Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Abbot of Monte Cassino & Father of Western Monasticism
July 11 · d. 550
Benedict of Nursia gave Western monasticism its enduring shape. Withdrawing to a cave at Subiaco and then founding the great house of Monte Cassino, he wrote a Rule of such balance and humanity, ordering a whole life around prayer, work, and the slow reading of Scripture under an abbot, that it became the pattern for monks across Europe for fifteen centuries. He is honored as a father of monks and a patron of Europe.
Benedict was born around the year 480 at Nursia, a Roman town high in the Sabine mountains, in the broken Italy left by the fall of the Western Empire, today Norcia in Umbria in central Italy. Sent as a young man to Rome for his studies, he was repelled by the dissolute lives of his fellow students and gave up his education to seek God alone. He withdrew east into the wild hills above the Aniene valley, to a place called Subiaco, today in Lazio, and there he lived three years as a hermit in a cave, a monk named Romanus lowering bread to him on a rope.
He could not stay hidden. Disciples gathered, and Benedict, who understood the human heart as few have, organized them into small communities, twelve monks to a house, each under its own superior. When a jealous local priest tried to poison him, he moved south to a mountain above the old town of Casinum, today Cassino, between Rome and Naples. The hilltop still held a grove and an altar of Apollo where the country people sacrificed; Benedict broke the idol, overturned the altar, and raised in its place oratories to Saint Martin and Saint John. There, around the year 529, he founded Monte Cassino, the monastery that would carry his name down the centuries.
It was at Monte Cassino that he wrote his Rule, the small book that is his true monument. It is a work of extraordinary balance, neither harsh nor lax, treating the monastery as a school for the Lord's service and the abbot as a father. "Listen, my son, to your master's precepts, and incline the ear of your heart," it begins, in the public-domain translation of Leonard Doyle. Against the restless idleness Benedict knew so well, it lays down that "idleness is the enemy of the soul," and so the brethren are to be occupied at fixed hours in the work of their hands and at fixed hours in sacred reading. Through it all runs one aim, that "in all things God may be glorified."
He had a sister, Scholastica, a consecrated virgin who lived nearby, and the two met once a year to speak of holy things; three days after their last meeting he saw her soul rise to heaven as a white dove. When his own end came, Benedict foretold the day to his monks, asked to be carried into the oratory, and there, in the words of Pope Gregory's account translated by Edmund Gardner, "having his weak body holden up betwixt the hands of his disciples, he stood with his own lifted up to heaven, and as he was in that manner praying, he gave up the ghost." He died around the year 547.
The empire he was born into was dying. The monasteries he planted would keep the lamps of prayer and learning burning through the long centuries that followed, copying the Scriptures, feeding the poor, and teaching half a continent how to pray. The later tradition summed up his Rule in two words, "ora et labora," pray and work, words he never wrote but which catch the balance of the life he ordered. He had asked only that in everything God might be glorified, and in the quiet houses that still live by his Rule, the asking goes on.
How we know Benedict is from two sources of very unequal weight. The first is the Rule itself, which he wrote at Monte Cassino in the 530s or 540s and which speaks in his own voice, drawing openly on the monastic tradition before him, the anonymous Rule of the Master, John Cassian, and Basil. The second is a single narrative life, the second book of the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, written around 593, nearly fifty years after Benedict's death, from the memories of four of his disciples whom Gregory names. Every story we have of Benedict, the cave at Subiaco, the altar of Apollo, Scholastica and the dove, the death in the oratory, comes from Gregory, and Gregory wrote not biography but hagiography, a book of miracles meant to edify. Modern scholars read the Dialogues with caution, and the traditional dates, born about 480 and died about 547, are reconstructions, for Gregory gives no years. The Rule, by contrast, is solid ground, and through it the man himself still speaks more clearly than through any miracle.
Benedict's feast is kept on July 11 in the modern calendar; the older date, March 21, marked the day of his death. In 1964 Pope Paul VI named him a patron of Europe, at the rededication of Monte Cassino, which had been destroyed in the battle of 1944 and rebuilt from its foundations. In art he is shown as an abbot with the crozier and the book of his Rule, often with a broken cup or a raven bearing off a loaf, both from the poisoning stories in Gregory. The Medal of Saint Benedict, stamped with an old prayer against evil, is worn as a sacramental across the Western church. The motto the tradition gave his Rule, "ora et labora," pray and work, is not a phrase Benedict wrote, but it catches the threefold balance of the life he ordered: the Divine Office sung in choir, the slow reading of Scripture, and the work of one's hands, held together in one house under one rule of love. That Rule is still the living foundation of the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Trappist orders.
Further reading. Benedict's own Rule is short and endlessly re-readable; the standard modern edition with full notes is Timothy Fry's RB 1980, and Leonard Doyle's translation is freely available in the public domain. The sole ancient life is the second book of Gregory the Great's Dialogues. For the Rule as a way of life, Esther de Waal's Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict is the classic lay introduction, and Columba Stewart's Prayer and Community: The Benedictine Tradition sets it within the wider story of Benedictine spirituality.
Online resources. Doyle's translation of the Rule is at Project Gutenberg; Gregory's Dialogues, Book II, in Edmund Gardner's translation, is in the public domain online.
British (Received Pronunciation): Nursia /ˈnɜːrʃə/; Aniene /ɑːniˈɛneɪ/; Norcia /ˈnɔːrtʃə/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Benedict of Nursia, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.