St. Benedict

A DIVINE THOUGHT breathed over the baptismal font of Nursia; the child born was heir to a great civilization. Centuries had slowly woven for him a baptismal robe made of justice, order and gravitas, which allied the taste of a wise administration to the ancient piety that offered a cult to gods, parents, country. The child belonged to the gens Anicia descended from the provincial nobility whose virtues survived the decadence of the Empire. He was, according to his biographer, St. Gregory, "filled with the spirit of all the just;" a grace of leadership in his soul would make of him the father of a race of men called by Psalm 23 "the generation of them that seek God (Haec est generatio quaerentium Dominum)." It is to them that the Psalmist says, "Seek his face evermore."

Flight from the World

What do we know of the child blessed of "God by grace and by name" who grew up at Nursia, a little town clinging to the side of the Sabine hills? St. Gregory tells us nothing, but the behaviour of the man of God, his words, the maxims of his Rule and the tender affection which bound him to his sister Scholastica, suggest a patriarchal atmosphere, a virile education, the profoundly religious spirit of the ancient Romans to which divine grace added charity, peace and Christian gentleness. The young Benedict, at the threshold of adolescence, received the liberal formation inherited from antiquity. He was therefore sent to Rome and entrusted to a college of rhetoric and grammar whose lessons consisted essentially of three subjects: reading, rhetoric and recitation.

The child listened to the lectures, disturbed at not finding in them the echo of that blessed voice which, since the age of reason, murmured to his soul, as to that of the martyr of Antioch: "Come towards the Father!" Sadly he saw around him the vanity of the honors promised by a false learning—the Senate or the magistracy—and moved by divine inspiration, he left the world and buried himself in a wild retreat, followed for a time by his nurse.

This detail, picked out by his biographer, teaches us more about the soul of St. Benedict than many a treatise. One guesses that despite his firm resolve to leave his family and his home, he could not resist the wish of this pious servant who must have been like a second mother for him. So it is sometimes in Christian families where the obscure loyalty of the humble watches over the souls of children as tenderly as a guardian angel. But the holy young man, so his biographer tells us, wanted to please God alone—soli Deo placere desiderans. These few words depict the soul of St. Benedict and form a rule of life which will inspire his disciples for all time.

St. Benedict then embraced total solitude in the grotto of Subiaco, and in the sight of God began a holy life witnessed only by the angels. That is why the Eastern Church will accord to St. Benedict the splendid title of Isange (resembling the angels). Hours passed in prayer. The young man raised his eyes to heaven and lowered them to the world around him. Does not contemplation of the divine Essence allow everything to be seen in the light of God? Everything having been created in the Word, how could the purified soul not recognize, in the world transfigured and shot through transillumined by the light of the Word, the fresh imprint of the finger of God and the radiation of His glory? But more perfectly than inanimate creatures, the mirror of the soul reflects the deifying light of the Word, penetrating it no longer as ontological presence of immensity but by a supernatural presence of love.

This is why St. Gregory writes in his Dialogues that the solitary of Subiaco lived within himself: habitavit secum. Thus he went from the mirror of the soul to the mirror of creatures in the unity of a purified view. In his earthly exile he then experienced a joy unknown to him, a joy at once painful, poignant and suave, which mystics will describe with the help of magnificent symbols in ages to come.

The holy young man is not, however, there to write. His soul is filled with an immense reservoir of grace which he will later pour over his sons. He magnifies the Lord who works in him. By patience, he participates in the silence of God. He remains in his place. He listens. He consents. He obeys. In his soul, light and shadow alternate as they do in the beautiful sky of Italy, crossed by great clouds which make sombre patches on the neighboring hills, and he says with Psalm 33, "I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise shall always be in my mouth."

The Fighter

Popular imagery and the anecdotes preserved by posterity have left shadowy this period in the life of the saint. The patriarch has eclipsed the solitary. Youthful enthusiasm has given way to fecund old age like a great tree laden with fruit under the summer sun. The long line of saints of both sexes proceeding from the Patriarch of monks, the imperishable monuments of beauty born of prayer and work, the influence of his disciples spreading all over Europe, teaching the barbarians the art of living together in a hard-working, happy family existence, retaining of earthly values whatever was likely to turn souls to heaven, invite us to recognize in St. Benedict above all, qualities of order, balance, wisdom, reflection. His high stature as leader and father whose precepts contained in his Rule laid the foundations of Western spirituality; his native goodness, his moderated severity, and the power of his miracles make up a royal figure in which the dominating features are of a man who commands, organizes and constructs, rather than of the avenger of God and destroyer of idols. But the founder of Western monasticism, filled with the spirit of all the just, gathers in himself all the space where centuries of sanctity are deployed.

Like Abraham, father of believers, who carried in his bosom an innumerable multitude of the elect, St. Benedict belongs to that line of robust prophets jealous of God's honor, leaders of peoples, doers of miracles and breakers of idols. To him the word which Jahweh addressed to the prophet Jeremiah is eminently applicable: "I have set thee over the nations and over kingdoms to root up and pull down, to waste and to destroy and to build and to plant." St. Benedict, educator of Western peoples, began by defying him whom Our Lord calls the enemy, a murderer from the beginning, father of lies. All his life consisted in mounting vigilant guard over that sacred eyrie which he first tore from the grip of the devil and which would be his first monastery; before organizing, he overturned. It was then a destroyer of idols who set off on that miraculous morning when under a storm-laden sky the birth of the Benedictine Order coincided with the awakening springtime of the Church. Leaving Subiaco, St. Benedict gave up a certain type of monastic life implantation which consisted of scattered hermitages, each sheltering a group of monks under the guidance of a senior. His prophetic gift discerned the shortcomings of the system inspired by Egypt when faced with human weakness. He then turned to a monarchical conception, better structured and more on family lines; the same of which today's Benedictine monastery still offers us the image.

The departure from Subiaco is dated around 530 A.D. It was therefore at a mature age that Benedict of Nursia set out at the head of his little colony to establish himself in his new domain, there to dislodge the ancient enemy. Having soaked his soul in solitude, the young hermit who drank from the sweet and bitter waters of contemplation became the strong man of the gospel who raised his head. We may apply to him what Psalm 109 says of Our Lord Himself and of His saints: de torrente in via bibet propterea exaltavit caput. Contemplative and fighter, he drank deep of the torrent and lifted up his head. Before him rose Cassinum, a citadel dominating an immense circle of high wooded mountains; at the bottom of the valley the river Liris flowed peacefully to the sea. It was a former strong point where once the Roman legions had camped. Ramparts flanked by towers could still serve as refuge to populations threatened by the barbarians. But the pagan acropolis preserved vestiges of a moribund religion, and before making of it the Sanai of the West, the man of God—vir Dei as his biographer calls him—cleared the Eyrie of the idols which contaminated it. It made agreeable music to the angels, the sound of those hammer blows and the toil of the Father and his sons reducing to powder Apollo, Jupiter and the sacred wood dedicated to Venus, abolishing the maleficent spell of images in which the philosophers of the Late Empire no longer believed, but behind which the entrenched demon hid to deceive the humble inhabitants of the region. The student from Rome knew the danger of these mythologies which for so long had cradled the old dreams of humanity—gods and goddesses naked, satisfied, smiling, empty as the declamations of the rhetoricians of the period. Had he himself always been insensible to it, would he have abandoned them as he did on that memorable day when, sapienter indoctus as St. Gregory says, he wisely made himself ignorant of things from which he might later have been unable to detach himself?

These texts plunge our great civilized minds into profound astonishment: how uncouth those spirits must have been to adore a piece of metal or wood in animal shape, covered with gold plaques! A moment, please. Ancient civilizations rested on religion: the religion was made of rites, mysteries and images. Let us not believe that the pagans were so stupid as to believe in the divinity of the idol. It played a mediatory role, appearing as the epiphany of the divinity manifested through its symbol. The man of antiquity was less materialistic than is believed.

All shades at least were allowed. We have ourselves so lost the meaning of the language of creatures and their link with mystery that we are incapable of comprehending its attraction, the profound seduction exercised by this reflection of the universe on the spirit of our ancestors. The prophets never ceased to remind the children of Israel of the gravity of the sin of idolatry. At the end of wars of conquest in ancient times, it was customary for the divinities of conquered peoples to be supplanted by those of their conquerors. The founder of Monte Cassino acted in the same way, cleansing his eyrie, expelling without pity the languishing and their false incantations, their false reference to the divine whence floated the musty smell of the cult of the body, something that the Christian soul has a horror of. As he hammered, a world crumbled under his blows. St. Benedict completed the work of St. Martin, himself a great destroyer of idols, and erected an altar in his honor. A new civilization was about to be born, founded on acknowledgement of the living and true God, Lord of Glory, light of the world and support of the universe, but distinct from Him.

Benedictine civilization would last a thousand years, during which, as the Apocalypse predicted, Satan would be chained. In the sixteenth century, the west relapsed into the rut of paganism; it unearthed forgotten gods, exhumed the faded phrases of a natural philosophy, celebrating Man and Nature; in the eighteenth century it was science; in the nineteenth, progress and in the twentieth, evolution. Millions of human beings, heads bowed, adore their new gods.

Benedictines, in the footsteps of their Father, will they know how to remain faithful to their vocation of breakers of idols? They could do so, not necessarily with hammer blows (though often the monuments of modern art and culture deserve no better treatment!) but by learning again the humility of the beginnings, by relearning how to be silent, to read, to obey, to pray, to say no to lies, to cultivate the taste for truth.

In destroying the idols, Saint Benedict did not only make an act of faith, he rid the West of the old pantheistic temptations which still today infect the soul of Eastern religions; for if the Essence of God is drowned and diluted in the world, what is there left of His Sovereignty? Facing the breakup of the old paganism, the Benedictine Order, young and intact, undertook the education of man without falling into the other temptation, that of Manichaeism which declares the natural order irremediably evil, failing to perceive its true vocation, which is to be a hymn of glory.