(A.D. 584.)
[The life of S. Maurus, professing to be by S. Faustus, is not of
the date it pretends to. It was written by Odo of Glanfeuil (D.
868); it is, however, probable that he used a previous composition
of S. Faustus, monk of Cassino (D. 620), amplifying and altering in
style. Other authorities are S. Gregory the Great, Dialog. II., and
a metrical life, falsely attributed to Paulus Diaconus.]
A nobleman, named Eguitius, gave his little son Maurus, aged twelve, to
the holy patriarch Benedict, to be by him educated. The youth surpassed
all his fellow monks in the discharge of his monastic duties, and when
he was grown up, S. Benedict made him his coadjutor in the government of
Subiaco. Placidus, a fellow-monk, going one day to fetch water, fell
into the lake, and was carried about a bow-shot from the bank. S.
Benedict seeing this from his cell, sent Maurus to run and draw him out.
Maurus obeyed, walked upon the water, without perceiving it, and pulled
out Placidus by the hair, without himself sinking.
The fame of Benedict and his work had not been slow to cross the
frontiers of Italy; it resounded especially in Gaul. A year before the
death of the patriarch, two envoys arrived at Monte Cassino, from
Innocent, Bishop of Mans, who, not content with forty monasteries which
had arisen during his episcopate in the country over which he ruled,
still desired to see his diocese enriched by a colony formed by the
disciples of the new head and law-giver of the cenobites in Italy.
Benedict confided this mission to the dearest and most fervent of his
disciples, the young deacon Maurus. He gave him four companions, one of
whom, Faustus, is the supposed author of the history of the mission; and
bestowed on him a copy of the rule, written with his own hand, together
with the weights for the bread, and the measure for the wine, which
should be allotted to each monk every day, to serve as unchanging types
of that abstinence which was to be one of the strongest points of the
new institution.
At the head of this handful of missionaries, who went to sow afar the
seed destined to produce so great a harvest, Maurus came down from Monte
Cassino, crossed Italy and the Alps, paused beneath the precipices which
overhang the monastery of Agaunum now S. Maurice in the Valais, beside
the foaming Rhone, which the Burgundian king, Sigismund, had just raised
over the relics of the Theban Legion; then went into the Jura to visit
the colonies of Condate. Arrived upon the banks of the Loire, and
repulsed by the successor of the Bishop who had called him, he stopped
in Anjou, which was then governed by a viscount called Florus, in the
name of Theodebert, King of Austrasia. This viscount offered one of his
estates to the disciple of Benedict, that he might establish his colony
there, besides giving one of his sons to become a monk, and announcing
his own intention of consecrating himself to God. On this estate, bathed
by the waters of the Loire, Maurus founded the monastery of Glanfeuil,
which afterwards took his own name. The site of this monastery, now
lost among the vineyards of Anjou, merits the grateful glance of every
traveller who is not insensible to the advantages which flowed from that
first Benedictine colony over the whole of France.
The beloved son of S. Benedict spent forty years at the head of his
French colony; he saw as many as a hundred and forty monks officiate
there; and when he died, after having lived apart for two years in an
isolated cell, to prepare himself in silence for appearing before God,
he had dropped into the soil of Gaul, a germ which could neither perish
nor be exhausted.
In art, S. Maurus is represented holding the weights and measures given
him by S. Benedict.