Sanctuary of Einsiedeln

The site of the "dark forest"

The very name of the place tells its origin: Einsiedeln means in German "the hermitages", "the hermit's place". Before the abbey, there was nothing there but a high-altitude forest, the Finstrer Wald ("dark forest"), on the slope overlooking Lake Sihl, far from the roads.^[3] It was this solitude that drew, in the 9th century, a monk seeking God far from the world.

Today the shrine stands at about 900 metres of altitude, in a Prealpine hollow of the canton of Schwyz, one of the three founding cantons of the Swiss Confederation. The town of Einsiedeln grew up around the abbey, like so many monastic towns of central Europe: it was the monastery that made the village, not the other way round.

Saint Meinrad's hermitage (c. 828-861)

The first occupant of the site was Meinrad, a Benedictine monk trained at Reichenau Abbey on Lake Constance.^[4] Around 828, he left his community to live as a hermit on the slopes of Mount Etzel, then moved deeper into the forest, to the present site of the shrine. Tradition reports that he brought with him a statue of the Virgin given by Abbess Hildegarde of Zurich's Fraumunster — it is from this primitive Marian devotion that the place would later draw all its meaning.^[5]

Meinrad was murdered by two robbers on 21 January 861, who coveted the offerings left by visitors.^[6] His hermitage was not abandoned: other solitaries succeeded one another there, and the memory of the martyrdom fixed upon this corner of forest a reputation for holiness that never faded.

Meinrad's ravens, emblem of the place

The legend attached to the site tells that two ravens, which Meinrad had fed and tamed, pursued his murderers to Zurich, croaking above them, drawing attention and securing their arrest.^[7] Whether true or embellished, the story marked the place more durably than one might imagine: the two ravens became the heraldic emblem of the abbey. They are found today sculpted and gilded in the Baroque church, where a gilded clock flanked by two ravens, symbols of Meinrad, surmounts the pulpit.^[8] The place thus carries, even in its 18th-century decoration, the memory of its first hermit.

Benno, Eberhard and the Benedictine monastery

The hermitage became a true monastery at the beginning of the 10th century. Two figures brought about this transformation: Benno, a canon and then bishop who withdrew to the site, and above all Eberhard, former provost of the Strasbourg chapter, who organized the community and became its first abbot around 934.^[9] The monks adopted the Rule of Saint Benedict: Einsiedeln thus entered the great Benedictine family, to which it has belonged without interruption for almost eleven centuries.

The new abbey was quickly endowed and protected. As early as 965, the third abbot, Gregory, was raised to the dignity of prince of the Empire by Emperor Otto I — the first sign of the place this forest monastery would hold in Germanic Christendom.^[10]

The legend of the angelic consecration (948)

The founding story of the shrine is that of the Engelweihe, the "consecration by the angels". According to this tradition, when Bishop Conrad of Constance came, on 14 September 948, to consecrate the new chapel raised over Meinrad's hermitage, he discovered that the ceremony had already taken place: the previous night, Christ himself, surrounded by angels and the great Doctors of the Church, had consecrated the shrine.^[11] A heavenly voice is said to have interrupted the bishop just as he was about to begin the rite.

"Stop, brother: the chapel has been consecrated by God." — Words attributed to the angel by the legend of the Engelweihe, as reported by the Einsiedeln tradition^[12]

The house of Einsiedeln itself invites us to distinguish between the piety this story nourishes and its historical status: the legend of the miraculous consecration was not written down until around the middle of the 12th century, two centuries after the events, and must be read with a critical eye.^[13] Caution does not erase devotion: for centuries, 14 September has remained the great feast of the shrine, celebrated with an illumination of the church and monastery.^[14] Pope Leo VIII is said to have examined the account, and Pius VI confirmed the privilege of the feast in 1793.^[15]

A principality of the Empire

Einsiedeln's rank never ceased to grow. In 1274, Rudolf of Habsburg erected the abbey as an independent principality, endowed with its own temporal and spiritual jurisdiction.^[16] The Abbot of Einsiedeln was both religious superior and sovereign prince of a small state, a status he retained until the French Revolution. Ecclesiastically, the abbey answers directly to the Holy See: it is a territorial abbey (nullius dioecesis), exempt from all diocesan jurisdiction, an extremely rare situation that continues today.

Medieval pilgrimage and the Way of Saint James

From the Middle Ages, Einsiedeln was a major staging post on the pilgrimage routes of central Europe, and notably on one of the great itineraries leading to Santiago de Compostela.^[17] Pilgrims from Swabia, Alsace, Switzerland and northern Italy stopped before the Black Madonna before continuing to Galicia (see the shrine of Compostela). The city of Zurich organized an annual pilgrimage that is said to have gathered 1,500 to 1,800 people out of a population of five thousand — until the Protestant Reformation interrupted these processions in the summer of 1524.^[18]

This place in the Jacobean network makes Einsiedeln the Alpine cousin of other great pilgrimage shrines found elsewhere in the encyclopedia: the Black Madonna of Czestochowa in Poland, or the relic-shrines of Italy such as Manoppello and Monte Sant'Angelo.

Fires and reconstructions

The material history of the place is a long series of destructions and recoveries. The monastery was ravaged by fire several times over the centuries, each blaze carrying off ornaments, books and manuscripts.^[19] Each time, the community rebuilt. This resilience explains why the building visible today is not a frozen medieval monument, but a Baroque creation of the 18th century, raised on foundations a thousand years older — much like Manoppello, whose present appearance dates from a late reconstruction.

The revolutionary ordeal (1798-1803)

The gravest crisis of the shrine was the French Revolution and the invasion of Switzerland. In May 1798, French troops occupied Einsiedeln and plundered the abbey.^[20] But the monks had planned ahead: before the soldiers arrived, they had sheltered the Black Madonna. The statue was first hidden in the Alpthal valley, then buried on the Haggenegg, before being taken to the monastery of Saint Peter at Bludenz in the Austrian Vorarlberg and entrusted to the provostry of Saint Gerold.^[21]

The statue returned only after the pacification. Thanks to the Act of Mediation of 1803, which restored the abbey, the Black Madonna returned to Einsiedeln on 29 September 1803, after five years of exile.^[22] The shrine had almost disappeared; it was saved, and its most precious image was back in its chapel.

Caspar Moosbrugger, the monk-architect

The present church is the work of a lay brother of the monastery itself: Caspar Moosbrugger (1656-1723), a mason by training who became one of the great architects of the Vorarlberg Baroque.^[23] The reconstruction, decided by Abbot Maurus von Roll, began in 1704 and continued until 1735.^[24] Moosbrugger designed a grandiose ensemble linking the church, the great square and the conventual wings: one of the vastest Baroque complexes north of the Alps.

The building is immense: the church measures about 113 metres long, with a nave 41 metres wide and a dome rising to 37 metres.^[25] The great crescent-shaped square (the Klosterplatz) before it, enclosed by arcades, was designed to receive crowds of pilgrims and remains one of the finest monastic squares in Europe.

The Asam brothers and the decoration

The interior decoration was entrusted to the Asam brothers, the Bavarian masters of the late Baroque: Cosmas Damian Asam for the frescoes, Egid Quirin Asam for the stucco.^[26] Cosmas Damian Asam painted the vault frescoes of the pilgrimage church between 1723 and 1726; the whole — frescoes, gilded stucco, marble — ranks among the most accomplished works of the South German Baroque.^[27] The visitor entering is seized by the explosion of light, gold and colour, intended as a foretaste of Heaven.

The octagonal dome and the consecration of 1735

The summit of the decorative programme is the great octagonal dome above the entrance. Its fresco depicts precisely the founding scene of the place: Christ descending to consecrate the shrine, surrounded by the Evangelists and the saints — in other words the Engelweihe set in paint, just above the Chapel of Grace.^[28] The completed church was consecrated on 3 May 1735, under Abbot Nicholas Imfeld.^[29] The decoration thus unites architecture and legend: one enters the church through the very image of the miraculous consecration.

The Gnadenkapelle, heart of the shrine

At the centre of the church, and not in the choir, stands the true heart of the shrine: the Chapel of Grace, the Gnadenkapelle. It marks the supposed site of Meinrad's hermitage and of the chapel consecrated by the angels. The Baroque chapel having been destroyed in the Revolution, the present aedicule was rebuilt in a Neoclassical style between 1815 and 1817, in black and light marble.^[30] It is in this setting, placed like a reliquary in the middle of the nave, that the Black Madonna is venerated.

The statue: pearwood, 15th century

The statue itself is a pearwood sculpture about 119 centimetres high, dated to the 15th century — Meinrad's primitive statue having perished in one of the fires.^[31] It depicts the Virgin standing, carrying the Child Jesus. Following the custom of the great Marian shrines, it is usually clothed in a rich embroidered state mantle, whose wardrobe is renewed through the liturgical year, making it one of the most famous "dressed Virgins" of central Europe.

Why is the Virgin black?

The dark colour of the statue was not originally intended: the face and hands, at first painted in a light tone, gradually blackened under the soot of the countless candles burned before it.^[32] In 1803, on the return from exile, a restorer tried to give the statue back its primitive light complexion; but this new appearance displeased the pilgrims, who no longer recognized "their" Black Madonna. It was therefore decided to repaint in black the visible parts, to restore to the image the appearance under which it was loved.^[33][34] The choice was pastoral as much as aesthetic: the statue that returned in 1803 had to look like the one that had left in 1798.^[35]

Devotion to the Black Madonnas, far from being a curiosity, runs through all of Catholic Europe — from Czestochowa to many shrines of France and Spain. Einsiedeln is one of its most venerated centres north of the Alps.

The daily Salve Regina

Each day, at nightfall, the monks of Einsiedeln gather before the Chapel of Grace to sing the Salve Regina, the Marian antiphon par excellence.^[36] This daily prayer, unbroken for centuries, is the central liturgical gesture of the place: what pilgrims discover is not a museum, but a praying community.

"Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve." — The Salve Regina antiphon, sung each day before the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln^[37]

The fourteen-spout fountain

On the great square, before the church, stands the fountain of Our Lady (Frauenbrunnen), fed by the waters of Meinrad's spring.^[38] Tradition holds that the pilgrim drinks in turn from each of its fourteen spouts as he approaches the church, without knowing which one flows from the spring where, it is said, Christ drank during the angelic consecration.^[39] This popular gesture, still alive, roots devotion in a simple, concrete rite open to all.

The library and the archives

Einsiedeln is not only a shrine: it is one of the great centres of monastic culture in Switzerland. Its library, whose holdings go back to the 10th century, preserves about 230,000 printed volumes, nearly 1,230 manuscripts and more than 1,000 incunabula.^[40] Among the most precious pieces are medieval manuscripts from the mid-10th century, witnesses to the activity of the scriptorium from the abbey's earliest decades.^[41] The archives, for their part, preserve the written memory of more than a thousand years of monastic life.

The Great Theatre of the World

Since 1924, the abbey's great square has served as the stage, every few years, for the Great Theatre of the World (Das grosse Welttheater), an adaptation of the allegorical drama by Calderon de la Barca (1655).^[42] The initiative came from Abbot Ignatius Staub and a circle of scholars.^[43] From 1924 to 1992, Joseph von Eichendorff's translation was performed; since 2000, contemporary Swiss authors have offered new versions.^[44] Played in the open air before the Baroque facade, this popular spectacle makes the square itself a protagonist of the shrine.

The school and the community

The abbey is also home to a renowned school (Stiftsschule), heir to a long teaching tradition: today it welcomes around 400 pupils, supervised by some fifty teachers.^[45] The monastic community numbers, in recent years, about forty Benedictine monks, who provide liturgical prayer, pilgrim welcome, teaching and guardianship of the shrine.^[46] The place thus remains what it was from the beginning: a house of monks, organized around the Virgin.

Einsiedeln remains the foremost Marian shrine in Switzerland and one of the most frequented in central Europe. Estimates vary with the periods and methods of counting: older sources spoke of 150,000 to 200,000 pilgrims a year, while contemporary presentations mention up to a million visitors and pilgrims a year, including cultural tourism.^[47][48]

The influence of the place has also spread: in 1854, monks of Einsiedeln founded Saint Meinrad Abbey in Indiana, in the United States, the starting point of an American Benedictine congregation that already counted several monasteries by the beginning of the 20th century.^[49] From the dark forest of the 9th century to its foundations across the Atlantic, the shrine of the hermits has never ceased to hand on, with the Rule of Saint Benedict, devotion to Our Lady.

• The shrine of Compostela — Einsiedeln was a major staging post on the ways of Saint James.
• The shrine of Czestochowa — the other great Black Madonna of Catholic Europe.
• The shrine of Mount Carmel — another great Marian and monastic shrine.
• The shrine of Manoppello and Monte Sant'Angelo — Italian pilgrimage shrines rebuilt around a treasure.