In this outwardly stable life, Nicholas remained devoted to prayer—finding the divine in the fields and mountains around him, in private devotion, and at Mass—yet he felt an insistent call to a deeper spiritual life. Nicholas spent mornings indoors in silent prayer, studying “in that High School of the Holy Ghost,” as Heinrich von Gundelfingen, one of Nicholas’ first biographers, put it. Nicholas’ life is but one example of a larger pattern: A person withdraws from the world to seek God, receives divine wisdom, and this transcendent moral authority then speaks to crises in the broader society.