The unpretending village of Stans, situated in the midst of a very forest of fruit-trees, at no great distance from Jenbach, is the birth-place of Joseph Arnold, one of the religious artists, of whom Tirol has produced so many. Without winning, of some it may be said without meriting perhaps, much fame for themselves in the world, without attaining the honour of founding a school, they have laboured painstakingly and successfully to adorn their village temples, and keep alive the faith and devotion of their countrymen. Almost where-ever you go in Tirol you find praiseworthy copies of paintings, whose titles are connected with the celebrated shrines of Italy, modestly reproduced by them, or some fervent attempt at an original rendering of a sacred subject, by men who never aspired that their names should reach beyond the echoes of their own beloved mountains. The prior of Viecht, Eberhard Zobel, discovered the merits of Joseph Arnold and drew him from obscurity, or rather from one degree of obscurity to another less profound, had him instructed according to the best means within his attainment, and gave him occupation in the monastery. His homely aspirations made him content with the sphere to which he was native, and he never went far from it. The altarpiece in the church of Stans, representing St. Lawrence and St. Ulric, is his work and his gift.
From Stans there is a path through the grand scenery of the Stallenthal, leading to the shrine of St. Georgenberg. For a time the pretty villages of the Innthal are lost to sight, and you pass a country known only to the wild game, the hunter, and the pilgrim; the bare rocky precipices relieved only here and there with woods, while the Stallen torrents run noisily below. Who could pass through such a neighbourhood and not think of the crowds of pilgrims who, through ages past, have approached the sacred spot in a spirit of faith and submission, bearing their sins and their sorrows, the burden of their afflictions, moral and physical, and have gone down to their homes comforted?
A wonderful shrine it is: a rock which might seem marked out ‘from the beginning’ to be a shrine; shut out by Nature from earthly communication; piercing the very sky. You stand beneath it and long for an eagle’s wings to bear you aloft: there seems no other means of access. Then a weary winding path is shown you, up which, with many sloping returns upon your former level, and crossing the roaring stream at a giddy height, you at last reach an Absatzbrücke—a bridge or viaduct—over the chasm, uniting the height you have been climbing, with the cliff of S. George. It is a long bridge, and only made of wood; and you fancy it trembles beneath your anxious tread, as you span the seemingly unfathomable abyss. A modest cross, which you cannot fail to observe at its head, records the marvellous preservation of a girl of twenty-one, named Monica Ragel, a farm-servant, who one fine morning in April 1831, in her zeal to gather the fairest flowers for the wreath she was weaving for the Madonna’s altar, attempted to climb the treacherous steep, and losing her footing slipped down the cliff, a distance of one hundred and forty feet. The neighbours crowded to the spot, with all the haste the dangerous footing would admit, and though they had no hope of finding her alive. She was so far uninjured, however, that she was able to resume work within the week.
The buildings found perched at this height cannot fail to convey a striking impression; and this still more do the earnest penitents, who may nearly always be found kneeling within. First, you come upon the little chapel of the ‘Schmerzhaften Mutter,’ with a little garden of graves of those who have longed to lie in death as they dwelt in life—near the shrine; among them is that of the Benedictine Magnus Dagn, whose knowledge of music is referred to in the following simple epitaph, ‘Magnus nomine, major arte, maximus virtute.’ Opposite it is the principal church, containing in one of its chapels one of those most strange of relics, which here and there have come down to us with their legends from ‘the ages of faith.’ In the year 1310, when Rupert I. was the fourteenth abbot of St. Georgenberg, a priest of the order[8] was saying Mass in this very chapel. Just at the moment of the consecration of the chalice a doubt started in his mind, whether it were possible that at his unworthy bidding so great a mystery should be accomplished as the fulfillment of the high announcement, ‘This is My Blood.’ In this condition of mind he concluded the words of consecration; and behold, immediately, in place of the white wine mingled with water in the chalice, he saw it fill with red blood, overflowing upon the corporal; some portion of this was preserved in a vial, set into a reliquary on the altar. Round the church are the remains of the original monastery, in which the monks of Veicht generally leave some of their number to minister both to the spiritual and corporal needs of pilgrims.
It seems difficult to fix a date for the origin of this pilgrimage, one of the most ancient of Tirol. There is a record that in 992 a chapel was consecrated here to our Lady of Sorrows, by Albuin, Bishop of Brizen; but it was long before this[9] that Rathold, a young nobleman of Aiblingen in Bavaria, ‘having learnt the hollowness of the joys his position promised him, made up his mind to forsake all, and live in the wilderness to God alone.’ He wandered on, shunning the smooth and verdant plains of his native lands, and the smiling fruitful amenities of the Innthal, till at last he found himself surrounded by wild solitudes in the valley of the Stallen; plunging into its depths, his eye alighted on the almost inaccessible Lampsenjock. Then choosing for his dwelling a peak, on which a few limes had found a ledge and sown themselves, he cut a little cave for his shelter in the rock beneath them, and there he lived and prayed. But after a time a desire came over him to visit the shrines of the mightiest saints; so he took up his pilgrim staff once more, and sped over the mountains and over the plains, till he had knelt at the limine Apostolorum, and pressed his lips upon the soil, fragrant with the martyr’s blood. Nor was his zeal yet satisfied. There was another Apostle the fame of whose shrine was great; and ‘a year and a day’ brought our pilgrim to S. Iago de Compostella. Then, having thus graduated in the school of the saints, he came back to his solitude under the lime-trees on the rock, to practise the lessons of Divine contemplation he had thus imbibed in the perfume of the holy places.
He did not come back alone. From the great storehouse of Rome he had brought a treasure of sacred art—a picture of the Madonna, for which his own hands wrought a little sanctuary. From far and near pious people came to venerate the sacred image; and ‘Unsere liebe Frau zur Linde,’ was the watch-word, at the sound of which the sick and the oppressed revived with hope.
One day, it chanced that a young noble, whom ardent love of the chase had led into this secluded valley, turned aside from following the wild chamois, to inquire what strange power fascinated the peasants into attempting yon steep ascent. Curious himself to see the wonder-working shrine, he scaled the peak, and found to his astonishment, in the modest guardian of the picture, the elder brother who long ago had ‘chosen the better part.’ In token of his joy at the meeting, he made a vow to build on the spot a chapel, as well as a place of shelter for the weary pilgrim. His undertaking was no sooner known than all the people of the neighbouring valleys, nobles and peasants, applied to have their part in the work. Thus supported, it was begun in right earnest; but the workmen had no sooner got it fairly in hand than all the blessing, which for so long had been poured out on the spot, seemed suddenly to be quenched. Nothing would succeed, and every attempt was baffled; and one thing, which was more particularly remarked, was that the men were continually having accidents, and wounding themselves with their tools. More strange still, every day two white doves flew down from above, and carefully picking out every chip and shaving on which blood had fallen, gathered them in their beaks and flew away. Finding that no progress could be made with the work, and that this manœuvre of the doves continued day by day, the pious Reinhold resolved to follow them; and when he at last succeeded in finding their hiding-place, there lay before him, neatly fashioned out of the chips which the doves had carried away, a tiny chapel of perfectly symmetrical form.[10] The hermit saw in the affair the guiding hand of God, demanding of him the sacrifice of seven years’ attachment to his cell; and cheerfully yielding obedience to the token, requested his brother that the chapel should be erected on the spot thus pointed out. Theobald willingly complied, and dedicated it to the patron of chivalry, St. George. The fame of Reinhold’s piety, and of his wonderful chapel, was bruited far and near; and now, not all who came to visit him went back to their homes. Many youths of high degree, fired by the example of the hermit sprung out of their order, applied to join him in his life of austerity; and soon a whole colony had established itself, Camaldolese-fashion, in little huts round his. There seems to have been no lack of zealous followers to sustain the odour of sanctity of St. Georgenberg; early in the twelfth century, the Bishop of Brixen put them under the rule of S. Benedict, to whose monks Tirol, and especially Unterinnthal, already owed so great a debt of gratitude, for keeping alive the faith. His followers endowed it with much of the surrounding land, which the brothers, by hard manual labour, brought into cultivation. They were overtaken by many heavy trials in the course of centuries: at one time it was a fire, driven by the fierce winds, which ravaged their homestead; at another time, avalanches annihilated the traces of their industry. At last, the spirit of prudence prevailing on their earlier energetic hardiness, it was resolved to remove the monastery to Viecht, where the brothers already had a nucleus in a little hospital for the sick among them, and where also was the depôt for their cattle-dealing—a Viehzuchthof,[11] whence by corruption it derived its name.
The execution of this idea was commenced in 1705. The abbot, Celestin Böhmen, a native of Vienna, had formerly held a grade of officer in the Austrian artillery. Nothing could exceed the zeal with which he took the matter in hand; and plans were laid out for raising the building on the most extensive and costly scale. So grand an edifice required large funds; and these were not slow to flow in, for St. Georgenberg was beloved by all the country round. When he saw the vast sums in his hand, however, the old spirit of the world, and its covetousness, crept over him again, and a morning came when, to the astonishment of the brotherhood, the abbot was nowhere to be found—nor the gold! The progress of the work was effectually arrested for the moment; but zeal overcame even the obstacle presented by this loss, and by 1750 Abbot Lambert had brought to completion the present edifice, in late Renaissance style, which, though imposing and substantial, forms but one wing of Celestin Böhmen’s plan.
If the spirit of the world came over Abbot Celestin in the cloister, the spirit of the cloister came back upon him in the world; and it was not many years before he came back, full of shame and contrition, making open confession of his fault, and placing himself entirely in the hands of his former subjects. Though at this time the monks were yet in the midst of their anxieties for the means for carrying on the work, they suffered themselves to be ruled by a spirit of Christian charity, and refused to give him up to the rigour of the law; and he ended his days with edifying piety at Anras, in the Pusterthal.
A great festival was kept at Viecht, in 1845, in memory of the consecration, which was attended by sixty thousand persons, from Bavaria as well as Tirol.