And the candlesticks indeed, by Nicholas's order, gave their light to the divine offices in the church of the parish of Sachseln, while with the silver a pasture k farm was bought for the needs of the chapel. The liberality of this sacred Prince was afterwards emulated also by other great Nobles throughout Germany and Magnates of the Roman Empire. Above all Sigismund, Archduke of Austria, and his pious wife Eleanor, Queen of Scotland, moved by the fame of the place and of the man, sent there by messengers with a liberal hand chalices remarkable in gold, silver, workmanship, weight and size, and likewise the other furnishings necessary for divine worship, and earnestly commended themselves and their people to Nicholas's prayers to God.
[33] Indeed, that the gifts of such great Princes were pleasing to God, and the prayers poured forth by Nicholas for them accepted, Their peace with the Swiss, an event desired and salutary for the whole country declared. For until that time the hostile feuds between the Most Serene house of Austria and the Swiss had not yet wholly cooled down, which, however, this very year, the seventy-third of that century, at length ended, quieted, extinguished: for as soon as that grievous enmity between such great parties was wiped away, as it were by the hand, by the tears and prayers of the man of God, the hearts of both parties grew together so much that, a perpetual friendship being established by a perpetual and, as they call it, hereditary league, the Archduke himself ordered not a few of the citizens of Lucerne to be of his councillors, as a sure sign of the faith given and the friendship agreed. This many ascribed to a great miracle: nor can the prudent reader oppose it, who has attained even a slight knowledge of past times and discords. the foundation of the chaplaincy, There were added thereafter to the chapel the pious gifts of other men also, so that not many years later, namely in the seventy-seventh of that age, an honorable revenue for maintaining a Chaplain was gathered by Nicholas from the alms contributed. Whom accordingly the public records l, which survive today, show to have been the first Founder of that Chaplaincy. The supreme Pontiff of that time, Paul II, added to these profane treasures also the sacred treasures of Indulgences, as they call them, Indulgences obtained. with which he willed to adorn that little church already consecrated to God, and to testify the singular affection of his mind both toward Nicholas and toward the whole nation of the Swiss. The diploma m of this same liberality, excellently fortified with the larger seals of sixteen purpled Fathers, is still preserved today in the same church, and joined to it is also another of Hermann, Bishop of Constance, who not only confirmed n by his authority the former one received from Rome, but also heaped upon it fresh grants of graces.
AnnotationsCHAPTER IV.
Nicholas's miraculous fast, his pious exercises, his profitable conversations with his neighbors.
CHAPTER VI.
[34] Through appointed guards Most of the natives were now thoroughly persuaded of Nicholas's perpetual abstinence from food, but not all. Many began to doubt again, and, as is the inconstant nature of the common people, to fear fraud or pretense, to suspect, and to murmur openly that food was being secretly brought to the man. Although, therefore, as we have mentioned above, Nicholas's sincerity in this matter had long since been proved by a strict and prolonged enough guard, the Unterwaldians nevertheless, to test the truth even more certainly, decreed by public plebiscite fresh sentries and stationed them throughout the entire surrounding valley in such a way that no access or departure to him would be open to anyone, would never be permitted to anyone, until the matter was established by the most thorough investigation. The abstinence of Nicholas is investigated: For an entire month the guards spent their time in their stations with vigilant and diligent care, certain that during all that time Nicholas had lacked not only all sustenance but even all human sight. And because in the meantime the man of God had been found to have persevered alone, in the highest quiet, absorbed in divine meditations, without any diminution of strength or health, the siege was at last lifted, and all vain fear and false suspicion about his integrity was thoroughly removed and vanished from men's minds. The Vicar of Constance Indeed, that the truth of the matter might be more firmly proved and, confirmed by higher authority, might become more celebrated, when the Unterwaldians approached the Bishop of Constance, as I mentioned above, about the consecration of the chapel, they simultaneously made solemn mention to him of the prodigious abstinence of Nicholas, so that, if he wished, he too might take some notable and authoritative test of the same. He therefore seriously committed this business also, to be diligently investigated, to his suffragan bishop—the Bishop of Ascalon, as I have said. When the dedication of the church had been performed with pontifical rite, the aforesaid Bishop Thomas entered Nicholas's cell, attached to the sacred building, and spent a great part of the day, mingling sublime conversations with him, with much feeling of piety and sweetness. He marveled at the divine eloquence in an unlettered man, at the austerity of life beyond human powers, at the unusual visions and prophecies; and at last, when the conversation turned to the virtues, he asked which of all the virtues Nicholas himself considered the chief and queen. To him Nicholas presently answers that obedience seemed to him to hold the sovereignty among the other virtues. Then indeed he, smiling sweetly, bringing out from his bosom fragments of bread and a little draught of wine, hidden there beforehand for this purpose, said: See, my brother, the bread which obedience sets before you, see the wine which the same virtue pledges to you; take, swallow, that you may obtain the reward of obedience in heaven.
[35] he takes a test of his obedience: The man of God, struck by this saying, because for the space of a whole year and a half he had now tasted nothing of food or drink, yet ready to obey the precept of him who commanded, lifts in his hand one of the three fragments of bread, and earnestly asks that he may be allowed to take it broken into three crumbs. And when he had obtained this without difficulty, he let the morsel put into his mouth pass down only with the greatest difficulty through his dry and unaccustomed throat, his stomach also resisting because of the strangeness of the food; then he passed into his stomach a little drop of wine taken into his mouth, not without grievous shuddering and nausea. When this was taken, a huge pain of the stomach so cast him down that the pious Bishop, astonished, asked pardon for what he had done, and openly declared that by this event the fasting of the man of God was abundantly proved: that he had taken this upon himself not by his own authority but by that of his Prince, in order to test so great a man: that he would diligently report what he had seen happen, and would proclaim everywhere the grace and the prodigies of God in this man. Then, Hermann having discharged his office and his life, Otto, Count of Sonnenberg, was lawfully given as his successor in the See of Constance, who, roused by the fame of Nicholas growing daily, the Bishop himself visits him. decided to come himself to the spot and to make the state of the matter better explored. Wherefore so great a Prince set out on the road, hastened to the Unterwaldians, entered the wilderness and the humble little hut of the holy man, engaged with him in words concerning divine things, and in short omitted nothing which he judged could serve toward forming a judgment of the man's integrity. Many conversations having therefore been held back and forth, the Prince broke out into those words which won for the man of God a great praise and esteem among all: that he marvelled at his life and holy manners and held them for a prodigy, that he congratulated his country, himself and his diocese on such a man; and that he rendered great thanks to God, who at that time had raised up so great a pillar of his Church; that he hoped, by the intercessions or merits of such a man, to have a happy rule in his Pontifical office. So the excellent Pastor gloried in his remarkable little sheep, and, commending his folds to his pious supplications before God, returned whence he had come.
CHAPTER VII.
[36] In the first years which Nicholas spent in solitude, since his chapel still lacked its own Priest, at first on the feasts only he could indeed assist at the divine offices more rarely than he wished, yet he strove daily to be present at them in mind and in pious thoughts, since he could not be in body. Meanwhile on the days free from work he would make his way by a steep and rough road to the parish of Sachseln, situated a thousand paces a from there, and there, with rare piety and singular example, he applied his ears, eyes and mind to his Parish Priest b as he performed the sacred rites, and, the worship of God being finished, turning back on his way he returned straight home. And because at least once a week the mysteries were celebrated in his chapel, he assiduously assisted at them. But when at length, ten years later, that wilderness could maintain its own c Chaplain, as I said, the pious anchorite was present daily at his celebrating, then he hears it daily. and thereafter (unless perhaps more notable d Indulgences called him somewhere) he went nowhere. And in this manner, while he was zealously present at the divine banquets, having first confessed his faults to the Priest, in the earlier time indeed when the more solemn days occurred, but in the later time every month, he himself sat down to them as a ready guest and table-companion. Since, then, his fasting, already so often explored, was a cause of wonder to many, those same who were familiar with him quite often desired to learn from him Asked whereby he lives, by what thing at length he was fed and sustained life. He was perpetually of unimpaired strength; whether he was hidden at home or had at times come out of doors, he never contracted his cheerful and open brow; he always appeared with a sound, lively and strong body, wholly free of all pain or sickness. His friends, therefore, quite often asked him by what nourishment at length he achieved it that he could live so vigorous without any human care.
[37] When, among others, his aforenamed Parish Priest Oswald Isner once inquired this of him more pressingly, he confesses that it is from the Eucharist, he at length, though reluctantly, laid open to him the course of the matter in order: When, he said, my Father, I kneel by the Priest celebrating, and see him fed by that sublime banquet, or I myself in my turn eat of those same divine dishes, my mind is wont to be flooded by God with so great an ocean of spiritual delights or strength that its abundance overflows plenteously into the body also. Hence it is, namely, that I neither hunger nor thirst for anything earthly; hence my strength, hence my powers; the body of Christ and his Blood are my only fattening. He himself abides in me, and I in him: I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me: he himself is my food, drink, health and medicine. So he. To other rarer and dearer friends likewise, who pressed him on the same matter, he is said to have added also this, and from the passion of Christ. that the last pains of our Savior borne on the cross, brought into meditation, wrought such sweetnesses in his breast that thence a certain vital vigor, diffused through the body also, supplied strength and powers to all his members. But above the rest, that he was fed chiefly by the death of Christ, received his bowed head into his own heart, drank in with open mouth his spirit sent forth: these, to be sure, were his pastures, by which he was nourished daily, and therefore he needed no other fodder. Here I would that some profane assessors of divine things should correct their error, who seek their delights and nourishment only on earth with the beasts, thinking that heaven rains down no nectar or sweetness upon mortals, and who so starve and waste away with leanness amid the sweetest banquets of the Angels, and are not satisfied except when they gnaw bones with the dogs and feed on carcasses with the vultures; when they roll about in the muddy wallowing-places of pleasures, then at length they think they are well off: who find nothing that has savor among the altars, wholly born for the pigsties: they loathe the things that are God's, and embrace with their whole heart the things that serve the belly. These, I say, such men, I would have set our Nicholas before their eyes, and compare his life with their own, and at length judge with a sounder sense how great, compared with these perishing things, is the efficacy of things above, and how much more heavenly foods can do even in the human body than these earthly ones, that with our Nicholas they may grow old sound and strong both in mind and in body.
CHAPTER VIII.
[38] Nicholas let no moment of the daytime or nighttime pass without some singular fruit, but observed most diligently his plan once duly laid down and ordered, and did not depart from it a finger's breadth. The daily exercises of Nicholas, The greatest part of day and night he gave to the meditation of divine things, to the divine office, and to other sublimer exercises, and he was accustomed to do this without interruption from midnight to the noonday hours: thereafter he was wont either to give ear to strangers flocking to him for counsel and consolation, or, in fair weather, to walk about the wilderness outside his cell, sometimes also to visit a neighboring anchorite whom he had taken as a companion of the wilderness, as I shall afterwards set forth, and to mingle divine discourses with him; toward evening he returned alone to his customary exercises of piety, and finally, the night being now well advanced, he rested in a short sleep. This course of his life in the wilderness was perpetual, from which he never relaxed anything, unless perhaps charity sometimes counselled otherwise or necessity required it. In meditating he was intent above all on the mysteries of the life and death of our Savior, and for this purpose he retained in memory a concise little commentary on all those mysteries, divided into ninety-two sections: which, afterwards taken down with the pen by others from his mouth, Father Peter Canisius of most pious memory, and the method of meditating the Passion a Theologian and Priest of the Society of Jesus most well known throughout the world, reduced to order and committed to print and to the public light. To these forms of meditation that great Author prefaces, among other things, in this manner: It must be known, published by Canisius. he says, that the following meditations, with their various little prayers added, were composed and dictated by that pious and devout servant of God while he was still living, and beyond doubt were used very often by night and by day with great fruit and sense of piety. It is established likewise by the testimony of many that he often asked this very thing of God with warm desires, that those forms of prayer, at length reduced to order and published in print, might be handled everywhere by the Christian people: for he understood well enough of how great
reported, and that the holy and innocent life and death of Christ should constantly be before the minds of men, and that thanks should be given to God more frequently for such great benefits. These brief divine meditations ought to be all the more acceptable to us, not only because we know that they came forth from a man most expert in divine matters and a friend of God most richly endowed with the Holy Spirit, but also because they embrace in a brief compendium the principal points of our ancestral faith, set before us for meditation the chief articles of our redemption, and finally clearly set forth the duty of a Christian man." Thus Canisius; and after a few more words, he concludes that preface with these: "May God the Best and Greatest grant that these meditations and prayers, now published for the first time, may be embraced by all in the spirit of Nicholas himself, and, more frequently read, may be fruitfully employed." The same most weighty author then subjoins also certain other pious sighs of Nicholas, which he was accustomed to interject while considering somewhat more at length the words of the Lord's Prayer and the Angelic Salutation; from all of which it is easy for one skilled in divine matters to gather how the man of God was by no means unlearned in sacred things but experienced, and by what feelings he was moved in them.
[39] This he repeatedly impressed upon those who came to him: that there is nothing in the whole world better or more salutary than to preserve a pure mind and a clean conscience, He commends purity of heart, and if it has perhaps contracted some stain, to purge it more frequently through sacred confession properly made. When he suffered any adversity, he had but one maxim on his lips: "This is the will of God." He also gave thanks to God daily for three kinds of benefits: first, that by divine will he had obtained the gracious permission of his wife and children, with the care of domestic affairs set aside, to live in solitude and to serve God alone; grateful to God for benefits, then, that by the same generous favor he was never tempted by any desire or thought of returning to his own; and finally, that by divine grace he was permitted to live his life sound and whole without any nourishment of the body. He confessed that from boyhood he had yearned for this grace with many prayers and tears, so that he might be the more remote from all the impediments of this world and might cling the more fixedly to God alone. Yet he judged this the head and fount of God's other benefits toward him, that he had been permitted to fly away free into the desert from his wife and children, and constant in his purpose, and he made so much of it that he set even the grace of fasting received from God far after it. And although in body he was not far away from his home, yet in mind he was distant from it by so great an interval that at no time did he ever bring himself to visit his own even for a moment, or to enter once the house he had left; however close it was to the road which very often led him from his hermitage to the Parish of Sachseln for the sake of the divine offices. It happened once that Nicholas, passing those same old dwellings of his on a feast day, heard some kind of clamor within, as if his children were disputing among themselves with quarrelsome words. Moved by this, the pious father, drawn nearer from the road to the little window, sternly enjoined peace and silence on his children, and, at once drawing his foot back from there, went on his way fearfully, because by this act he seemed to himself to have deviated from the rigor of his institute, and he expiated that fault against himself with serious chastisement. From that time the hellish enemy was wont quite often, on Nicholas's going to and returning from the sacred church, to stir up monstrous tumults in that same house, by which, however, he could never move him even for a moment to stop or to look back, as though that house had never belonged to him.
[40] What he would admonish his wife and children: But if his wife too, with the children accompanying her, sometimes entered his hut to visit or see him, which yet happened rarely, he himself never made any mention of domestic or profane things, but, having instructed them by a salutary compendium on ordering their life rightly and healthfully and on constant perseverance in the divine service, and having bidden them shortly prepare for their return home, he dismissed them from him. On this matter Peter Canisius thus: He quite often imparted to his wife and children this salutary and fatherly admonition: My little children, take care that you never forget almighty God: fear him, serve his majesty with all diligence and devotion; direct all your efforts and indeed your whole life to this end, that you consecrate yourselves to him as to the supreme Lord, obeying his will and commandments; for it is he who can give and take away life, save and destroy. So Canisius. Strangers, whenever he admitted them to converse in the afternoon and spare hours, as I said, How he dealt with his neighbor? he received courteously, greeted, revered, showed them a kindly and serene face, and to whatever they brought forward he always answered each thing with an even brow. Men he used to address by the name of sons, all women by that of daughters; he gave consolations, counsels, instructions, exhortations to all; he busied himself to strengthen those standing, to raise the fallen, to amend the wicked, to teach the ignorant. With even the most learned men he, devoid of all literature, nay even of the art of writing or reading, so conversed that he not only satisfied all, but in many things carried the torch before them, and often removed hidden errors from their minds. This, among others, Abbot Trithemius also testifies of him in these words: This man of God was a miracle to us in his time; who, though he was wholly ignorant of all letters, yet flourished with a wonderful subtlety in the understanding of the Scriptures, and gave answers to the questions of any learned men whatever, no otherwise than that holy Antony the hermit is said once to have answered a most learned Philosopher without letters. So he.
CHAPTER IX.
[41] There was, as I said, a great flocking to the man of God from every side, both of natives and of foreigners, from far away. he is frequently approached by pilgrims, Hardly anyone came to greet the Holy Virgin in the hermitage of the Schwyzers without also wishing to meet in the hermitage of Unterwalden (although this is a whole day's journey distant from that) the man of so great a name and fame, and to commend himself to him for pious supplications before the divine Godhead. Many came often as if to see the miracle of the world, that is, a man who lived without any food under heaven, after the manner of the heavenly Spirits; others came together as if to an oracle, whence they might learn the future beforehand; others finally hastened to him as to an asylum, namely those whom some more notable calamity had oppressed. But the Swiss of his own country far surpassed the foreigners both in frequency and in eagerness to hear and learn from him; more frequently by the Swiss to these he commended above all obedience, which I recorded above held the first place among the other virtues with him. For the rest, he was for the most part accustomed to address them thus, as Canisius witnesses: My little sons and daughters, hear gladly your Catholic Pastors and Superiors, learn the truth from them, hold fast their teaching with your teeth, and fulfil in deed according to your strength whatever they have set before you as necessary to be done and believed. If you comply with these as ready little sheep, you will never, solicitous for the divine nod, lack anything; for he who hears these hears Christ, who is with us and abides in the Church until the consummation of the world. Whenever artisans and merchants also asked to be instructed by him about their salvation: he urged them to exercise their crafts and merchandise with sincere faith and an innocent conscience; to inflict injury, guile or fraud on no one, whether by word or by deed. Married people he admonished to follow the course of their life in the fear of God, to manage their household without complaint, to pursue solely the love of God and of their neighbor in carrying out their duties, and to persevere in piety: for by this way the approach to heaven lies open equally as from the desert itself; for it is not granted or advisable to every one of mortals to spend his life solitary in the desert, separated from all fellowship of men, with John, the forerunner of our Savior.
[42] and to their magistrates: The leading men of the Swiss, who quite frequently came running to him for counsel, he freely admonished of their duty, and helped the whole country with profitable counsels; Beware, he would say, O confederates, of discords: do not admit envy and mutual hatreds: repress favoritisms and the dissensions of parties as plagues of your country and Commonwealth. Do not push the limits of your league any further, for so you will more quietly and securely defend the liberty which, as you know, has cost you so much. Do not mix yourselves in foreign affairs and leagues: it befits you to execrate the corruptions of gifts worse than a dog and a snake, lest you should ever seem willing either to sell your country or to pursue your own advantage; keep exiles and the banished out of your borders; unless a grave cause presses, abstain from hostile force and incursion; yet repel force with force: defend your country and liberty manfully; yet so that it suffices to have defended them. But before all things fear God and keep his commandments; honor the Priests, observe their admonitions, even though they be froward and live a life alien from their state and dignity. For as it makes no difference to cold water through what channel at length it is conveyed, whether of lead or of copper, of gold or of silver, so it is all one to the divine gifts of grace whether they are poured from heaven into minds duly and worthily disposed by the ministry of good or of bad Priests. These and many other admonitions of the kind Nicholas gave to his countrymen: which without doubt clearly demonstrated the singular soundness of mind in that man.
[43] At Dillingen once a little book came to light by the authorship of Adam Wallasser, at whose end a certain Dialogue was thrown in, he converses with an unknown man which contains a conversation between our Nicholas and a certain unnamed pilgrim, from which it has pleased us to bring some things here. That traveller, then, begins thus. When I was in my exile, and was going through places illustrious for graces and divine benefits, I turned aside from my road into the hermitage of Unterwalden, where I found a man whom they called Brother Nicholas; at the sight of whom my heart leaped for joy: for in him I contemplated the miracles of God, in that he lived devoid of all natural nourishment. When I had greeted him, he in turn received me most lovingly. Then I: on the love of God, My brother, does it please you that we converse a little while on the love of God? since our Savior has testified that where two are gathered together in his name, he is in the midst of them. Then he: Set forth, he said, what occurs to you about the love of God. So he. He then subjoins questions brought forward and explained on the divine love, on the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mother of God, on the bread which we call daily, on the grievous scourge of the plague, etc.; all of which, since it seems superfluous and too long to go through, yet I will not pass over one or another answer of the man of God, that from these few it may shine forth how imbued with divine things the mind of the servant of God was. When that interlocutor raised the question, as I said, about the daily bread, and said that the living bread must above all be asked of God, which can secure us for ever to the heavenly joys, he himself answered: You have spoken rightly, I think, of this bread; in any
for in bread lies hidden the grace of God, in daily bread, which if it be withdrawn, man seeks life in it in vain, nor can he be satisfied by it any more than if he were eating stones. When God by his unlimited power secretly enters the small host of bread, then indeed the bread is transubstantiated, so that there is no longer natural bread there, but by God's generosity flesh and blood, true God and man, though invisibly; and in any host consecrated by a Priest, indeed in any even the smallest particle of it, the entire Deity is perfectly and undividedly contained and remains. And this is finally our daily bread." the plague of pestilence. Thus he. When the man of God asked his guest about the savage contagion of the pestilence, what he thought—whether any mortal could withdraw himself from divine anger—and the guest at length asserted that it depended on the hand of divine providence and grace, he replied that he was of the same opinion: that indeed no one could withdraw himself from divine anger; yet that whoever preserved himself in the truth and constantly spent his life in the love of God, whatever might at last befall him, it could not turn out badly for him. After these and other conversations held on both sides, of which more shortly below, that unknown traveler, requesting Nicholas's prayers, resumed his journey.
AnnotationsCHAPTER V.
Heavenly Visions and Temptations Presented to Nicholas: His Affection toward the Blessed Virgin.
CHAPTER X.
[44] The best God is wont to instruct and enlighten in various ways his own, whose simplicity of soul and eminent candor of mind, By a wonderful vision and ardor for learning and suffering divine things, he has tested. And he is wont not rarely to effect this by certain portents and figures, of slight moment indeed to look at, which yet are both full of mysteries and most suited to meditating on the most sublime things. We have as witnesses of this the sacred records themselves, which show us the wheels, chariots, wonderful apparitions of living creatures, and six hundred other forms set before the ancient prophets, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and the rest, by which the most wise God willed to show them the highest mysteries covered as it were with a thin veil. In the number of these God reckoned also our Swiss prophet, as will be seen both from what has been mentioned above and from what is now to be mentioned. A wheel once seemed to him to be let down from heaven before his eyes, which, joined by a double rim, was marked out equally by six spokes; a face of wonderful beauty made firm the nave or hub of the wheel: and that face bore before it a divine Majesty, wreathed with a crown, of about the kind the Emperors use. The spokes themselves, golden and shining, varied in different forms, for three, with their point turned toward the face, went forth from its eyes, ears and mouth, and ended more broadly at the outermost rim of the wheel. But the points of the other three were turned away from the face, and went somewhat beyond the outer edges of the wheel, while their bases, spreading more broadly, rested on its inner rim. This whole machine shot forth from itself on every side so intense a light or splendor that the man of God, as if struck by lightning, was cast to the ground with his face turned away, and, gripped by so great a terror, thought that his heart would be burst into a thousand pieces. Nay, from this fire a certain spark, darted into the face of the holy man, so clung to it, as once in the face of Moses, until his death, that those who afterwards visited him were struck at the first glance, terrified by a certain unwonted splendor.
[45] he is taught great mysteries. And this very figure, so admirable, shown to him from heaven, Nicholas thereafter willed to be drawn on a little tablet and to be perpetually before his eyes, and he used to call that tablet his book, which he had learned to read in the academy of the Holy Spirit, in which, by meditating, he read through daily all the most hidden mysteries a. That crowned face in the inner rim of the wheel signified the abyss of the immense divinity seated on the highest throne of heaven, and meanwhile filling all things far and wide. The inner rim represented the supreme throne of the divine and undivided nature and essence, the outer the compass of the whole universe. Those three spokes whose point seemed fixed in the divine nod marked the Trinity of the divinity. They proceeded from the mouth, eyes and ears, and ended in the outermost circle of the wheel; whence the man of God learned that by the word of God from his mouth all things were founded, that all things which are comprised within the compass of heaven and earth are ruled and governed; that nothing is done anywhere of which he himself is not the witness with his eyes; that nothing is ever said which he himself does not hear with his ears. These same spokes ending in the outer circle he imagined also as certain ways by which one may come from created things to the knowledge of the Creator. But the other spokes running out beyond the rims of the wheel were tokens of the divine immensity, which cannot be shut in and comprehended by the compass of the whole universe; these too he explained as certain ways by which God himself, most liberal, had poured himself out lavishly upon men, and that by a threefold benefit above the others, of Creation, of Redemption, and of the Institution of the most holy Synaxis. Finally, that their bases were broader within, but sharpened into points outside, he interpreted thus: that the works of God are great in themselves, but compared to his infinite majesty appear small; that likewise the infinite Godhead willed to take a small form on earth, and to hide himself under the small species of bread and wine in the most divine Sacrament of the Eucharist. From the same spokes too he was wont to gather that power of the Most High which was predestined for the Virgin Mother of God from all ages, and in its time overshadowed her and filled her with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Likewise the brevity of human life, which, though it is wholly fleeting and transitory, can yet merit for us an infinite blessedness. This, then, was that heavenly philosophy and Theology of his, at which, with God as Master, he labored skilfully day and night for almost twenty whole years, and which also, as he himself had learned it, he professed to his hearers with great lowliness of mind. Nor is there any doubt that God often either instructed or gladdened this his servant by many other portents as well, which, however, the modesty of the same man was unwilling should come out or be published among the people, so wholly alien was he from all boasting and display. This, among other things, I find handed down to memory, that on the merrier days, which others by a depraved custom are wont to dedicate chiefly to Bacchus and Venus, Nicholas, visited once by his intimates, was found prostrate on the ground in his cell, and so withdrawn from every sense that, more like one dead than one asleep, he could scarcely be roused with the greatest effort. When at length he felt himself wholly restored to himself, to those anxiously asking where he had been, or what he had meanwhile been doing, he answered in a few words: that he had spent the sweetest festivities with great pleasure of mind in a place far distant.
CHAPTER XI.
[46] Such indeed is and always has been the disposition of the capital enemy of the human race, that those whom he knows to be most friendly to God and most closely joined to him, these he attacks and persecutes most of all with hostility. And as witness of this it would be possible to produce Job from the old instrument, from the new Paul and others, As other Saints, six hundred of them, if a cause clearer than the noonday sun itself needed patrons and witnesses. For what else were the hermitages of the ancient Fathers, spread far and wide through the whole world in the most hidden deserts of the lands, but palaestras, circuses or amphitheatres, in which the holiest men fought it out with this beast? Let the Antonys, the Pauls, the Hilarions, the other innumerable ones speak for themselves of their fights and victories which they won over the enemy; I, because I count it superfluous, return by right of return to our Nicholas. For lest the greatness of the revelations should exalt him, there was given him an angel of Satan to buffet him. With such an onset did that hellish whirlwind often pour itself forth, as if the Stygian bars were broken, and rush upon the little hut of the man of God, that it seemed to be very near ruin and to be overturned from its foundations. Quite often, entering in a horrible shape, he is afflicted by the demon, he did not fear to engage with him at close quarters, so as to drive him out from there and turn him from his purpose either by the atrocity of blows or by the terror of threats. Sometimes too he went so far in audacity that he seized the brave athlete by his venerable hair, dragged him out of doors with wanton violence, and cast him out. But all these engines of the turbulent enemy fell in vain; the most unconquered Nicholas conquered, not by repelling force with force, but by sustaining it with great virtue: he manfully set before the mad torturer a body dried up and bloodless with fasting: he preferred to be cut down rather than to give way; he could be seized, dragged, thrown out, but he could not be torn from his purpose. What then should the crafty enemy do? Sound the retreat? Give in? Hold out the grass? His obstinacy, of course, even when triumphed over, could still not be broken.
[47] After his manner and disposition, he descended from force to frauds and stratagems; and he is tempted once to desert his purpose, he assumes the likeness of a man, counterfeits a nobleman by a vain bearing of body and face; his garment was of silk, a golden chain around his neck, sapphires on his fingers; he sat on a noble horse, he pretended to be riding through the desert for recreation, he invited the Anchorite, called out of his hut, to converse, he brought forward various things, and among the rest, that this manner of life displeased him in such a man: that he was rude and unskilled, could easily be deceived by the crafty enemy, alone could be laid low by a slight onset, and if he fell would have no one to lift him up. That it was safer to live in the society of men, and not to trust oneself too much; that this life which he had begun was too long; that he was deceived if he believed he would persevere in it to the end. He added finally that he knew for certain that by this mode of living he would not attain the eternal blessedness which he sought, and the joys of that heavenly country; that he would therefore do more rightly if he ceased to be singular: that, a man, he should live after the manner of men and among men, and count nothing human alien to himself. More deeply than can be said, these so fraudulent
and pernicious words entered Nicholas's soul and wounded him gravely like a dart. He perceived immediately, of course, who it was that suggested such things—namely that noble apostate spirit, noble for his celestial ruin, noble for his implacable hatred and envy toward the human race. Wherefore, not deigning to give him a reply, he decided that he should be answered with silence and contempt. Meanwhile, turning his mind to God and to his Mother, the Mother of God, he fortified it against the wiles of the crafty old deceiver and earnestly implored her aid. When this was done, the vain spirit, confounded, immediately ceased to appear. At another time likewise, when Nicholas was walking not far from his cell along the bank of the Melchaa, the same impostor met him in the guise of a wealthy merchant, and again, for a large purse hung from his belt. And when the wicked spirit was now standing very near to the man of God, he began to address him thus: "What are you doing here, my brother, alone in the wilderness? Why do you flee from men, when you could benefit men greatly? You are a prudent man, provident, and beyond others most experienced in many things—are you then going to bury all these gifts in this desert? Are you going to steal away your help and counsel, necessary and salutary to many who are in need, through this separation and your obstinate absence?" To this Nicholas replied: "But you, wretch, what are you teaching me? You would have better counseled yourself, if you had been wise, when you still enjoyed celestial glory, lest you should ever be expelled from thence and plunged into the chasms of hell." And with this word he drove the proud enemy far from himself.
CHAPTER XII.
[48] They report that Nicholas frequently confessed to a certain intimate friend of his, a man of the senatorial order, that he had a daily contest with those infernal phantoms, He is aided by the Blessed Virgin, but that he placed his chief defense, next to God, in the Virgin Mother of God, by whose help and consolation he was never abandoned in his combats. Whence many gather by no vain conjecture that that most pious Lady often stood by her servant in those contests in visible form and put those monstrous specters to flight. This at least is entirely beyond doubt: that with the foremost piety and veneration, next to God, Nicholas cherished this his Patroness; this the very many ancient records about him testify, painted tablets, the writings of his biographers, most devoted to her, the other sketches which make mention of him. Certainly the crown of the same Virgin, or rosary, as we call it, which, strung of beads for saluting her, we carry about as it were as the token of a Catholic man, he never put out of his hands, but turned and ran through it very frequently. And that pilgrim too, with whom, as I recounted above, he met in a singular conversation on divine things, disclosed that he had learned this of him everywhere by report, that Nicholas burned with a peculiar devotion toward the Queen of heaven, and so much that he could not bear, but corrected, those who said that that spotless Virgin was indeed conceived in her mother's womb not without the stain of original sin; and to her immaculate Conception: but that as soon as she was conceived, while still in her mother's very womb, she obtained the purging of that same stain and the perfect sanctification of soul and body.
[49] What if the man of God were living today, what do we think he would say, and with what censure would he brand those scourgers of Mary, he piously invokes her. for whom the great Mother of God is held in as small price and honor as any threepenny bawd from a tavern, who blaspheme that a she-goat is not surpassed by her in dignity? Who tear her, wherever they can, with jests, gibes and sacrileges? The provident man surely foresaw, as I shall set forth shortly afterwards, this sacrilegious kind of men, nay this offspring sprung from the Styx, and condemned it by his vote even before it was born, and forewarned that it was to be shunned and fled more than a viper. Peter Canisius of most pious memory relates, among the other forms of prayer to which Nicholas was singularly accustomed, also this pious manner of praying and of saluting the great Mother of God: Hail, pure, spotless and holy Mother of God Mary, mother of mercy, mother of Christ, almighty God and man. I beseech you, undefiled and noble Virgin, loving and worthy mother of God, be for us an effective patroness with your beloved Son and our Judge Jesus Christ; that he may bestow his infinite mercy upon us miserable sinners in this valley of tears, and preserve us ever and ever in his love and grace, and not suffer us to be taken from the exile of this world except with a contrite heart and a pure breast, fed with his precious body and blood. I beseech you also, O mother Mary, most full of praises and graces, obtain for us this among other things from your son, our beloved Lord, that he extend his loving mercy not only to all living sinners, men and women, but also to all the souls of the faithful, and free them from the pains of purgatory, and mercifully receive them into his everlasting kingdom, Amen. Whence, finally, it is abundantly manifest with what affection and zeal our Nicholas was borne toward the Blessed Virgin.
AnnotationCHAPTER VI.
Nicholas knows secret things, absent things and future things by the prophetic spirit.
CHAPTER XIII.
[50] a There was indeed, as I said, a great flocking to the man of God from every kind of men, A searcher of secrets, but truly access was not open to all without discrimination and choice, for he had obtained it divinely that he looked deeply into the hearts of those coming to him, even when they were not yet present, and when he had neither seen them before nor ever known them. He perceived well, therefore, from afar, whom the zeal of a better life and fruit, and whom curiosity had brought to him; and these indeed he kept off by the barred door of his cave, while those he received kindly and sweetly. If levity of mind alone and a Pharisaic lust of testing had brought any there, these he declined with all zeal, nor ever admitted them to his sight. There had come to him some man or other, a secret adulterer, of manners by no means chaste, since, wounded with adulterous love, he held the laws of the marriage bed in no account: this man, when with pretended religion he asked him many things and showed himself eager to learn, was taken by the hand and led by the holy man, who had already wholly penetrated the secrets of his breast, to the flowing Melchaa. When both had gone down, Nicholas, turning to the impure man, said: Here I will show you what is the state in the other life of those who, while they lived, entangled themselves in impure and adulterous loves. specters being shown, At this word, straightway two most foul shades (perhaps of those mistresses with whom, while they lived, he had been basely familiar) emerged from the waters, fiery beyond red-hot iron, so that fire-vomiting balls of flames burst out from them on every side; they rushed out of the waters into mutual embraces, and, lifted on high, clashed horribly together; but soon, thrust back by a certain hidden force into the torrent, they were not seen; whence, cast out quite often, crying out again and again atrociously, they were pressed down to the same place, until at length they ceased altogether to be seen. This struck the adulterer of whom I spoke with so great a terror that he could scarcely stand on his feet, and was deprived of courage and strength: but Nicholas on the contrary began sweetly to address the man, to strengthen him, to exhort him to better fruit, to dissuade him from base loves, to commend to him God's mercy toward the penitent, he brings him back to amendment: and so, instructed, to dismiss him. He returned whence he had come, and seriously corrected his manners and life.
[51] His companion Ulrich, of whom more below, the holy man was sometimes accustomed to visit in the afternoon hours, and to have converse with him on divine things. he takes away a temptation, When, therefore, one day they were conversing in the open air according to custom, behold, a young man was coming toward them from afar, loaded with three fresh lumps of butter, which his parents had vowed to be offered to three chapels of that place for the use of the lamps. When, therefore, the man of God saw the young man approaching from a distance, raising his right hand he made many crosses in the air against him, so that he threw the young man, who was observing it, into great wonder. by the sign of the Cross: And Nicholas had already gone away, when the boy, coming nearer to Ulrich, asked whether Brother Nicholas had signed him from afar with so many crosses. To whom Ulrich said: That clear-sighted man saw you surrounded by a huge throng of evil demons, who were secretly persuading you to turn these vows of your parents to your own use, and to defraud of them the churches for which they were destined. The young man recognized how the matter stood, namely whence the thoughts which he had turned over in his mind had drawn their origin; having therefore carried those offerings of his parents where he had been bidden and offered them, returning home he never ceased to proclaim the holiness of both hermits.
[52] In the village of Kerns a certain husband had come under suspicion with his wife of adulterous intercourse with a neighboring woman; A jealous woman, the hellish enemy fostered these jealous torches in the woman's breast, and gave her no place of rest. The unhappy woman once went out from her house into a neighboring meadow, whose center dense bushes occupied; when she cast her eyes full of suspicion thither, she seemed to herself to see plainly a man accompanied by a woman, who was hiding himself among those bushes, nor did she doubt that her husband, together with the suspected woman, had penetrated thither for the sake of committing adultery. Kindled, therefore, with violent fury, she bares a knife from its sheath, and hastens at full run to the place, to stab the adulteress forthwith. It was a pure mockery of the impure evil demon, for, entering the thicket, she found no one there; then, seeking the suspected woman by the straight road at her own home, she found her sitting on a stool, and in her lap a little son, who hung at her breasts. Wholly confounded in mind, therefore, because she saw herself deluded, she at length decided to betake herself to Brother Nicholas and to use his counsel. When she came there, he understands that she is present. she found all approaches to him blocked by a multitude of people who happened at that time to have flocked there. Fresh crowds took the place of those going away, which shut her out from speaking in secret with the man of God about what she wished. Meanwhile that crafty spirit did not cease secretly to inflame the mind of the troubled woman more furiously, and again and again to suggest to her that what she suspected of her husband had most certainly been accomplished in deed while she herself was away from home. Whence, when she despaired of access to the man of God that evening, and was even now preparing herself for her return, behold, the man of God came forth from his hut into the chapel, where this woman was still standing among a most crowded throng of both sexes, and, raising his voice as if preaching, addressed all at once and said: There is among you a certain anxious woman, who has come here to consult me: to her I solemnly declare that she should return home, and lay aside the false opinion which she has undeservedly conceived about those two, since they are wholly free of that crime. These words spoken, he indeed at once returned to his chamber, while the men present looked around in wonder, not knowing to whom or about whom those words so
faithfully and openly stated. The woman, moreover, on whose account the matter was being handled, understanding the affair well, at that same moment perceived both herself freed from all doubt and jealousy, and bids her go away reassured: and her husband amply vindicated from all perverse suspicion by so great a testimony.
[53] At some point a certain Swiss—I know not who—of profane appearance and speech, had approached the holy man. he corrects youthful vanity, For in his clothing there was nothing Swiss, but everything was foreign; nothing ancestral, but all was theatrical and histrionic. For his garment gaped with various deliberate slashes, and vanity shone through on every side through the windowed doublet. When this most vain man, therefore, presented himself to the man of God with great pomp and boastfully asked whether this style of dress pleased him, he answered that if the heart were good, all the rest would be well; "but your heart could be as sincere and good as to not degenerate from the modesty of your fatherland by despising this condemned extravagance of garments." And thus, having corrected him sweetly and yet vigorously at the same time, he sent him home. But what would Nicholas now be thought to feel about his Switzerland, into which, looking down from his heavenly watchtower, he sees all of France, England, Italy, and Spain to have migrated in regard to clothing? If he were to pronounce his countrymen vain—not to say foolish—he would be judged to strike them with far too light a censure, inasmuch as they have deviated by so great a distance from the ancient discipline of their ancestors. A certain citizen of Constance, engaged in the cattle trade, was so careless of his affairs and the pretense of riches. that in a short time he was reduced to destitution. He often traveled through Switzerland, whence the celebrated fame of Nicholas could not have escaped him. When, therefore, he saw that his resources were at rock bottom, he told certain people that he had heard many things about Brother Nicholas, and that he would therefore go and test by experience what that man could do. He goes; from his belt he hangs an enormous purse, bulging not with copper or silver but with hay, and ropes as well, as though about to buy up whole herds and droves of cattle, and thus presents himself before the holy man. To whom Nicholas said: "You pretend to be rich, wretch, and you disguise your poverty; your purse bulges, but it hides not even a farthing." At these words the vain merchant, drenched in blush, retraced his steps to where he had come from.
CHAPTER XIV.
[54] Not only could Nicholas, divinely helped, look into the hearts of men, but he could also foresee things far distant, and things to follow long afterwards. To his Swiss nation the truth-telling prophet foretold many things He calls an assembly to reconcile the Cantons after the victories won: which later ages first saw, not without grief and sorrow. About the year seventy-six of that age the Cantons of Switzerland triumphed in celebrated victories over Charles, Duke of the Burgundians, who had invaded their borders to plunder them, and, having taken some towns by force, had punished their defenders by hanging, and they returned home richer with abundant spoil of booty. Yet that thing was to the confederates themselves a crop of lawsuits and discords; a dissension had arisen over the division of the spoils, and indeed, since they were to be divided into eight parts, the people of Zurich, Bern and Lucerne demanded larger portions, because they had also made greater outlays than the rest on those expeditions; but the other five Commonwealths, because they said they had acted equally strenuously and exposed their heads to dangers, were unwilling to be inferior to those three cities, and would not suffer anything to be withdrawn from them of the booty. There came in addition the Envoys of the Nuithones, namely of the Commonwealth of Fribourg and of Solothurn, who were soliciting the minds of the confederates that they might be admitted into the fellowship of the same league with the other Cantons. Here too their wishes and votes disagreed: the opinion of the three Cities was not to reject such allies, who offered themselves of their own accord; the rest, with obstinate minds, refused to enlarge the leagues. The people of Zurich, Bern and Lucerne, therefore, since they despaired that the rest could be moved from the mind once conceived, bound Fribourg and Solothurn to themselves by a singular league: which the people of Uri and Schwyz and the other confederates took very ill indeed and grievously: and the quarrel was at length brought to such a point that, almost rushing to arms, they hoped it could be decided only by the sword.
[55] These commotions rightly displeased our Nicholas, and he himself, present, urges and persuades peace; since he knew well at whose instigation they were stirred up, and how great a plague they were to commonwealths. Putting his own quiet, therefore, after the public good, he gave his effort solely to this, that the leading men of the Swiss should come together at Stans, a town of Unterwalden, in a common assembly, and should inquire among themselves with fair minds about peace and the conditions of the leagues: he also exhorted the envoys of Fribourg and Solothurn through messengers to present themselves at the same assembly, and to press anew the cause of their cities. It is incredible to say with how great zeal the whole nation of the Swiss seized upon the counsel of so great a man. All forthwith augured a prosperous outcome of the assembly, because it was being convoked under the auspices of so great a man. This was everywhere the one voice of the people: that to the merits and fervent entreaties of Brother Nicholas before God was owed all the safety of the country; that in those battles of Grandson, Murten and Nancy it was not their own strength but Nicholas's prayers that had conquered: that he, though absent, had fought in the hands of the soldiers: that it would have been all over with them against so great an enemy, had not Nicholas made the divine Godhead propitious to them. So indeed in express words Henry Gundelfingen b writes on this matter. This, he says, is certainly our opinion, that we believe without doubt that the greatest, best and almighty God has at length turned his mild and kindly eyes upon the most robust confederates of the great League, and wills, through the intercession of this religious and blessed hermit Nicholas, to heal them of very many troubles, disturbances and diseases, and to preserve them in that league and keep them safe. What other intercessor, indeed, in the wars of the Burgundians about Grandson and Murten and in others, could our confederates have had, weightier, more devout, more religious than this one Nicholas, and more excellent in every kind of perfect religion? It would surely have been all over with our confederates, had not the prayers of Nicholas and of other devout persons shone before God, by whose most happy guidance and most firm religion a certain perpetual salvation is judged to have arisen for all our confederates. So he.
[56] In the year eighty-one of that century, then, when the assembly had been proclaimed by common votes at the place and time that Nicholas had advised, and they had sat down in numbers; before anything was proposed for treatment, Nicholas himself, condemning for the time his quiet and his hut, having traversed a journey of four hours, hastened to Stans, and, entering the council-house, wonderfully gladdened that illustrious gathering by his presence. They gazed most eagerly at the man, celebrated throughout the world for fame and the name of holiness: there shone forth from the bearing of his whole face and body a certain extraordinary splendor which dazzled the eyes of all, and now all, silent, with their eyes fixed on him, desired nothing else than that he himself should open the assembly. Then indeed Nicholas, with a modest and grave countenance, began to say a few words by way of preface, and to set forth the reason for his purpose, why he had left the desert at that time, why he had been the author of the assembly, why he had come himself to speak in so great a session. That the matter in hand was, of course, the safety of the country, and the welfare of the people, whose life and fortunes were called into danger by the dissension of their minds. That it was fitting, assuredly, to put the public good before the private: that he would counsel not what he had learned by his own wit or by human prudence, in which he himself was very little strong, but what he had learned from heaven at God's suggestion. That discord is the ruin of Commonwealths; that their league had grown together by concord: that, its bond broken, nothing firm, nothing stable remained. That the divine favor had hitherto breathed upon them, not because they had fought with united strength but with united minds, that they had exposed their life for the country, assuredly, not for booty; that it seemed shameful indeed that they should now wish to go and ruin the country for the desire of a slight gain, for which they had before shed their own blood with such eagerness. These and other weighty considerations of the kind on so great a matter the man of God brought forward with so great ardor and so great freedom of speech that they remained fixed more deeply in the minds of his hearers, and they did not hesitate forthwith to look seriously about for the conditions of restoring peace and union, and to lay aside all enmities, and that (as Josias Simler c, a historian though estranged from the Catholic faith, relates) solely through the intervention of Brother Nicholas, that pious anchorite in Unterwalden, who was already then held as a Saint by the whole of Switzerland, nay by all everywhere. likewise that 2 new cantons be admitted. As to admitting the Commonwealths of Fribourg and Solothurn into the fellowship of the league, he said that he knew for certain that this was according to the mind and will of God: I, he said, my confederates, not only exhort and admonish you, but also pray and adjure you, to join these cities to your league; for there will come, there will surely come a time when you will greatly need their help and protection. You have hitherto had eight cantons; hereafter you will number ten. And, I pray, do not admit more; be content with these. Those cities therefore obtained from the other cantons the ninth and tenth place, whereas before this, through those very hundred and twenty-five years, only eight, as I said, were comprised in the Swiss league.
[57] he rejects the money offered by them, Not so many years ago the Consular men of Fribourg of the Nuithones, Henry Lamberger and Peter Falck (of whom the latter, very aged, is still living), reported in the assembly of Lucerne, at which envoys from that city were present, that they had read in the annals of that same city that fifty gold pieces had once been sent by that city to Nicholas in thanksgiving, because he had been the one chief author and agent of that settlement; which, however, he had nobly rejected and sent back, saying that he neither sought anything nor had any need of that money in any way. And those to whom at this time throughout Switzerland zeal for the ancestral religion sits at heart now find indeed that the predictions of their prophetic hermit were true, and those very cities even today give thanks to this their peculiar Patron for that prophecy, by which he foretold that they would remain in the old faith and would come to the help of the other cantons. While the Primates of the country were sitting in the same assembly, he prophesied with a truly prophetic spirit the troubles to come for the sake of religion: he foretells the heresy to come Religion, he said, O Fathers of the country, will suffer schisms not long after my death, whence huge losses will arise to the whole commonwealth. Beware therefore, sons, beware diligently, lest you be deceived by novelties of this kind and crafty deceits. Remain with united minds in your true faith: do not be driven round like a reed-bed by every breath; keep to the straight path, do not move your foot even a finger's breadth from the footsteps of your ancestors; the faith which you drank in with your mother's milk, hold it ratified and holy; persist in the concord of faith; flee seducers and keep them away from you, for so the squalls of the threatening storms will not disturb you. O immortal God (our great Canisius adds to all these), how useful and how necessary it would be if our confederates were willing to receive these prophecies and fatherly admonitions of Brother Nicholas with fair ears and minds, and to acquiesce in and obey his cautious counsels! How easily not only temporal but also eternal losses of souls
arising from a change of religion, could be guarded against and averted? He is truly blind, indeed more sightless than a mole itself, who does not observe from the present state of the fatherland that Nicholas's prophecies have long since been confirmed by the event." Thus he. Our prophet, therefore, not only uttered such prophecies at those assemblies at Stans, but also in the hermitage, when the magnates of the fatherland came often to visit him; he repeated these same prophecies and many others and impressed them again and again. Meanwhile he is also said to have been accustomed to add the following to these prophecies of future heresies, and their destruction: that he hoped from the goodness of God that those sects would not last much more than a hundred years. Indeed also in the year following these assemblies, in a letter given by him to the people of Bern, he again warned them of the same dangers; which I have translated into Latin, word for word, in the rude and simple style in which it was given.
"To the Venerable, Pious, and Most Prudent Magistrates and Senate of the City of Bern."
[58] He writes an exhortation to the Bernese. "Venerable, etc. May the Name of Jesus be your greeting, and I pray for you all prosperity and happiness; and may the Spirit be my final reward. First I give you great thanks for your gift, from which I recognize your paternal love toward me, which is more welcome to me than the gift itself—of which I wish you to be persuaded that I am perfectly content; indeed, if it were less by half, it would still have abundantly satisfied me. That I may therefore be able to recompense your charity before God and men, I will most readily labor. The messenger to whom you entrusted the gift faithfully delivered it into my hands; I ask you again and again to hold him commended to you out of love for me. I therefore write to you out of obedience, which is the greatest virtue in heaven and on earth; and therefore you must take care that mutual compliance flourish among you, and know that this is most dear to him from whom all things take their most blessed beginning. Peace is always in God; indeed God himself is peace, and can never be disturbed; but by discord peace is disturbed. You must therefore labor to pursue peace, to protect widows and orphans, as you have done until now. If anyone's fortune on earth grows for the better, let him be grateful to God, so that it may also grow in heaven. Let crimes committed in public be resisted by you; administer justice always; keep the torments of Christ fixed in your hearts, which are wont to be the greatest consolation at the last. Many are vehemently in doubt about the faith, and the devil tempts very many about it; but let us not be doubtful in the faith, for it stands just as it has been instituted until now. And I do not write these things to you because I doubt of your true faith, for I do not question that you are good Christians: but I write to you for caution's sake, that if perhaps the evil spirit should wish to tempt anyone in this regard, he may resist the more strongly and constantly. So much for this; may God, the best and greatest, be with you. Given on the feast day of S. Barbara, in the year eighty-two. I have also had this same letter fortified with my own seal.
I, Brother Nicholas of Flüe."
which they venerate even today. So Nicholas to the people of Bern: who, in the general assemblies of the confederates not long ago, when mention of this letter arose, frankly confessed that its autograph was still with them in the council-house, and was prized like a great treasure. And when the Catholic Cantons earnestly asked that it be given to them, they refused this indeed; but they promised that they would make them a copy of the same: saying repeatedly that Brother Nicholas was in such esteem with them that they did not at all hesitate to number him among holy men.
[59] He foretells sects to arise, There had once come to the holy man some man or other of remarkable piety, with whom he had much and long converse about divine things, so that at length, in wonder, he broke out into these words: O how happy, my father, and how most blessed you are! To whom the man of God at once said: Do not, my son, proclaim me blessed: for to God alone is every most pious man known, and every most impious: but in the course of time a certain new religion and faith will arise, and he who sets himself against it as a wall and as it were a rock, he at length can be called blessed. A certain honest citizen of Kerns, an Unterwaldian, a long life to a boy, when he had brought his little son d, ten years old, with him to the hut of the man of God, and had already drawn out his conversation with the man of God for some hours, the little boy at length began to go up to his father, to press for going home, to remind him of the time that had slipped away. Then indeed Nicholas, placing his right hand upon the boy's head, said with gentle words: Cultivate diligently, my little lad, piety, and above all reverence toward your parents; for God will adorn your life with a long old age on earth. And it afterwards happened no otherwise than the divine prophet had foretold, for that boy at length departed this life more than ninety years old. A certain honest matron had brought her daughter-in-law to the same man, who, clothed in a new garment made of some foreign cloth, when she displayed herself to him magnificently and as it were boastfully, the man of God, turning to her seriously, said: If you use this garment for pride, even though you were already set in heaven, know for certain that you would be cast down thence together with these clothes. And if you also pride yourself on dressing preciously the children who shall come forth from your womb, you will certainly never see the face of God. And indeed the kindly God will give you many offspring, yet you will suffer much trouble from the same: which you will experience at length then, when, about to throw a firebrand drawn from the hearth into the crowd of your quarrelling children, you will be mindful of my prophecy. The event answered the prophecy, for, having become the mother of eleven children, when after many years, sitting by the hearth, she was cherishing her youngest child in her lap, and the rest, contending more wantonly, were stirring up troublesome commotions for their mother, many offspring to a woman, seizing a firebrand to make peace, she then at length called back to mind the presage of the man of God. About the same time a terrible plague of pestilence, arisen among the Unterwaldians, had begun to spread widely and to rage, so that a certain consular man e labored vehemently to take out of danger two sons whom he loved to distraction. To withdraw the mortals from death, therefore, he sends them away elsewhere, where he had understood the air to be purer, until the contagion had ceased raging at home. And when he afterwards told Nicholas what he had done, he, looking at him with a severe countenance, said: See that you have not perhaps sent away to hell your sons withdrawn from heaven. Horrible to tell! not long afterwards both were cut off by a sudden and premature death: and the first indeed perished in the market-place of Sarnen, stabbed with a dagger by a countryman of his; but the second, thrown from the back of a fierce horse, to others a swift death: his neck broken against the branch of a tree, or, as others report, crushed by the weight of an overturned cart loaded with hay, breathed out his soul.
[60] That Nicholas, though absent, was present at divine services in churches far distant, what his brother saw at Mass, what I now narrate attests. When his brother Peter, together with another honest man, was assisting at the divine Office at S. Nicholas's, far from his little cell, Peter suddenly saw a tall tree of the most beautiful kind flower forth from the pavement of the church, and spread itself out with its branches diffused through all the corners of the building: but soon the flowers, falling from the tree, flowed down upon the heads of the people, and on the heads of different persons partly withered at once, partly kept their former vigor most tenaciously. With the same vision God favored also the absent Nicholas (others report that he was present): for when those men, the sacred rites being finished, had turned aside to him from their road on the way back, Peter, asked by him what he had seen that morning in the church of S. Nicholas at the time of the sacrifice, recounted the whole spectacle in order. Then indeed Nicholas straightway disclosed that he had been a spectator of the same: The tree, he said, which you saw, Peter, was the symbol of the divine liberality toward men, diffusing itself on every side because of the offering of that unbloody sacrifice; those flowers designated the gifts and favors of God, which, falling on the heads of mortals, signified with what mind each one assisted at the divine service: the dry ones indeed, dry and cold men, moved by no repentance of their crimes: but the others, which kept their vigor, men fervent with piety and with expiatory sorrow for their faults, who accordingly, contrary to the rest, will one day be rewarded by God with a great glory also in heaven. he knew things set far away. Nicholas is also said quite often to have foretold that the Swiss would one day burden themselves too much with foreign or alien business, and that at that time they would suffer from a dearth of the fruits of the earth the more grievously, the more earnestly they mixed themselves in external troubles. To relate more such things is not of our purpose, both because they are private, and also because this chapter would grow beyond measure.
AnnotationsCHAPTER VII.
The miracles and death of Nicholas: his companion while living, Ulrich: his successor after death and grandson, Conrad.
CHAPTER XV.
[61] While our Nicholas was still living among the living, God, most loving toward him, willed to bring forth testimonies of his holiness by miracles, By his son Nicholas, some of which I have thought it worth while to relate here. The man of God had a son of his own name, whom we said above was the youngest; this one, destined by him for a higher kind of life, he willed to be imbued with the liberal disciplines. Whence, having sent him to the University of Basel, established and adorned with privileges by Pius II, Supreme Pontiff, in the year fifty-nine of the same age, he commended him to Frederick Guarlet of Eichstätt, Doctor of Both Laws, a man renowned for piety as well as riches, then staying at Basel. He, as he was very devoted to our anchorite, whom, led by piety, he had visited in the hermitage, and had conceived a great esteem of his innocence and holiness of life, kindly and liberally received into his own house the pledge of Nicholas committed to him, to be supported at his own expense: for he counted it in place of a great benefit to have as nursling of his table the son of one who, himself the nursling of God alone, fed on nothing but heavenly dishes. Wherefore that Nicholas, son of Nicholas, skilfully using the lavish liberality of so great a Maecenas, applied himself to the studies of more polished literature with such diligence that in a short time, the humaner letters being mastered, he showed himself fit and ready for higher things. Sent then by the same Maecenas of his to Lutetia of the Parisians, he there so severely
he also applied his mind to even more rigorous studies, letters sent to him from Paris, so that at last in the solemn theater of that most celebrated University he was honored with the supreme laurel of Philosophy. At that time, it happened that a certain young man, likewise a German by nationality, had devoted himself to letters at the same University, and finally, about to return to his fatherland, had received from his roommate two letters for Nicholas's excellent father, whom he had planned to visit on his way. It happened, however, by I know not what accident, that he carelessly lost one of them near the very borders of Burgundy, and was therefore so dismayed that he feared to present himself before the man of God and dreaded some offense on his part. Having recovered his spirits, however, he continued his journey, and when he was not far from Nicholas's chapel, he perceived the very same man coming forth to meet him. Wonderful to say! The man of God, with hand raised, was displaying from afar the letters that had been lost he receives them by a miracle: and already utterly despaired of by the messenger, and with a serene and cheerful countenance asked the young man, who stood fixed with astonishment, whether he also bore any other letters from his son from Paris. Refreshed by this prodigy, the anxious guest began to admire and venerate the man of God all the more, to whom those lost letters had without doubt arrived by heavenly messengers.
[62] A Consul from Interlaken in the territory of Bern had a foot so swollen with a grievous tumor that, tossed about with the most severe pains, he could take no rest. And now human remedies had failed, he heals a swollen foot, whence the religious man, turning to divine aids, vowed a wax foot to the Virgin Mother of God, who was then propitious to many in Nicholas's chapel, commended himself singularly to Nicholas's prayers, and thus shortly recovered his former health. Having recovered his strength, however (as is the ingratitude of mortals, mostly forgetful of benefits), forgetting that he was bound by his vow, he neglected to deliver the votive offering which he owed; whence the avenging hand of God compelled him to fulfill his vow by afflicting him with the old affliction. As soon, therefore, as he began to feel the retribution for his neglected piety, he hastened with as much speed as his illness allowed to the chapel of the man of God, and having hung up the votive offering, begged Nicholas's pious supplications before God for the health of his foot. No sooner said than done: the man of God, pouring forth prayers, immediately restored the foot to the sick man completely whole, in the sight of his Chaplain and of another honest man of Bern, who had betaken himself there with the Consul. Credit is given to the prodigy by the thing being at once entered in the public records b: and it was abundantly attested by these eyewitnesses. The chief village above the forest, he puts out a fire, called Sarnen, once brought to the extremest danger, experienced the present help of its pious countryman even when he was absent. It had begun, by I know not what chance, to blaze with a grievous fire, and the flames were already raging into many houses, so that no force of water, however lavishly thrown on the fire, could overwhelm them; and everywhere people despaired of putting it out or of saving the village. Then indeed, in so great a panic, it came into the minds of some citizens to make known so great a need to Brother Nicholas through a sure messenger, and to implore his help in the desperate situation. A messenger is sent; he announces what he had been bidden. Without delay the holy man, leaving his dwelling, hastens together with the messenger to a higher place, from which there was a view of the fire: and, raising his hand, draws the sign of the Cross through the air against the fire. Which done, the balls of flame at once began to diminish, to return into themselves, and not long afterwards to cease altogether. c Many other things which happened miraculously to the man of God before his death he is fragrant with a heavenly odor: I prudently pass over, lest I be too long. One I add by way of a finishing flourish, from which it will be abundantly attested by what nourishment Nicholas was quite often wont to be refreshed. Many had once flocked to him for counsel, with whom the man of God held converse outside before the doors of his church. But soon, the conversation being interrupted and leave asked, having promised that he would return very soon, as though about to finish some weighty matter, he withdrew inside into his chamber. The pious man returned not long afterwards, and brought with him from his hut to the nostrils of those standing by so great a fragrance of a most sweet odor that there was no one who did not judge that Nicholas, refreshed meanwhile with heavenly nectar and divine ambrosia, was breathing out that fragrance from his mouth.
CHAPTER XVI.
[63] The seventieth year of his age was now rolling round for Nicholas, which was to be his last, by the heavenly prophecy, as we mentioned above. In the month of March, therefore, of that year he fell into a grievous and fatal sickness, falling sick in the 70th year of his age which, having seized his whole body most badly, at length laid him wholly low. The force of the disease pervaded the very fibers, bones and marrow of all his limbs, so that, harassed by the most bitter pains, he rolled this way and that lamentably. Yet he was most patient of pain, although for eight whole days he struggled with those most grievous torments without any rest or remission. These eight days' torments therefore being endured, he began to pant with his whole heart for that heavenly and happy country, and urgently to ask for the divine banquet with which Christian men are wont to fortify themselves for that journey as with a viaticum. he dies piously: When it was brought, and he had enjoyed it most sweetly, even more than he was wont, and with great lowliness of mind and reverence; soon, having composed his body on his accustomed board with his feet stretched out, amid outpoured praises of God and acts of thanksgiving, resting most peacefully in the Lord, he gave back his soul to his Creator. This was done in the year eighty-seven of that age, on the twelfth of the Kalends of April, which day is every year sacred and festive to S. Benedict, the same day on which, as we recorded above, he was brought forth into this light seventy years before. It is said that at the last, before he breathed out his soul, he bade a last farewell to those standing round in these few words, but full of piety and religion: Although, he said, my Brothers, the pains which drive the soul out of the body are grievous, yet it is more grievous and more terrible, believe me, to fall into the hands of the living God. Study, therefore, so to order your life and manners that you may be able to look upon your Judge with a cheerful and glad countenance, not a fearful and trembling one. It pleases me to subjoin about this death the words of Henry Gundelfingen: by Gundelfingen, Our Nicholas indeed has died, he says, since he was by no means immortal in body. Yet let us not count his death for death: for we have sent him on before, dead, thinking that he goes before us and is our intercessor with God, not that he has perished. And although it has been announced to us that he has met death, yet we ought to be affected with the highest joy and gladness; nor do we dare to call him dead, but we say that he has made an end of living on earth. Let us all and each wish to have such an end of life, and in that manner to depart from the hardships of this world and to behold Christ. So he.
[64] Peter Canisius, moreover, speaks thus of his death: There is reason why we Catholics should rejoice, and he is praised by Canisius: and congratulate ourselves on so great a Swiss, strengthen our religion by his faith, console ourselves even today by his intercession, and celebrate his glorious memory in blessing, and especially on the feast day of S. Benedict, the twenty-first of March, praise and honor God in him: for on this very day the pious man, through whom God works many miracles, departed piously and religiously from this valley of tears, and left here on earth such signs of his holiness that beyond doubt he is himself already a suppliant to God for us in the Church triumphant, and in no way needs our prayers in this world. So Canisius. The testimonies of others about this man we shall relate shortly in more detail. When the death of the man of God was made known, it cannot be said how great a grief seized the minds of the people. There was no talk except of him: to be buried at Sachseln, all cried out that the common parent of the country had been snatched from them: they wept their bereavement: they proclaimed his life, manners, miracles, prophecies, counsels. The following day, appointed for his funeral, roused all Unterwalden round about, so that in that whole region no one of the Priests performed the Sacred rites at home that day. The customary funeral rites were celebrated with solemn pomp in the church of S. Theodulus d at Sachseln, where the man of God had asked before his death to be entombed: he was buried before the altar of the Holy Virgin, and covered with a stone bearing the likeness of the man of God skilfully carved. On the same day also on which the last rites were paid him, he heals many sick. a great flocking of the sick to his obsequies wonderfully illustrated his holiness: for many, freed from various diseases, were suddenly restored to complete health: two leading men indeed from the village of Lungern, of whom one also held the highest magistracy there, long and greatly vexed by feverish heat, returned home wholly sound from those same obsequies. Of his other prodigies after death divinely shown at his tomb we shall speak in the following part. Now let us subjoin something about the companion of the man of God, Ulrich.
CHAPTER XVII.
[65] The life and deeds of this man Matthew Rader, a Writer of our Society, has comprised in a compendious enumeration in his holy Bavaria, which he published in print; whose words accordingly it has pleased us to insert in this narration first, and then to subjoin what he himself passed over. Thus, then, he says: Blessed Ulrich, a noble Bavarian anchorite, companion of Nicholas of Unterwalden. Hunger for gold and thirst for wealth drive the human race to go into the bowels of the earth, and to search out the veins of silver, Ulrich, drawn by the fame of Nicholas, and to explore the shining globes of metal at whatever peril. We too go into the rocks and gaps of the mountains, not to call forth treasures thence, but to bring to light despisers of gold. Well known in the Christian world is that man who never dined nor supped, the miracle and oracle of the Swiss nation, Nicholas of Unterwalden, who for almost twenty whole years in the retreat of the mountain, after the manner of the heavenly ones, did not hunger, nor tasted any food or drink born of the earth. Satisfied with the ambrosia of the Bread which came down from heaven, and flooded with the nectar of heavenly contemplations. Breathed upon by the fame of this so great man, and surrounded by the brightness of a happy star, Ulrich, illustrious in the land of Bavaria for the images of his ancestors and born of a noble family of the Bavarians (there are those who think he was of Munich), came to see and converse with Nicholas, and found a holiness answering to the celebrity of his fame, or surpassing it: and, captivated and inflamed (as the voices of the Saints glow and kindle) by the speech and companionship of Nicholas, he urged him most earnestly with the humblest prayers not to wish him separated from the fellowship of his life: that he had resolved, at that very moment of time, to send back a notice of dismissal to human affairs, and to persevere in his companionship and under his mastery, and never to see home again. At length Nicholas yielded, though prevailed upon with much difficulty, because he himself preferred to seek for himself a master of a holier life rather than to hand on precepts of living to others.
[66] Now Ulrich seemed to himself most blessed, in that he had been received into the discipline of Nicholas, and being admitted by him as a disciple, and, emulating his manners and life, he began to begin higher than to finish; for the condescension of the Godhead is not one for all, nor the way by which he leads mortals to holiness. One he wills to advance by modesty and silence, another by open and huge prodigies and portents: one he illuminates by continence, another by wisdom, others by other heavenly gifts; as it has seemed good to his providence, which knows most thoroughly
what would be expedient for anyone's salvation. Ulrich therefore, first, following the example of his teacher, removed all nourishment from his stomach: he brought to the table neither any delicacy nor even bread, after a fast of 13 days and spent thirteen whole days entirely fasting and without effort or hunger, initiated into the holiest thoughts, in the hut which Nicholas himself had first inhabited, and then the sacristan. Then Nicholas, taught by heavenly counsel, sent him half a loaf to be dipped in the stream of the Melchaa and eaten. Ulrich, although his stomach was already averse (so quickly had it accustomed itself to enduring hunger), yet judging that fasting ought to take second place to obedience, ate it at Nicholas's command, he eats only out of obedience: and then on the following day took the other half. Then at last he began to feel such distress from the fast that it seemed he could appease his stomach with no food. Nicholas had already anticipated this in his mind and gave instructions to his household to prepare a copious supper for Ulrich, by which he might satisfy his thirteen-day hunger. Ulrich nevertheless wondered, when his hunger was now removed, why Nicholas had not allowed him to continue the practice he had begun of abstaining from food, since during all those days he had suffered no discomfort from fasting. "This sufficed for you," said Nicholas, "and thus God's command prescribed it; cease to inquire further." To what end (says the author of the life) consider, my reader: namely, that by the miraculous thirteen-day fast, the angelic sobriety of nineteen and a half years of Nicholas might be confirmed as with a seal.
[67] After this, Ulrich, having returned the cabin to John the Custodian of the church, he builds an oratory: withdrew to the rock of a hollow and eroded cliff across the Melchaa, and beside the cave erected a small sacred edifice with three altars, inscribed to Michael, the Leader of the heavenly Legions; to the Apostle Bartholomew; and to Anne, the excellent parent of the Mother of God of Christ our Liberator. There he established his arena of religious exercise; there he sustained his body with the most frugal and meager fare, for the sake of preserving life; he constantly harassed it with sleeping on the ground, vigils, and watches, and tormented it with praying and meditating. He spent seven years until his final day in the most holy manner, surviving Nicholas by four years. and three months: he departed on the very day on which g the Church was keeping the triumph of the Body of Christ, and was buried in the parish of Kerns. surviving his master by 4 years That he died at a great age can be understood from the habit of his body: for he was to be seen with venerable white hair, and otherwise of a stature midway between tall and short, with a broad, thick and long beard; with a huge body, but disfigured by leanness and pallor; in his dress and garment h he emulated Nicholas; his bare feet he protected with no sack; he took his sleep on the ground with a stone put under his head. He is said to have wrought admirable things after his death also, but the narrator of his deeds expresses none of them singly. he is buried religiously. A pillar of stone set upon his body in the manner of an altar bears an Epitaph of this kind: HERE LIES BURIED BROTHER ULRICH, WHO DIED HAPPILY IN THE YEAR 1491. So Rader of the companion of Nicholas. The same Author signs his image with this epigram:
He withdraws to lonely glades and inhospitable wastes, And flees the sea and shipwreck of the world. Amid monstrous crags and the rage of wild beasts He sits safer than amid the wealth of men. For the foul contagions of the crowd defile the mind, Or the proud court draws one into its own ways. He who alone measures heaven with lofty breast, He treads the earth and the stars with his feet.
[68] It has pleased us to add to these what we have culled from Henry Gundelfingen, who, treating of this Ulrich, speaks thus: The abstinence of Nicholas also brought it about Gundelfingen's words about him: that it drew to him a certain nobleman, called Ulrich, born in the Norican country. He, having heard of the most upright and most religious religion of the hermit Nicholas, seized with the desire of seeing him, moved by this saying of the gospel, Having nothing and possessing all things, left all things for Christ to his kinsfolk, and went away to the hermitage of Nicholas: and, received by him most kindly, Ulrich said to Nicholas, who inquired the cause of his coming, that the long troubles which he had endured in this slippery world, and the rigor of his religion, had been the cause of his coming: and that, seized on this account by the desire of visiting him, he had come to this deep and pathless valley, and had not yet met any of the hermits more religious in the eremitic religion and abstinence, and that, wandering through forests, groves and pathless ridges, he had sought him out as the refuge of his life and the salvation of his soul: he declares too, with more penetration, that all things in the world are base, dire, unspeakable, execrable, savage, barbarous, empty, and that the whole race of mortals is shameless and pestilent. And he testifies that Nicholas, while speaking, showed him such manifest signs of his virtue and at length of his love, and that at the very beginning of the conversation he had wondered in greater measure that he had found him alone out of the whole crowd of hermits so mild, pious, how familiar he was with Nicholas: upright, and endowed with every eremitic religion. So he. He then adds a little after: Ulrich offered himself to every austerity of the hermitage, except this, that he should abstain from all bodily food, since he judged that his nature, already declining toward evening and worn out by old age, was to be refreshed only with bread and water, according to the ancient religion and observance of the hermits. So Gundelfingen. In spare hours Nicholas was wont to meet this his Achates, lying hidden under his rock, and to converse with him on the highest things. To him alone he revealed the hour of his death, as he had long since been taught of it; nay, each opened to the other with mutual and sincere confidence whatever he had shut up in his breast. Yet what Ulrich had received from Nicholas he covered with silence until his death, and thereafter first spread it abroad to many. In that year which was Nicholas's last, Ulrich hastened to Rome, to greet the thresholds of the Princes of the Apostles and the other sacred places of the City. his Roman pilgrimage. He brought back thence venerable relics of many Saints, and various graces granted by the Apostolic See to his hermitage, which even today are still read there, comprised in a public diploma. This, given at Rome on the second of February in the year one thousand four hundred and eighty-seven, remains fortified even today with sixteen larger seals i hanging from it. Returning home, Ulrich found his pious parent Nicholas already set in the final struggle and fighting bravely: whose spirit he himself received, not without great grief, and closed with sorrowful hand, with flowing tears, the eyes of his most clear-sighted Master. At length, the last rites being paid, under the hollow rock, like a solitary turtle-dove, he lamented with groans his bereavement. And let it suffice for our purpose to have added briefly these things about Ulrich, the companion of Nicholas, to what precedes.
[69] The grandson of Nicholas and his pious successor in the hermitage was Conrad Scheuber, born of Dorothy, Nicholas's daughter, k at Wolfenschiessen in Unterwalden, and piously brought up by her. He was a young man of excellent body, outstanding beauty, Conrad, grandson of Nicholas, and brave spirit; whence, by order of the magistrate, he served in war among his people, and won a glorious name from the eleven expeditions in which he took part. In those conflicts which they call the Kappel wars, from the former l monastery of Kappel, this Conrad too, about the year 1531, proved himself a hero. There the newly arisen heresy contended with the ancestral faith; many with few; but the few conquered, m the juster cause conquered: there lay among the corpses even Ulrich Zwingli himself, the head and prince both of the impious sect and of its warfare at that time, an unhappy apostate. Andreas an der Halten, a citizen of Sachseln, an Unterwaldian, laid him low, pierced by a ball, which has been ascertained with the most certain faith: and when, lying on the ground, asked whether he wished to wash his soul by confession and return into grace with God, he refused, another citizen of the same Unterwalden (so the Basel chronicle relates) fixed him, prostrate, to the earth with a two-headed axe, and sent his unhappy soul to hell. From this battle Conrad returns victorious with his men to his native Alps, and, renowned for many deeds, is deservedly honored first with the senatorial, soon also with the consular dignity. Having discharged these functions for some time to the great good of his country and his own glory, he imitates his grandfather, he began gradually to conceive far other things in his mind, to turn his thoughts in a different direction, and to remember that he was the grandson of Nicholas. He meditated daily on the emptiness of the world and its instability, and the falls headlong from the lofty summit, until at length he decided to set his foot in the very footsteps of his grandfather, and to send a notice of dismissal to the world and its pomps. Having left his wife and children, therefore, after the ancestral example, he goes to the same hermitage, to serve God alone thereafter, shuts himself in the same hut, and there exercises his body with incredible austerity. He wholly abstained from eating meat, eggs and fish, and nonetheless had most days as fast days. Through the eighteen whole years in which he lived as a hermit he relaxed nothing of this rigor; meanwhile he fed his mind assiduously with meditations on divine things.
[70] The dire torments of Christ and his cross he so embraced in his mind that he eagerly longed to bear some cross after Christ in his body also: and having stayed 3 years in his cell and this wish he at length obtained. For when once, according to his custom, he was intent in the cell of his grandfather Nicholas on pouring forth prayers to God, the hellish enemy, bursting in with great force, afflicted one of his thighs with so great and so incurable a wound that it could never be cured by any poultice, and he remained perpetually lame indeed in body, but upright in mind to his very last breath. For three years the religion and holiness of the place held the pious grandson in his grandfather's hut; and would have held him until death, had there not been daily such concourses of mortals visiting now not so much the memory of Nicholas as his follower Conrad, by whom he was quite often called away, not without grievous annoyance, from his holy quiet. he withdraws elsewhere, He sought, therefore, a more hidden retreat in his own grove, on a mountain at the first milestone from his native place; there he erected for himself a humble cottage, where he could indeed serve God, but could not lie hidden from men; every age and sex ran out to him; all vied in asking to be instructed by him, to be admonished, to be given consolation: whom at length he no longer dared to resist, but, patiently giving a hearing to each, dismissed them from him helped according to each one's need. Of things absent and future he spoke as though he beheld them present. But Conrad was the asylum not of the living only; the very shades of the departed were wont in the night hours to knock at the doors of his little cell and, with lamentable wailing, to beg for expiatory help, and to say: Bring help, Brother Conrad, for we are tortured beyond measure in the fires of purgatory. Conrad approached the divine mysteries on the more sacred and more solemn days in his parish of Wolfenschiessen, and so at length, very aged, his body emaciated by fasts, he closed a happy life with a still more blessed end. and dies piously. More things are related of this man of God, and those admirable, which, however, I forbear to insert here, since these things said of the pious grandson of a most pious grandfather seem to suffice for the commendation of both. Now I return to the grandfather himself, and set forth his posthumous honor in as few words as I can.
Annotations"After this, when peace was made, very many churches fell away to Papism; and in the year 1533, the people of Solothurn, Fribourg, and the Valais joined with the Five Cantons in a private alliance, indeed for the sake of defending the Catholic religion."
CHAPTER VIII.
The Fame of Sanctity, Preserved from the Time of Nicholas's Death to the Present Day and Attested by Public Worship.
PART III
CHAPTER I.
[71] On the day after the one on which Nicholas was buried in the ground, the glorious man himself appeared both to his wife and also to other honored and trustworthy citizens. He stood upon that cliff The glory of his appearance after death, which had given him his family name; a most brilliant splendor spread itself from him far and wide and dazzled the eyes of those who beheld him. He carried in his hand a white banner displaying the image of a bear's paw, and waving it through the breezes, he sang of victory and triumph. That great spectacle brought consolation to his grieving wife, great commendation to the man of God himself among his countrymen, and assurance of eternal happiness. As soon as this thing, made public and proved by sure witnesses, became known, new motions of minds toward the man of God began to arise in all. This was everywhere the talk among all about him: that Nicholas had conquered, that he had carried off the triumph once divinely promised, that they wished to follow him as Leader and these standards, and to live, fight and conquer under them, certain of the future triumph. And hence also the man of God began everywhere and openly to be venerated with heavenly honors, whence also his images were publicly set up and hung among the other icons of the Saints. Five years after his death, that is, in one thousand four hundred and ninety-two, in the church of Sachseln, and in the churches at Kerns where we said Nicholas was buried, when the principal altar was newly being set up, it seemed good that an image b of the man of God should be made in a more elegant and noble painting on one of its wings. In the same year also, in the church of St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, set up long since not far from there in the parish of Kerns, images of both Brothers, namely Nicholas and Ulrich, were painted on the high altar and set forth for the veneration of the pious.
[72] a more spacious church is erected, Since this veneration grew daily, and great flockings took place daily from every side to the hermitages of both, so that not rarely whole villages and towns and several parishes, pouring forth, went there to make supplication in long and seemly order, the narrowness c of the places necessarily shut out many from hearing the divine offices. Wherefore, in the centenary year next following, a pleasant and spacious area having been marked out between the two hermit cells in the same valley, d a new and more august church e began to be raised, which was completed in the third year after, chiefly by the help and liberality of the people of Bern, Lucerne and the Valais. There is a not obscure report that Nicholas himself, while he was still living, saw the Virgin Mother of God in visible form in that same place, and received from her a presage and design of the church to be built there one day. On the principal altar of that church is seen a two-cubit image of the man of God f made of wood, the image is placed on the altar, of rare and laborious statuary work, which is judged to express his form to the life, and therefore above others draws the minds and eyes of the beholders to admiration and veneration of him. Not long afterwards, in the church of Sachseln, at the side of the altar, there was erected a tabernacle, as they call it, likewise at Sachseln among the Patrons, or repository of the most holy Eucharist, twenty feet high, whose costs the piety of the mortals flocking there gave, while Basel gave the stones and the craftsman's hand. This work is splendidly adorned with many statues, among which Nicholas also has his place. For the same divine banquet there was also constructed at that same time a silver monstrance for the same church, by a hand of Basel, of work quite rare, whether you regard the art or the weight. Around that tower stand, as it were as sentinels, many Saints portrayed in gilded statues, among whom Nicholas too holds his station with his staff and beads of prayer.
[73] Whence it can easily be gathered what the sense of men was and in the oratory of the King of France: about this man immediately after his death: for from that time he who for so many years had lain hidden in the wilderness began to be seen through the whole world, since artists in various ways everywhere displayed his likeness expressed to be looked at. So that it even penetrated the inmost closet of the Most Christian King of France (which I have ascertained by a sure report), and is seen fixed there and honored among the tutelary Saints of his most ample kingdom. The Belgians too spread abroad the likeness of this holy man expressed in copper, likenesses are engraved in Belgium. and subscribed it with this elegant epigram:
This is Nicholas, who neither dined nor supped, Who alone lived for five Olympiads. Let the Swiss crags and the witnessing rocks tell How many tears they drank, how many prayers they heard.
On some other images of him I have read this inscription written:
This is Nicholas, who, fed on the Body of Christ, Was fasting from all else for twice two lustres.
And let these things be said of his cult in his image.
CHAPTER II.
[74] When Nicholas had been taken from among men, and all the last rites duly performed, his heirs hastened to enter upon the inheritance left them by so great a parent and to divide it among themselves. The whole patrimony was a tunic reaching to the ankles, beads of prayer, The furniture of the dead man is distributed, the staff with which he had been wont to guide his steps, a board resting on low stools, and, placed upon it in place of a mattress, the stone or log on which he had been wont to sleep. This was all his equipment and his whole furniture: for the other things which he had once possessed he had long since left to his heirs. This treasure, then, valued as very great indeed, the heirs came together to divide among themselves. And now that staff indeed had migrated abroad, for the Prelate of the most celebrated monastery of Muri g, when he too wished to honor by his presence the obsequies of the man of God, the Abbot of Muri the staff, obtained that staff by many prayers, and, having carried it into his monastery as a great treasure, adorned it neatly with silver. It is now preserved at Fribourg of the Swiss in the treasury of Lord Peter h Techterman, a Senator of that same Commonwealth, a most learned man, and is held in the greatest veneration and value. The rest, therefore, were distributed among the heirs in this way. The garment of the man of God fell to his son Walter of Flüe, formerly i Consul of Unterwalden, and after his death to Nicholas of Flüe, whom his father Walter left successor and heir both of his consulship and of the paternal goods. This Nicholas, grandson of Nicholas, is said to have sat at the helm of the Commonwealth in his country for many years, with the highest praise of prudence, his son Walter obtains the garment: justice and piety, until extreme old age, and when he had departed this life a nonagenarian, k to have made over those sacred remains to his son of the same name and dignity l, great-grandson of the man of God. He at length, lest that sacred garment should be farther away from the church of Sachseln, entrusted it to his son, who lived not far from there, that thus the piety and devotion of pilgrims might more conveniently be satisfied, who vied in desiring to see this sacred gown, to kiss it and to touch it religiously. And certainly even today it is still held in great veneration: as many good men as look upon it are kindled in their breast with a singular sense of religion or a sacred warmth, while the wicked are frightened by a wholesome horror and blushing, so that they betake themselves to amendment. And so much of that garment in which the holy man, clothed, passed from this life to a better.
[75] For there survives also another one, in which he is believed to have begun the institute of his holier life and to have spent many years. another garment at Lucerne, It is preserved, and held in great value, these many years at Lucerne in the church of the holy Savior of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus: for there, from the upper gallery, a statue of Nicholas, of the height that he was, neatly enclosed in a glass case, looks out into the floor of the whole church below, which, wrapped about with this garment, both brings an ornament to the church and increases the veneration of the man of God. This treasure was given to the college of Lucerne by Lord Uttenberger, a man of a very honorable family and of Senatorial rank, to whom it had descended from his ancestors by hereditary right. But in what manner that garment came to that family an old and not empty tradition thus relates. The city of Lucerne was once, by I know not what fate or chance, which he used to come to the procession liable to frequent fires, so that sometimes they brought devastation on whole streets, nay, the voracious flames often threatened the whole city with ashes. The Senate and people, already then formed and fashioned to all piety and religion, when human remedies for averting such great calamities failed, took refuge in divine ones: and they took a vow to institute every year a solemn procession round all the circuit of the city on the day before the Salutation of the Virgin Mother of God, on which day they had experienced the special help of God in those calamities of fire. When that procession had now been celebrated for many years with a very great concourse and devotion of natives and strangers, in order that a greater fruit of souls might arise therefrom for citizens and strangers, it was decreed in common to ask of the Supreme Pontiff some expiatory grace, which might spur on even those running of their own accord to adorn that sacred procession more eagerly. There sat at that time at the supreme helm of the Christian Commonwealth Julius, afterwards increased with indulgences, the second Supreme Pontiff of that name, who in the year one thousand five hundred and three the keys
of Peter, which he had received left to him for governance by his predecessor Alexander VI. He, having learned of the ardor of piety with which the Republic of Lucerne pursued that supplication for the appeasing of God, moved by pious generosity, granted the suppliants an annual jubilee, which his successive papal successors to the present day not only confirmed every ten or fifteen years, but also most generously augmented and extended to more days each year. This was done by Clement VII, Paul III and IV, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, likewise Paul V, and finally Gregory XV, who sealed those Indulgences by his latest bull for two five-year periods, in the year one thousand six hundred and twenty-two, the first of his Pontificate. To these graces with which the Popes, as I said, adorned that divine worship, the Senate of Lucerne itself also added its generous hand; for it assigned to the Priests, whether inhabitants or neighbors, as many as flocked to it, two cups of wine of the Lucerne measure each, and six pounds of fish.
[76] That procession usually proceeded from the principal church of S. Leger, accompanied by the most holy Eucharist, he left to his host: the sacred relics of the Saints, a great multitude of Clergy, and the people, and crossed the nearby lake or the river Reuss by boat, and circled the rest of the city walls in such a manner that, after a preacher had delivered an oration in the open air on the suburban hill—in Latin to the clergy, and in the vernacular to the common people—it finally returned to where it had started. That our Nicholas attended this supplication at Lucerne every year is established by the most certain evidence, other relics held in honor. as Eichhorn testifies; but this must have occurred before it was adorned with the Pontifical indulgences which I mentioned above, as will easily be understood by anyone who diligently examines the chronology. The holy man lodged at Lucerne with the Uttenberg family, whose ancestors are said to have drawn their origin from the Unterwalden region. And since he was clad in a toga now worn and torn, a new one was offered—but one no less made from rough gray cloth—and the pious hosts asked and obtained that the old one be left to them or given as a gift; they then kept this honorably and religiously. The Uttenberger whom I named above afterwards piously consecrated it, so preserved, to the church of the Society of Jesus recently raised at Lucerne. And so much of the garments of Nicholas. Let us return to the rest of his furniture. His rather large beads, which we call prayer-beads, and which the man of God was wont assiduously to turn in his hands and run through in praying, the other heirs, friends and intimates distributed among themselves, and laid them up like a great treasure. Finally his little wooden bed, cut into the smallest pieces, carried off little by little by natives or strangers, was also held in place of a great treasure. So greatly, indeed, were the relics of the holy man esteemed even from his very death. But today it is incredible to say in how great honor are held the little bones, the bits of dust from his body, likewise the fragments from his tomb, and even the finest threads from his garment; they are laid away in gold, they are valued as pearls, they are hung from the neck among other sacred amulets, they are enclosed in reliquaries, they are set on sacred altars for veneration and for the memory of so great a man. Certainly the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Ladislao d'Aquino, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, and formerly Apostolic Nuncio to the Catholic cantons, having gone to the tomb of Nicholas, would not receive a fragment of the same garment from the Parish Priest of Sachseln except kneeling on the ground in veneration. John Krummenacker, a citizen and Standard-bearer of all Unterwalden, counts among his treasures a gold coin which is said to have once belonged to Nicholas: which he not only holds in the highest veneration, but also quite often sends as a loan to the sick who ask for it, for obtaining health, not without fruit, as many testify. From which, finally, it is clear that by the common and pious sense and consent of all Catholics this man has long since been held among the Saints.
CHAPTER III.
[77] But indeed the all-powerful and kindly Godhead did not will to allow that his servant should be honored after death by men only, In the year 1510 the body is dug up but he himself willed also to show to the whole world by manifest signs with what favors he attends him in heaven. His sacred body still lay in that humble place where I said he was buried, dug into the earth and covered with a great stone: and meanwhile God, by huge prodigies which took place there daily, showed that so great a pledge was worthy of a more honorable tomb, and that he willed this one thing, that the bones and ashes, sustained so long without earthly nourishment, should be raised from the earth and sustained in a loftier mausoleum. This, then, the Unterwaldians at length decided to do in the year after Christ's birth one thousand five hundred and eighteen, the thirty-first after the death of the holy man. They invited for accomplishing this work the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Benedict de Montferrand, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Bishop of the Church of Lausanne n, an excellent man and most devoted to Nicholas, and, the Clergy being gathered from all Unterwalden, they named for this solemnity that day which is festive every year to S. Benedict, and which was to Nicholas himself the last on earth, but in heaven the beginning of eternity. On that day, then, in the presence of those I have mentioned and of very many other spectators, the stone being removed and the tomb opened, the body is found, nay no longer a body, but bones covered with ash are raised from the ground, and by the hands of the sacred Bishop are placed again in a new sarcophagus, he is translated into a new mausoleum, which is opened again in the year 1600. which they had made of oak for this purpose, and the sacred remains received into it are shut in with iron locks and bars. Then in the same place in which they had first lain buried they erect a lofty mausoleum of solid Lucerne stone, carved on every side and skilfully adorned with figures: in this they place the stone which had first covered the monument; on this they set the sarcophagus, with a casket joined to it which contained the letters of the said Bishop of Lausanne for the record of the matter: the whole monument they close again with a huge stone, which bore an august likeness of the servant of God carved in excellent work; and they surround and fortify the whole body with latticed iron, and adorn it with seven lamps to burn perpetually. An epitaphic inscription was added in these words: Brother Nicholas of Flüe, having left his wife and children, withdrew into the wilderness; he served God without bodily food for nineteen years and six months: he died on the feast day of S. Benedict, in the year of the Lord 1487. This mausoleum was opened again in the centenary year one thousand six hundred, the eightieth after its erection, when the church of Sachseln had necessarily to be enlarged, and all things were found in the order we have described, except that the Papal letters, consumed by age and by the dampness of the walls, could no longer be read. Those who were then present confessed that they had been breathed upon by a most sweet odor bursting from the tomb: among whom James, Prelate of the celebrated monastery in Unterwalden which has its name from the mountain of the Angels o, always asserted this most constantly: who, at the time these things were done, was rendering vicarial service to the parish of Sachseln. There are those who take it for a singular omen [p] that about the time when in Saxony heresies against the ancestral religion, monstrous and unheard of in all past ages, arose and sprouted, the sacred body of Nicholas was translated at Sachseln in Unterwalden and honored with eminent honor: both because that truthful prophet had foretold that it would be so, and also because, when the scourgers of the Saints were being born and bursting forth from hell itself, God willed to honor and illustrate his own recent Saints too, that he might openly teach that this was that new or alien faith which Nicholas had long ago quite often forewarned would arise, and was to be fled worse than a dog and a snake. Let these things suffice to be said of the translation of the man of God into a new mausoleum.
[78] This also is to be recounted among the last things, that from almost his very death the Catholic Priests, Mass is said there until the year 1603 who flocked frequently to Sachseln, offered to the divine Godhead in honor of the man of God the unbloody victim by a proper sacrifice, as is wont to be done by orthodox Priests for special and approved friends of God, and that for sixty-two whole years: until, namely, in the year 1603 the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord John George von Hallwil, Bishop of Constance, when he was visiting his diocese, having learned of the matter, suspended by a public prohibition that too premature devotion, saying that he acknowledged indeed that Nicholas had been a man of eminent holiness, and by no means unworthy of that honor: but that without the supreme authority in sacred things he could not permit that this honor be decreed to a man, even a holy one, not yet enrolled among the Saints with solemn rite. Wherefore from that time nonetheless until these our times and his feast is celebrated until now the day on which Nicholas was born to heaven began to be kept festive every year through all Unterwalden, and on the same day a most celebrated memory of the holy man to be held in the church of Sachseln. On that day there is wont to be a concourse of all ranks more celebrated and more frequent than in the whole year: so that the church, though spacious, scarcely holds half the multitude. The highest and the lowest prostrate themselves at the tomb of the man of God, lowly venerate his garment, go round and creep into his hermitage in great numbers, kiss the pavement, water it with tears, and in short omit no kind of religion and piety by which they think they can testify their mind toward so great a man. The divine worship on that day in that church is wont to be ordered in this way. The altars are adorned as festively as can be, and besides the private sacrifices, three times in the forenoon hours sacrifice is offered to God with solemn rite: with a threefold sacrifice. the first for the freeing from the pain of purgatory of those of the family of Nicholas who have departed this life; for it is held for certain that Nicholas himself by no means needs such help: the second in honor of S. Benedict, and finally the third in honor of the Most Holy Trinity [q]: where also, in the commemoration of all the Saints, the memory of Nicholas is included. Those who preach on that day to the crowd poured round are for the most part wont to occupy themselves in adorning the man of God and setting him forth to mortals as an example of life and virtues. Straightway in the second year which followed his death, An Office once composed. that is, in one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight, by the authorship of Henry von Gundelfingen, Canon of Beromünster, a whole Office, as they call it, was composed on this man of God, such as are daily sung or recited by the Catholic Clergy for the more excellent inhabitants of heaven: which, although the whole of it makes greatly for the commendation of the man of God, yet it has seemed too long to transfer the whole of it here. Meanwhile I hope it will not be at all troublesome to the Reader if from that office I offer him its simple antiquity and the sincere affection of the author toward this hermit, to be tasted even with the tips of his lips; which I shall do by copying one or another hymn at the end of the whole work, and likewise one or another formula of intercession by which he honored and invoked God in this man of God.
[79] Nicholas was, moreover, even after his death, in the highest value and honor not only with commoners Honor from the Bishop of Sion. but also with princely men. Certainly the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Matthew Schiner, Bishop of Sion and Prefect of the Valais, etc., who in the year one thousand five hundred and nine was co-opted at Rome among the purpled Fathers, whose eminent
praises—which Paulus Giovio, the distinguished historian, pursues more fully in volume 1, book 11—that pious Prince, I say, was drawn with a thoroughly pious and religious affection toward this man of God. This is clearly attested both by his generosity, with which he above all promoted at his own expense the building of a new church near Nicholas's hermitage, begun in the year one thousand five hundred and one, as I said; and also by the preface of Henry Lupulus, Canon of Bern, by which he dedicated his booklet on the life of Nicholas, written in the already-named year, as I shall relate more fully below, to this Prince who was most devoted to Nicholas. In it, among other things, he addresses him thus: "Since it is by no means hidden from me with what great affection you are moved, not only toward this Nicholas and his entire posterity, but also toward all the citizens of Unterwalden, I humbly offer and dedicate this booklet, most distinguished Prince, to your excellent dignity—not because I would be so mad as to think that the uncultivated weave of words would please your most polished judgment in any respect, but so that, sometimes setting aside weightier business, you might meanwhile restore your wearied powers by reading the most approved character of so holy a man; and that the history itself, insufficiently supported by the strength of its own author, undergoing the correction of so great a judge, might be less attacked by the calumnies of detractors." Thus Lupulus to that Prince.
Among the other leading persons who religiously visited Nicholas's tomb, by S. Charles Borromeo, there was Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church—that man most celebrated throughout the entire world for his fame of sanctity and miracles—who in the year one thousand five hundred and seventy came to Sachseln and, prostrating himself before the mausoleum of the man of God with great humility of soul and body, poured forth his prayers to God as a suppliant. And from that time, as long as he lived, showing himself a singular Patron and Father of the Swiss, he devoted all the efforts of his soul earnestly to their welfare, as his acts, signed in public records, amply declare. Nor is there any doubt that even after he ceased to be here, he has never ceased to be a Patron of Switzerland together with Nicholas, whom, as I have said, he singularly venerated. They relate that this same holy man, when he beheld the icon of Nicholas, publicly professed that he judged that this man had certainly been of eminent holiness; whom he had also already decided to visit again in Unterwalden, by Sigismund of Austria, had not a premature death cut short the journey for him. The Most Serene Archduke of Austria Sigismund, with whom, as we recorded above, Nicholas was in great place and honor, when he received news of his death, offered funeral rites to his pious shade with the Sacrifices of a hundred Priests: not because, as he himself confessed, he believed that he needed such help in punishments, but in order to testify, even after his death, his love toward him and the esteem which he had conceived of him. It is no matter to weave on a long catalog of the other Princes and illustrious men and lavished by others. who from all parts of Europe by long journeys have visited the tomb of Nicholas, fallen before it as suppliants, and, offering great gifts to the church, have hitherto willed to testify their piety toward him; since even to this day nothing is more common there, and nothing more frequent. Let us then now step on to other testimonies of his holiness.
Annotationsp. Above all Eichhorn, page 57 of the first and page 55 of the second edition.
q. So now: but when Eichhorn was writing, the third and principal Mass was said in honor of the most glorious Virgin Mary, the most singular Patroness of Nicholas, with the Commemoration of all the Saints.
CHAPTER IX.
What has hitherto been done concerning the canonization of Nicholas.
CHAPTER IV.
[80] Scarcely had Nicholas, having laid down his mortal burden, flown up to those above in heaven, when much talk began already to be spread everywhere about his solemn and public cult and veneration among the Saints: Canonization was treated of at the Council of Trent, which is made most manifest above all from this, that at that very time the Hours prayers about him, which I mentioned above, were composed and published by an author of great name and religion, which it is certain are rendered only to those Saints whom the supreme authority has decreed are to be venerated. But, as I at least think, the iniquity of the times prevented a matter of so great moment from being pressed as was fitting. And although both at Rome and also at Trent, at the time of that great Council, much mention of this business often occurred, yet the most grievous calamities of the Church, which arose new every day, so called away elsewhere the minds of those concerned that what had been discussed about this matter within private walls could not be pressed in public and referred to the Apostolic See: and so this matter was put off until the next century from the death of the man of God. For at length about the year one thousand five hundred and ninety, at the instigation of the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Ottavio Paravicini, then in the year 1590, Bishop of Alessandria, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church a, and at that time Pontifical Legate to the Swiss, an assembly of the Catholic cantons was proclaimed in Unterwalden for that reason: where it was concluded by common counsel that the holy life of Nicholas should be skilfully inquired into, everything entered in public records and established by witnesses above all exception, and so consigned to the feet of the Supreme Pontiff. Then, a solemn procession having been ordered, the leading men of the Swiss gathered for the assembly themselves, followed by a huge multitude of all ranks, went in procession from the town of Sarnen to the church of Sachseln, and there, having implored the divine help for so great a work and most solemnly performed the divine service, procurators chosen in the Assembly, returned in the same order to where they had set out: and finally, fifteen men being chosen out of all Unterwalden, excelling in good faith, religion and authority, they set over this business Peter Emberger, at the time Canon at Lucerne and afterwards Provost at Beromünster; James Krus, Rector of the college of the Society of Jesus at Lucerne; and Renward Cysat the elder, Apostolic Notary, Count of the Holy Lateran Palace, Knight of the golden spur, and Chief Secretary of the Commonwealth of Lucerne: whom they commanded to treat everything with public faith, to appoint a day, to summon whom they would: to give ear to each, to search out, to exact an oath: and finally to omit nothing which pertained to giving credit to those things which had hitherto been spread abroad about the life, death and miracles of Nicholas, whether by report or in writing, or could be newly investigated.
[81] they form a process, The Assembly being dissolved, those to whom the business had been given set about it without delay, namely in the first month of the following year: where there were heard first of all those whose parents or nearest blood relations had once both often seen Nicholas in the hermitage and conversed with him, and had been eyewitnesses of his innocence and holiness. They narrated the things which we have hitherto gathered into our pages about the holy man, with simple and holy faith: and what they had narrated they confirmed by giving their right hands, which rite in those places holds the force of an oath. There came then many others in long order, who testified with the same faith to prodigious benefits obtained for themselves and their people by the help of the man of God: for relating which there will be its place a little below. Several days were spent in that examination, everything was entered in the records, and was established and strengthened by the addition of a public decree of the Leading men of Unterwalden. But Renward Cysat, whom I named above, Apostolic Notary, reduced what had been noted with proven faith concluded by the Notary into a compendium and brief commentary, as he testifies of himself in these words: The present act and process being finally completed and concluded in the manner and form as above, with all the clauses and solemnities requisite and necessary for these things, everything was taken down in notes by me the undersigned Notary, and faithfully comprised in this present little book, in the presence of the venerable, religious and most learned men, the Lords John Molitor, Master of Arts and Philosophy, Parish Priest of Lucerne, and Canon of the venerable College of Beromünster; and Father Martin Leubenstein, Priest of the above-mentioned College of Lucerne of the laudable Society of Jesus, witnesses specially called and requested for this. Which act and process was indeed reduced into this present Instrument and this present form at the petition of the aforementioned Lords of Unterwalden, and of the Lords examiners themselves (who confirmed the same act and process with the customary oath, having touched with their own hands the most holy Gospels of God, and by the subscription of their said hands and of the witnesses and of me the public Notary named below), and was strengthened and confirmed in the house of the aforesaid College of the Society of Jesus at Lucerne, on the Kalends of February, in the year of restored salvation 1591. All those whom I named above subscribed to these things. The Inquisitors also testified on oath and subscribed by the witnesses. that no evil guile or fraud had crept into this act, but that the business had been undertaken and dispatched with holy and sincere faith, as far as could be done humanly. Finally this epilogue concludes all the acts reduced, as I said, into a commentary: From this brief and most true account, then, of the life and miracles of so great a man, the Most Holy
"the Lord, the Lord Pope will be able to gather what he owes to the prayers of Catholic Switzerland, to the opinion of the entire people, and to the testimonies of so many approved men concerning the admirable abstinence and sanctity of life of this our Nicholas, and concerning the evident miracles both during his life and after death; what, finally, he owes to the necessities of these times for the expansion of Catholic piety and faith in these regions of Catholic Switzerland. Wherefore the Powerful and Most Illustrious Lords of the Cantons or Districts of the Catholic Swiss, by humble prayers through their appointed Legates, petition His Holiness that, in consideration of this man and in acceding to the most pious prayers of so many faithful, having diligently examined and investigated the foregoing matters, he may deign to proceed to his consecration and canonization—lest he whom God has shown by many and manifest signs and miracles to have been made worthy of the choir of Saints in celestial glory should be defrauded on earth of the honor due to the Saints."
[82] The Unterwaldians sent to Rome as Legates the illustrious men Melchior Lussi and Melchior im Feld, both Knights of the Golden Spur and Consuls of both Unterwaldens, After the death of Gregory XIV, the former of whom had also been the ambassador of the Catholic Cantons to the Council of Trent. Pope Gregory the Fourteenth of that name received them most lovingly, especially Lussi, whom he had already begun to know at Trent, and gave them great hope of generously obtaining what they had piously and religiously sought. And certainly this hope would not have deceived them, had not intervening death removed the Pontiff, most ready for this matter, from the living. And so the business was again postponed to the year one thousand six hundred and twenty-one, the business is resumed under Gregory XV, when of its own accord the Congregation that is called the Congregation of Rites—because the former inquiry had lacked certain required solemnities—with the approval of the Supreme Pontiff Gregory the Fifteenth, decreed that a new inquiry should be made into the life, character, and miracles of Nicholas. This decree, when the Pontiff was shortly afterwards taken from the living, our Holy Lord Urban the Eighth, the present Pontiff, at the request of the Catholic Cantons, not only confirmed but also amply showed, by letters of his own given to the same Cantons, and by Urban VIII, with what mind he is toward Nicholas, and how greatly he desires to satisfy the desire of pious men in this business. His letter runs thus.
POPE URBAN VIII.
To our beloved Sons the Schultheissen, the Landammänner, and the Senate of the eight Cantons of the Swiss, Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Zug, Fribourg, Solothurn and Appenzell, defenders of Ecclesiastical liberty.
Beloved sons, Greeting and Apostolic blessing.
The cult of the Saints is not only a duty of Christian piety, but also a bulwark of every sovereignty: for if, reigning with Christ, they judge nations and rule over peoples, they fortify with heavenly benefits above all those by whom they rejoice that the glory of the almighty Majesty is worshipped in them. Wherefore you seem to draw down into your Alps the help of the Angels and the patronage of the Saints, while you ask heavenly honors and radiant diadems for Nicholas von Flüe of Unterwalden, whom holiness in the wilderness is believed to have reared for heaven. Great is this glory of the Swiss nation, not only to win trophies for Kings in the battle-line and to guard Principalities at their posts, but also in the camps of Christian penance to do violence to heaven and to merit the triumphs of blessedness. Such pious wishes of a most valiant nation we have received with inclined ears. Wherefore we await the morals as well as the miracles of the Hermit Nicholas, consigned in public records, so that the Pontifical authority may as soon as possible weigh this heavenly business with the accustomed counsels of piety and prudence. And we shall pray him who holds the sovereignty of the Saints that he may instruct us to decree, in so grave a deliberation, what may be salutary for the Catholic Church and glorious for the Swiss name, and we impart to you the Apostolic blessing. Given at Rome at S. Mary Major, under the ring of the Fisherman, on the 13th day of September, 1625, in the second year of our Pontificate.
Giovanni Ciampoli.
Having received this letter from the Pontiff, by which it was commanded by the same Pontiff, they proceeded in that same year to a new and final inquiry, and so that now only the declaration is lacking. took care of it most skilfully, so as to omit none of those things which the custom of the universal Church and the magnitude of so great a business seemed to require. And this process, at length completed in the solemn and customary form, is said to have been received and approved at Rome by those whose office it is to inquire into and pronounce upon businesses of this kind: so that nothing else now seems to remain than that the final authority and hand of the Supreme Pontiff be at length put upon so great a business, which we hope will shortly be b.
AnnotationsCHAPTER X.
The Life of Nicholas written long ago by various authors.
CHAPTER V.
[83] The first of all to write the Life of Nicholas, though in compendious form, was the Reverend and most Learned Lord Henry von Gundelfingen, Doctor of Arts and Philosophy, and Canon of the most ample College of Beromünster in Switzerland, Henry Gundelfingen wrote of Nicholas, and he dedicated it to the renowned Senate of Lucerne in the second year after the death of the man of God. The title prefixed to the little book is: The Proclamation of Nicholas, Hermit of Unterwalden. And the beginning of the little work itself, because it commends the man of God not a little, it has pleased us to set before your eyes, Reader, copied here: thus, then, he begins. Those who have judged that all things which pertain to living well and blessedly are placed in virtue alone are wont to seem to me to have thought nothing rashly. For what is there in the body or in fortune itself, as they call it, either good or desirable, if it lack uprightness? That that alone which is upright and according to virtue ought to be counted good, not only did the Stoics assert in word, but far more in deed also did Brother Nicholas of Sachseln in Unterwalden, a most religious man, declare it. For what did our Nicholas think, say, or do, which did not proceed from the midst of virtue and religion? Who, if he had thought that something splendid or chief was placed in the goods and advantages either of the body or of fortune, would then have pursued quiet and pleasure, then the heaping up of riches, after having left behind him his children and his wife: all of which he so shrank from that he thought nothing more alien from himself than the foolish pursuit of riches. Brother Nicholas, our most religious hermit, knew indeed that all things of this kind are servile and unworthy of a great and lofty mind. He understood that the man who is outward ought to obey and submit to the inner man: and that it belongs to the latter so to command as reason and intellect prescribe. For by these two as it were lights the human mind looks upon all things, sees all things, discerns all things clearly, whether they be of time or of eternity, whether they be in the world or above the world. Therefore let them cease to wonder, if any perhaps ignorant of things have begun to, why Nicholas the hermit, as soon as he had sought the solitary and anchoretic life with the consent of his consort, turned his mind to nothing more than to restoring the eremitic religion, instituted by Antony, Paul and other Fathers, and now almost wholly crushed. Nicholas knew indeed that he was born not for himself alone, but much more for the eremitic religion too: whose distressful oppression through the sloth of other hermits he judged it no less ruinous and deadly to suffer any longer than unworthy and disgraceful. Wherefore first of all he, who should have stayed with his consort and educated his children, in so great strength of body and amid the very grievous widowhood of his wife, not only neglected this, but even despised it: since he left them enough riches, and took nothing with him but a wallet and a staff, etc. So he: to which he then subjoins most of the things which we have already set forth of the birth, life and death of the man of God.
[84] In that very same year also, the eighty-eighth of the same fourteenth century from Christ, the author of the Sachseln manuscript, which followed the death of the man of God, a certain citizen of Nuremberg, roused by the fame of Nicholas and his prodigies, came to the spot in Unterwalden, and what he himself could learn most certainly about him he entered on parchments with his own hand and in a simple style: a copy of which still survives among the records of Sachseln. It is established likewise that already at that very time certain notaries were appointed by the authority of the elders, to enter in those records about the man of God nothing but things most fully attested and established by oath. The third place among the Biographers of Nicholas is owed to Henry Lupulus, Henry Lupulus Canon at Bern of the Nuithones, a man renowned in his age for the praise of learning and virtue, and of great esteem among the Swiss. He dedicated his diligent labor to Matthew, Bishop of Sion, of whom mention was made above: but he prefaced the same little book of his with a not inelegant little preface to the Citizens of Unterwalden, which, since it makes excellently for the confirmation of his history, it has pleased us to copy word for word. When this charge was first enjoined upon me by you, Men of Unterwalden, the little book addressed to the Unterwaldians, that I should labor more diligently in setting out in order the Life of your holy Nicholas, I feared that there would be some who, shrinking either from the name of an unknown author using a purblind pen, or from the novelty of a history unheard of in these our ages, would rather calumniate (as is the barking of the envious) than approve our undertaking: and so it came about that I girded myself unwilling and slow to the work already enjoined. But when, my mind snatched for a little while from domestic cares, I had collected it more quietly, I understood indeed that deeds are to be counted of no moment if, relying only on the strength of writers, they are compelled to beg credit from ink. Whence, in my judgment at least, truth itself by its own right claims for itself a most sufficient authority. And it matters nothing, so long as an unknown author writes true things, with the most elegant saying of Aurelius Augustine agreeing: Let truth itself, he says, be authority, without which authority avails not. Nor is the history itself so unwonted that it should come to be rejected by any of the faithful: since no Christian is ignorant that in those earlier times of the Church there were very many of such religion and abstinence, not only of the male but also of the female sex. But if perhaps it happens more rarely now in our age, this is to be imputed not to the tight-fistedness of the most kindly and best Creator, who bestows abundantly on those who are willing, but rather to our inveterate malice, by which the good are afflicted together with the wicked. Wherefore, made bolder, I was willing at length to comply with your petition, and to compose into one reading those fragments, so to speak, sought out here and there from various little notebooks without order, but by the testimony of trustworthy men, and lately brought to me: which, cut into many small portions, might so embrace in a certain sequence both the age and the most commendable manners of this Nicholas, from sworn testimonies that it should include nothing in itself which had not first been established as explored by your work under the sacrament of an oath. To which I then subjoined also the very miracles by which the servant of God has hitherto been renowned: so that if any envious men had presumed to insult him living (which happens most of all to the most just), they might at least thoroughly learn to revere him dead, flashing with prodigies. In which matter also, further
an exordium was to be taken, by which your own most praiseworthy city—not the least among the parts of the Swiss confederation, yet still unknown to some foreign regions—illuminated from afar by the fame of this holy Nicholas, might also increase its renown through our writings, while we unfold the place itself and the people. Receive, therefore, best of men, this booklet, the first fruits of our labor, with an equitable mind, by which you may more easily perceive my regard for you and the mirror of your fatherland, to be beheld by all the Unterwaldians.
[85] With this exordium Lupulus wished to address the Unterwaldians as he set about describing Nicholas's life. with the epilogue: I also add to the exordium the peroration with which he closed his commentary: "These things, men of Unterwalden, have been presented to me for writing concerning your holy Father and countryman Nicholas. Although they are most true, they ought to furnish you with an occasion not for rashly or ineptly boasting, but rather for embracing and increasing divine religion. For what could have been given by God Most High more graciously to your city than to have its Republic preserved safe and peaceful amid such uncertain turns of fortune, enriched by the patronage of this hermit? Indeed no one ought to doubt that his intercessions have very often availed not only for his own fellow citizens but also for the entire Swiss Confederation. Therefore the greatest effort must be expended by you to most abundantly bestow all the benefits of so great an Advocate for the praise of God and your own edification; and if you do this, there will be no reason for you ever to complain that you are destitute of his aid. It remains for this little work of ours, composed with a cheerful countenance and a heart whole toward all the Unterwaldians, to be more promptly disseminated by you, so that minds devoted to Nicholas may more easily close the mouths of adversarial detractors (if there be any), and that they themselves, setting before themselves an example of piety, may be more ardently inflamed in obedience to God and his servant. I would also wish to exhort the benevolent reader not to be angry with me if he perhaps finds something rather inept or less polished to have slipped out, since I have labored more to declare the truth than in the toil of weighing polished discourse." These things Lupulus; whose little work was long ago so approved and accepted that it was praised even by the enemies of the Catholic faith, contrary to the custom and disposition of men of that stamp, as I shall shortly show more fully.
[86] Then about the year of restored salvation one thousand five hundred and twenty-one, Sebastian Rhätus, Sebastian Rhätus, a Priest, who had charge of the chapel of our Nicholas for many years, a man of ancient faith and sincerity, himself also gathered into a little book his deeds from Lupulus and the other old records, together with the sacred and spirit-filled sayings and prophecies of the man of God; which even today survives, kept in manuscript in Unterwalden with the Reverend Lord Joachim Eichhorn, of whom shortly. And so he was the fourth writer of the life of Nicholas. In this labor he was then succeeded by a man eminent for integrity and prudence, John Salat, John Salat, citizen and public Notary of Lucerne, whose work, printed in the year of the restored world one thousand five hundred and thirty-six and dedicated to the Senate of Lucerne, still exists. His history is commended in the very preface of his little book in these simple words: And this is a true, authentic history, pleasing to God, which can excellently support the Christian Catholic faith, useful and necessary to know, and in no way to be covered any longer with silence: an example of piety, uprightness and true faith: which no one has ever dared to disparage, nay, which it is wholly impossible to overturn and refute. These and many other things there, which however I gladly omit. And although these commentaries I have mentioned had come to light, put to the press abundantly enough, yet so great was the piety and devotion of men toward Nicholas that the copies, however abundant, by no means sufficed for the fervor of those desiring to read his life. Whence in the seventy-first year of that age Ulrich Wittwiler, Preacher of the most celebrated monastery which obtains its name from the hermitage a of the Mother of God, to fulfil the desires of the pious, from the authors already named, whom he himself acknowledged as approved, Ulrich Wittwiler: newly compiled the history of Nicholas, and, printed at Dillingen in Swabia, dedicated it with a learned preface to the five Catholic Cantons of Switzerland. And since not even so did those copies answer the wishes of all, the same man, afterwards Prelate of the same Monastery and styled Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, had the same history written by him reprinted and spread in very great number; and finally this very Prince, the Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Prelate, in that year in which, as I said above, the solemn inquiry into the life of Nicholas was begun, confirmed to the designated Censors and to the whole world, by a splendid testimony, that very thing which he had published about him in public records.
[87] And although that is rather long, yet because it gives no small authority both to our history and to the man of God, who testified in the year 1591, it has seemed worth while to give it here copied for the Reader. It runs thus. Brother Ulrich, by the grace of God and of the Apostolic See Abbot of the most celebrated Monastery and chapel of the Holy Virgin Mary of the hermits, divinely consecrated, immediately subject to the Holy Apostolic See, of the Order of S. Benedict, of the Diocese of Constance, of the province of Mainz, etc., and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, to all the faithful of Christ who come to the knowledge of what is written below, eternal salvation in Christ. That God, the best and greatest, from the very founding of the world down to these our ulcerated times, has been wont first to forewarn mankind, against the ruins, crimes and punishments of crimes, the calamities and scourges impending over the human race in general or even over particular parts, by various miracles and by the admonitions as well as the examples of life of most holy men, will be plain to one even moderately versed in sacred letters and Ecclesiastical histories. that God, as other nations through other Saints, For he himself forewarned the First-formed of his fall; through Noah the whole world of the deluge; through Moses, the law being given, of the manner of living; through the Prophets, of various captivities and straits; through Christ and the Apostles and their various most approved followers, of the most pestilent heresies and errors which were to arise in the Church of God (men's sins wresting this out), and fortified them against them beforehand. Hence he set in his Church some as Apostles, others as Prophets, some as Doctors, others as powers, others as graces of healing, for the building up of the Body of Christ, that his defenses and fortifications might not be lacking to it against all the wicked assaults of enemies occurring anywhere. There were threatening in the last century times by far the most dangerous of all, in which the net of Peter was to be torn by the perfidy of men through almost infinite portents of heresies and sects, into which we, born very unhappily, have fallen. The greater, therefore, God foresaw that the iniquity of men and the more grievous the dangers would be, the greater and more numerous also the remedies of evils he willed to provide. Above the old ones, then, common to us with others, he gave another new and peculiar support of salvation. For when the most deadly shipwrecks of the Catholic religion had not yet arisen, but were threatening at the doors, which we now unwillingly see and suffer in our Switzerland and elsewhere everywhere, so through this one forewarned the Swiss of evils to come: there is born in the same Switzerland, in the Catholic Canton of Unterwalden, about the year of the Lord 1417, Nicholas von Flüe, commonly called Brother Nicholas: whom God, in his mother's womb and in death, made admirable and venerable alike to Angels and men by the prophetic spirit, by virtues, by unconquered constancy in the Catholic faith, and likewise by miracles: as many orthodox men who were still living within our memory, eyewitnesses and most faithful witnesses, and besides the history of his life, worn and most well known everywhere in the hands of all, both in manuscript and also committed to the press, give undoubted credit to this.
[88] The course of his life was first, as I have seen, printed in public type about the year of the Lord 1488 in the Catholic city of Lucerne of the Swiss: whose Life both many others, afterwards, the copies running short, a repeated edition of it was eagerly and quite importunately requested and awaited by very many good men most closely joined to the Catholic Church, both by others and also urgently by me, the aforesaid Brother Ulrich Wittwiler, at that time Dean and Parish Priest of my aforesaid monastery. The honor of God and the glory of the holy man variously manifested compelled me, the public welfare of the country drove me, its wretched and most disordered condition on account of raging heresies finally pressed me, both the gravity and the truth of the matter itself urged me, to comply with the desires of the pious as far as I could, until something more splendid or sublime should be published by other more learned men or by the Church of God. Having, therefore, implored the help of divine grace and the patronage of the just man whose history we were to write, and also he himself wrote and published it; and having received a very old original manuscript copy from Unterwalden, and having most diligently collated it with the printed one together with the faithful accounts of many trustworthy men, when we saw that it agreed with them in all things into one, and contained nothing in itself against the Catholic faith or good morals, we undertook the work and published the little book, and we testify by these presents that we published it, coming out with this title: Truly wonderful history and life of the most upright, pious, devout and most renowned Nicholas of the Rock, in German called von der Flue, commonly Brother Claus. Who was born above the forest in Unterwalden of the Swiss, renewed and enlarged by Brother Huldaric Wyttwiler, Dean of the hermits: together with a preface and Christian admonition of the same to the praiseworthy Nation of the Swiss, with the privilege of the Imperial Majesty, printed at Dillingen by Sebald Meyer, in the year of the Lord 1571. in the years 1571 and 1585: Reprinted afterwards in the same place by John Meyer, in the year of the Lord 1585. In that edition (for so we call God and his Saints to witness) we added and inserted nothing false or feigned, nothing new, nor anything from our own that was not to the point: but only sent to light, with the order somewhat changed, what agreed with the truth as clear to all, as in the old original manuscript, as in the old printed copy, as in the faithful account of most upright men and old men, as finally handed down as it were from our ancestors from hand to hand.
[89] Why then should there not come to light in our most afflicted age this rare example of the divine power and kindness, for it ought not to be suppressed, not unlike those of the ancient hermits? Why should not this Swiss man rise again in our times, like another Antony and Hilarion of our Switzerland, turbulent and oppressed by the darkness of heresies, like a most limpid star? that to the Catholics For he was born peculiarly for us, given to us, and a little before us lived most holily as a mortal himself among mortals. It surely was not fitting that so great a treasure given by God should lie hidden under the earth: it was to be dug out and claimed for the light from the deep mines of human forgetfulness. So limpid, so glad, so venerable a light of a truly Evangelical man ought not to be suppressed nor hidden under a bushel: it was to be set publicly on a candlestick for all, being given by God to illuminate the great house of the Church, to illuminate as many as sit in the darkness of errors and in the shadow of the death of mortal sins, and likewise to direct the feet
of all toward the way of truth, justice, salvation, and peace. To those who are good and who have not deviated from the Catholic faith until now, it ought to be set forth that by the living example of so great a man they should remain and can benefit also the non-Catholics. unmoved, fixed, constant, and undaunted in the ancestral and Catholic religion, in the one orthodox Church of Christ, in the faith, veneration, use, and frequent reception of the most holy Sacraments; and that they should not allow themselves to be shaken and struck down by any storms of heresies and monstrosities of schisms—against which he, while still living, warned his contemporaries and followers so frequently, so seriously, so anxiously, and so fraternally, and impressed upon them the need for caution. To those, however, who have either wickedly defected from the Catholic faith themselves, or who, fraudulently and wretchedly deceived and seduced by impostors, are tossed about in the darkness of errors—to their own confusion, which nevertheless (if they wish to be wise and to reflect more diligently with themselves, from the course of his life, whence and whither they have wretchedly fallen) can lead them to the recognition of their errors and bring them back to that one Roman fold of Christ and the Catholic Church, from which they deviated and in which our Nicholas lived and died. These men boast that they have found the clear light of the Gospel and of the Word of God under the benches; but the time will certainly come, unless they return to the footsteps of Brother Nicholas, when they will experience and in vain lament their irreparable and eternally deplorable loss—when from the thickest and more than Cimmerian darkness of perfidy, errors, and heresies, and from the foul gloom of crimes, in which they are already enveloped, oppressed, and held, they will be cast into those outer and everlasting ones. Let this be our glory, this our joy and exultation, this the boast of our freedom and nobility: that by God's benefit so great a man has been given to us. Let us not only continually contemplate his faith, life, character, and God's wonders in him, nor only boast with our lips of his sanctity, but let us join and conform faith to faith, life to life, character to character, and thus truly proclaim God, who is wonderful in his Saints, in word and deed, here and forever. And let these testimonies of our edition and of its motivating reasons, among all lovers of Catholic truth, in writing and fortified with our seal, be splendid. Given in our Monastery of the hermits on the 13th of the Kalends of March, in the year of salvation 1591.
I, the same as above, testify with my own hand.
[2] John Joachim Eichhorn. So the Most Illustrious Prince, who indeed illustrated our Nicholas eminently by these and other records of his. John Joachim Eichhorn, a Priest of Unterwalden, a native of Belheim among the Nemetes, in this our time has at length put the colophon and the last hand to those labors which the writers already named, as I said, spent in writing the life of Nicholas. He diligently gathered from every side whatever most approved and most fully attested things he could find about Nicholas, and, having heaped them up into commentaries, published them more than once in the vernacular and the Latin tongue b: all of which the rest of the Clergy of Unterwalden, having diligently inspected them, testified with their own hand to agree wholly with the old records and writings which exist about the man of God. These things about the ancient and recent Biographers of Nicholas I have recorded somewhat more fully for this reason, that I might gain a fuller credit also for this narration of mine, which I offer the Reader to taste, drawn not from any cistern that comes to hand, but chiefly from these very most limpid fountains.
AnnotationsCHAPTER XI.
Testimonies and judgments of natives and foreigners, of Catholics and non-Catholics, about Nicholas.
CHAPTER VI.
[91] Besides those mentioned, there were many other natives who celebrated the name and fame of our Nicholas in their writings, Testimonies of Henry Glareanus the Poet, though more briefly, a few of whom it has pleased us to append to the foregoing. Let that laureate Poet lead the column, Henry Loriti Glareanus, a patrician of Glarus: for whom the first year of life was the same as Nicholas's last: whose grandfather and other ancestors took part in wars together with him, while his father spoke with the man of God in the hermitage, and the Poet himself saw his son as Consul in Unterwalden in the year 1510. This Poet, then, in the brief little work in which he depicts all Switzerland, while he sings of the Unterwaldian nation, among other things chants thus:
— — To this people belongs the pious Dweller of the vast desert, Nicoleos, who, sober for one and twenty years, Took nothing of drink or food: but, taught the mysteries of heaven, He lived upon the sacred body of Christ.
In these few lines Glareanus comprises many things, which there is no need to set forth more at length here, because we shall show them a little below set forth already by another. of Sebastian von Beroldingen, Knight, It has pleased us to set next in reserve the most noble and most strenuous Lord Sebastian von Beroldingen, Knight of the golden spur, who in his age held the highest magistracy of the Commonwealth of Uri at home and in the field: to whom, in the year one thousand five hundred and ninety, it seemed good to play with a more ample Minerva in praise of the man of God. In the year following this Nicholas had also an excellent encomiast, whom I named above, Renward Cysat the elder, of Renward Cysat, Notary. a man of eminent virtue and authority, who in the instrument which he drew up about this Saint, approved by the votes of all, both in very many other words and above all in these proclaims him: The integrity of life, the holiness of manners, the rigor of abstinence, and the power and splendor of the miracles wrought both in life and after death, of our most praiseworthy and most blessed anchorite Nicholas of Flüe, have so dazzled the minds and eyes of all, not only of natives but also of foreigners, that he is both venerated by many among the chief friends of God, and numbered by very many, and held so by all. That learned and pious man addresses him by many other splendid names also: he calls him again and again the friend of God, the most holy dweller of the wilderness, the holy hermit: and finally he omits nothing which might seem able to make for the singular commendation of the man of God with all, and especially at Rome with the highest Prelates of the ancestral Religion.
[92] of Christopher Hartmann, To the same Nicholas of ours the annals also of the Hermitage of the Mother of God, written by the Reverend Father Brother Christopher Hartmann, Professed and Librarian of that same most celebrated monastery, give applause: for under Gerold, Prelate and Prince of that place, they speak thus of him: In the year eighty-one Blessed Nicholas, the hermit of Unterwalden, settled the controversy that arose among the Swiss Confederates on account of the division of the Burgundian booty. Fribourg and Solothurn were received by the rest into the fellowship of the league by the persuasion and authority of the same hermit. Then soon under Conrad, Gerold's successor, whom the people of the Hermitage reckoned the third Prelate of this name, they again record these things of Nicholas's death: In that very year also there died, on the day after St. Benedict our patron, Nicholas a Rupe, formerly an Official of Unterwalden: who, having withdrawn into solitude, and having lived in it for twenty years not far from Sachseln, a village of the people of Sarnen, on no human food, receiving only the most holy Eucharist every fifteenth day, renowned for miracles and the gift of prophecy, greatly illustrated his country and all Switzerland. So he.
[93] And Francis Guillimann of Fribourg of the Nuithones, in book 1, chapter 15 of the Antiquities of Switzerland, where he discourses much about other holy men of Switzerland, adds at the end these things about ours: At length in the last century Switzerland brought forth among the Unterwaldians Nicholas the Hermit, whose integrity of life and continence it is more fitting to admire with the utmost striving of minds and to be astonished at, than to disparage through the fault of wits. For it is sufficiently established that he passed twenty years on no human food, content with the sole Sacrament of the most holy Eucharist taken every fifteenth day. His acts, oracles and admonitions are carried about everywhere, which if not a few of the Swiss had preferred to obey rather than to embrace the novelties of certain men, there would not be these dissensions of minds and religions, and the World would bear nothing more illustrious, nothing more formidable than Switzerland. So there. Elsewhere also, speaking of the people of Fribourg, he adds these things: of Francis Guillimann, So they asked, wholly of their own right and liberty, to come into the league of the eight Cities, as the people of Solothurn also did. Some admitted them, their valor and bravery having been seen in the past war, but others strove against it. Until at length, by the counsel and authority of Nicholas, a hermit among the Unterwaldians at that time of celebrated holiness and continence, they were co-opted with the applause of all and great gladness at the assembly of Stans, and made up the ninth and tenth City. The letters of this matter were given on the Saturday after the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, in the year of our Lord ⅭⅠƆ CCCCLXXXI. So Guillimann. The rest I gladly pass over: namely Peter Etterlin, Clerk of the Court of Lucerne, likewise Sebastian Werro, Doctor of Sacred Theology of Fribourg, and others, and of other Swiss. both lest I be longer than is fitting, and also lest by repeating the same things too often I beget weariness in the Reader. One more eulogy of him I set down, taken from the Annals of the church of Sachseln, which was given him while he was still among the living. It runs thus word for word: Be it known to all and each, that about the year of the Lord 1467 there was a certain good man, named Nicholas von Flüe, born and brought up in the Parish of Sachseln on the mountain; in the vernacular An-dem-Berg, who left father and brother, and his own wife, sons and daughters, namely five sons and as many daughters, and passed into the wilderness which is called der Ranfft, where God sustained him without food and drink for a long time, namely eighteen years: when these things were written, and he was still of sound reason and of holy life, which we have seen and know in truth. Let us pray, therefore, that when it befalls him to go out of the prison of his body, he may be led to the place where God shall wipe away every tear from the eyes of the Saints. Amen. So there. From the natives I now turn to foreigners.
CHAPTER VII.
[94] The judgment of the natives about our Nicholas might be suspect, were it not confirmed as proven by the votes and authority of foreigners also: whence it has seemed good to assign their place to foreign witnesses too, who may give their opinion on the remarkable fame and name of the man of God, celebrated throughout the world. John Trithemius, formerly Prelate of Sponheim, of John Trithemius, a most celebrated writer in his age, describing the year one thousand four hundred and eighty-seven, commends Nicholas in these words: In this year, he says, on the twenty-fifth day of the month of March (he ought to have said the twenty-first), there died that famous hermit Nicholas, in the district of the Schwyzers or Swiss, not far from the town of
Lucerne, in a vast wilderness; who for many years in great poverty, humility, patience, and sanctity strenuously served the Lord as a solitary in the same desert; and before his death lived continuously for twenty years without bodily food, as we have ascertained by the testimony of the Bishop of Constance, in whose parish he was dwelling, and of many other trustworthy persons. He also had the spirit of prophecy, and foretold to his people certain future events which afterwards came to pass. There was a great concourse of pilgrims to him, even from remote regions, since his dwelling was not far from the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Hermits. This man of God was a miracle to us in his time; for although he was utterly ignorant of all letters, yet he flourished with a wonderful subtlety of understanding of the Scriptures, and gave answers to the questions of any learned persons whatsoever, not otherwise than that holy hermit Antony, once the most learned Philosopher without letters, is reported to have given. Although he did not admit all persons indiscriminately to conversation with him, but only those whom he recognized as being moved to speak by the divine Spirit. Finally, he is reported to have been resplendent with miracles." Thus Trithemius in that passage. In his fifteenth Homily, however, on abstinence and fasting, he proclaims this concerning the same man: "Behold, it is now the twentieth year since that famous Nicholas of Schwyz, having entered the wilderness, has not taken human food. I speak of what is most well known to all, nor do I think there is a man living in Germany who has not heard the fame of this miracle." So that Bishop spoke of Nicholas truly and no less than magnificently.
[95] Then in the ninety-first year of that century, there appeared at Strasbourg the Fasciculus Temporum, of the Fasciculus Temporum, compiled by an unknown author, which, among other outstanding men from the creation of the world, also includes our Nicholas and gathers his most ample praises in these words: "A certain devout hermit in the regions of the Swiss, near Unterwalden, in great humility, refreshed only by the Body of the Lord each month, lived for fifteen years and more without bodily food." Thus that passage. Two years later at Nuremberg, in both Roman and vernacular tongue, it published annals, of the Annals of Nuremberg, whose chief authors are named as Hartmann Schedel, Doctor of Both Laws, Sebastian Camerarius and Sebald Schreyer: they too make lengthy mention of our Nicholas among the acts of the year 1480. This passage John Nauclerus, himself also Doctor of Law and Provost of Tübingen, transferred in abridgment into the second volume of his Chronography in these words: Among the mountain Schwyzers in Alemannia, and of John Nauclerus: not far from the borders of the people of Lucerne, in a place of vast solitude, an old man was leading at this time a solitary and most abstinent life, who lived for twenty years without bodily food: whom they called Brother Nicholas. He had a wife and children, from whom he withdrew for the fruit of a better life. A man dried up and exhausted in body, compacted only of skin, sinews and bones. This man led as it were a heavenly life on earth, spotless, without filth: although some unjust judges interpreted it otherwise than was fitting. But it is a wonder why they calumniate the man, who led a long life in the strictest poverty and solitude: persevering in extreme abstinence and humility: who desired nothing, who was injurious to no one, who trampled on avarice: spurned honors, showed no tinder of pride: thinking excellently of the faith: though he was a man of few words, yet to questions he always answered wholesome and consoling things, so that rarely did anyone depart from him unedified. He was therefore always held by the good to be Good, Just and Holy. He knew himself free from mortal sin, intent on good works and contemplations. This was shown by the man's perpetual cheerfulness and gladness, whom no one saw sad, but always with the same countenance. He was also approved by the Bishop of Constance, at whose command, as a son of obedience, he ate three particles of bread, which he swallowed with difficulty. At length, failing with old age and strength, a gentle sleep dissolved his aged soul. He was buried in the church of his Pastor, with the reputation of holiness. So Nauclerus: which the Nuremberg writers end thus: Buried in the church of his Pastor, he rests not without Miracles, he who also foretold some prophecies to the neighboring peoples.
[96] Nay, the fame of Nicholas, having crossed the Alps, penetrated into Italy itself. Bonifacio Simonetta, Abbot of the monastery of Corno, of Abbot Bonifacio Simonetta, a contemporary of the same servant of God, relates thus in his epistolary work, book 3, in a letter to Niccolò Palmieri. An upright man of Milan, who is called Donatus, who often wanders through the world for precious stones, adds two things more wonderful than the foregoing, namely that in Germany (and Switzerland is a part of Germany, as Lombardy is of Italy) in our times a hermit, shut in a cave with the greatest observance, has not eaten for twenty years now past: and he asserts that another, not far distant from him, eats every day three small balls made of peach-kernels. So he. Gregory of Valencia, formerly a great Theologian of our Society, of Gregory of Valencia, S.J. inserts these things about our Nicholas in the Preface to his books on the Eucharist, published at Ingolstadt in the year 1587: It was once the common praise of the Swiss that among them above all, if anywhere else, the true faith and religion toward the most holy Eucharist flourished and bloomed and was cultivated, which God also attested there both by other arguments and by a remarkable miracle, when he prolonged for twenty years with that heavenly food alone the life of the most holy man Nicholas of Unterwalden (whose anniversary memory, on account of his happy passing from the body a hundred years ago, is celebrated on this very day): so that even from this it might be understood that he himself is most truly contained and received in the most holy Eucharist, who is the true life, and from whose life-giving flesh and blood our blood and flesh too is in some manner nourished. Thomas Murner likewise, Doctor of Both Laws, of the Order of S. Francis, of Thomas Murner, formerly Parish Priest of Lucerne, mentions our Nicholas in his history, which he wrote and published in print there in the year from the virginal birth 1537. Matthew Rader, mentioned above, a writer of our Society, in the first part of his Viridarium, writing the life of S. Theodosius the Cenobiarch, of Matthew Rader, S.J. inserts these things about our Nicholas: S. Nicholas the Swiss abstained wholly from all food for twenty whole years. Finally many other not uncelebrated foreign authors make most honorable mention of this man of God in their lucubrations: whom, however, lest I be longer than is fitting, I gladly pass over.
[97] There were also great men who long since listed the name of Nicholas among the other names of the Saints in their calendars. of Gilbert Génébrard, Gilbert Génébrard indeed, Theologian of Paris, Royal Professor there of the divine letters and the sacred tongue, prefixed to that work in which he commented on the songbook of the once Royal prophet, a calendar which he calls Roman: in which he assigned to our Nicholas the twenty-second day of March. of Peter Canisius. Peter Canisius likewise, the Theologian of our Society already often named, in his Martyrology which he once had published at Dillingen, at the eleventh of the Kalends of April, celebrates our Nicholas among the high Saints with this encomium: Likewise the blessed remembrance of Brother Nicholas, Anchorite, of Unterwalden of the Swiss, who, with his wife consenting, leaving his home together with the world, led a separate and religious life in the wilderness, and lived about twenty years without any human eating or drinking. Living he was renowned for the spirit of prophecy, dead for many miracles. He rests in the parish church of Sachseln. So there b about Nicholas Canisius, that light of the Catholic world, and especially the bright Star of Germany and of our Switzerland, whom I ought rightly to have placed among the native praisers of the man of God: for although he did not begin to live in Switzerland, yet he both spent a great part of his life there with great profit and fruit to the country, and at length began there to live for eternity. And because that holy man labored very much for our Saint, and did not think it enough to have inserted his name in his calendar and to have discoursed briefly about him, it has pleased us to gather into this place the rest also, which he treats about him in a special little work in his native tongue.
CHAPTER VIII.
[98] In the first place, he says, it is certain, and cannot be denied, that this man, born a Swiss, was and persevered truly and constantly Catholic in absolutely all articles of faith, and endured blameless and obtained salvation in no other way than in the unity and obedience and religion of the same Catholic Roman Church. Praising Nicholas as truly Catholic, And although this new religion, only fifty and sixty years old, was as yet unknown and unheard of in the age in which he lived: yet he, instructed by the spirit of God, foretold it by prophecy, and seriously and faithfully taught his countrymen to flee and avoid all novelties of religion. By his praiseworthy example too Brother Nicholas confirmed whatever it befits all truly pious Catholics to do, and to observe in the divine offices, in the use of the divine mysteries, in Ecclesiastical ceremonies, in sacred and profane government, finally in the ancestral manners and customs usual in the Catholic Church. He himself loved Catholic Priests, revealed to them all the recesses of his mind, assisted as a religious hearer at the unbloody Sacrifice of Christ, adored his Savior, true God and man, present in that most sacred mystery together with his body and blood, and received it in one outward species only. He gladly venerated the Virgin Mother of God, our Lady, with the whole choir of the heavenly Saints, and implored their help, and prayed to God for the departed equally with the living: and, to finish all in a compendium, through the whole course of his life from boyhood he held fast with his teeth to the order of the Catholic Church, and diligently taught and led the other Christians whom he could to follow the ancient path of faith. Happy should we Catholics be if even now, constant not only outwardly with our mouth but also with our whole heart and in very deed, we freely testified our true Catholic faith to the whole world: then indeed we could truly glory with our Brother Nicholas, nay with the Doctor of the gentiles: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith: for the rest there is laid up for me a crown of justice. 2 Tim. 4
[99] c Next this Brother Nicholas is to be praised by most deserved right, holy in life, in that his manners and life, worthy of a Christian and Catholic man, perpetually answered to the true faith which he held: he kept the rights of marriage inviolate, he served bravely in war, he nourished his children in piety with singular care. Meanwhile he found by experience that through domestic and other profane cares he was very greatly hindered in divine worship and called away from heavenly things; whence his heart, kindled with divine love, sighed for a more secret kind of life, because in money and the other goods of fortune, in friends likewise and companions, in the allurements finally and pomps of the world, he felt in place of quiet nothing but perpetual trouble, weariness and bitterness, he decided to serve God alone, to die wholly to worldly vanities, and to choose the best part: whence, temporal things
and cares having been renounced, he could say with S. Paul: "I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." Phil. 3 and 1 This finally is the greater and more wonderful thing: that this man, by God's will and guidance, proposed to himself no other manner of life than that severe and hard way of the anachoretic life, and persevered constantly in that very way of life for about twenty years until death, with a glad, cheerful spirit and soul. Indeed, by his own testimony, he said he could never be sufficiently grateful to the Supreme Godhead for the fact that, free and released from wife, children, home, and other secular affairs, he could treat of heavenly things and devote himself day and night to pious exercises. Just as also the Forerunner of our Savior, John, by divine instinct sought the desert and spent the greatest part of his life there alone in severity. Entirely this soldier of Christ could appropriate the words of the blessed Paul: "Far be it from me to glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world. Gal. 6 and 2 I live, yet not I; but Christ lives in me."
[100] Nor should it seem strange to anyone that Brother Nicholas abandoned the married state of life an imitator of the Apostles: and departed from home, children, and wife. For God is wonderful in his Saints and works in them and through them as through his instruments in diverse ways, drawing them at his will to embrace this or that manner of living. Who shall resist the will of God? And who shall answer him? Whatever Nicholas did in this respect, he did with the foreknowledge and consent of his wife, following the example of the Apostles, who, induced by Christ's admonition and promises, left behind not only their worldly goods but also their wives, as soon as, inspired by the divine Spirit, they began to spread the seed of the Gospel throughout the whole earth. For Christ in plain words had foretold to them: "Everyone who has left house, or brothers or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children, or fields, for my name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess eternal life." Matt. 19 Whence it is manifest that Nicholas attempted nothing contrary to the ordinance of God and of the Church, and carried nothing out against it. whose institute they have approved, But in order that every scruple about this deed of our Anchorite might be wholly removed, and that it might be plain to the whole world that his eremitic institute is to be approved rather than blamed, the all-powerful God showed indeed prodigiously to every sound man the tree from its fruits, and the workman from his work. For by a threefold irrefutable indication every best man is convinced that the institute of Nicholas rested on the best foundation and was acceptable to God: whatever certain fault-finders or calumniators may bark against it: for the perverse world is of such a disposition that it readily conceives and publishes false, fraudulent judgments, alien from all truth, about the Forerunner of the Lord and the other hermits, nay about the Lord himself. In the first place, then, there testifies of this champion of Christ his wonderful and inexhaustible endurance in his various temptations and snares, which he perpetually sustained and bravely overcame: for the crafty and shape-shifting spirit (as his deeds testify, and most anchorites experience in their vocation) left him no part of quiet, but invaded, vexed and terrified him, by himself and by others, even in a visible and hideous form, as happened also to Saints Paul, Antony and others: whose wrestling was not only against flesh and blood, but also against Principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness. How great bitternesses of pains Nicholas bore in these struggles, through the very fibers of his emaciated body and the marrow of his bones, cannot be said. I will pass over the assaults with which known and unknown, friends and enemies, inhabitants and neighbors, and false brethren attacked him for many years, whence he often digested grievous troubles and temptations. But he had learned to console himself and, helped by divine aid, to conquer, mindful of what the Savior had said: by wonderful patience, In your patience you shall possess your souls. And of what S. James had written: Blessed is the man that endureth temptation, for when he hath been proved he shall receive the crown of life, which God hath promised to them that love him. Luke 21 For such patience truly works probation, and probation hope, and hope confounds not: nay, it marks out the true friends of God, who through many tribulations must enter into the kingdom of heaven.
[101] There testify of this man of God, next, the eminent prodigies known to the whole world, which God wrought through him before and after his death in various places, by miracles, and which very many, healthy as well as sick, have experienced, and which accordingly can be proved and confirmed not only by tradition but also by authentic records. This above all is a great and eminent prodigy, that this Nicholas for almost twenty years, never dining and never supping, passed his life in the wilderness wholly without any human food and nourishment, so that beyond nature he was preserved sound even in body by a nourishment not bodily but spiritual. Which surely ought to be esteemed no less than the forty days' fast of the holy prophets Moses and Elijah, sustained by divine power: and our most abstinent Nicholas seems wholly comparable with Magdalen, beloved of Christ, who they say served God in the wilderness for about thirty years with a like abstinence. Who then would not confess that the finger of God worked in this anchorite, and gave testimony to his sincere life and manners, so that there can rightly be no doubt of it? There testifies of him, finally, that noble prophetic spirit, to be greatly esteemed by all, and of prophecy: with which God wonderfully illustrated and adorned this prodigious man, so that he quite often laid open great and hidden mysteries to him, and he, otherwise rude and unlettered, penetrated very many things about the secret of the most holy Trinity and taught others. Moved by this Godhead, he made hidden things manifest to many, taught them beforehand of impending dangers, admonished them, instructed them unto salvation, the highest and the lowest; the poor and the rich; strangers and natives: for there were great concourses from every side to this famous Anchorite, and as many as kept coming to him returned home instructed with the best counsels, and affected with the fruit and consolation they had sought. So Peter about Nicholas, whose eulogy is to be esteemed the more highly, the better known and more illustrious were the holiness of his life and the excellence of his doctrine. Happy our country, which was irradiated by such great lights in these most turbulent storms: these Nicholas foretold and warned were to be guarded against, Peter like a most firm rock broke them: Nicholas in the desert, Peter in the open: both are renowned even today for prodigies: both are reckoned and venerated among the Heavenly ones by the common sense of the pious, and nothing is so much in the prayers of the whole of Catholic Switzerland as that the supreme Authority in sacred things should at length decree jointly to both the public honors on earth which they have long since deserved.
CHAPTER IX.
[102] In the last place it has pleased us to set the adversaries, from whom truth and the virtue of the man of God have wrung this, that, forgetful of themselves, they praised in Nicholas what they condemned in all others. The adversaries, I say, praised even by heretics, of the ancestral faith and of all venerable antiquity, whom a roving liberty of believing and doing anything has carried so far that whatever comes into their mind or mouth they judge to flow drawn from the inmost abyss of the divinity, however new, absurd, unspeakable. These enemies of our faith, then, approve in Nicholas the religion which they detest: they execrate Catholics, they condemn anchorites together with the severer discipline of living; and yet they praise Nicholas; they confess him renowned for prodigies and oracles; they proclaim his prayers, Communions, confessions, which yet they themselves hate worse than a dog and a snake: to close all in a word, they approve the better and follow the worse. But lest I seem to have said this without ground, I will bring forward one or another witness of this kind into the amphitheatre, that we may watch them fighting with themselves in the manner of blindfolded gladiators, and meanwhile follow out all the praises of Nicholas. Oswald Molitor, surnamed Geisshüsler, and after deserting his country and his country's religion called by the affected name of Myconius, by Oswald Molitor, let him first sweat in this palaestra. He had Lucerne for his native place, but, alas, the lantern despised, he fell at Basel into the darkness of Zwingli in the manner of bats and owls, exchanged his German name for a Greek one, and the wretched Miller in the mill of heresy, with the other deserters of the same flour, began to grind nothing but unhappy darnel. In that little commentary, then, in which he interprets the heroic verses of the aforesaid Henry Glareanus in which he depicted Switzerland, where he sings eloquently of the Unterwaldians and, as I said, of the star of the Unterwaldians, Nicholas, he himself illustrates the poet thus: He means Nicholas the Hermit. He indeed, an Unterwaldian by nation, born of his father Henry and his mother Hemmanna, entered the wilderness by divine admonition, leaving his wife with ten children, five boys and as many girls, where he passed 21 years without human food and drink*. He was wont to say at times that it had been far more pleasing to him that by divine grace he could wholly renounce his wife than food. He lies buried among the Unterwaldians, in the village whose name is Sachklen. He was a man of quite tall and handsome stature, beyond which he was sufficiently worn with leanness, so that he seemed to have nothing else but skin clinging to his bones. His color was dark, his hair black, sprinkled here and there with grey. His beard not long nor of much hair, but forked in the middle; his eyes very black, and such that one could be shaken with terror at them, because of their venerable brightness. The veins of his neck and throat, while he spoke, seemed full not of blood but of air; he used a single and simple garment let down to the ankles: his head always bare, and his feet bare. He uttered a manly voice, slow speech. Disputing about God, he seemed to have searched out all the secrets of the sacred letters, though he did not know even a letter. This I will add: that his little cell was two and a half paces long, one and a half wide, high so that its top touched his head. It had two little windows of the breadth of a palm; you saw nothing besides, except very low stools, which without doubt he used for pillows. These things we have added for this reason, that we have not hitherto seen them noted by those who have committed the life of that man to letters: although Henry Lupulus, Canon of Bern, a thoroughly learned man, omitted almost nothing: his little book we shall shortly bring to light. The father of our poet is said to have spoken with him, and to have been in war with him together with the poet's grandfather and his ancestors. The poet was born in that year in which Nicholas dies, in the year of Christ 1488. The poet saw his son as Consul of Unterwalden in the year from the birth of Jesus Christ 1510. So that man of Lucerne, to the old lantern which once shone for him in his native land.
[103] I will set next to him a noble pair of brothers, one sprung from Zurich, by John Stumpf, the other from Basel: the one is John Stumpf, known throughout Germany as the Chronographer of Switzerland; the other Henry Pantaleon, the Prosopographer of the heroes and illustrious men of Germany:
the former of whom, treating of our Nicholas in book 7, chapter 4, describes him in these words: "A brief enumeration of the life, appearance, and dwelling of Brother Nicholas of the Unterwalden, a holy man and outstanding hermit. Around the year one thousand four hundred and eighty, in the Unterwalden above the forest, a certain adult citizen, having left all his relatives, withdrew into the desert of the Melchaa valley above Sachseln, called Brother Nicholas. He left behind him ten children, males and females in equal number. In this desert he led a solitary and holy life for twenty-one years without any bodily food or drink (some think he lived on roots). The natives frequently blockaded all the ways to him, to observe whether he was secretly fed from elsewhere. It was, however, certainly discovered that this man, similar to the Angels, surpassed the frailty of human nature and, though clothed in flesh, was nonetheless devoid of the necessities of the flesh and by no means subject to them. His principal prayer was: 'O Lord, take me from myself and give me entirely to you,' etc. Among other things he was accustomed to say that it had been far more welcome to him that by God's favor he was permitted to leave his wife than to live without food. He was a man of erect and tall stature, yet dried up and exhausted, so that only the skin adhered to his bones and sinews. His abstinence from food was also tested by the suffragan Bishop of Constance, who detected no fraud or pretense, so that he determined that he could only be sustained by divine power. He was chestnut in complexion, with black hair sprinkled with gray, a moderately long beard, thin and forked, with black or bright eyes from which a flashing terror struck those who beheld him. The veins of his throat, when he spoke, were thought to be moved and agitated more by air than by blood. He used one garment, reaching to the ankles, with head and feet bare. His voice was manly and his speech measured; to those who came to him he counseled repentance and the amendment of life. He disputed about God so exactly and subtly that it was as if he had penetrated all the secrets of the sacred pages, although he was utterly rude and unlettered. The serenity of his heart was an infallible sign of his certitude, on which his hope rested firm and unshaken, so that with S. Paul he placed all his glory in the testimony of his conscience: whence he was never seen somewhat sad by anyone, but always with an open brow. 2 Cor. 1, 12 He quite often foretold future things; he admonished the Swiss to cultivate peace, to love labor, to live intent on and content with their native cares, to beware of foreign wars, of confederations with Kings and Princes, of services and yearly pensions, because these were hostile to their liberty and to the public peace. The dwelling which he inhabited equalled a pace and a half in breadth, and was only one pace longer; its height equalled his stature, so that he touched the ceiling with the crown of his head. Two little windows of a palm's breadth let in the light. There was no furniture there, except two low stools, which perhaps he used for taking rest. He departed this life about the year 1502 (an error has crept into the numbers here), and was buried at Sachseln in his Parish, which he always visited, and never separated himself from it." These things about Nicholas Stumpf, rendered into Latin word for word.
[104] And Pantaleon the Physician, in part 2 of his Prosopography, at the year of Christ 1486, likewise commends the same man at length: and, leaving out those things which he took from Stumpf, by Henry Pantaleon, he relates these things among others about him: He was, he says, remarkable for innocence of life, who, despising the pay of foreign Princes d, procured a living for himself and his family by his own labors. When he had persevered for some time in this way, at length, offended by the haughtiness of certain men, he thought of seeking retirement and fleeing the allurements of this world. And so, having obtained consent, he left his wife with ten children, and, betaking himself into solitude, prepared for himself a small cell above the place Saxlen. And a little after: He therefore lived in that place with great holiness without any food and drink. Then, after many other things, which I gladly omit, he finally concludes thus: His memory exists very fresh among the Swiss, so that parents from time to time deservedly impress the pious admonitions of this man on their sons and grandsons. So Pantaleon. I add to these Josias Simler of Zurich, and by Josias Simler. who also himself touches on the praises of Nicholas, though briefly. For when he discussed at greater length those assemblies of Stans, of which I made more mention above, at which Nicholas himself was present in person, he concludes at length with these words: All those affairs, debated in many assemblies, were at length decided by the intervention of one man, Brother Nicholas, that pious Hermit of Unterwalden, who obtained a great name for holiness both among all the Swiss and everywhere else. So he. This, then, was the fixed opinion of these and other heretics, whom I pass over for brevity's sake, about Nicholas: that he was a holy man, that he pleased God, that prodigies done beyond the powers of nature had testified this. What then will they say of his faith? Do they not know that saying of the Doctor of the gentiles, Without faith it is impossible to please God? Heb. 11. Nicholas pleased God? then surely his faith too pleased God; it was therefore true, for how could a false one please God? But if, finally, the faith of Nicholas was true, as it wholly was, that faith must be false which opposes his faith and condemns it. Look back, then, O wretches! O blinded ones! look back, lest Nicholas himself, whom you praise and approve, reprove and condemn you.
Annotations* Rather, XIX and a half.
CHAPTER XII.
The posthumous miracles of Nicholas: the blind, the deaf, the lame cured.
CHAPTER X.
[105] Innumerable are those wonders, and wholly admirable, for writing out all of which a huge volume would not suffice. They testify to the multitude of miracles, This alone, therefore, I shall do in this last place of this history, that the pious Reader may well know that the wonderful God has hitherto wrought, and still works, both many and great things at the tomb of Nicholas, by which he has declared abundantly enough in what place he is with him in heaven, and in what place he wills him to be held on earth too. In the first place, then, I shall bring forward some witnesses who will speak of those portents in general: in the second I shall gather certain prodigies of this kind into a few classes, and especially those which were transmitted to the Roman Curia to be examined and confirmed for the testifying of the holiness of the man of God. Henry Lupulus, First, then, about the first miracles after the death of Nicholas, let us hear the first writer of his life, Henry Lupulus, speaking briefly thus: The servant of God being now dead and taken away, he says, whose so sweet conversation on earth had been a specimen of virtues to all the faithful of Christ who flocked to him, the merciful God, not willing that the people devoted to him, despoiled of his most delightful converse, should be tormented by a long complaint, has not ceased until this day to console them with many and various miracles through his intercessions. Then, having gone through some more notable prodigies of this kind a, he finally adds these things: And to conclude at length summarily, it seems scarcely credible to hear with how many or how great miracles that happy Father daily shines, since almost no kind of disease is left uncured at his intercessions: but most of all in the fevered, who, it is plainly established both to the Priest in charge and also to the devout flock of the Church itself in Saxlen, are heard there daily and obtain health according to their vows. Henry Gundelfingen, So he. Let us hear another also, namely Henry Gundelfingen, singing thus of Nicholas in his Hours odes, in the first year after his death: This is a true Israelite, who dwells in the tabernacle of God without stain: through whom God has shown very many powers in this world. He adds a little after: Whose head Christ has encircled with a crown woven of virtues, while through him he frequently gave back the gifts of health to the languishing. So he sang briefly of the miracles of the man of God. I omit here those other witnesses whom I have already brought forward above, who all confess with one mouth that the name of Nicholas has perpetually been renowned after his death for many miracles.
[106] Renward Cysat, Renward Cysat among other things speaks thus eloquently of this friend of God: In the past century Brother Nicholas of Flüe, that he might serve God more quietly and securely, withdrew himself from the world, and in the wilderness of his native land lived holily and soberly for many years, nay for almost twenty years without any bodily nourishment, and at length piously closed his last day: all of which things, known to the whole world, and from time to time proved by very many miracles, are confirmed even to the present day by daily prodigies. More things of the same kind from the same author on this matter I gladly pass over. But the supreme Magistrate also of the Commonwealth of Unterwalden, the Magistrate of Unterwalden, among other things, gave a splendid testimony in public records in the year 1591 to the miracles also performed at the tomb of Nicholas, which I append word for word to what precedes: It has seemed good to us, a mature deliberation having been held among us, by common counsel to testify and confirm that the miracles which almighty God deigned to work through this his beloved servant while he lived, and thereafter after his death, are so various and so many that, through the carelessness of writers, not all, but the least part of them has been committed to written records. But most of them, having been thus handed down from our grandfathers and great-grandfathers to us, have been spread abroad not only in this whole region of ours, but also in the neighboring and other far distant Provinces, and are confirmed daily in our age by other new miracles supervening. All of which we can prove by our good and truthful faith and the attestation of our honor, by the force of the present letters, which we have fortified with our common and public seal, the proper seal of our Commonwealth, on the 20th of January, in the year 1591. Andreas Zbären. So the Leading men of Unterwalden testify. In the same year Andreas Zbären, Parish Priest of Stans and one of the Six of the Chapter, affirmed in good and holy faith that he had served as Parish Priest of Sachseln, where the bones of Nicholas are laid, for twenty-eight continuous years, and that in all that time so many prodigious benefits, implored at the intercessions of the man of God, were granted by God both to natives and to strangers, especially concerning the freeing of the fevered, that their number cannot be reckoned. This very thing a certain very old little notebook also confirms, written a hundred years ago by a certain Parish Priest of the same place: namely, that an innumerable multitude of men, having visited the tomb of the man of God and given a pious alms, went away freed from various kinds of diseases, and above all from fever. And so much in general about the testifying of the miracles of Nicholas. Now I shall distribute certain more solemn ones in particular, as I said, into a few paragraphs.
§ I.
[107] A certain citizen of Unterwalden, bearing the same name as the man of God, originating from the village of Inwil, had fallen by I know not what accident into extreme blindness, so that for not a few days his eyes admitted no light at all. A blind man receives sight, It came to mind, therefore, to visit Nicholas's tomb and, having poured forth prayers to God, to open heaven for himself, and also his eyes at the same time, through the intercession of the man of God. He goes, wearies himself and God with profuse supplications and tears, but moves nothing: he returns blind to his paternal home. During the following night, in his sleep he seemed to hear a voice of one seriously calling out that he should rise immediately, and leaving his bed, should follow with haste the one who called. He rises, and with his eyes opened he perceives that he can see even through the darkness; and from that time he had far sharper sight than ever before.
Sion is the capital of the Valais, a blind woman, where the daughter of a certain respectable citizen, afflicted with the same kind of misfortune, sat for three whole months without sight and struggled with the darkness. Her family members advised her to implore the aid of Nicholas and to vow a pilgrimage to his ashes. She implores, vows, and recovers her sight, and a few days later she joyfully discharged her vow at the church of Sachseln, bringing with her her parent as a witness to the prodigy.
From the domain of Bern, a certain careless man so severely struck one of his eyes against a wall and a one-eyed man: that he knocked out of it all faculty of seeing. When various remedies had been applied and the one-eyed man made no progress, he became a suppliant to the ashes of Nicholas and wiped away all blindness from the eye.
A certain man of advanced age, likewise another, for a long time, an inhabitant of the village of Lungern in Unterwalden, more sightless than a mole for many years, at last determined to seek his sight at Nicholas's tomb and to cling to it with a resolute mind until he should see with his eyes that his vow was fulfilled. He sets himself on the road, and at the very moment he began to tread it with his feet, he also began to make use of it with his eyes—though with dim and somewhat obscure vision. He proceeds full of hope, and gradually gains as much by seeing with his eyes as he advances by walking with his feet, with an equal increase of journey and sight, so that he at last found the same end both of his journey and of his blindness. Therefore, having completely recovered the power of his eyes, giving thanks to God and to Nicholas, he returned home, and, living and seeing for many years more, proclaimed the benefit he had received.
another suddenly blind. The son of a certain painter, when he had gone to bed sound in the evening, could not open his eyes in the morning, because a huge swelling had closed them, which could be soothed or wiped away by no medicines. The father, anxious about his son's eyes, vowed to go on pilgrimage to Nicholas: which he also did. As he was returning home, his wife met him on the road and announced that one of the eyes had already opened of its own accord, and, going into the bedroom together with her husband, she soon saw with joy the other also being unlocked.
§ II.
[108] We have seen the blind seeing; now let us hear also of some deaf men hearing at the tomb of Nicholas. They recover their hearing, Henry Zvissenbach h of Sibenthal, from the territory of Bern, had a little son of ten years, whose ears had become so deaf through I know not what grievous symptom that for the space of more than a whole year he perceived neither a voice nor any sound. It came into the mind of the pious father to commend the deaf boy to the prayers of Nicholas; and while he was doing this, the boy's ears meanwhile began to open somewhat. Soon, therefore, he commits himself to the journey with his son to the tomb of the man of God, where at length he obtains for him the perfect hearing of the ears. a man, and a woman too, A certain honest matron, in the year of salvation brought forth one thousand five hundred and eighty-nine, brought her deaf daughter, fifteen years old, by a vow to the hermitage of Nicholas i. There they first saluted, prostrate, the Virgin Mother of God in the sacred church, and soon, entering the religious little cell of the man of God, kissed the pavement and the walls with great feeling of mind. Then the deaf daughter cast herself upon the little wooden bed of Nicholas, laid her head upon the stone pillow, composed her body as if to take rest, and meanwhile ran through five times the Lord's Prayer and the Angelic salutation. Wonderful to say! scarcely had she finished those prayers when all deafness at once departed; she rises with hearing ears, and returns home glad with her mother. Another honest matron, in the twentieth year of her age, had been deprived by grievous pains of the ears of all use of one ear. another, She feared lest the force of the evil should stop the other too. Taking the road, therefore, to the tomb of Nicholas, she hung up wax ears to God and the Saint for the soundness of her ears, and in this way, all pain being wiped away, she feels her ears fully restored to her. A midwife of the village of Sarnen, deprived of all sense of hearing, a third; having tried many remedies in vain, at length placed all her hope in the help of Nicholas. She promises that on three Fridays she will give an offering of wax ears to his tomb; and behold, the first approach to the tomb opens her ears, the second increases her hearing, and the last at length perfects it wholly. Let these few things heard out of many suffice about the deaf.
§ III.
[109] Benedict, Bishop of Lausanne, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, had long had one foot most grievously affected, the Bishop of Lausanne the faculty of walking, so that he could scarcely go with a limping gait. And now the art and industry of the physicians had failed, when our Nicholas occurred to the pious Prelate, by whom the afflicted foot might be restored to its function. He vows, therefore, a pilgrimage to his sacred remains, and at once experiences a relief of the pains. Soon he rises from his bed, prepares himself for the journey, mounts a horse, reaches Sachseln though not without pain, falls down in veneration at the tomb of the man of God, and by warm supplications shortly wipes away all the swelling of the foot together with the pain. And this is that Bishop who, as I remember saying above, gathered an eminent opinion of the holiness of Nicholas from this benefit and other miracles seen at his tomb, and afterwards labored in person that the man of God might be entombed more honorably. Wonderful is what I subjoin: a foul swelling of the foot had compelled a certain Danish fisherman to limp so that he crawled with difficulty where he would only leaning on props, and meanwhile suffered great pains. He applies many remedies, sacred and profane; all in vain. He decides at length, at whatever labor, to visit S. James at Compostela in Galicia, and to ask health of him. He comes from Denmark into the Spains; he enters those sacred thresholds: he prays, but is not heard; he presses, but obtains nothing by entreaty. And when he was now thinking of returning home, one night he is admonished through a dream to prepare his journey into Germany: that among the Swiss Alps Nicholas the Hermit rests, that he should commend himself to his prayers, and that so at length the foot would return to its former vigor. Awakened, he invokes the name of Nicholas, promises to go to and venerate his bones by however long a journey and labor, and at once feels the torment of the foot eased. Fired, therefore, with the desire of recovering his foot, he enters, lame, upon the long and laborious road, and at length, having got through great difficulties, comes to Sachseln, assists at the divine sacrifice, offers his gift too, and suddenly receives soundness of the foot, leaps up while all look on and stand fixed in amazement, hangs up his props, and returns sound and eager to his country. Margaret Rorberg, a matron of Heidelberg, a most acute pain of the foot had so fixed to her bed a Danish fisherman, a woman of Heidelberg. that for a space of about eight months k she could not put her foot out of it. She was burned by I know not what hidden flame, so that water poured on drop by drop evaporated like smoke, nor did that heat leave her any part of rest. The physicians consulted neither recognize the disease nor find a salutary medicine for the disease. Turning, therefore, to Nicholas, the despairing woman promises, if it be granted her to approach his sacred tomb on her feet, and at once becoming bound by her vow, carries out on sound feet what she had promised when sick. A Rhaetian l young man, hindered by a disease of the feet of three months, could go nowhere, and meanwhile suffered atrocious torments. His pious m parents implore the help of Nicholas, and behold, at the following dawn they receive their son rising from his bed a youth and a girl, and walking rightly. To a certain father a daughter was born with the sole of the right foot bent back and turned over, which defect, when the mother tried in vain to correct it by binding, the father corrected within a short time by a vow made to Nicholas. A certain woman had most grievously injured one of her legs, so that she thought herself now wholly condemned to her bed. n Placing her hope, however, in the divine protection, she pronounces a vow to visit the ashes of Nicholas. a woman injured in the leg, Upon the vow the evil so relents that she was able to rise from her bed and, leaning on supports, to limp to the tomb of the man of God; where, the help of God and of Nicholas being invoked, she cast away all infirmity of the foot together with the props on which she had crept there sick. In a certain native some grievous disease or other had so contracted the sinews of one foot a man with a contracted foot. that he could by no means touch the ground with that foot, nay, that he walked only propped on wooden feet, with that affected foot hung from his neck. By a vow made to Nicholas he obtains this, that, though with his foot still contracted, he visited his bones without props. And since he could not go on his knees, falling forward on his hands he let his body down on the ground, and resolved to persevere in ardent prayers until, his sinews restored, he could stand upright and return home; both of which he shortly obtained. Many similar things I omit, because they are wholly similar o.
Annotationssays the name was, and that the affair occurred two years before the mother legitimately testified to it in the year 1591, and that the girl was fifteen years old.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Dying and Various Sick Persons Cured through Nicholas.
§ IV.
[110] A boy, falling headlong from a height, struck his neck so violently upon a very sharp stake that the stake could not be pulled from his pierced throat without great force applied again and again. Lives are saved: a boy with throat transfixed, An enormous swelling of the jugular followed, which seemed about to cut off the boy's breath at any moment. The parents take up their son and, having carried him to Nicholas's tomb, beg for his life and health. The swelling immediately subsides, freer breathing returns, and the wounded throat is shortly healed.
A certain matron had undertaken to nurse her nephew by her sister, another crushed at night: quite an infant. It happened, however, on a certain night that, lying in the same bed with a maid, she placed the nursling between the two of them and sank into a deep sleep. When she finally awoke, she found the infant crushed and completely suffocated. Both rise from the bed, anxiously seek for life in the lifeless little body, and lament for a whole hour. At last, when they see that they are laboring in vain, they turn to heavenly aid; they bind themselves by a vow to Nicholas, and thus immediately recall the already-exiled little soul, together with perfect health, back into the little body.
[111] A boy of ten, accompanying his father to carry home wood, slipping by I know not what chance through carelessness, fell under the oxen which were drawing a thick tree fifteen feet long. The oxen nonetheless went on moving the weight under which the boy was groaning, so that the wretch lay crushed and wholly lifeless. The father ran up astonished, threw himself on his knees, a crushed boy is raised, commended his son to the patronage of Nicholas, vowed as a suppliant to visit his tomb, and at once saw the boy revive, so that he rose up, and at length within the space of half an hour was wholly restored to himself. In the year 1607 a certain careless father of a family had by chance so dashed to the ground his little daughter, slipped from his hands, and a girl dead from a fall, that, her skull broken, she seemed to lie already devoid of all life. And now the despairing parent, from fear of the Magistrate, was thinking of seeking asylum in a neighboring monastery: when suddenly it came into his mind to try the patronage of our Nicholas. He orders his household, therefore, to throw themselves at once on their knees, and each, reciting five times the Lord's prayer and the Angelic salutation, to honor Nicholas and implore his help. And behold, during the praying the little girl dashed on the ground calls her parents with living voice, and is lifted from the ground by them sound and unharmed. From four days of bad weather in Unterwalden all the waters had swollen beyond measure, when a certain citizen of Alpnach, returning home, came into the gravest danger of his life. The little bridge which he was crossing, thrown apart by the violence of the waves, one man is rescued from drowning, hurled him headlong into a most rapid torrent. In that danger, a vow being pronounced, he commends himself to Nicholas, and so, leaning on a board, hopes to escape from the rubble of the broken bridge: when behold, torn from the board by the violent wash of a huge stone, having struggled long without support amid the rolling of the waves, he conceives a second vow for his safety, and so, carried farther away, is cast up on a heap of sand standing out in the midst of the waves. There, deprived of all human help, fearing lest, all soaked, he should perish in the night from cold or some other misfortune, he binds himself to Nicholas by a third vow: and so, with a rough stick as guide, he tries the ford, and at length, through the most rapid whirlpools of the waves, not without a miracle, escapes to the shore. His whole body was one bruise and swelling, so had the rocks battered him amid the waters: his clothes were so heavy with sand and stones that they exceeded sixty pounds. Twenty passengers in one little boat, making for Lucerne by the lake d of Unterwalden, when a grievous storm arose, all labor being frustrated, were compelled to commit themselves together with the boat to the winds and squalls. The boat groaned under the weight of the waters, 20 passengers in peril: nor could it be lightened even by bailing with their caps. When all had despaired, a vow at length made to Nicholas calmed the storm, and delivered from danger those already given up. A woman of Unterwalden, returning from e Frauenfeld, fell into a grievous sickness at Zurich. She grieved that she should die unshriven in a non-Catholic place; she begs of the patronage of Nicholas strength by which she might reach Catholic territory. She came into a village of Lucerne, and thence, failing again in strength, is carried into the City, where she understands from the physician dying women are healed, that no hope of a longer life remains. Turning again, therefore, to Nicholas, she vows to his church a cap which she had at home, splendid and precious, if she should recover. She recovered, but for some time unmindful of her vow she began to fall sick again, whence she brought the vowed offering indeed to the church, but yet redeemed it for a price. A sickness, therefore, returned more grievous than before, and afflicted her so obstinately that at length she laid down both her faults and the offering before the Priest. And so, three days later, she accomplished on foot a long and arduous journey to the baths of the Valais.
[112] six epileptics, John Sartor, citizen of Eichstätt on the Altmühl, harassed for five whole years by a grievous dizziness of the head, was quite often dashed on the level ground. He, when the report of the miracles of Nicholas was brought to him, leaving his country, began to hasten by a long f journey to the Alps of Unterwalden, and on the way lost all his headache entirely. The son of John Rutiman suffered from a grievous epilepsy, so that for four whole years, quite often thrown to the ground, he rolled about foaming for a long while. No human means profited him. Carried to the tomb of Nicholas two or three times, at the third time at length he was so cruelly seized by the falling sickness and twisted on the ground that those present despaired of his recovery. The boy came back to himself, but the disease, by the benefit of God and of Nicholas, did not thereafter come back to the boy. In the territory of Lucerne a certain man suffered bitter pains of the head; he cried out again and again that his temples were being bound with an iron clamp, that both his ears were being pierced with a nail; all feared madness. But the help of Nicholas implored gradually broke the force of the disease, so that he himself, shortly sound, rendered thanks at Sachseln to God and the Saint for the soundness obtained. The patronage of Nicholas extinguished the falling sickness for very many. This was confessed by a certain g Ulrich Molitor of Fürstenberg, who had met Nicholas while he was still living among the living, and had dealt with him so familiarly that both established between themselves a perpetual mutual league of prayers. When, therefore, this man ten years later saw his daughter suffering from a most troublesome epilepsy, mindful of the league entered into, he called Nicholas into his prayers, and testified, by an offering made at the tomb of the man of God, that she had suddenly been wholly restored to him. Letters as witness of the same benefit received were given by h Henry Krieg of Burgdorf, from the dominion of the Bernese: for, having himself become the companion of his daughter, who suffered from the falling sickness, to the tomb of the man of God, he brought her home sound. That he had received the same grace from God by the intercession of Nicholas, as soon as his neighbors interposed the name of the man of God for him, a certain young man of Zurich confessed. i The intercessions of the man of God, implored, have also driven away phrenitis from many. two phrenetic boys, Two matrons in Unterwalden lived under the same roof, and each had a child of three years, who, when they were playing together one evening, seized at the same moment of time by a dangerous frenzy, rolled on the ground with horrible movements. That pitiable spectacle had already held the mothers and the neighbors running up as spectators for five or six hours: when behold, the elder sister of one of the infants vows the afflicted ones to the tomb of Nicholas; which vow, scarcely conceived, brought first quiet and then also a deep sleep upon the sick. Wonderful to say! they slept for two hours, and then, together with the sleep, all sickness was wholly shaken off and departed. In another matron a grievous headache arose and at length turned into phrenetic passions. one woman, The woman spent sleepless nights, and, not mistress of herself from the greatness of the pain, struggled on the ground. Yet at intervals she returned to her mind, and meanwhile, mindful of Nicholas, she took refuge in his merits before God. She begs for health, vows to go on pilgrimage to his tomb, and to hang up a wax offering. Which done, she is straightway seized by sleep, sleeps off all the phrenitis, and the next day, sound, discharges herself of the obligation of her vow.
§ VI.
[113] Berchtold Feer, Parish Priest at the Holy Virgin of the hermits, as they call it, was afflicted with the torments of the stone and strangury, a Priest vexed by the stone and for forty whole weeks he stuck fast to his bed in the greatest distress. Remedies were in vain, the pains perpetual, the hope of prolonging life slight. Nicholas gave hope of soundness to the despairing man, for after he was called to help, the force of the evil at once began to be loosed, a huge stone to roll out through the passage, and sand
a great many things followed, together with perfect health. A few days later, he himself came to Sachseln as a witness to this miracle, and ascribed his life and health, after God, to the man of God.
A certain k woman from Zurich commended her son, who had been struggling with kidney stone for a whole year and had been brought to extremity by the intolerable pain, and a boy, to Nicholas, with the interposition of the devotion of a pilgrimage and a religious offering at his sacred tomb. The following night the stone, the size of a bean, was expelled, and the health that followed made the mother bound by her act of devotion.
A certain citizen of Unterwalden had burdened himself with too great l a bundle of wood, so that, groaning under the weight, he contracted a hernia. He pledged a wax votive offering to Nicholas's tomb, and on that very night on which he made the pledge, he began to be free from all the affliction likewise four hernia sufferers and from all pain.
A certain parent in Unterwalden had handed over his son to a blacksmith to learn that trade; but he did not know that his son was herniated, for the boy's modesty had concealed that defect. But when the severity of the labor at the anvil caused the ailment to grow gradually worse, and he himself began to become more and more unequal to lifting the hammer, the matter could no longer be concealed. Surgeons are consulted, and they reveal the hernia. The parents take refuge with Nicholas, prostrate themselves together with their son before his sacred ashes, and immediately obtain for him complete restoration.
A certain woodcutter, intent at one point more vigorously than usual on his work, was ruptured with the same disease; but having poured forth prayers to God at Nicholas's tomb, he entreated relief from the affliction and immediately repaired the damage.
A seven-year-old boy, by I know not what accident or leap, began to suffer from hernia, and as the evil increased day by day, he began to decline to such an extent that he was finally called to the ultimate crisis of life. The anxious parents hurry to Nicholas's mausoleum, beg for the health of their dear child, and obtain it; for at home, while they were away, the boy completely recovered.
AnnotationsCHAPTER XIV.
Other miracles wrought at the invocation of Nicholas.
§ VII.
[114] A certain young man had been so seized by a contagious plague A young man infected with the plague, that the force of the poison swelled out from one leg in a triple ulcer; he had already been given up, nor did any medicine appear except in the patronage of Nicholas. His father conceives a vow, and destines a wax leg as an offering. Meanwhile health returns to the son; two ulcers are thoroughly healed, the third remaining, but harmless; so that the son could be present in person with his father at the tomb of the holy man, and free himself of the vow. But because the price of the votive wax had not yet been paid, that third open ulcer gradually advanced so far that the shin gaped with a great and deep passage, nor did it begin to close until after some months they discharged themselves of the debt to the creditor. A certain man a, a native of Sion, the metropolis of the Valais, poisoned by chance or by sorcery, suddenly swelled up so in his whole body that, his doublet not bearing the swelling, his sleeves cut open, his skin, foully distended, all but burst. The help of Nicholas, implored, rescued the despairing man from present death. For as soon as the wretch bound himself by a vow, a man bewitched, the deadly venom, bursting out wherever an outlet offered, namely by the mouth, ears, nostrils, navel, and even the more secret parts of the body, at length so wholly left him that in a short time he was restored to his former soundness. another who had drunk poison is healed, Another man, having drunk poison from some source or other, fell into so pestilent a disease that he was carried off again and again into frenzy, and, exhausted by violent torments, was not far from death. Various remedies sought from everywhere profited nothing; at length they came to the sacred tomb of Nicholas, and there a present medicine was found for the evil. The plague is kept away from the Unterwaldians, In the year one thousand six hundred and eleven a grievous pestilence so afflicted almost all Switzerland that its face was everywhere wholly deathly; Unterwalden alone, and the whole of it, was immune, although access lay open to all pilgrims to the mausoleum of the man of God, no account of discrimination being taken. Nay, to very many already seized by the savage plague it was salvation that, having entered Unterwalden, they crept to the tomb of Nicholas. Nay more, whole communities which the plague infested, admitted as they proceeded thither in solemn procession, not only did not infect Unterwalden, but even drove the infection out of their own borders. And so the country, a procession being instituted from all the villages, ascribed that soundness to its solemn Physician and Patron. A certain man, a native of the territory of b Glarus, was often tossed by I know not what unknown infirmity even to madness; a sorcery is undone. medicines availed nothing; all suspected sorcery. Brought to the monument of the man of God, while he prays, he casts out by vomiting fragments of the iron shoes of horses, nails, little knives and other rubbish of that kind, which are still shown at Sachseln, together with the whole sickness.
§ VIII.
[115] The wife of a leading man in Sarnen, the metropolis of the Unterwaldians, felt the present help of Nicholas in a most grievous danger of childbirth. Help is given to 4 in peril in childbirth, The fetus stuck crosswise in the womb, and put forth from it only a little arm. Those standing round despaired of the life of both; the labor both of the mother in childbirth and of the midwives was in vain. At length it occurred to them to call upon Nicholas, that he would come to the aid of so great a need. This done, the stretched-out hand of the infant gave a sign of life by a threefold movement, and in turn, by the Parish Priest's counsel, received the sacred fount of the life-giving bath; soon afterwards the lifeless fetus, cast out with no great labor, left the mother free and unharmed. Another woman, twenty-three years old, bearing a heavy womb, had fallen into a grievous sickness and a swelling of the whole body, so that no prudent person did not forebode an unhappy birth for her. She goes herself to the tomb of Nicholas, and begs his help as a suppliant: a little after, to the wonder of all, the swelling goes down, and, herself also unharmed, she brings into the light a living and vigorous child without great difficulty. The same woman, eleven years later again pregnant and swollen with the same swelling, happily experienced the same help in childbirth. A certain not ignoble matron of Lucerne had labored for four days in vain in childbirth; there were added to the difficulty of the birth also most grievous convulsions of the whole body, so that her life was already given up. Meanwhile that garment of Nicholas which we recorded above is preserved in the church of the Society of Jesus at Lucerne is brought, is laid upon the woman in labor, and within the delay of half an hour brings her a happy and living delivery. To another matron laboring in childbirth even to death her pious husband came to the aid, a vow being pronounced to Nicholas; for a little boy brought forth into the light, scarcely bigger than a fist, washed in the saving font before he was suffocated by blood, left his mother surviving and unharmed.
§ IX.
[116] The Reverend Lord Rudolph Uttinger, born at Zug, Chaplain of the church of Sarnen, once seized by a most burning fever, the fevered are refreshed; long and greatly boiled with a huge heat. At length it came into his mind to seek a remedy for the disease from Nicholas, and he vowed to visit his sacred remains in veneration on three Fridays. At once the feverish heat cooled down, and a little after all languor vanished. A man of known name throughout Unterwalden had a little son of eight, whom, long struggling with a fever and nearer to death than to life, after many remedies had been applied in vain, he at length vowed to Nicholas. The prayers prevailed, for the sick boy recovered, and in his whole life felt nothing more of fever. The same kind of benefit was not long ago rendered by Nicholas to a certain Theologian of our Society. For when he was professing moral Theology in our College at Lucerne, he fell into a grievous and dangerous fever, which long obstinately eluded the art and diligent work of the physicians. Turning, therefore, to higher remedies, the pious Father fell as a suppliant before our hermit, asked for health, promised that, as long as he should live at Lucerne by obedience and his kindly superiors should permit, he would religiously visit and salute his sacred bones every year. This vow being conceived, the matter fell out according to the wish of his mind; the Father ceased to be in fever, and from that time ascribed his health to God and to Nicholas.
§ X.
[117] A certain man of Unterwalden, of no lowest rank, had blazed with grievous hatred against a certain one of his countrymen, for I know not what cause. the desire of revenge is taken away, The hellish kindler increased the fire with poisoned torches and blasts, so that that citizen, carried away by the heat of enmity, could now scarcely restrain himself from inflicting death on his enemy. Meanwhile a wholesome bite of conscience gnawed his mind, and counselled sounder things. Having long been in that agony, he at length turned his eyes to him from whom he had once received a prodigious benefit. And indeed he could rightly hope also for serenity of mind from him from whom he had once obtained soundness of body. This was our prodigious anchorite; he had once snatched him from death when seized by a contagious plague, whence he did not hesitate to ask of the same a calm also for these viperous motions of his embittered mind. He asked, and obtained: for when he was praying more ardently in the church of Sachseln, suddenly as it were a most sweet light began to rise in his mind and so to flood it wholly that, all the darkness of sinister rancor being dispelled, full tranquillity returned to his mind, and he himself, having made confession of his sins, the torches of hatred being extinguished, rushed gladly into embraces, tokens of Christian love, with his former enemy, now his friend. Conrad Scheuber of Glarus, a Swiss, was so tortured by a foul and dire disease an intolerable pain is soothed. that by day and by night the pain forbade him to close his mouth and eyes. For a whole year he had lain with his limbs plainly dead, his flesh eaten away, and his back already putrefying; when at length, mindful of Nicholas, he binds himself by a vow to visit his sacred urn as soon as his health
Then the pain began to subside, rest to return, food to taste good, and the limbs to solidify. Having therefore left his bed after three days, supporting his not yet entirely firm limbs with crutches, he came c to Unterwalden, and thence returning without any aid, he brought home with him the perfect health of his body.
A certain citizen of Erfurt had gone to d Compostela in Galicia as a pilgrim to venerate the ashes of S. James. It happened, however, A long-lasting disease is healed, that, oppressed by a grave and long-lasting disease, he was confined to bed there for nearly a full year, and no hope any longer remained in physicians or medicines. At length a refuge was found: the sick man resolved to visit the threshold of Nicholas on his journey home, if his strength should be restored. No sooner said than done: in the space of eight days, having recovered his strength, he prepared his journey toward Switzerland and finally completed it happily.
[118] A e matron of Nuremberg was so drained by a menstrual flow a flow of blood, that, completely deprived of strength, she could scarcely crawl on her hands and feet. The wretched woman, destitute of all help, commended herself to the prayers of Nicholas, and immediately, with the flow ceasing, she hastened in health to his tomb. From the same city, a certain neophyte who had been converted from the dregs of the Jews to the true faith erysipelas, was so burned by the sacred fire, as they call it, that all had already entirely despaired of his health. He therefore invoked Nicholas, when all other remedies had been despaired of, and by his most clear vows immediately extinguished all those fevers—which he himself proclaimed publicly a few days later, in full health, in the church of Sachseln.
A certain Unterwaldian matron received many benefits from God through Nicholas for the health of her children and grandchildren. diarrhea, Her two-year-old son had nearly breathed out his soul from a three-month diarrhea; Nicholas stopped the flow. The legs of her little daughter had swelled severely from the touch or spell of a witch, and, now blacker than charcoal, they threatened putrefaction; sorcery, Nicholas shortly removed all the sorcery. He also corrected a severe defect of the hip in her grandchild, and not long afterwards also a foul scab of the head and face.
The grandchild of a leading man among the Unterwaldians, one year old, had such a severely ulcerated right knee that all judged that it was all over not only for the foot but indeed for the boy entirely. When, therefore, no hope any longer remained in natural remedies, the parents fled to divine aid and carried the afflicted little child to Nicholas's sacred tomb. The ulcer vanished immediately, on the very journey, with all pain and danger wiped away, and on the foot only a scar appeared as a witness of the miracle.
ulceration, The sacristan of the parish of Kerns was so languid with paralysis of all the limbs below the loins that for four whole years he could not rise from his bed. He vows wax offerings to Nicholas again and again, but in vain: he feels no relief from them. He therefore has himself placed on a horse and, entering the threshold of the church of Sachseln with others supporting him, he immediately rejoices that his somewhat weakened limbs are solidifying, so that he could at least return home leaning on two crutches. After a month had passed, he returns the same way on horseback and, amid fervent prayers, obtains feet so firm and strong that in the following year he visited on foot both the Blessed Virgin at Loreto and the threshold of the Apostles at Rome. Then, having neglected for one or two years to offer the wax he had devoted, he fell into the same paralysis; nor did he recover until he made up for the vow he had neglected.
I furl my sails, for I have entered an infinite sea, which, if I wished to cross entirely, paralysis: I could not find or reach a port. Nicholas is the patron and preserver, and the common Physician, as he is usually called by the people, not only of his fatherland and his countrymen, but of all the surrounding regions and peoples. Even today people hasten, from near and far, heretics experience similar things. even the heretical Bernese themselves, to his ashes; vows are made, supplications are offered; gifts are sent, offerings are hung up; candles are lit; daily prodigies are obtained and wrought. I have enumerated a few from the innumerable, so that from these few the rest, whether equal or even greater, may be gathered. Whence it is easy to conclude that if God wished the bones and ashes of this our hermit on earth to be so glorious and prodigious, with how great glory and blessedness he has caused his soul to be bathed in heaven. And God, the best, will bring it about, as I hope, that even on earth the honor of this holy man may yet grow further, above all for the greater glory of the all-powerful God himself, and also for the more ample welfare of both our bodies and, most especially, our souls.
AnnotationsHYMNS AND COLLECTS
Venerable Nicholas of Flüe, Hermit of Unterwalden in Switzerland (S.)
Composed in the year after Nicholas's death by Henry of Gundelfingen, Canon of Beromünster.
For Nicholas's merits and his renowned deeds, And also for his shining virtues, let heaven exult with praises.
Born in Unterwalden, steadfast in word and deed, He hastened to the hermitage. "O God of your soldiers."
The time of his mature age he did not spend frivolously, Loving you most intimately, "O best Creator of light."
He despised worldly delights and snares, Relying on your consolation, "O Jesus, our redemption."
He abstains for a long time, bearing punishments in his body, Mindful of your works, "O gracious Creator of the stars."
He spent the nights in prayers and labors, Nor did he cease from work "when the star of morning had already risen."
Wearing himself down with fasts, afflicting himself with abstinence, He desired to enter "the supper of the provident Lamb."
At last imbued with the titles of virtues and miracles, He departed to you, O Lord, "Jesus, crown of Virgins."
Praise be to the Father with the Son, always on the throne of heaven, And fill us from above, "Come, Creator Spirit." Amen.
ANOTHER.
On the bright day of the Lord, let nations give praises to his Name, In a melodious song, "from the eastern boundary of the sun."
On this day Nicholas is joined to the heavenly citizens, With the angelic host "let the heavenly hall exult."
When he was celibate and leading a holy life, In you was his rest, "O Christ, who are the light and the day."
He obeyed your commandments, wherefore he was renowned for signs, For the salvation of the faithful, "O King Christ, maker of all."
Hence let us sing the glory, honor, and victory of the Trinity, In a faithful hymn, "in the mystical manner of the Doctor." Amen.
FIRST COLLECT.
O God, who showed the light of your grace to your Blessed Nicholas the hermit, walking in the way of angelic abstinence and of all the virtues: graciously grant that we may feel him as our intercessor in heaven, by whose example of life we are illuminated on earth.
SECOND.
O God, who made Blessed Nicholas the hermit a merciful intercessor for the sins of all: grant us, by his intervention, the forgiveness of our sins and the longed-for joy of eternal blessedness.
THIRD.
Grant, we beseech you, almighty God, that we may exult in the merits of the holy hermit Nicholas and be uplifted by the support of his benefits.