Venerable Benedict of Nursia

Saint Benedict of Nursia

The most holy and venerable father of Western monasticism, Saint Benedict, father of the Benedictine Order to whom most of the Western (and specifically English and German) saints I’ve been highlighting these last five months have belonged – and the spiritual grandfather, through the monastic Saints Gregory Dialogos and Augustine of Canterbury, of English Christianity as such. He also should be, as I have explained a bit before, something of a folk-hero for the Christian left: not only for his rejection of private property, but also for his insistence that monks subordinate their own will to the service of Christ, particularly to His image in the person of the poor, the orphan, the widow and the traveller.

Saint Benedict was born in Nursia (modern Norcia), and was a member of one of the old families there, and thus likely of Sabine heritage, who had been members of the Roman polity – both Republic and Empire – since its earliest days. According to the Dialogues of Pope Saint Gregory, he had a sister, Saint Scholastica, an infant oblate to the monastic life who is commemorated on the tenth of February; Saint Bede puts forward a tradition that she was his twin sister. The two holy siblings, Benedict and Scholastica, would meet once every year to converse on spiritual topics, to pray and to study together. In her old age, and knowing her death was nigh, when the day came Saint Scholastica asked her brother to stay and pray with her a little while longer than usual. Benedict wanted at first to return to his abbey, but Scholastica prayed to God with all her heart, and a great storm arose with such terrible thunder and lightning that Benedict could not leave their meeting-place, and thus the two siblings stayed together and conversed through the night. Saint Gregory relates this story to show the sister’s great love for her brother and the power of her humble prayers to God.

Saint Benedict spent his youth in Rome, a pupil among the great sæcular tutors in that city, at the behest of his parents. However, he soon saw that many who gained a little of the sæcular knowledge fell into ‘dissolute and lewd life’. Saint Gregory implies that it was the manners of the scions of the Roman élite among whom he lived – their greed, their lust, their desire to dominate others, their willingness to live lives of comfort and security while others starved – that utterly galled him. From them, he ‘drew back his foot’, as Saint Gregory relates, and sought out an entirely different way of life. The first miracle he performed was for his governess, who had broken a sieve for cleaning grain, restoring it by prayer to its whole state. When he had the chance, however, Saint Benedict fled from his governess and sought out a desert place, which he found in a grotto in Subiaco. There, he made the acquaintance of a hermit named Romanos, who kindly provided him with bread from his hermitage.

The early years of Benedict’s eremitical days were marked by temptation and ascetical heights: at one point he threw himself in a briar-patch to avoid the temptations of his own lust. He gathered several monks around him, and was not loath to beat them with a switch if they were found idle in their prayers. In his early rule, several disgruntled monks attempted to poison him, but by making the sign of the cross from afar off he shattered the vessel from which he was supposed to drink the atter, and bade the evil monks to reform themselves and seek another master. Later, an envious competitor – a false monk and vagrant named Florentius, tried to poison Saint Benedict with a tainted loaf of bread; this, however, was borne off by a crow which visited Saint Benedict and who ate bread from his hands. When the bread had been taken away, Saint Benedict rewarded the loyal bird with a good loaf. Yet Benedict did not return evil for evil. When he received news later that Florentius had been killed in an accident, Saint Benedict not only wept for him, but also rebuked a monk who had rejoiced at the news.

Saint Benedict had not only renounced the pleasures of the flesh and the false securities of mammon, but also the political divisions of late Rome. He made no distinction among the brothers between those who had been citizens and those who had been slaves. He also made no distinction from what race or country they came. Far from being anti-Gothic, as many Roman patricians were in those days, he welcomed Goths among his monastic community; one wonder he worked was to restore the head of a bill-hook, which a Gothic brother had been using to prune the trees when it broke and fell into a deep lake. Another miracle he worked was to restore to life a certain oblate from a noble family, who had been crushed to death by a wall that had fallen upon him as he was building it.

Saint Benedict was given, as later saints such as Saint John of Kronstadt would be given, the gifts of spiritual insight and foresight. He could tell at a glance when the brethren had eaten outside of the monastery, made improper visits outside, or even entertained proud or delusional thoughts. At another time, a monk hid a wooden flagon of wine for himself in the bushes outside; before he went back to take it, Saint Benedict told him to be wary of what may have gotten inside. As it turned out, an asp had gotten into the flagon and drunk the wine. And at yet another time, Saint Benedict foresaw that one of the abbeys he had built would one day fall to the Langobards. When he was brought before Totila King of the Ostrogoths, who had heard of this gift of Saint Benedict’s, the King had exchanged robes with one of his heretogs, Riggo, in order to fool the saint. However, Benedict was able to see at once that Riggo who greeted him was a false Totila. When Totila himself came to greet Benedict, the Gothic warlord feared greatly; Benedict prophesied to him the things which would befall him, including the loss of his kingdom and his death, and entreated him to repent of his former wickedness. Saint Gregory does not tell us whether Totila truly mended, but he did say that the Gothic king ‘from that time forward was nothing so cruel as before he had been’.

Saint Benedict became renowned from great distances for the wonders that he worked: he cured lepers, raised a child from the dead, and whenever wealth came into his hands, he did not keep it for himself but used it to aid the poor. Despite the severities of his early life, his popularity grew when word of the miracles he worked became known. Just as God promised to Abraham a great nation of sons, so too did God provide to Saint Benedict a great nation of spiritual sons, which had to be divided – like the sons of Jacob formed twelve tribes – into twelve separate monasteries, with twelve monks each. In each of the monasteries he appointed an abbot to rule; however, he himself undertook the instruction only of the youngest novices. At this point Saint Benedict undertook to write his famous Rule, which was composed based on his own study of the Desert Fathers and particularly on the model of Abba Cassian. Saint Gregory describes the Rule as being not marked for its ascetical severity, but instead ‘excellent for discretion and eloquent for the style’.

The Rule of Saint Benedict has been the great model and the golden mean, the standard by which all of Roman Catholic and Anglican monastic spirituality has been measured. Again, the emphasis in the Rule is not so much upon severities and mortifications of the flesh, as it is upon strict obedience to the abbot and the mortification of the will, the latter of which Benedict found more dangerous, particularly in older monks, than the flesh. It cannot be emphasised enough, that the great danger Benedict saw in sæcular Roman life was neither its sexual perversion nor its cultural decadence. No, to his mind these were only symptoms of a greater root evil: the will to dominate others, the temptation to set oneself up as one’s own ‘little god’, which even after its Christianisation continued to afflict the spiritual life of Rome. The ‘lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ was what Benedict aimed to staunch and destroy in the lives of his spiritual children. And to this end, the Rule that Saint Benedict laid down is truly communistic in its total renunciation of property and in its insistence on the equality of brothers under complete subjection to the abbot; any distinctions that there are among the brothers, are not distinctions of rank but rather the fruits of spiritual cultivation and willingness to serve.

To this truly-peerless starets of the West, to this great and shining spiritual grandfather and Abraham to the Western churches and to the church in England especially, we truly owe a great debt of gratitude. And in the modern day especially, we need to take up the spirit of Saint Benedict. Not in an attitude of fear, unless that be the holy fear of God, and certainly not in an attitude of withdrawal; but instead in an attitude of service, bearing in mind particularly how Benedict treated foreigners and the poor in an age of spiritual and material ruin. Our father among the saints, Holy and Venerable Benedict, entreat with Christ our God that our wretched souls may be saved!

By your ascetic labors, God-bearing Benedict,
You were proven to be true to your name.
For you were the son of benediction,
And became a rule and model for all who emulate your life and cry:
Glory to Him who gave you strength!
Glory to Him who granted you a crown!
Glory to Him who through you grants healing to all!