certain capable Wolfgang, who died as Bishop of Ratisbon in 994, and whose life Othloh wrote. The latter, on becoming a monk, received charge of the monastery school, which he continued to direct for thirty years.[1] Then he left, because some of the young monks had turned the Abbot against him; but after some years spent mainly at the monastery of Fulda, he returned to St. Emmeram's in 1063, where he died an old man ten or fifteen years later. From his youth he had been subject to illness, even to fits of swooning, and, writing in the evening of his days, he speaks of his many bodily infirmities.
As Othloh looked back over his life, his soul's crisis seemed to have been reached soon after he was made a monk. The wisdom brought through it came as the answer to those questionings which made up the diabolic side of that great experience. Othloh describes it in his Book concerning the Temptations of a certain Monk.
"There was a sinful clerk, who, having often been corrected by the Lord, at length turned to monastic life. In the monastery where he was made a monk he found many sorts of men, some of whom were given over to the reading of secular works, while some read Holy Scripture. He resolved to imitate the latter. The more earnest he was in this, the more was he molested by temptations of the devil; but committing himself to the grace of God, he persevered; and when, after a long while, he was delivered, and thought over what he had suffered, it seemed that others might be edified by his temptations, as well as by the passages of Holy Scripture which had come to him through divine inspiration. So he began to write as follows: I wish to tell the delusions of Satan which I endured sleeping and waking. His deceits first confounded me with doubt as to whether I was not rash in taking the vow perilous of the monastic life, without consulting parents or friends, when Scripture bids us 'do all things with counsel.' Diabolic illusion, as if sympathizing and counselling with me, brought these and like thoughts. When, the grace of God resisting him, the Tempter failed to have his way with me here, he tried to make me despair because of my many sins. 'Do you think,' said he, 'that such a wretch can expect mercy from God the Judge, when it is written, Scarcely shall a righteous man be saved?' So he overwhelmed me, till I could do nothing but weep, and tears were my
- ↑ Cf. Endres, "Othloh's von St. Emmeram Verhältnis zu den freien Kunsten," Philos. Jahrbuch, 1904.
