Saint Elizabeth of Schönau

In the year 1152, at the age of twenty-three, Elisabeth began to have ecstasies and visions, which usually occurred on Sundays and feast days, during the hours of the Divine Office. As many people desired to know what God was revealing to her, she disclosed it, by order of Abbot Hildelin, to a brother she had, named Robert, a canon of the churc h of Bonn; but she had great difficu lty in resolving to do so, fearing that some might take her for a saint, others for a hypocrite who wished to deceive, or for a madwoman. Finally, for fear of resisting the will of God, she recounted to her brother what she saw and heard day by day, and he wrote it down in a simple style, in which it does not appear that he added anything of his own.

She composed four books, the third of which, entitled The Ways of the Lord, co ntains several useful exhortations for the different states of Christians: the contemplative life, the active life, marriage, and perfect continence. Elizabeth makes terrible reproaches therein to the prelates of her time, who for the most part lived in splendor and secular pomp, in riches and delights, forgetting their essential duties and no longer thinking that they were the successors of Jesus Christ and the Apostles; but in the fourth book of this collection, there are historical errors concerning the story of Sain t Ursula, which come from who knows where: whether from the Saint herself, who might not have disentangled her private opinions from supernatural revelations; whether from her brother, who might have added them to his sister's account; or from a foreign hand, which might have inserted them after the fact. But, wherever these errors or difficulties come from, the fact remains that they greatly damage the authority of the entire collection. In general, as these private revelations have not been examined or approved in a special manner by the Church, they can hardly be used to establish either theological dogmas or historical facts.

There are, moreover, fifteen letters of Saint Elisabeth, the most significant of which is addressed to Sain t Hildegard. She wrote it around the year 1160, while already superior of the nuns of Schœnaug. In it, she complains of the malicious talk directed at her by the religious themselves, and of some false letters that were being circulated under her name; she asserts that she only revealed the graces that God had bestowed upon her by the express order of an Angel, reiterated several times.

After having received these supernatural graces for thirteen years, she died on the eighteenth day of June 1165, in her thirty-sixth year. Although she was not formally canonized, her name was inserted into the Roman Martyrology in the year 1554, and, since that time, she has been honored as a saint at t he monastery of men of Schœnau g, for that of the women was ruined by the Swedes .

She is represented trampling a dragon underfoot, which may signify either the triumphs she won through long patience in cruel illnesses, or the writings by which this Saint opposed the Manichaeans of the Mid dle Ages in defending t he Eucharist.

Acta Sanctorum . Translation by Abbé Rohrbacher.