St Benedict, the Father of Western Monasticism
- St Benedict has been represented in European art for centuries.
St Benedict was born in Norcia, Italy, around 480 AD.
As a young man he went to Rome for study, but was unimpressed by the quality of learning and life there. He decided to seek God alone and seek sanity in doing so. St Gregory, the Pope who wrote Benedict’s biography ,describes his untutored instinct for the solitary life: scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus, (‘knowingly unknowing and wisely untaught’).
He found a lonely mountain 40 miles from Rome at Subiaco. The gorge was wild but at its foot was a deserted memorial of Roman luxury: a pleasure villa of Nero’s and an artificial lake. Benedict climbed up the cliff face and lived in a cave to be alone, to pray and to surrender his life utterly to God. The cave is still there and the monastery which was later built round it. Nero’s villa, though, was in time swept away when the lake burst its dam. Nothing of it is left today.
Although Benedict sought the life of a hermit, when others sought him out for his guidance and help, he responded. Instead of the solitary search for God he taught them to seek God together in community. Benedictine monks and nuns are those who still follow that way in the strength of common prayer and a common life.
That community at Subiaco, however, did not appreciate the rigour of Benedict’s way and tried to poison him. The legend says that when the saint blessed the cup of poisoned wine, it shattered miraculously. He is usually shown in images with a broken cup for this reason.
The Abbot of Monte Cassino
He left Subiaco and founded instead the great monastery of Monte Cassino. There he wrote his Rule for Monks, which is the only surviving writing he left. He died in 547. His life had spanned a period of dramatic change from the last uncertain flare-ups of the light of Roman order to the beginning of the Dark Ages.
The last of the barbarian invaders – the terrible Lombards – sacked Monte Cassino 34 years after Benedict’s death. They left it in ruins: but this was the seed that died in order to bear fruit a hundredfold. The monks themselves escaped and carried the treasured manuscript of the Rule to Rome. The Pope helped them to re-establish themselves in a monastery on the Caelian Hill. A few years later, in 597, a monk of this community, called Augustine was sent under orders from the Pope to convert the wild and heathen inhabitants of England. Both Gregory and Augustine are regarded as secondary patrons of English Benedictines for this reason.
Anyone who believes that ‘there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will’, may be inclined to see the hand of God in the way the text of the Rule of St Benedict was preserved. To others it may seem to be no more than a matter of historical luck. But there is one strange point to be noted. The Rule was written for Benedict’s own community in his own time. You might expect it to be such a product of its time that it would have become out of date long ago. Not so!
The text assumes that the Abbot should have the liberty to apply the Rule in any situation or circumstance. There is in it both a firmness of principle, and a flexibility of application that means it has continued to guide and inspire monks, nuns, and lay people too, for 1500 years.
Apart from the Rule itself, we have one other document that tells us about Benedict: the Dialogues of Gregory the Great. This is a narrative in the form of a conversation, which tells the stories of the holy men of the previous hundred years. The whole of the second book is dedicated to Benedict’s life. Some have maintained that Gregory, who had been a monk before he was Pope, used Benedict’s Rule himself.
The most striking feature about Benedict that Gregory highlights is the centrality of prayer. Miracles are performed through Benedict’s prayer and intercession, even in his own lifetime. This reflects again the central message of the Rule: for prayer to be the beginning of any work that is done. For Benedict ‘nothing should be accounted of more importance than the work of God’, that is, the common prayer of the community.
St Benedict's Rule
St Benedict did not invent monasticism. St Antony and the Egyptian monks, started it all in the 3rd century. St Basil and St Augustine wrote rules for monastic communities in the 4th century. Benedict himself relied on John Cassian's writings, and a document called 'The Rule of the Master' (which may have been written by a younger Benedict!). But the monks of the western Church all followed St Benedict's Rule because of its wisdom and flexibility. Click here to find out more.
Other monastic orders
There are other orders that also follow the Rule of St Benedict. These include the Cistercians, Trappists, Camaldolese and Carthusians - which is why they are all called 'monks'.
Lay groups also use the Rule of St Benedict, notably the Manquehue Movement in Chile.