Saint Severin
A Saint in Civilization's Collapse
Join me today to meet a saint who appeared to save a people in their darkest hour.
Name: Severin, Severinus of Noricum
Life: c. 410 - 482 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: January 8
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Maximus of Noricum had led his men out on a mission of mercy. His caravan had gone to find supplies, and now they were headed home, back to Noricum, an area located roughly within modern Austria. These days there was never enough food. And because everyone was so busy trying to grow food, there was no time to make clothes either, which meant there was a permanent clothing shortage in Noricum’s cold winters. Maximus’ carts were laden with food and used clothing. Now all they had to do to get home was to pass through the Alp mountain range.
Crossing the Alps in the winter was always dangerous. As Maximus and his men were in the high passes, a blizzard swept in, and soon the men were struggling in deep snow. Before long, the snow was so deep that they couldn’t even see where the paths had been. Maximus and his men made camp, as the reality of their situation sank in. Even if the blizzard passed, the snow would stay, and the paths would be obscured. They were lost, and they were going to die on the mountain. Maximus worried, but the day had been exhausting, and soon he fell into sleep. And Maximus dreamed.
In the dream, Maximus saw a familiar figure. It was the mysterious hermit, Severin, the man who had inspired Maximus to set off on this mission in the first place. Was this dream only a memory, or was it something more? As soon as Severin started talking, the answer was obvious. Severin’s trademark was that he seemed to see every physical problem as though it had a spiritual solution - and the worst thing, the most infuriating thing, was that he tended to be right. Here was a case in point: in the dream, all Severin told Maximus was not to be afraid, and to keep travelling.
Right, but in what direction? Severin was talking as though direction didn’t matter. In the morning, Maximus decided to act on faith. He roused the other members of the caravan. They packed their belongings, picked a direction and set out through the snowdrifts, pretending that they knew where they were going. They had not wandered long when a huge shape loomed out of the blowing snow - a bear. The men were terrified. But the bear showed no interest in them. Instead, it plowed methodically forward through the snow, leaving a path behind it. Cautiously at first, then with more confidence, the men followed the path the bear had carved out in the snow, walking mile after mile until they found themselves descending the mountains. As they approached the gates of the monastery where he now lived, Severin said to an assistant that he was happy that the bear followers had returned. These men of Noricum were taken care of, which meant that Severin could turn his mind back to the network of charity and prayer and promises which by this time was all that was holding Noricum together.
The people of Noricum had seen better times. Originally the Norici were a Celtic people who had settled these lands by the Danube river centuries before. As time passed, the might of Rome grew, and soon the Norici were Roman allies, then incorporated into the empire as a Roman Province. The people of Noricum embraced Roman civilization. They built theatres, temples, and baths. They built mines and produced the all-important ferrum Noricum, what we call Noric steel to make the hard, sharp blades in the swords used by the Roman legions. And in their homes, the men of Noricum enjoyed that miracle of Roman engineering for their cold climate: central heating. When the tribes North of the Danube began to grow restive, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius marched North to put them down, and left a legion in Noricum to keep the peace.
Meanwhile Noricum embraced another element of Roman culture: the new religion of Christianity. For a while, the influential Christian Florian even held back the emperor Diocletian’s persecution in Noricum. Later, long after Saint Florian’s martyrdom, when it had become undeniable that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, the Roman Empire became officially Christian. The Church in Noricum grew more comfortable, even as the empire seemed less stable. There were two legions in Noricum now, but somehow things were less safe than ever.
One great source of instability was the Goths. They had been migrating West, fleeing the mighty Huns. The emperors of the Western Roman Empire had made the disastrous decision to allow the Goths into their borders, hoping the Goths would do the fighting that Romans no longer wanted to do. In exchange for this service, the Goths had been given land in Pannonia - the next province to the East from Noricum.
The Goths, as it turned out, had other plans. By 410, the Goths had sacked Rome itself, and this set off the slow-motion collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Out in remote provinces like Noricum, there was a power vacuum, and it was soon filled by other, smaller barbarian tribes. Minor barbarian kings from North of the Danube fought over Noricum - often by raiding and re-raiding the towns.
Theoretically, Noricum was still part of Rome, and theoretically a Roman tribune was in charge. There were still some holdovers from a more stable past: the mail from Italy arrived as it always had. However, many of the soldiers who had kept order in the province were recalled to Italy, or deserted. The Roman administration in Noricum tried to compensate by hiring mercenaries. Soon the wages that were supposed to pay these mercenaries stopped arriving from Italy, and the mercenaries became bandits and added to the chaos. Towns built walls and hired a local guard, and it became dangerous to stray too far from the small farms, vineyards, orchards and bee yards that hugged the walls of the fortified towns.
Times had become hard. Everyone had to work, women in the fields alongside men. Even that left a food shortage, and food had to be imported by ships on the Danube. When the Danube froze, Noricum starved. The people of Noricum were desperate, but to their credit they did not lose themselves in hedonism or turn away from Christianity as others would in the crumbling empire. The people of Noricum choked down their despair and soldiered on. And perhaps this determination not to give up was a part of why it was that, in the years after the death of Attila the Hun, when the Emperor of Rome was holed up in the city of Ravenna, a stranger came to Noricum.
The man was a hermit, with a single piece of clothing and a thin mat for sleeping on. He wore no shoes, even in the cold of winter. He was of average height, or perhaps a little short for his time. His life was ascetic, and his manner was humble. His name was Severin. Severin the hermit found lodging in the town of Asturis, modern Zwentendorf. And then one day at church, he made a surprising announcement.
Severin told everyone there that disaster was coming for their town. He predicted the precise day and hour when a barbarian army would arrive. But there was still hope. Asturis could save itself by finding a spiritual solution to their military problem: the town had to join Severin in days of fasting, prayer and charity.
The people of Asturis reacted pretty much the way you would expect people to react to a barefoot stranger predicting doom. They ignored Severin’s advice, and most of them forgot all about it. And so Severin sadly packed up his things, rolled up his sleeping mat and walked East to Comagenis, modern Tulln.
Comagenis was in an even worse situation than Asturis - the town was currently surrounded by a barbarian warband. Severin slipped through their lines, entered the church, and delivered a similar message to the one he had given in Asturis. The people of Comagenis laughed at him too. And then something happened to change their minds. A refugee made his way into the town. He was surrounded in the town square by people asking for news, and the refugee explained that he was one of the few survivors of the massacre at Asturis. He had only escaped, he told the citizens, because a barefoot stranger had predicted the day and the hour of the attack, and the survivor had decided to be outside the town just in case. When the survivor saw Severin, he recognized him as the man whose words had saved his life. Suddenly the people of Comagenis had a much more open mind.
And so the town of Comagenis tried Severin’s plan. For three days, the town fasted and prayed, as the surrounding barbarians watched with amusement. Their amusement came to an end on the third day, when an earthquake shook the area. The barbarians, knowing an omen when they saw one, decided to try for easier prey and moved on.
After that, when Severin travelled through the towns of Noricum, people listened to his message, which was always the same. Things were bad. It was not really the fault of anyone in Noricum that things were bad. And yet the right response, the Christian response, was to run back to God, to pray, repent, fast, and do charitable works. Nobody could accuse Severin of not practising what he preached. Often he only ate once in a week, sleeping on his flimsy mat and arising every day energized to help the people of Noricum. And, gradually, although Severin had no money, no army, no official position in the church, not even a pair of shoes for the winter, his influence began to make itself felt across the former Roman province.
Those who had money became afraid to hoard grain because of Severin’s eerie ability to single them out. Severin wanted everyone to give what he could, and he announced that Christians had to tithe in food and clothes in Noricum. Severin had no official standing to make this proclamation, but he made it, and the tithes began to come in. Soon Severin was at the centre of a hub that distributed food and clothes to the poorest people in Noricum. Severin built a small hermit’s cell, and a monastery took shape around it.
The poor came for clothes and food, and the sick came for healing, which Severin offered freely, so that barbarians lined up along with the people of Noricum to ask for his help. One of the few men ever to impress Severin was in this group. He was a leper, and Severin healed him and told him to go on his way. But the former leper wouldn’t leave, and protested that the job was only half done. His body might be healed but his soul was sick and dying. Severin nodded, pleased to be understood at last, and made a place for the former leper in the monastery.
Who was Severin? By what right did he arrive in Noricum and simply take command? That was a topic about which Severin would not speak. He said it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that God had called him to go and help the people of Noricum.
Even so, the priests and monks who lived around Severin found a few clues. Sometimes Severin spoke about a man who had made a terrible journey through the collapsing Roman Empire, walking North from the deserts of Egypt. Gradually, the other monks understood that Severin was this man, that he had once been a hermit out in the lands of the Desert Fathers. Severin didn’t speak with a local accent, or an Egyptian accent for that matter. He spoke the cultured Latin of a Roman aristocrat. Maybe, before his time in the desert, he had been some powerful lord, or a military commander. Then again, maybe Severin had been nobody at all, just an ordinary man, called to greatness.
Whatever Severin had been in the past, he was now a man without fear. Noricum was under constant threat from the Germanic tribes moving West or jostling for control. The kings of these tribes were fascinated by the holy man of Noricum. One king, Gibuldus, wanted to meet Severin. Gibuldus seems to have assumed that Severin would not be so indiscreet as to bring up the fact that Gibuldus had done some light raiding and slaving in Noricum. But when Severin heard that Gibuldus was near, he marched out alone and confronted the king in front of his army, dressing the king down. To the shock of the army, the king began to visibly tremble before the hermit’s anger. Gibuldus would later admit that he had never been so scared in his life - and he lost no time in sending out men to scour his kingdom for abductees from Noricum to send them home.
A king who had better luck with Severin was a young man named Odoacer. The tall young warlord had to crouch down to even get into Severin’s cell, where he had come to meet the holy man of Noricum. Severin told Odoacer that he would meet with great success, in fact, Odoacer would be a great king. And then Severin added something else, a puzzling prediction which didn’t make any sense. He told Odoacer than when he succeeded, he would give great gifts to many. Puzzled but hopeful, Odoacer went on his way, headed for Italy.
In the years that followed, Severin moved through the chaos and war in Noricum, following an order that only he could see. In one town, Severin insisted that extra guards should be posted, foiling an attack that night. On a different occasion, he sent a messenger to a slave market deep in barbarian territory to buy the freedom of a man that none of them had ever met. The man was there, sure enough. And the former slave had a secret: he had been carrying precious relics of the saints, waiting to find them a new home. He gave them to Severin’s monastery.
Meanwhile in the South, in Italy, the warlord Odoacer had been successful. He had become a high king, uniting several tribes and then leading them to crush the last of the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer had taken the throne for himself, becoming King of Italy. Now that he had success and power, he wondered about the second part of Severin’s prophecy. What did it mean to say that Odoacer would be a giver of gifts? Maybe the prophecy was Severin’s way of asking Odoacer to give him something. Odoacer wrote to Severin and offered him anything that was in his power to grant. Severin replied that he didn’t really want anything, but he supposed it would be nice if Odoacer could recall a certain man from exile. King Odoacer performed this small favour, more puzzled than ever.
By now, in Noricum, Severin was growing old. For almost thirty years, he had travelled the land, fed the poor, healed the sick, and encouraged the people. Now he was talking about a future that did not include him. Severin made the local kings promise to keep the peace after he was gone. Sometimes, mysteriously, he described an exodus, an escape to a better, safer place, although it was not obvious how or where the people of Noricum could go.
Severin was in his monastery, among the monks and priests who had gathered to live around him when he felt his body begin to fail. He found the energy to speak to the monks and priests one last time, telling them that they would have to be examples for the people of Noricum now. He blessed them, and said goodbye. Many of the monks were crying. And when no one knew what to say, Severin quoted the last sentence of the last Psalm,
“Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:6)
And before the monks had time to make a reply, the old hermit was gone.
Severin was buried in his monastery, in Noricum. In a way, Severin had frozen the collapse of the Roman Empire, halting it around him in Noricum. Now that he was gone, it began again. The promises that Severin had extracted from the minor kings in the area began to lose their force. One king, Ferderuchus had sworn up and down that he would never touch what Severin had built. But now that Severin was dead, he couldn’t resist raiding the monastery itself. Five years passed, and soon, Noricum was as dangerous as it had ever been.
And it was then, just as the people of Noricum were once again sliding into despair, that another army arrived in Noricum. The army was led by Prince Hunwulf, the brother of King Odoacer. The king had finally untangled Severin’s words about the great gift that he would bestow. It was not a gift for Severin, but for the people to whom Severin had devoted his life. The army of Hunwulf casually crushed the forces of the petty kings in the area. But this was not just an invasion. It was a rescue. Hunwulf announced to the people of Noricum that a place had been prepared for them in the warmth and safety of Italy. And so the people packed up their possessions. The monks remembered that Severin had told them of this exodus, and that they were to bring his body along with them. When they opened the grave, the saint’s body was incorrupt.
And so it was that the body of Saint Severin was reverently put on a cart, one of many, carrying the fortunes and the hopes of the people of Noricum as they walked South, under the protection of the king, toward a new land and a new life.
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I had never heard of St. Severin. But now I say, "St. Severin, pray for us!"