(A.D. 543.)
[Roman Martyrology, Benedictine, that of Bede. Greek Menologium on
March 14th. Authorities:--Life written by S. Gregory the Great, in
the second book of his dialogues; S. Gregory received his information
from the lips of four disciples of the holy patriarch, Constantine,
Honoratus, Valentinian, and Simplicius, the two first of whom had
succeeded him as abbots respectively of Monte Cassino and Subiaco.
Also the Chronicon Casinense, the first three books containing the
life of S. Benedict by Leo Marsicanus, B. of Ostia, a monk of Monte
Casino; the fourth book was added by Paulus Diacomus. The following
life has been condensed from that by M. de Montalembert in his "Monks
of the West."]
S. Benedict was born in the year of our Lord 480. Europe has, perhaps,
never known a more calamitous or apparently desperate period than that
which reached its climax at this date. Confusion, corruption, despair,
and death were everywhere; social dismemberment seemed complete.
Authority, morals, laws, sciences, arts, religion herself, might have
been supposed condemned to irremediable ruin. The germs of a splendid
and approaching revival were still hidden from all eyes under the
ruins of a crumbling world. The Church was more than ever infected by
heresy, schisms, and divisions, which the obscure successors of S. Leo
the Great in the Holy See endeavoured in vain to repress. In all the
ancient Roman world there did not exist a prince who was not either
a pagan, an Arian, or an Eutychian. The monastic institution, after
having given so many doctors and saints to the Church in the East, was
drifting toward that descent which it never was doomed to reascend; and
even in the West, some symptoms of premature decay had already appeared.
[Illustration: S. BENEDICT. After Cahier.
March 21.]
Germany was still entirely pagan, as was also Great Britain, where the
new-born faith had been stifled by the Angles and Saxons. Gaul was
invaded on the north by the pagan Franks, and on the south by the
Arian Burgundians. Spain was overrun and ravaged by the Visigoths,
the Sueves, the Alans, and the Vandals, all Arians. The same Vandals,
under the successor of Genseric, made Christian Africa desolate, by a
persecution more unpitying and refined in cruelty than those of the
Roman emperors. In a word, all those countries into which the first
disciples of Jesus Christ carried the faith, had fallen a prey to
barbarianism. The world had to be re-conquered.
Amidst this universal darkness and desolation, history directs our gaze
towards those heights in the centre of Italy, and at the gates of Rome,
which detach themselves from the chain of the Apennines, and extend
from the ancient country of the Sabines to that of the Samnites. A
single solitary was about to form there a centre of spiritual virtue,
and to light it up with a splendour destined to shine over regenerated
Europe for ten centuries to come.
Fifty miles to the west of Rome, among that group of hills where the
Anio hollows a deep gorge, the traveller, ascending by the course of
the river, reaches a basin, which opens out between two immense walls
of rock, and from which a limpid stream pours from fall to fall, to a
place called Subiaco. This grand and picturesque site had attracted
the attention of Nero. He confined the waters of the Anio by dams, and
constructed artificial lakes below, before a delicious villa, which,
from its position, assumed the name of _Sublaqueum_, and of which some
shapeless ruins remain. Four centuries after Nero, when solitude and
silence had long replaced the imperial orgies, a young patrician flying
from the delights and dangers of Rome, sought there a refuge with God.
He had been baptized under the name of Benedictus, or the Blessed. He
belonged to the illustrious Anician family; by his mother's side he
was the last scion of the lords of Nursia, where he was born, as has
been said, in 480. He was scarce fourteen when he resolved to renounce
fortune, his family, and the happiness of this world. Leaving his old
nurse, who had been the first to love him, and who alone followed him
still, he plunged, in 494, into these wild gorges, and ascended those
savage hills. On the way he met a monk, named Romanus, who gave him a
hair shirt and a monastic habit made of skin.[81] Proceeding on his
ascent, and reaching the middle of the abrupt rock, which faces the
south, and which overhangs the Anio, he discovered a dark cave, a
sort of den, unillumined by the sun. He there took up his abode, and
remained unknown to all, except the monk Romanus, who fed him with the
remainder of his own scanty fare, but who, not being able to reach his
cell, transmitted to him every day, at the end of a cord, a loaf and
a little bell, the sound of which warned him of this sustenance which
charity had provided for him.
[81] The locality of the meeting is indicated by a chapel called S.
Crocella.
He lived three entire years in this tomb. The shepherds who discovered
him there at first took him for a wild beast, but by his discourses,
and the efforts he made to instil grace and piety into their rustic
souls, they recognised in him a servant of God. Temptations were not
wanting to him. The allurements of voluptuousness acted so strongly on
his excited senses, that he was on the point of leaving his retreat to
seek after a woman whose beauty had formerly impressed him, and whose
memory haunted him incessantly. But there was near his grotto a clump
of thorns and briers: he took off the vestments of skins, which was his
only dress, and rolled himself among them naked till his body was all
one wound, but also till he had extinguished for ever the infernal fire
which inflamed him even in the desert.
Seven centuries later, another saint, father of the most numerous
monastic family which the church has produced after that of S.
Benedict, S. Francis of Assisi, came to visit that wild site, which was
worthy to rival the bare Tuscan rock, where the stigmata of the passion
were imprinted on himself. He prostrated himself before the thicket of
thorns which had been a triumphal bed to the masculine virtue of the
patriarch of the monks, and after having bathed with his tears the soil
of that glorious battle-field, he planted there two rose trees. The
roses of S. Francis grew, and have survived the Benedictine briers.
This garden, twice sanctified, still occupies a sort of triangular
plateau, which projects upon the side of the rock, a little before
and beneath the grotto which sheltered S. Benedict. The eye, confined
on all sides by rocks, can survey freely only the azure of heaven.
It is the last of those sacred places visited and venerated in the
celebrated and unique monastery of the Iagro Speco, which forms a
series of sanctuaries, built one over the other, backed by the mountain
which Benedict has immortalized. Such was the hard and savage cradle
of the monastic order in the West. It was from this tomb, where the
delicate son of the last patricians of Rome buried himself alive, that
the definite form of monastic life--that is to say, the perfection of
Christian life--was born.
The solitude of the young anchorite was not long respected. The
faithful in the neighbourhood, who brought him food for the body, asked
the bread of life in return. The monks of a neighbouring monastery,
situated near Vico Varo, obtained, by dint of importunity, his
consent to become their ruler, but, soon disgusted by his austerity,
they endeavoured to poison him. He made the sign of the cross over
the vessel which contained the poison, and it broke as if it had
been struck with a stone. He left these unworthy monks, to re-enter
joyfully his beloved cavern, and to live by himself alone. But it
was in vain: he soon found himself surrounded by such a multitude of
disciples, that, to give them a shelter, he was compelled to found in
the neighbourhood of his retreat twelve monasteries, each inhabited by
twelve monks. He kept some with him, in order to direct them himself,
and was thus finally raised to be the superior of a numerous community
of cenobites.
Clergy and laymen, Romans and barbarians, victors and vanquished, alike
flocked to him, attracted by the fame of his virtue and miracles. While
the celebrated Theodoric, at the head of his Goths, up to that time
invincible, destroyed the ephemeral kingdom of the Hercules, seized
Rome, and overspread Italy, other Goths came to seek faith, penitence,
and monastic discipline under the laws of Benedict. At his command they
armed themselves with axes and hatchets, and employed their robust
strength in rooting out the brushwood and clearing the soil, which,
since the time of Nero, had again become a wilderness. The Italian
painters of the great ages of art have left us many representations of
the legend told by S. Gregory, in which S. Benedict restores to a Goth
who had become a convert at Subiaco, the tool which that zealous but
unskilled workman had dropped to the bottom of the lake, and which the
abbot miraculously brought forth. "Take thy tool," said Benedict to the
barbarian woodcutter,--"take it, work, and be comforted." Symbolical
words, in which we find an abridgment of the precepts and examples
lavished by the monastic order on so many generations of conquering
races: _Ecce labora._
[Illustration: S. BENEDICT EXORCISING AN EVIL SPIRIT WHICH HAD
INTERRUPTED THE WORKMEN EMPLOYED IN BUILDING A CHAPEL. From a Fresco,
by Spinelli d'Arezzo, in the Church of San Miniato, near Florence.
March 21.]
Beside these barbarians already occupied in restoring the cultivation
of that Italian soil which their brethren in arms still wasted, were
many children of the Roman nobility, whom their fathers had confided
to Benedict to be trained to the service of God. Among these young
patricians are two whose names are celebrated in Benedictine annals:
Maur, whom the abbot Benedict made his own coadjutor; and Placidus,
whose father was lord of the manor of Subiaco, which did not prevent
his son from rendering menial services to the community, such as
drawing water from the lake of Nero. The weight of his pitcher one day
overbalanced him, and he fell into the lake. We shall leave Bossuet to
tell the rest, in his panegyric, delivered twelve centuries afterwards
before the sons of the founder of Subiaco:--
"S. Benedict ordered S. Maur, his faithful disciple, to run quickly and
draw the child out. At the word of his master, Maur went away without
hesitation, ... and full of confidence in the order he had received,
walked upon the water with as much security as upon the earth, and
drew Placidus from the whirlpool, which would have swallowed him up.
To what shall I attribute so great a miracle, whether to the virtue
of the obedience or to that of the commandment? A doubtful question,
says S. Gregory, between S. Benedict and S. Maur. But let us say, to
decide it, that the obedience had grace to accomplish the command, and
that the command had grace to give efficacy to the obedience. Walk,
my fathers, upon the waves with the help of obedience; you shall find
solid support amid the inconstancy of human things. The waves shall
have no power to overthrow you, nor the depths to swallow you up; you
shall remain immovable, as if all was firm under your feet, and issue
forth victorious."
However, Benedict had the ordinary fate of great men and saints. The
great number of conversions worked by the example and fame of his
austerity, awakened a homicidal envy against him. A wicked priest
of the neighbourhood attempted first to decry and then poison him.
Being unsuccessful in both, he endeavoured at least to injure him in
the object of his most tender solicitude--in the souls of his young
disciples. For that purpose he sent, even into the garden of the
monastery, where Benedict dwelt, and where the monks laboured, seven
wretched women, whose gestures, sports, and shameful nudity, were
designed to tempt the young monks to certain fall. When Benedict, from
the threshold of his cell, perceived these shameless creatures, he
despaired of his work; he acknowledged that the interest of his beloved
children constrained him to disarm so cruel an enmity by retreat. He
appointed superiors to the twelve monasteries which he had founded,
and, taking with him a small number of disciples, he left for ever the
wild gorges of Subiaco, where he had lived for thirty-five years.
Without withdrawing from the mountainous region which extends along
the western side of the Apennines, Benedict directed his steps toward
the south, along the Abruzzi, and penetrated into that land of labour,
the name of which seems naturally suited to a soil destined to be the
cradle of the most laborious men whom the world has known. He ended
his journey in a scene very different from that of Subiaco, but of
incomparable grandeur and majesty. There upon the boundaries of Sammim
and Campania, in the centre of a large basin, half-surrounded by abrupt
and picturesque heights, rises a scarped and isolated hill, the vast
and rounded summit of which overlooks the course of the Liris near its
fountain head, and the undulating plain which extends south towards
the shores of the Mediterranean, and the narrow valleys which, towards
the north, the east, and the west, lost themselves in the lines of the
mountainous horizon. This is Monte Cassino.
It was here, amidst this solemn nature, and upon that predestinated
height, that the patriarch of the monks of the west founded the capital
of the monastic order. He found paganism still surviving there. Two
hundred years after Constantine, in the heart of Christendom, and so
near Rome, there still existed a very ancient temple of Apollo, and
a sacred wood, where a multitude of peasants sacrificed to the gods
and demons. Benedict preached the faith of Christ to these forgotten
people; he persuaded them to cut down the wood, to overthrow the temple
and the idol.
Upon these remains Benedict built two oratories, one dedicated to S.
John the Baptist, the first solitary of the new faith; the other to
S. Martin, the great monk-bishop, whose ascetic and priestly life had
edified Gaul, and reached as far as Italy.
Round these chapels rose the monastery which was to become the most
powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe; celebrated especially
because there Benedict wrote his rule, and at the same time formed the
type which was to serve as a model to innumerable communities submitted
to that sovereign code. It is for this reason that emulous pontiffs,
princes, and nations have praised, endowed, and visited the sanctuary
where monastic religion, according to the expression of Pope Urban II.,
"flowed from the heart of Benedict as from a fountain-head of Paradise."
Benedict ended his life at Monte Cassino, where he lived for fourteen
years, occupied, in the first place, with extirpating from the
surrounding country the remnants of paganism, afterwards in building
his monastery by the hands of his disciples, in cultivating the arid
sides of his mountain, and the devastated plains around, but above
all, in extending to all who approached him the benefits of the law of
God, practised with a fervour and charity which none have surpassed.
Although he had never been invested with the priestly character, his
life at Monte Cassino was rather that of a missionary and apostle
than of a solitary. He was, notwithstanding, the vigilant head of a
community which flourished and increased more and more. Accustomed
to subdue himself in everything, and to struggle with the infernal
spirits, whose temptations and appearances were not wanting to him more
than to the ancient fathers of the desert, he had acquired the gift of
reading souls, and discerning their most secret thoughts. He used this
faculty not only to direct the young monks, who always gathered in such
numbers round him, in their studies and the labours of agriculture and
building which he shared with them; but even in the distant journeys
on which they were sometimes sent, he followed them by a spiritual
observation, discovered their least failings, reprimanded them on their
return, and bound them in everything to a strict fulfilment of the rule
which they had accepted. He exacted from all, the obedience, sincerity,
and austerely regulated life of which he himself gave the first example.
Many young men of rich and noble families came here, as at Subiaco, to
put themselves under his direction, or were confided to him by their
parents. They laboured with the other brethren in the cultivation of
the soil and the building of the monastery, and were bound to all the
services imposed by the rule. Some of the young nobles rebelled in
secret against that equality. Among these, according to the narrative
of S. Gregory, was the son of a _defender_--that is to say, of the
first magistrate of a town or province. One evening, it being his turn
to light the Abbot Benedict at supper, while he held the candlestick
before the abbotial table, his pride rose within him, and he said to
himself, "What is this man that I should thus stand before him while
he eats, with a candle in my hand like a slave? Am I then made to be
his slave?" Immediately Benedict, as if he had heard him, reproved him
sharply for that movement of pride, gave the candle to another, and
sent him back to his cell, dismayed to find himself at once discovered
and restrained in his most secret thoughts. It was then that the great
legislator inaugurated in his new-formed cloister that alliance of
aristocratic races with the Benedictine Order which we shall have
many generous and fruitful examples to quote.
He bound all--nobles and plebians, young and old, rich and poor--under
the same discipline. But he would have excess or violence in nothing,
and when he was told of a solitary in the neighbouring mountain, who,
not content with shutting himself up in a narrow cave, had attached to
his foot a chain, the other end of which was fixed in a rock, so that
he could not move beyond the length of this chain, Benedict sent to
tell him to break it, in these words, "If thou art truly a servant of
God, confine thyself not with a chain of iron, but with the chain of
Christ."
And extending his solicitude and authority over the surrounding
populations, he did not content himself with preaching eloquently to
them the true faith, but also healed the sick, the lepers and the
possessed, provided for all the necessities of the soul and body, paid
the debts of honest men oppressed by their creditors, and distributed
in incessant alms the provisions of corn, wine, and linen which were
sent to him by the rich Christians of the neighbourhood.
A great famine having afflicted Campania in 539, he distributed to
the poor all the provisions of the monastery, so that one day there
remained only five loaves to feed all the community. The monks were
dismayed and melancholy: Benedict reproached them with their cowardice.
"You have not enough to-day," he said to them, "but you shall have too
much to-morrow." And accordingly they found next morning at the gates
of the monastery two hundred bushels of flour, bestowed by some unknown
hand. Thus were established the foundations of that traditional and
unbounded munificence to which his spiritual descendants have remained
unalterably faithful, and which was the law and glory of his existence.
So much sympathy for the poor naturally inspired them with a blind
confidence in him. One day, when he had gone out with the brethren to
labour in the fields, a peasant, distracted with grief, and bearing in
his arms the body of his dead son, came to the monastery and demanded
to see Father Benedict. When he was told that Benedict was in the
fields with the brethren, he threw down his son's body before the
door, and, in the transport of his grief, ran at full speed to seek
the saint. He met him returning from his work, and from the moment he
perceived him, began to cry, "Restore me my son!" Benedict stopped and
asked "Have I carried him away?" The peasant answered "He is dead;
come and raise him up." Benedict was grieved by these words, and said,
"Go home my friend this is not a work for us; this belongs to the holy
apostles. Why do you come to impose upon us so tremendous a burden?"
But the father persisted, and swore in his passionate distress that
he would not go till the saint had raised up his son. The abbot asked
him where his son was. "His body" said he "is at the door of the
monastery." Benedict, when he arrived there, fell on his knees, and
then laid himself down, as Elijah did in the house of the widow of
Sarepta, upon the body of the child, and rising up, extended his hands
to heaven, praying thus; "Lord look not upon my sins but on the faith
of this man, and restore to the body the soul Thou hast taken away from
it." Scarcely was his prayer ended, when all present perceived that the
whole body of the child trembled. Benedict took him by the hand, and
restored him to his father full of life and health.
His virtue, his fame, the supernatural power which was more and more
visible in his whole life, made him the natural protector of the poor
husbandmen against the violence and rapine of the new masters of
Italy. The great Theodoric had organized an energetic and protective
government, but he dishonoured the end of his reign by persecution and
cruelty; and since his death barbarism had regained all its ancient
ascendancy among the Goths. The rural population groaned under the
yoke of these rude oppressors, doubly exasperated, as Barbarians
and as Arians against the Italian Catholics. To Benedict, the Roman
patrician, who had become a serf of God, belonged the noble office
of drawing towards each other the Italians and Barbarians, two races
cruelly divided by religion, fortune, language, and manners, whose
mutual hatred was embittered by so many catastrophes inflicted by the
one, and suffered by the other, since the time of Alaric. The founder
of Monte Cassino stood between the victors and the vanquished like an
all-powerful moderator and inflexible judge. The facts which we are
about to relate, according to the narrative of S. Gregory, could be
told throughout all Italy, and, spreading from cottage to cottage,
would bring unthought of hope and consolation into the hearts of the
oppressed, and establish the popularity of Benedict and his order on an
immortal foundation in the memory of the people.
It has been seen that there were already Goths among the monks at
Subiaco, and how they were employed in reclaiming the soil which their
fathers had laid waste. But there were others who, inflamed by heresy,
professed a hatred of all that was orthodox and belonged to monastic
life. One especially, named Galla, traversed the country panting with
rage and cupidity, and made a sport of slaying the priests and monks
who fell under his power, and spoiling and torturing the people to
extort from them the little that they had remaining. An unfortunate
peasant, exhausted by the torments inflicted upon him by the pitiless
Goth, conceived the idea of bringing them to an end by declaring
that he had confided all that he had to the keeping of Benedict, a
servant of God; upon which Galla stopped the torture of the peasant,
but, binding his arms with ropes, and thrusting him in front of his
own horse, ordered him to go before and show the way to the house
of this Benedict who had defrauded him of his expected prey. Both
pursued thus the way to Monte Cassino; the peasant on foot, with his
hands tied behind his back, urged on by the blows and taunts of the
Goth, who followed on horseback, an image only too faithful of the
two races which unhappy Italy enclosed within her distracted bosom,
and which were to be judged and reconciled by the unarmed majesty of
monastic goodness. When they had reached the summit of the mountain
they perceived the abbot seated alone, reading at the door of his
monastery. "Behold," said the prisoner turning to his tyrant, "there
is the Father Benedict of whom I told thee." The Goth, believing that
here, or elsewhere, he should be able to make his way by terror,
immediately called out with a furious tone to the monk. "Rise up, rise
up, and restore quickly what thou hast received from this peasant."
At these words the man of God raised his eyes from his book, and,
without speaking, slowly turned his gaze first upon the Barbarian on
horseback, and then upon the husbandman bound, and bowed down by his
cords. Under the light of that powerful gaze the cords which tied his
poor arms loosed of themselves, and the innocent victim stood erect and
free, while the ferocious Galla, falling on the ground, trembling, and
beside himself, remained at the feet of Benedict, begging the saint to
pray for him. Without interrupting his reading, Benedict called his
brethren, and directed them to carry the fainting Barbarian into the
monastery, and give him some blessed bread, and, when he had come to
himself, the abbot represented to him the extravagance, injustice, and
cruelty of his conduct, and exhorted him to change it for the future.
The Goth was completely subdued, and no longer dared to ask anything
of the labourer whom the mere glance of the monk had delivered from his
bonds.
[Illustration: S. BENEDICT REPROVING TOTILA, AND PREDICTING HIS DEATH.
From a Fresco, painted by Spinelli d'Arezzo, in the Church of San
Miniato, near Florence. March 21.]
But this mysterious attraction, which drew the Goths under the
influence of Benedict's looks and words, produced another celebrated
and significant scene. The two principal elements of reviving society
in their most striking impersonation--the victorious Barbarians and the
invincible monks--were here confronted. Totila, the greatest of the
successors of Theodoric, ascended the throne in 542, and immediately
undertook the restoration of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths, which the
victories of Belisarius had half overthrown. Having defeated at Faenza,
with only five thousand men, the numerous Byzantine army, led by the
incapable commanders whom the jealousy of Justinian had substituted
for Belisarius, the victorious king made a triumphal progress through
Central Italy, and was on his way to Naples when he was seized with
a desire to see this Benedict, whose fame was already as great among
the Romans as among the Barbarians, and who was everywhere called a
prophet. He directed his steps towards Monte Cassino, and caused his
visit to be announced. Benedict answered that he would receive him. But
Totila desirous of proving the prophetic spirit which was attributed
to the saint, dressed the captain of his guard in the royal robes and
purple boots, which were the distinctive marks of royalty, gave him a
numerous escort, commanded by the three counts who usually guarded his
own person, and charged him, thus clothed and accompanied, to present
himself to the abbot as the king. The moment that Benedict perceived
him, "My son," he cried, "put off the dress you wear; it is not yours."
The officer immediately threw himself upon the ground, appalled at
the idea of having attempted to deceive such a man. Neither he nor
any of the retinue ventured so much as to approach the abbot, but
returned at full speed to the king, to tell him how promptly they had
been discovered. Then Totila himself ascended the monastic mountain,
but when he had reached the height, and saw from a distance the abbot
seated, waiting for him, the victor of the Romans, and the master of
Italy was afraid. He dared not advance, but threw himself on his face
before the servant of Christ. Benedict said to him three times, "Rise."
But as he persisted in his prostration, the monk rose from his seat and
raised him up. During the course of their interview, Benedict reproved
him for all that was blamable in his life, and predicted what should
happen to him in the future. "You have done much evil; you do it still
every day; it is time that your iniquities should cease. You shall
enter Rome; you shall cross the sea; you shall reign nine years, and
the tenth you shall die." The king, deeply moved, commended himself
to his prayers, and withdrew. But he carried away in his heart this
salutary and retributive incident, and from that time his barbarian
nature was transformed.
Totila was as victorious as Benedict had predicted that he should be.
He possessed himself first of Benevento and Naples, then of Rome, then
of Sicily, which he invaded with a fleet of five hundred ships, and
ended by conquering Corsica and Sardinia. But he exhibited everywhere
a clemency and gentleness which, to the historian of the Goths, seem
out of character at once with his origin and his position as a foreign
conqueror. He treated the Neapolitans as his children, and the captive
soldiers as his own troops, gaining himself immortal honour by the
contrast between his conduct and the horrible massacre of the whole
population, which the Greeks had perpetrated ten years before, when
that town was taken by Belisarius. He punished with death one of
his bravest officers, who had insulted the daughter of an obscure
Italian, and gave all his goods to the woman whom he had injured, and
that despite the representations of the principal nobles of his own
nation, whom he convinced of the necessity of so severe a measure,
that they might merit the protection of God upon their arms. When Rome
surrendered, after a prolonged siege, Totila forbade the Goths to shed
the blood of any Roman, and protected the women from insult. At length,
after a ten years' reign, he fell, according to the prediction of
Benedict, in a great battle which he fought with the Greco-Roman army,
commanded by the eunuch Narses.
Placed as if midway between the two invasions of the Goths and
Lombards, the dear and holy foundation of Benedict, respected by
the one, was to yield for a time to the rage of the other. The holy
patriarch had a presentment that his successors would not meet a second
Totila to listen to them and spare them. A noble whom he had converted,
and who lived on familiar terms with him, found him one day weeping
bitterly. He watched Benedict for a long time, and then, perceiving
that his tears were not stayed, and that they proceeded not from the
ordinary fervour of his prayers, but from profound melancholy, he asked
the cause. The saint answered, "This monastery which I have built, and
all that I have prepared for my brethren, has been delivered up to
the pagans by a sentence of Almighty God. Scarcely have I been able
to obtain mercy for their lives." Less than forty years after, this
prediction was accomplished by the destruction of Monte Cassino by the
Lombards.
Benedict, however, was near the end of his career. His interview
with Totila took place in 542, in the year which preceded his death,
and from his earliest days of the following year, God prepared him
for his last struggle, by requiring from him the sacrifice of the
most tender affection he had retained on earth. The beautiful and
touching incident of the last meeting of Benedict with his twin sister,
Scholastica, has been already recorded (Feb. 10th). At the window of
his cell, three days after, Benedict had a vision of his dear sister's
soul entering heaven in the form of a snowy dove. He immediately sent
for the body, and placed it in the sepulchre which he had already
prepared for himself, that death might not separate those whose souls
had always been united in God.
The death of his sister was the signal of departure for himself. He
survived her only forty days. He announced his death to several of
his monks, then far from Monte Cassino. A violent fever having seized
him, he caused himself on the sixth day of his sickness to be carried
to the chapel of S. John the Baptist; he had before ordered the tomb
in which his sister already slept to be opened. There, supported in
the arms of his disciples, he received the holy Viaticum, then placing
himself at the side of the open grave, but at the foot of the altar,
and with his arms extended towards heaven, he died, standing, muttering
a last prayer. Died standing!--such a victorious death became well that
great soldier of God. He was buried by the side of Scholastica, in a
sepulchre made on the spot where stood the altar of Apollo, which he
had thrown down.
The body of S. Benedict was carried by S. Aigulf, monk of the abbey
of Fleury, from Monte Cassino, which had been ruined by the Lombards,
into France, to his own monastery. This translation took place on July
11th, and is commemorated in all the monasteries of France on that day.
Another solemnity, called the Illation, has been instituted in honour
of the transfer of the same relics from Orleans, whither they had been
conveyed, from fear of the Normans, back again to Fleury-sur-Loire.
In 1838, the bishop of Orleans resolved on sending the relics to the
Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, in the diocese of Le Mans, but the
project met with so great opposition that he contented himself with
sending only the skull to Solesmes.
The reliquary which was opened in 1805, by Mgr. Bernier, bishop of
Orleans, was found to contain, together with the bones, several papal
bulls authenticating the relics. It is, however, necessary to add that
the abbey of Monte Cassino claims to possess the body of S. Benedict,
and adduces a bull of pope Urban II., declaring anathema against all
who deny the authenticity of that body. It is possible that if the
relics in both places were examined carefully, it would be found that
the portions missing in one place would be found in the other. It is
certain that S. Odilo of Cluny sent one of the bones of S. Benedict
to Monte Cassino out of France, in the 11th cent., and that it was
received there with great joy, so that the monks there cannot have
possessed the body at that date.
In Art, S. Benedict is represented with his finger on his lip, as
enjoining silence, and with his rule in his hand, or with the first
words of that rule, "Ausculta, O fili!" issuing from his lips, and with
a discipline, _i.e._ a scourge, or a rose bush at his side, or holding
a broken goblet in his hand.
[Illustration: Saint giving benediction]
March 22.
S. PAUL, _B. of Narbonne, 3rd or 4th cent._
S. APHRODISIUS, _B. of Beziers, 3rd or 4th cent._
SS. CALLINICA AND BASILISSA, _MM. in Galatia, circ._ A.D. 252.
SS. SATURNINUS AND IX. COMPANIONS, _MM. in Africa_.
S. BASIL, _P.M. at Ancyra_, A.D. 363.
S. LEA, _W. at Rome, circ._ A.D. 383.
S. DEOGRATIAS, _B. of Carthage, circ._ A.D. 456.
SS. HERLINDA AND REINILDA, _V.V. Abss. at Maeseyck, in Belgium,
8th cent._
S. BENVENUTUS, _B. of Osimo, in the Marches of Ancona_, A.D. 1276.
S. EELKO LIAUKMAN,_ Ab. of Lidlom, in Holland_, A.D.. 1332.
B. THOMAS OF LANCASTER, _M. at Pontefract_, A.D. 1321.
S. KATHARINE OF SWEDEN, _V. daughter of S. Bridget_, A.D. 1381.
B. NICOLAS VON DER FLUE, _H. at Sachseln, in Switzerland_, A.D. 1487.