Wolfgang, who lived during the 10th century in an area of present-day Germany, had a double problem: he was very very smart and he was very very kind. It’s a horrible choice, really: be smart and be hated, or hide your talents and probably still be bullied.

When Wolfgang was still a student, a professor put before the class a most difficult passage of literature to see if anyone could possibly explain it anywhere near accurately. Each tried, but it was Wolfgang who “explained it with so much perspicuity and evidence” that all the students present were so dumbstruck that, after that, they began looking to Wolfgang for insight–rather than the instructor! So the professor began to persecute Wolfgang, to harass and bully him, to make him an object of hatred and ridicule. And gained converts from among the student body to his treatment of Wolfgang.

Because he was so kind-natured, Wolfgang took this mistreatment without returning or, likely, even deflecting this malevolence. The heartbreak that Wolfgang experienced is described by Butler (in quite a lengthy, single sentence):

But observing how easily petty jealousies, envy, resentments, vanity, and other dangerous passions prevailed among both masters and scholars, [Wolfgang] lamented to see those who professed themselves lovers of wisdom, so much strangers to it, and more addicted to the meanest and most ungenerous passions of the human mind than the most ignorant and boorish among the common people; so that perverting their very studies and science, they made them the means, not of virtue, but of sin, and the nourishment of their most dangerous passions, for want of studying to know and perfectly vanquish themselves, without which even the best food of the mind is converted into the worst poison.

So instead of turning his back on his love of scholarship, or abandoning the whole learning process and those involved in it, Wolfgang took over a school for children! He turned his attention to creating a love of learning and a community of caring among those who were youthful enough not have (yet) gravitate to “petty jealousies, envy, resentments, vanity, and other dangerous passions.” Wolfgang’s efforts were crowned with massive and noteworthy success!

After this, Wolfgang tried his hand in educating seminarians–those who had dedicated themselves to a base level of kindness (one hoped) in the first place. Here, too, Wolfgang proved well able to prevent the perversion of education into pettiness and “ungenerous passions.”

Born to be a learner and a teacher, Wolfgang proved himself not only a gifted educator but one who saw to it that the tools of learning were extended beyond the privileged, and encompassed those ignorant and poor that were so deeply looked down upon by so many of Wolfgang’s initial masters and peers.

A saint indeed!