Who was St. Benedict?
Benedict before he was a saint was a student in Rome. He didn’t find what he was looking for in his studies or in the city lifestyle. So, he tried out an ascetic community for a while. Then one day, without telling anyone where he was going, he hiked out forty miles east of Rome along the Via Sublacensis to Subiaco, a Christian village. This village was located downstream of the highest dam in the world, which the Emperor Nero had constructed four hundred years earlier at the location he selected for his summer villa. His successors maintained the buildings in the area, “with the result that in St. Benedict’s time, the Via Sublacense, the emperors’ villas and the aqueducts were still in good condition” (Sacro Speco of Saint Benedict, “A Guide to the History and Art of the Sacro Speco by the Benedictine Monks of Subiaco).
Young Benedict noticed a cave overhung by a cliff, made his way to it, and camped out there. He ended up living there for three years, alone. The only person who knew he was alive was a monk he happened to meet on his hike out. This monk, Romanus lived in a monastery nearby and agreed to smuggle food to the boy without telling anyone who or where he was. There was no path to the cave, so Romanus lowered food over the side of the cliff with a rope. When you see how beautiful the landscape is, it’s not hard to understand why the emperor would want to spend his summers there; why Benedict would linger–and why Romanus would prefer not to climb down the cliff!
When did St. Benedict live?
It was the turn of the 6th century. Theodoric the Ostrogoth had been in power for a generation, after shaking off the authority of the last Roman emperor. Before taking over Italy, Theodoric had been a Roman general. He was the son of a Roman official. Although of Goth descent, Theodoric was therefore not an invader from outside. He was “part and parcel of the Roman structure, brought up within it and incorporated in it.” (Hilaire Belloc, The Battleground). And by St. Benedict’s time, a Christian community was established in the vicinity of what had been Nero’s villa. The last, terrible persecution of the Pagan Roman era, under Diocletian, had ended nearly two centuries earlier. The Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and had built the first Vatican church over the grave of St. Peter. He had summoned the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., well over a century before Benedict was born. So Benedict did not live under threat of death as punishment for his faith.
Why did Benedict walk away from Rome?
Perhaps it was because Rome was no longer a civilization.
Out of a decaying culture Benedict conceptualized an entirely new model for a community based on Christian principles. He had the sort of practical Roman mindset that had yielded roads and aqueducts and public baths. With that sort of problem-solving mentality, his Rule is a spiritual blueprint for a new sort of society.
Benedict’s was not the first monastic rule. But his Rule does exhibit the traits of a new endeavor. He considered the mechanisms of a functioning community, from interior qualities of character to logistical details of organization, including variations in scheduling to accommodate the level of natural light available at different seasons of the year. St. Benedict’s Rule contains the genetic material for the whole ethos of Western society that emerged over ensuing centuries. The origins of the Western city, the Western hospital, the Western business enterprise all exist in germ form in it. He thought through problems that no one had analyzed from a Christian perspective before, and he wrote down his conclusions. The result is a comprehensive manual for the practice of the Christian faith in a specific context.
What is the historical evidence?
The text of the Rule that St Benedict wrote in Latin can be traced back to the original handwritten document. The English translation that I quote from was published by the American Benedictine federation in 1980 to commemorate his 1500th birthday. It is a strange sort of text. It doesn’t have the compositional elements of the Classical literature that Benedict must have studied. The structure of the text does not follow a logical, linear sequence. It is not a work of theology and features almost nothing that could be described as abstract or ideological, or even explicitly philosophical. His style is succinct, even terse. His economy of words departs from the rhetoric of Classical literature and gives more detailed, practical instruction than any text of the New Testament.
As for information about Benedict’s life, we have one source, the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great. Gregory was seven years old when St. Benedict died, so he didn’t know him personally. But writing just one generation later, he was able to collect information from eyewitnesses. He himself was a Benedictine and eventually became Pope. St. Gregory sought out firsthand accounts and recorded the degree of removal from events of other testimonies. He records the names of individuals and their relationships to each other. His stringent selection of source material and his willingness to limit his range to verifiable information lend credibility to everything he says.
Today, near the town of Subiaco, the San Benedetto abbey is a Renaissance-era building grafted right into the cliff face. It incorporates the original cave, as well as successive frescoes and structures built and rebuilt over the centuries. Pilgrims have traveled to the site from the 6th century on, because by the time of Benedict’s death in A.D. 547, he was widely recognized as a holy man.
We can still learn from him today.
Where to go for more information?
The Vintage Spiritual Classics edition of the Rule is intended for lay readers. The official RB 1980 includes a much more detailed introduction and notes to the text written for scholars. It features the Latin and English texts side by side. The Order of St. Benedict website, http://www.osb.org publishes the entire Rule in several different languages, as well as all sorts of related material. The English version they feature is the Leonard Doyle translation, published in 1948, which is eloquently lyrical. But I find the RB 1980 clearer, in plain English prose, so I prefer it for this project.