On the eve of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, the great Augustinian preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara preached a sermon entitled “Arise, Arise, Christians!” urging Austrian Catholics to prepare for the coming battle.
Abraham a Sancta Clara, born Johann Ulrich Megerle in Kreenheinstetten near Meßkirch, Swabia, in 1644, as the eigth of ten children, was one of the most colorful and brilliant preachers of the Baroque era. His sermons are full of drastic and amusing images and word play, often he would break into rhyming verse in the middle of a sermon. His sermons are also quite long. According to the custom of the time they were generally preached outside of Mass, and could last over an hour.
In 1677 Abraham a Sancta Clara was appointed preacher to the imperial court of Vienna. But during the Turkish war itself he was stationed in Graz in Southern Austria. “Arise, Arise, Christians” was published as a pamphlet and distributed in Vienna before the Turks arrived.
We present some extracts below in a Rorate translation.
Arise, Arise, Christians
An Encouragement to Take up Arms Against the Turkish Blood-Leeches
Together with an Addition on Many Glorious Victories Against the Ottomans, Our Ancestral Enemies
And a Moral Teaching on and Praise of Martial Courage
by Brother Abraham a Sancta Clara, Augustinian and Court Preacher
“Cast out the wicked boy! Out of doors with him!” they said when great Abraham drove his prideful and evil son Ismael out of his house. Perhaps the the great and ispired patriarch foreknew what a bitter and poisonous fruit would grow from the Ismaelite root. For in truth: of the race of Ismael came that accursed brood of vipers Mohammed, born in the year of our Lord 592 on the 21st of September. His father was Abdullah, a violent socerer and governor. The mother of this hellish pest was a Jewess named Aminah, who was also an Arab [Arabin], that is, a raven [Rabin], on account of her godless life…
After the death of the rich man [for whom Mohammed labored], a death that Mohammed probably brought about by poisoning, he was able through seductive arts and sorcery to win the heart of the widow, whom he at last married…
After the death of this his Khadija, he had her great fortune in his hands… With such funds he quickly won a great many friends. For night-birds [Nachtvögel] and might-birds [Machtvögel] love to sing in the full moon… Among such friends the first was the vow-breaking monk Sergius, who, having fled Constantinople, lived in Arabia, spreading the errors of Nestorius with great malice. Likewise a certain John, an Arian. And also a certain spiteful and crafty Jew and Talmudist. These three villains he had as teachers, and he cooked from their various faiths a mixed broth. That he might more easily win adherents, he mixed some articles of the Christian faith into this broth, and thus composed his accursed Koran, all in verses. It is well known what a fantastical fiction and groundless concatenation of lies it is…
This Mohammed was such a stinking billy-goat that he married 40 wives, and that not being enough he also godlessly invented a number of divine privileges and liberties according to which many other women were forced to submit to his profligacy.
Among the other articles of his law he also mixed some which commanded his followers to rob despoil persons of others faiths, and to take their cities and countries…
It is not so wonderful that that little cloud that great Elias saw rising above the sea was able to spread out so much that it covered the whole earth with rain. Nor is it so wonderful that a little mustard seed, according to the Gospel, can grow into a great tree in which the birds of the air make their nests. Nor that the famous river Danube, which is so small at its source in Donaueschingen in the Principality of Fürstenberg that little children can wade across it… but which gains so much in volume as it passes through other lands that at last it is little less than a sea… All these things are not so wonderful as the terrible rise of the Turkish power, which begann in a haphazard gang of rascals and robbers, but which grew in time so that now the whole of Christendom trembles before it.
David cut off a tiny piece of Saul's royal cloak, at which the king was most indignant. How much more should we be indignant that the Turkish blood leech has torn off so great a piece of the garment of Christ, that is the Christian Church, with his sharp scimitar? …
With tears of blood we should bewail that the Holy Land— the fatherland of of the divine son (according to his human nature), the fatherland of the Mother of God, the fatherland of his holy Apostles, and of so many saints— still languishes in the claws of the Mohammedan enemy. The ground which the Savior Jesus consecrated with bleeding footsteps; the forrest in which the wood of the cross grew; the river in which our Lord was baptized; the mountain on which God's son saved us from the valley of tears; the cities and towns in which the divine mouth preached; the fields in the incarnate God worked so many miracles; the sea whose raging waves He quieted; the place in which His holy body was burried— in a word, that land so beloved by the Father, so consecrated by the Son, so hallowed by the Holy Ghost, is now for so many centuries been out of Christian hands, under the dominion of human adventurers, Mohammedan monsters, Turkish cancer…
Constantinopel, an earthy paradies, a glorious Queen of the East, an ornament of the earth, a jewel of the Christian Church, a city whose construction God blessed with miracles. This imperial residence, this home of many saints, this monstrance of so many sanctuaries, after flourishing for a thousand and seventy years, was (alas!) swallowed in the year 1452 by the insatiable Turkish maw! … Oh terrible fall! Constantinopel, once a bride of Christ, now the miserable whore of Mohammed!…
Arise! Arise, therefore, Christians! The Mohammedan scimitar is at the door!
What is the Turk? You Christians will certainly answer: he is an imitation Antichrist, a vain slave of his belly, an insatiable tiger, an incarnate Satan, an damned marauder, a cruel and ravenous beast, a murderous hawk, a venomous oriental dragon, an unchained hell-hound, a filthy Epicurean etc. It is true, my dear Christians, these epithets he well deserves! But one title has escaped your memory. Namely, the one that St Thomas of Villanova gave him. Once he was preaching with Apostolic zeal in the presence of Charles V, Roman emperor and Austrian Hannibal, and the other Christian princes who were preparing for battle against the Turks. With holy gravity he said: “What use is it to gather the whole army together if we do not uproot our sins? Do we not know that the Turk and the Turkish wars are the punishment of God?”…
Whosoever pages through the Holy Scriptures will see that Almighty God always acts in the same way towards us men. He shows us mildness and wildness, dagger [Degen] and blessing [Segen], according to our actions. When we follow His holy commandments and praise and glorify His holy name, He pours out a golden flood of peace on us, with longed for prosperity, and blessings that satiate the heart. But when we live in unbridled license, increasing daily in sin and vice, and offend His divine majesty; then He shows us an iron fist, cruel wars, and enemy invasions…
When the Lord was on Mount Tabor with the three Apostles, and showed them a sample of His glory, Peter was so overcome by the splendor that he called out with much joy and little thought: “Lord, how pleasant this is! Let us make three tabernacles!” But at this joyful cry everything disappeared, and as Peter thought he was standing in Heaven, suddenly he stood on the barren mountain. The cause of this sudden deprivation was, as clever scribes have taught us, that Christ the Lord wanted to reprimand Peter for usurping the craft of carpenters, to whom it belongs to construct such booths. As though the Blessed Lord wished to tell us that each should remain what he is. In the same way, when the Lord commanded Peter to reach into the mouth of a fish to find a piece of gold to pay the tax, we should see that had Peter been a butcher he would have been told to reach into the mouth of calf, or had he been a mason into a crack in a wall… but since Peter was a fisherman he was commanded to reach into a fish. Thus someone might scold me and object that I should remain what I am and concern myself with canons and not with cannons; with chanting psalms (Psalmieren) and not with armaments (Armieren), an that I have nothing to do with the armory (Zeughaus) but rather with oratory (Gotteshaus). It is true that I know little of halberds, and have no experience of battle. And yet I know the greatest of the causes of the rise Turkish power and decline of Christendom: our lack of unity and our divided souls… We Christians must be united! …
Unite Christian souls! Calculate the shame that Mohammedan pride has done to Christendom! Restore again to Christ the glories that the accursed Mohammed has taken; break the iron chains and dark dungeons in which so many Christians languish! …
And first of all you, Oh German Christendom of noble fame! Renew your famous zeal and strength! Let the ancestral Ottoman foe feel once again your immortal courage. Unite your power with the Austrian weapons, which are devoted not (as some foolishly dream) to vainglorious increase of power, but to the glory of God alone, and the welfare of the Holy Roman Empire…
Most beloved Christians, do you not blush red with shame at the memory of so much Christian blood [shed by the Turks]? Do you not hear how that blood cries from the earth for vengeance?…
Arise then Christians! Avenge the blood of your brothers! To you is said in truth what was said by lying tongues to the patriarch Jacob: Bestia devoravit Josephum: Joseph has been slain by a wild beast. Beloved Christians, so many hundreds of thousands of your brothers and fellow Christians have been slain by a wicked and wild beast, by the blood-lusting Ottoman monster! So do not hesitate to avenge this blood and to tear out the teeth of this monster. Aris! Arise!
