Saint Benedict of Nursia (480–547)

The patriarch of Western monks

Before Benedict, monasticism already existed: it was born in the East, in the deserts of Egypt and Syria, with Saint Anthony, Saint Pachomius and the Desert Fathers. But in the West it remained scattered, unstable, sometimes fanciful: isolated hermits, communities with no common rule, extreme austerities or laxity. Benedict’s genius was not to invent monastic life, but to give it a lasting, balanced and transmissible form.^[5][6]

His Rule made him, for posterity, the patriarch of Western monasticism. Throughout the early Middle Ages it gradually supplanted the other rules, until it became almost universal in the West. From this single source came countless branches — Cluny, Cîteaux and Saint Bernard, La Trappe, the modern congregations — all daughters of the same Rule. Few men, starting from so short a text, have exercised so vast and so lasting an influence.

A life known from a single book

It must be said at the outset, in historical honesty: Benedict’s life is known to us only from a single ancient source, Book II of the Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, pope, written about 593–594, roughly half a century after the saint’s death. Benedict himself left no autobiography; his Rule, his only other certain writing, is almost silent about his own person.^[7]

Gregory does not claim to write as a historian in the modern sense. He says he holds his information from four disciples who had known Benedict: Constantius, his successor as abbot of Monte Cassino, Honoratus, still abbot of Subiaco in Gregory’s time, Valentinian and Simplicius.^[8] His aim is edifying: to show that holiness and miracles have not vanished from an Italy ravaged by wars and invasions. The narrative thus mingles facts and wonders in a literary genre — hagiography — which must be read for what it is: not a report, but the spiritual portrait of a man of God, whose historical setting (the places, the Goths, the ruin of Rome) is itself perfectly real.

The child of Nursia and the student at Rome

Benedict was born about 480 at Nursia (today Norcia), a small mountain town of the Apennines, in Umbria, into a family of notables. Tradition, fixed by the liturgy, gives him a twin sister, Scholastica, likewise consecrated to God from childhood, who will play a decisive role at the end of his life.^[9][10]

The Italy in which he grew up is a collapsing world. The Western Roman Empire ended in 476; barbarian kingdoms fight over the peninsula; Rome, once mistress of the world, is now no more than a half-ruined city, soon besieged and retaken in the course of the Gothic wars. It is to this city that the adolescent Benedict is sent to pursue his studies of letters.^[11]

Flight from the world

At Rome, the young man discovers the moral dissipation of his fellow students and is horrified by it. Gregory sums up his decision in a formula that has remained famous: Benedict, “learnedly ignorant and wisely unlearned” (scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus), renounces his studies and the world to seek only God. He leaves Rome about the year 500, abandoning his father’s house and patrimony.^[12]

“As a fully credible explanation, Gregory mentions that the young Benedict was disgusted by the lifestyle of many of his fellow students, who lived dissolutely, and that he did not want to fall into the same errors. He wanted to please God alone.” — Benedict XVI, general audience on Saint Benedict of Nursia, 9 April 2008^[13]

He stops first at Enfide (Affile), where a first miracle — a broken sieve mended by his prayer — draws a fame upon him which he flees at once. For Benedict seeks neither crowds nor wonders: he wants solitude with God. He plunges into the wild mountains, toward a desert place called Subiaco (Sublacus), some fifty kilometres east of Rome.^[14][15]

Three years in the cave

At Subiaco, Benedict meets a monk named Romanus, who gives him the monastic habit and keeps the secret of his retreat. The young hermit settles in a narrow cave, on the cliffside above the lake formed by the dams of Nero’s villa — the cave tradition will call the Sacro Speco, the “holy cave”. He remains there three years, unknown to men.^[16]

Romanus, whose monastery stands higher up, lowers bread to him by a rope down the rock, with a little bell to warn him. Benedict leads there a life of prayer, fasting and combat. Gregory reports the most famous of his temptations: assailed by the obsessive memory of a woman, the saint strips himself and rolls in a thicket of nettles and brambles until he quenches, by the pain of the body, the fire of the flesh. He will never be troubled by it again.^[17]

“That is why we are going to found a school for the service of the Lord. In organizing it we hope to establish nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.” — Saint Benedict, Rule, Prologue, 45–46^[18]

These three hidden years are the foundation of all the rest. The man who comes out of them is no longer a fugitive: he is a spiritual master, formed by solitude, whom others will come to seek.

The poisoned abbot of Vicovaro

Benedict’s fame at last pierces the secret. On the death of their abbot, the monks of a neighbouring monastery — tradition places the episode at Vicovaro — come to beg him to govern them. Benedict first refuses, warning them that his way of life will not accord with their relaxed habits. They insist; he yields.^[19][20]

He had seen rightly. Weary of his discipline, some monks decide to poison him and present him with a cup of wine laced with poison. Benedict, as was his custom, makes over the cup the sign of the cross to bless it: at once, the glass shatters into pieces, “as if a stone had been thrown at it,” says Gregory. The saint understands, rises without anger, and returns to his beloved solitude of the cave.^[21] From this episode come Benedict’s iconographic attribute — a broken cup from which a serpent escapes — and his patronage against poison.

The twelve monasteries of Subiaco

Back at Subiaco, Benedict nevertheless no longer remains alone: disciples flock to him. Rather than building one single great community, he invents an original and already mature organization: he founds twelve monasteries of twelve monks each, placed under abbots whom he appoints, and keeps with himself, in a thirteenth, the youngest or most promising whom he forms himself.^[22][23]

Among them, two names have crossed the centuries: Maurus and Placid, entrusted as children by their Roman patrician families. Gregory relates that, Placid having fallen into the lake and been carried away by the current, Benedict sent Maurus to rescue him; and Maurus, running at the order of his spiritual father, walked upon the waters without noticing it, and brought the child back by the hair. Each of the two, Gregory adds with delicacy, attributed the miracle to the obedience and authority of the other, in a fine humility.^[24]

The jealousy of the priest Florentius

Success attracts hatred. A priest of the neighbourhood, Florentius, jealous of Benedict’s radiance, seeks to destroy him. He first sends him a poisoned loaf as a token of friendship: Benedict, inwardly warned, has it thrown away, and a raven carries it far off at his command.^[25] Florentius then tries to corrupt his monks. Rather than be a cause of scandal and strife, Benedict makes a decision of great peace: he leaves, yielding the place to envy rather than confronting it, and goes to seek a new place for his work.^[26][27] Thus Providence leads him to Monte Cassino.

The ascent to the summit (about 529)

About 529, Benedict leaves Subiaco with a few disciples and reaches, halfway between Rome and Naples, a high hill overlooking the town of Cassino: Monte Cassino (Mons Casinus). There he will found the abbey destined to become the heart of Western monasticism, and the place where he will compose his Rule and end his life.^[28][29]

The overturned temple of Apollo

At the summit of Monte Cassino there still stood, in the full Christian sixth century, an ancient pagan sanctuary: a sacred wood and a temple of Apollo where the peasants of the surroundings still offered sacrifices. Benedict sees in it the very ground of his combat. He casts down the idol, overturns the altar, cuts down the sacred wood, and converts the people. On the ruins of the temple he raises two oratories, dedicated to Saint Martin and to Saint John the Baptist.^[30][31]

Gregory reads the episode as a spiritual battle: the devil, dispossessed of his place, appears to Benedict, insults him, sets fire to the kitchen, makes a wall collapse upon a young monk — whom Benedict raises from the dead. The mountain of Apollo thus becomes a citadel of prayer, and the symbol of the Gospel’s victory over the old rural paganism that still survived.

Radiance and the gift of discernment

At Monte Cassino, Benedict attains his full stature as a spiritual father. Gregory multiplies accounts of his discernment of hearts: he reads the monks’ thoughts, unmasks lies, discerns faults and ruses from afar. He also radiates charity: during a famine, he has distributed to the last loaf of the monastery, and the next day two hundred bushels of flour are found at the door, given by an unknown hand.^[32]

This double reputation — wisdom and holiness — draws to Monte Cassino the poor as well as the powerful, peasants as well as bishops, and even the king of the Goths. But the great fruit of these years is not a miracle: it is a book.

A code of life, not a treatise

It is at Monte Cassino, in the last years of his life, that Benedict writes the Rule (Regula) that will bear his name. It is not a treatise of theology nor a manual of extraordinary asceticism: it is a code of common life, of about seventy-three short chapters, which concretely organizes a monastery’s day — prayer, work, meals, sleep, hospitality, faults and their correction, the choice of the abbot.^[33][34]

Scholarship has shown that Benedict drew largely on an earlier rule, the Rule of the Master (Regula Magistri), as well as on the tradition of Cassian and the Desert Fathers and of Saint Basil. But he recast everything with a sobriety, a measure and a realism that make the text’s originality. Where other rules crush, his breathes: Gregory praises it for its “discretion” and the “clarity of its language.”^[35]

“A school for the service of the Lord”

The whole Rule opens with one word and closes upon one aim. The word is the very first of all: “Listen” (Ausculta). The Prologue begins thus: “Listen, my son, to the precepts of the master, and incline the ear of your heart.”^[36] And the aim is to form, with nothing crushing, disciples of Christ:

“We are going to found a school for the service of the Lord. In organizing it we hope to establish nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.” — Saint Benedict, Rule, Prologue, 45–46^[37]

The Benedictine monastery is thus a school — not a place of exploits, but a patient, communal apprenticeship of the Christian life, until the heart acts, says Benedict, “no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ.”^[38]

Ora et labora: prayer and work

The motto that best sums up the Benedictine spirit — “Ora et labora,” “pray and work” — is not a literal sentence of the Rule, but it faithfully condenses its balance. Two principles indeed structure the monk’s day.

On the one hand, nothing comes before liturgical prayer, the Opus Dei, the “Work of God” — that is, the celebration of the hours of the office in the oratory: “nothing is to be preferred to the divine office,” writes Benedict.^[39] On the other, the monk must work with his hands, for idleness is dangerous to the soul:

“Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore the brothers should be occupied, at certain hours, in manual labour, and at other fixed hours in sacred reading.” — Saint Benedict, Rule, 48, 1^[40]

From this balance between prayer, manual work and sacred reading (lectio divina) a civilization was born: Benedictine monks cleared the forests of Europe, drained the marshes, copied and saved the manuscripts of antiquity, kept schools and hospitals. On this radiance, see Benedictine monasticism.

Hospitality: receiving every guest as Christ

One of the most famous chapters of the Rule makes the monastery an open house. Benedict commands that every visitor — poor man, stranger, pilgrim — be received as if he were Christ in person:

“Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.’” — Saint Benedict, Rule, 53, 1^[41]

This sacred hospitality, in which the abbot himself washes the feet of those who arrive, shaped for centuries the Christian idea of welcome. It speaks the heart of Benedictine spirituality: seeking and serving Christ in one’s neighbour, and first of all in the poorest.

Discretion, stability, obedience

The distinctive genius of the Rule is contained in one word: discretion (discretio), right measure. Benedict asks that everything be done “with measure, for the sake of the weak,”^[42] that the abbot adapt his demands to each one, that neither fasts nor vigils be imposed beyond one’s strength. It is this human balance that made the Rule universal.

It also introduces a decisive novelty: three commitments which the monk promises on the day of his profession — stability (remaining all his life in the same monastery), conversion of manners (conversatio morum, the permanent conversion of the heart) and obedience.^[43] Stability above all is a revolution: against the wandering of vagabond monks, Benedict roots monastic life in a community and a place, like a family.

Preferring nothing to Christ

Benedict’s whole spiritual doctrine can be gathered into a single formula, which returns like a refrain in the Rule: preferring nothing to Christ. He writes it among the “instruments of good works” — “Prefer nothing to the love of Christ”^[51] — and he makes it the last word of the chapter on good zeal, just before the conclusion of the whole book:

“Let them prefer absolutely nothing to Christ: may he deign to bring us all together to everlasting life.” — Saint Benedict, Rule, 72, 11–12^[52]

This absolute Christocentrism gives meaning to all the rest: obedience, silence, work, the office are not ends, but paths to seek God (quaerere Deum) and to render Him the whole man.

The twelve steps of humility

The summit of the Rule’s spiritual teaching is the long chapter 7, on humility. Benedict takes up the image of the ladder seen in a dream by Jacob and describes twelve steps by which the soul rises by lowering itself — from the fear of God to the humility that permeates all conduct, inward and outward. The end of this ascent is not crushing, but the freedom of love:

“Having climbed all these steps of humility, the monk will soon arrive at that love of God which, being perfect, casts out fear; and all that he first observed not without apprehension, he will begin to keep without any trouble, as naturally, by habit, no longer out of fear of hell but out of love for Christ.” — Saint Benedict, Rule, 7, 67–69^[53]

This spiritual psychology, of remarkable finesse, nourished the whole Western tradition of prayer and the interior life. On its development, see Benedictine spirituality.

Pax: Benedictine peace

Beside Ora et labora, the other watchword tradition has inscribed on abbey pediments is Pax, “peace”. It is not a mere tranquillity, but the order of charity: a community in which each one, following chapter 72, “honours the other with deference,” bears with his infirmities, obeys him “eagerly,” and “seeks not what is useful to himself, but what is useful to the other.”^[54] Benedictine peace is the visible fruit of humility and love of Christ lived together.

Totila, king of the Goths

One of the most striking narratives of the Dialogues stages Totila, the formidable king of the Goths, who wished to test Benedict’s gift of prophecy. He sent to Monte Cassino one of his officers clothed in the royal insignia, in his place. Benedict, without hesitation, unmasked the ruse: “My son, take off what you are wearing; it is not yours.” Confounded, Totila came himself to prostrate himself before the saint.^[55][56]

Benedict gravely reproached him for his cruelties and foretold his future: “You do much evil, you have done much; at last put an end to your iniquity. You will enter Rome, you will cross the sea, you will reign nine years, and in the tenth year you will die.” History confirmed the prophecy: Totila took Rome in 546, reigned until 552, and died that year at the battle of Taginae.^[57] From this meeting, says Gregory, the king showed himself less cruel.

The last meeting with Saint Scholastica

His sister Scholastica, vowed to God from childhood, lived not far from Monte Cassino at the head of a community of women. Once a year, she came to see her brother, who came down to meet her in a house at the foot of the mountain. At their last meeting, Scholastica, as if sensing her end, begged Benedict to stay all night to speak of the joys of Heaven. The saint refused: his Rule forbade him to sleep away from the monastery.^[58]

Then Scholastica bowed her head upon her joined hands and prayed; and at once burst forth a storm so violent — lightning, thunder, torrential rain — that Benedict could not leave. “May God forgive you, sister! What have you done?” he said to her. And she, gently: “I asked you, and you would not listen to me; I asked my God, and he listened to me.” Gregory concludes with a magnificent word: “she could do more because she loved more” (plus potuit quae amplius amavit).^[59]

They spent the night speaking of the things of Heaven. Three days later, from his cell, Benedict saw his sister’s soul ascend to Heaven in the form of a dove. He had her body carried to the tomb he had prepared for himself, “so that death might not separate the bodies of those whose souls had always been united in God.”^[60]

The vision of the world in a ray of light

Shortly before his own death, Gregory reports a vision in which Benedict’s whole spirituality seems gathered. One night as he prayed at his window, the saint suddenly saw a light dispelling the darkness, “brighter than the day,” and, in this ray, the whole world gathered as under a single ray of sun. Gregory gives the key: “To the soul that sees the Creator, every creature is narrow” — for whoever contemplates God, the whole universe holds within a gaze.^[61]

Death standing in the oratory (21 March 547)

Benedict knew in advance the day of his death and announced it to his disciples. Six days before, he had his tomb opened. Seized with fever, he had himself carried to the oratory, there received the Body and Blood of the Lord as viaticum, then, upheld by the hands of his brothers, standing, his hands raised toward heaven, he gave up his soul in the midst of a prayer.^[62][63] It was, according to tradition, 21 March 547.

Two of his monks, one at Monte Cassino, the other far away, had at the same instant the same vision: a path laid with carpets and lit by countless lamps rose from the saint’s cell toward the east, up to Heaven; and a radiant man told them it was the way by which “Benedict, the beloved of the Lord, ascended to Heaven.”^[64] He was buried, as he had wished, in the same tomb as Scholastica.

A cult from time immemorial, without a canonization trial

Benedict belongs to the saints of the early centuries: he was never the object of a canonization trial in the modern sense — in his time, formal trials did not yet exist. His title of saint comes to him from an immemorial cult: venerated by his monks from his death, recounted by a pope, father of a Rule that gradually became universal in the West, he imposed himself upon the whole Church without any decree having needed to proclaim him. His liturgical memory, formerly fixed on 21 March, the day of his death, is celebrated today on 11 July.^[74][75]

Patron of Europe

The cult of Benedict spread with his Rule, as Europe covered itself with Benedictine abbeys. At Monte Cassino, his tomb became one of the great pilgrimage places of Christendom — four times destroyed (by the Lombards, the Saracens, an earthquake, then the bombings of 1944), four times raised again.

It was precisely in coming to reconsecrate the basilica of Monte Cassino, rebuilt after the war, that Pope Paul VI, by the apostolic brief Pacis nuntius of 24 October 1964, proclaimed Saint Benedict principal patron of Europe. In it the pope hails him as a “messenger of peace, artisan of unity, master of civilization, and above all herald of the faith of Christ and initiator of monastic life in the West.”^[76] The choice expressed a conviction: Christian Europe was, in part, built in the shadow of Benedictine bell towers. Saint Gregory the Great, himself a monk, was one of the great disseminators of his memory and his Rule.

The medal and cross of Saint Benedict

Popular piety long invoked Benedict as a powerful protector against evil. Hence the famous medal of Saint Benedict, stamped with a cross and a series of Latin initials forming invocations and an abbreviated exorcism — including the word PAX (“peace”) and the formula “Vade retro Satana” (“Begone, Satan!”). Blessed according to its own rite, it is one of the most widespread sacramentals of the Latin Church, a sign of the faithful’s trust in the saint’s intercession against temptation and poison.

Today, thousands of monks and nuns across the world still live according to his Rule, fifteen centuries after he wrote it. His feast is celebrated on 11 July (and on 21 March, the day of his death, in monastic tradition). From Nursia to Monte Cassino, from a thicket of brambles to a throne of light, Benedict’s life remains the model of a holiness that is hidden, balanced and fruitful.

Fifteen centuries later, Saint Benedict remains strikingly relevant. He reminds us first that nothing lasting is built without roots. In an age of instability, flight and dispersion — his as well as ours — he made stability, silence and fidelity to a place the very ground of meeting God. His Rule exalts no exploit: it teaches us to seek God in the ordinariness of a common life.

He also reminds us of the value of work and measure. Against contempt for manual labour as against activism without prayer, Benedict held together the ora and the labora, contemplation and the work of the hands, in a human balance that shaped a civilization. His discretion — imposing nothing beyond one’s strength, adapting to each one — remains a lesson of wisdom for every art of governing and educating.

“Prefer nothing to the love of Christ.” — This saying, placed by Benedict among the tools of good, sums up his whole life: a man who, having left everything at Rome, sought nothing more than Christ, and who, by a Rule of a few pages, taught entire peoples the way of peace.

• Benedictine monasticism — the order and spiritual family born of his Rule, from Cluny to Cîteaux.
• Benedictine spirituality — ora et labora, lectio divina, humility and stability, developed in their own right.
• The sanctuary of Subiaco — the cave of the Sacro Speco where Benedict was converted, now a major pilgrimage place.
• Saint Gregory the Great — the pope-monk, Benedict’s biographer in Book II of the Dialogues.
• The Desert Fathers — the Eastern source of monasticism which Benedict inherits and adapts to the West.
• Saint Columbanus — the great Irish monastic founder, a contemporary whose rule gradually gave way to Benedict’s.
• Saint Bernard of Clairvaux — the most illustrious Cistercian heir of the Benedictine tradition.