Justified True Belief

(●) The Roman layman who wrote one short book of house rules, and gave the Christian West its pattern of ordered common life for fifteen centuries. + Anyone who has ever shared a house with other people knows the questions that have to be settled before anything else can happen. When do we eat, and who cooks? Who decides? What do we do about the man who is always late, and the one who will not stop complaining, and the one who has quietly stopped doing his share? Benedict of Nursia spent the last years of his life writing down answers to exactly those questions for a group of men who had promised to live together until they died. The result runs to about seventy pages in English. It has been in continuous use ever since. That is why a Christian apologetics site has room for a sixth-century abbot who wrote no work of theology and left no argument on paper. An abbot is the head of a monastery, and the title is worth a second look before it slides past, because it is not borrowed from the army or the civil service. It comes from abba, the Aramaic word for father, the word a family uses at home rather than a title borrowed from an office. The man in charge is called Dad. Christianity is not only a set of claims to be defended; it is also a way of living that has to survive contact with ordinary human beings on ordinary mornings. Benedict is the West’s great practical answer to the question of what Christians actually do when the civilization around them is coming apart, and his answer turned out to be a small, stable, praying household that also grows its own food, reads every day, and opens the door to whoever knocks. In the centuries that followed, houses built on his book became the schools, libraries, farms, hospitals and inns of Europe, largely without meaning to. One fact is worth carrying through everything that follows. Benedict wrote a single book, and we have it. Everything else known about his life comes from one source: the second of four books of Dialogues written around 593 by Pope Gregory the Great, roughly fifty years after Benedict died, by a man who never met him and who was writing to edify rather than to chronicle. So we have his mind in full and his life at second hand, which is an odd inheritance, and one worth keeping in view.

(●) c. 480 AD: Born at Nursia in the Umbrian hills, in the generation that watched Rome stop being an empire. + Nursia is the modern Norcia, a small town high in the Apennine mountains about a hundred miles northeast of Rome, cold in winter and long famous for its pork. Gregory says only that Benedict was born there of honourable parents and that he had a sister, Scholastica, given to God from her infancy. A later tradition makes them twins; Gregory does not say so. Every date attached to this life needs a word of warning, and it is best said here, at the first one. Gregory gives no years at all, not for the birth, not for the death, not for a single episode. The figures a reader meets everywhere, 480 for the birth and 547 for the death, were worked out by later writers from the handful of intervals Gregory does supply, and they are conventions rather than records. Being the conventions, they are the ones used here, and every one of them carries a "c." for exactly that reason. The world he was born into had just changed its name without quite noticing. In 476, four years or so before, the last emperor to reign in the West had been deposed by a general named Odoacer, who did not bother to replace him. By the time Benedict was a boy, Italy was ruled from Ravenna by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who kept the Roman senate, the Roman law, and the Roman taxes running. Theodoric was a Christian, but an Arian one, and the word matters. Arians held that the Son was the highest and first of God’s creatures rather than God himself, the teaching the Council of Nicaea had rejected in 325; most of the Germanic peoples who came into the empire had been brought to the faith by Arian missionaries, so the men now governing Italy and the Italians they governed went to different churches. Otherwise the surface of things looked much as it always had. Aqueducts still ran. Schools still taught rhetoric. Nothing had visibly ended. But the machinery was coasting on inherited momentum, and within Benedict’s own lifetime the wars between the Goths and the armies of Justinian, the emperor at Constantinople who set out to take the West back, would grind Italy down further than the barbarians ever had.

(●) c. 500 AD: Sent to Rome for a gentleman’s education, he walked out before he finished it. + A boy of Benedict’s class went to Rome to study grammar and rhetoric: how to read the poets, how to construct an argument, how to stand up in a court or a council and win. It was the training for public life, and it was the only ladder available. Gregory says he climbed a few rungs and then stepped off. He saw many of his fellow students falling into loose living, and rather than risk being pulled after them he "drew back his foot," gave up his books, and left his father’s house and money behind. Gregory sums up the departure with a phrase he clearly enjoyed: Benedict left the schools "instructed with learned ignorance, and furnished with unlearned wisdom." That is a compliment about priorities, not a slur on study. The man who walked out of the classroom would later write a rule that hands every monk a book at the start of Lent, the forty days of fasting before Easter, and expects him to read it through. He did not go far at first. He stopped at Enfide, the modern Affile, about forty miles east of the city, where his old nurse had followed him, and lived quietly among the local people. Gregory tells the first of his miracle stories here: the nurse borrowed a sieve from the neighbours, it fell and broke in two, and Benedict prayed over the pieces and handed it back whole. The neighbours hung the sieve over the church door. That was the trouble. Being admired was precisely what he had left Rome to escape, and so, Gregory says, he slipped away alone.

(●) c. 500 AD: He spent three years in a cave above a lake, fed by bread let down on a rope. + The place was Sublacum, modern Subiaco, a valley where the emperor Nero had once dammed the river Anio to make artificial lakes for a pleasure villa. The villa was a ruin by Benedict’s day. High in the cliff above it there was a cave, and a young man with no plan and no provisions moved into it. He was found almost at once, but only by one person. A monk named Romanus, from a monastery further down the valley under an abbot Gregory calls Theodacus, met him on the road, gave him a monk’s habit, and kept his secret. For three years Romanus fasted a little harder than he needed to, saved what he could from his own daily bread, and let it down the cliff face on a long rope with a small bell tied near the loaf, so that Benedict would know it had arrived. Gregory adds a detail that has the ring of a real place: the devil, annoyed, threw a stone and broke the bell. Living alone in a cave to seek God was not an eccentricity in 500 AD; it was a recognised vocation. The word for it is anchorite, or hermit, and the tradition went back two centuries to Antony of Egypt, who had gone out into the desert and whose life, written by Athanasius, was one of the most widely read books in the Christian world. What matters is what Benedict later did with his own experience. When he came to write his Rule, he put the solitary life second, not first, and said that a man is fit for it only after "long monastic practice and the help of many brethren," when he has "already learned to fight against the devil." He had lived the harder way and then declined to recommend it to beginners.

(●) c. 503 AD: A nearby community begged him to be their abbot, and then put poison in his cup. + Shepherds found him first, took him at a distance for a wild animal in his skins, and then came back for conversation. Word spread. When the abbot of a monastery in the neighbourhood died, the monks came up to the cave and asked Benedict to take his place. Gregory says he told them plainly that his ways and theirs would never agree, and that they should look elsewhere. They insisted. He came down. It went exactly as he had said it would. The monks found that the new abbot expected them to stop doing what they had always done, and instead of leaving, they agreed among themselves to poison his wine. At the meal the glass was handed to the abbot to bless, as the custom was, and when Benedict made the sign of the cross over it the glass broke in pieces. He stood up, Gregory says, with a peaceful face, and told them what he had told them before: go and find an abbot to suit your manners, because you cannot have me. Then he went back up to his cave. Whether the glass shattered by a miracle or by something in the wine, the human story underneath is unchanged, and it is the reason the episode belongs in his life rather than in a collection of wonders. A community that does not actually want to be reformed cannot be reformed by putting a good man in charge of it. Benedict learned that at about twenty-three, and the Rule he wrote thirty years later is built around it: nobody is admitted quickly, everybody is warned in advance about "all the hard and rugged things through which we pass on to God," and the door is deliberately left easy to leave through before the promise is made and hard to leave through afterward. The disciples came anyway, and that is the part of the story the poisoned cup tends to overshadow. Over the following years he built twelve small monasteries in the valley, put twelve monks and a superior in each, and kept a few with himself. Notice the shape of it: twelve small houses rather than one large one, which is the arrangement of a man who has thought about how many people one superior can actually know by name. Roman families began sending him their sons, and Gregory names two, Maurus and Placidus, who would become the best known of his followers. It is worth stopping over what that traffic means. Families with money and prospects had come round to the view that the best thing they could do with a boy was hand him over to a man on a hillside who owned nothing at all.

(●) c. 529 AD: Driven off by a jealous priest, he left his twelve houses behind, climbed Monte Cassino, and wrote the Rule. + The trouble came from a neighbouring priest named Florentius, who according to Gregory could not bear the crowds going to Benedict instead of to him. First he sent a poisoned loaf as a gift; Gregory says Benedict knew what it was and told a tame raven to carry it off where nobody would find it. Then Florentius tried the surer method and sent seven young women into the monastery garden to dance in front of the younger monks. That worked, in the sense that it decided Benedict. He would not stay and fight a man who was destroying other people to get at him, so he appointed superiors over the twelve houses and left the valley with a few brothers. They went about eighty miles south, to a hill above the town of Cassino on the road between Rome and Naples. Monte Cassino was still, in the sixth century, a working pagan site: there was a grove, an altar, and an image of Apollo, and the country people were still bringing sacrifices. Benedict broke the image, overturned the altar, cut down the grove, and put two chapels where they had stood, one dedicated to Martin of Tours and one to John the Baptist. Then he set about preaching to the villagers. The conventional date for this move is 529, which happens also to be the year the emperor Justinian shut the Platonic school at Athens; the coincidence is a favourite of textbooks, and it is worth remembering that Gregory supplies neither date. On that hill he wrote the book. A "rule" in this period is not a list of prohibitions pinned up by the door; it is closer to the written constitution of a household, the document that settles what the day looks like, who decides, and what happens when somebody fails. Several already existed, and Benedict knew them well enough to send his own readers on to two of them in his closing chapter, the rule of Basil and the books of Cassian. The Rule of Benedict is a prologue and seventy-three short chapters in plain, sometimes rough Latin, running from the four kinds of monks to how much wine a man may drink, from the twelve degrees of humility to who washes the dishes this week. And one thing about it should be said out loud rather than buried. Roughly a third of the Rule, including the whole prologue and the chapters on the abbot, obedience and humility, appears almost word for word in an earlier anonymous rule known as the Rule of the Master. Since Augustin Génestout put the case in 1938, nearly every specialist who has laid the two texts side by side has concluded that the Master came first and that Benedict was the borrower. Sixth-century writers did not footnote, and a man drawing up a rule for his own house treated an older rule roughly the way a builder treats good stone from an older wall. So the borrowing is not the interesting part. What Benedict did with the material is: he cut the Master’s sprawling text to about a third of its length, dropped much of its suspicion of the monks it governed, and softened it at nearly every point where the two can be compared.

(●) c. 542 AD: Totila, king of the Goths, came to test him and left on his knees. + By the 540s the Gothic war was burning through Italy in both directions, and Totila, the Gothic king, was winning. Gregory tells that Totila decided to find out whether the famous abbot really had second sight. He dressed one of his guard, a man named Riggo, in his own shoes and princely robes, sent three of the men who were always about him along as an escort, and pointed them up the mountain. Benedict, sitting at a distance, called out to the man as he approached to take off what he was wearing, because it was not his. Riggo fell on his face and so did his escort, and went back down badly shaken. Then the king came himself, and would not get up off the ground until Benedict came and raised him. What followed was not flattery. Gregory records the rebuke and the prophecy in one breath: "Much wickedness do you daily commit, and many great sins have you done: now at length give over your sinful life. Into the city of Rome shall you enter, and over the sea shall you pass: nine years shall you reign, and in the tenth shall you leave this mortal life." Gregory says the king went away frightened, and was noticeably less cruel afterward. The outline fits the history. Totila did enter Rome, in 546, and did cross to Sicily, and did die in battle, at Taginae in 552. The arithmetic is looser than Gregory makes it sound: Totila was raised to the kingship in 541, so his reign ran about eleven years rather than nine, and a reader should also weigh the plain fact that Gregory was writing forty years after the king’s death and knew how the story ended. That is the honest way to hold it. The meeting itself is entirely at home in the Italy of the 540s, when a Gothic king riding past Cassino would have been an ordinary sight.

(●) c. 547 AD: He died on his feet in the oratory, held upright by his monks. + Two scenes close the life, and Gregory puts them side by side. His sister Scholastica lived in a religious house not far away, and once a year Benedict came down to meet her at a property near the monastery gate, since a woman could not come in. At their last meeting she asked him to stay the night and go on talking about heaven until morning. He refused; the Rule did not allow him to sleep away from the monastery, and he had written the Rule. So she bowed her head into her hands on the table and prayed, and when she lifted it there was such lightning and thunder and rain that nobody could set a foot outside the door. "What have you done?" Benedict asked her. Gregory gives her answer: "I desired you to stay, and you would not hear me, I have desired our good Lord, and he hath vouchsafed to grant my petition." They talked all night. Three days later, from his cell, he saw her soul leave her body in the likeness of a dove and go up into heaven, and he had her buried in the grave he had prepared for himself. Gregory’s comment on the storm is one of the warmest sentences in the book: it is no wonder that a woman who had not seen her brother for a long time could do more at that hour than he could, because "God is charity and therefore of right she did more which loved more." Not long after, Benedict told his brothers to open that grave. A fever took him, and on the sixth day he had himself carried into the oratory. That is the room a Benedictine house sets aside for prayer and for nothing else, no business and no conversation, and it is where the bell had been calling him for the whole of his life as a monk. There he received communion, and then stood with his weak body "holden up betwixt the hands of his disciples," his own hands lifted toward heaven, and died praying. Tradition fixes the day as 21 March in 547; Gregory names neither the day nor the year. He does report that two monks, one in the monastery and one far away, saw the same thing that night: a road running east from his cell up into the sky, hung with cloth and shining with lamps beyond counting. Gregory also tells, from the last years of that life, a night when the old man stood praying at his window in the dark and "the whole world, gathered as it were together under one beam of the sun, was presented before his eyes." Whatever one makes of the vision, it says something true about the book he left. He wrote it for one house on one hill, and it turned out to be for everybody.

What He Taught

(T1) A monastery is a school for the Lord’s service, and the rule that governs it must not be harsh. + Anyone who has joined a gym in January knows the difference between a programme written by someone who wants you to still be there in March and one written by someone who wants to see how much you can take. Benedict wrote the first kind, on purpose, and said so. He opens by sorting monks into four kinds, and the sorting tells you what he is for and what he is against. There are cenobites, who live in a community under a rule and an abbot: these are the ones he is writing for, and he calls them the strong kind. There are anchorites, or hermits, who go out alone after long training in a community. Then come the two he has no patience with. Sarabaites live in twos and threes with no rule but their own appetite, and "what they choose to do they call holy, but what they dislike they hold to be unlawful." Gyrovagues drift from monastery to monastery for three or four days at a time, guests of everybody and members of nowhere, and Benedict says it is better to say nothing about them than to speak. Against that drifting he set the promise a new monk makes in front of the whole community: stability, meaning this house and these brothers for life; conversatio morum, the reform of his manner of living; and obedience. Stability is the strange one to modern ears. It means that when the community becomes tiresome, and it will, the tiresomeness is the material God has given you to work with, and the exit is closed. Having closed the exit, Benedict spends the rest of the book making the house liveable. The word he uses for the governing virtue is discretion, which in his Latin means something closer to good judgment about particular people than to keeping a secret: he calls it "the mother of virtues," and tells the abbot to arrange everything "that the strong may still have something to desire and the weak may not draw back." So each monk gets a pound of bread and a hemina of wine a day, roughly half a pint, and two cooked dishes at dinner so that a man who cannot manage one can eat the other. Each gets his own bed, with a mattress, a blanket, a coverlet and a pillow, and about eight hours of sleep, and a lamp is left burning in the dormitory all night. The sick, the old and the children are excused the strict letter of everything. Set that beside the desert fathers, the hermits who had gone out into the Egyptian sands two centuries earlier and whose sayings were copied all over the Christian world, among whom fasting could turn into something close to a competition; or set it beside the Irish rule of Columbanus two generations later, which counts out lashes and psalms for faults by the dozen, and the difference is the whole point. Benedict ends by calling his book "this least rule written for a beginning" and pointing the reader who wants more toward the Scriptures, Basil, and Cassian.

(Q) "We are, therefore, about to found a school of the Lord’s service, in which we hope to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome." + Source: Rule of St Benedict, Prologue (Verheyen translation). The sentence comes at the very end of the Prologue, after a long stretch of Scripture urging the reader to hurry while there is still daylight. Benedict immediately concedes that a little strictness may be needed "to correct vices or to preserve charity," and then tells the beginner not to run away in fright, because the road narrows only at the start: as faith grows, he writes, "we shall run the way of God’s commandments with expanded hearts and unspeakable sweetness of love."

(T2) Nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God, the eight fixed hours of prayer that cut up the day. + In a Benedictine house a bell rings, and everyone stops. Not finishes the sentence, not puts the tool down tidily and washes: stops, "leaving whatever he hath in his hands," and goes. What they go to is what Benedict calls the Work of God, opus Dei in his Latin, and it is not a metaphor for the day’s labour. It means the fixed services of psalms, readings and prayers that the community says together, also called the Divine Office. Benedict lays out eight of them across the twenty-four hours: Vigils in the depth of the night, Lauds at daybreak, then Prime, Terce, Sext and None spaced through the working day, Vespers in the evening, and Compline last thing before bed. The four odd names in the middle are less mysterious than they look: they are simply the first, third, sixth and ninth hours of the Roman day, counted from sunrise. Between them the community works its way through all one hundred and fifty psalms every week, and Benedict adds a dry aside about that, noting that "our holy forefathers promptly fulfilled in one day what we lukewarm monks should, please God, perform at least in a week." The timetable is not the teaching. The teaching is what the timetable does to a life. A day cut into eight pieces by prayer cannot be organised around a project, or a mood, or an appetite; the work is genuinely interrupted, several times, by something that produces nothing. Time itself is the thing being given away. Benedict adds a chapter on how to pray when the bell has brought you in: short, and honest. It is "not in many words, but in the purity of heart and tears of compunction that we are heard," and so prayer "ought to be short and pure," unless grace itself lengthens it. He has no interest in eloquence at prayer, and says the community should not attempt in public what only the private heart can sustain. The pattern outlasted the houses that kept it. Fixed-hour prayer is what Thomas Cranmer folded down into Morning and Evening Prayer when he wrote the English Book of Common Prayer, so that a parish or a family could do in two offices what a monastery did in eight. A man with a forge to run and children to feed cannot stop eight times a day. He can stop twice, and that is the whole of the adjustment. Every Christian who keeps an appointed hour, rather than praying when it occurs to him, is standing somewhere downstream of this chapter.

(Q) "As soon as the signal for the time of the divine office is heard, let everyone, leaving whatever he hath in his hands, hasten with all speed, yet with gravity, that there may be no cause for levity. Therefore, let nothing be preferred to the Work of God." + Source: Rule of St Benedict, chapter 43 (Verheyen translation). The chapter is headed "Of Those Who Are Tardy in Coming to the Work of God or to Table," and most of it is about where a latecomer has to stand. The famous sentence is therefore not a slogan hung over a doorway. It is the reason given for a rule about punctuality, which is a fair sample of how the whole book works: the largest claims arrive attached to small practical arrangements (T1).

(T3) Idleness is the enemy of the soul, and the labour of the hands is part of the cure. + To feel the force of this, remember what the Roman world thought about manual work. Cicero, writing five centuries earlier in On Duties, had laid it down that the wages of a hired workman are the wages of slavery and that a workshop has nothing gentlemanly about it. Leisure, otium, was the condition of a serious life; a gentleman thought, and other people dug. That assumption ran so deep that it barely needed defending. Benedict simply ignores it. His chapter on the daily work opens with a flat sentence, that idleness is the enemy of the soul, and then divides the day into three uses: manual labour, reading, and the Office. The kitchen is served in weekly turns by everybody, nobody excused except for sickness or more pressing work, "because greater merit and more charity is thereby acquired." The monk in charge of the stores is told to treat every pot and tool in the house "as if they were sacred vessels of the altar." And if the harvest has to be got in by the community’s own hands because there is no money to pay for help, Benedict tells them not to be downcast about it: "for then are they monks in truth, if they live by the work of their hands, as did also our forefathers and the Apostles." The reading half of the day is the other surprise. Benedict expects monks to read, and to read seriously: several hours a day, and during Lent each man receives a book from the library and is to read it straight through, with one or two seniors sent round to check that nobody is skipping or gossiping instead. The technical name for this kind of reading is lectio divina, "divine reading," which means going slowly through Scripture as prayer rather than as study, a few lines at a time, until the words are in the memory. Nobody in the sixth century wrote that chapter in order to save classical literature, and it would be an overclaim to say Benedict set out to preserve civilization. What he did was quieter and, in the end, more effective. He required every monk to read every day, which means a house needs books; he required communities to stay put, which means the books stay put too; and he built an institution capable of doing both for a very long time. The libraries, the copying rooms and the schools followed from those requirements over the next three centuries, largely as a by-product.

(Q) "Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading." + Source: Rule of St Benedict, chapter 48 (Verheyen translation). The first sentence of the chapter on daily work. What follows it is a timetable adjusted three times over for the seasons, because the hours of daylight change and Benedict would rather rewrite the schedule than pretend they do not.

(T4) The way up is down, and it has twelve steps. + The longest chapter in the Rule takes its picture from a dream. Jacob, sleeping in the open with a stone under his head, sees a ladder set on the earth with its top reaching heaven, and the angels of God going up and down it (Genesis 28:12). Benedict takes the two directions and turns them into a single sentence about human beings: we go down by pride and up by humility. The ladder, he says, is our life in this world, and its two side rails are the body and the soul. Then he counts out twelve rungs, and they are worth walking slowly, because "humility" has drifted in modern English toward a manner of speaking about yourself, a way of turning a compliment aside at a party. That is not what he means at all. The first rung holds up the other eleven: keep the fear of God before your eyes and do not forget him. The next six work inward, on the will, and they get harder as they go. Not loving your own will. Obeying a superior. Holding on under hard and even unjust treatment without running. Confessing your own faults instead of hiding them. Being content with the meanest of everything. And then the one that costs most, believing yourself genuinely lower than the others rather than merely saying so. The last five work outward, on the body and the tongue: doing only what the common rule and the elders sanction, keeping silence until you are asked, not being quick or loud in laughter, speaking briefly and gently, and finally carrying the whole thing in your bearing, so that a man’s humility shows in how he stands and walks and not only in what he says. That is a demanding list, and a Protestant reader in particular may feel it turning into a ladder of merit, a staircase a man climbs to make himself acceptable. Notice, then, where Benedict says it comes out. The end of the twelfth rung is not a certificate. It is that the monk arrives at the love of God "which being perfect, casteth out fear," and begins to do out of love, and out of sheer habit, what he first did out of dread of hell. The ladder is a description of how a frightened obedience turns into a free one. And the shape of it is not Benedict’s invention: it is the plain sense of Scripture, that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted (Luke 14:11), and that we are to do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit but in humility count others more significant than ourselves (Philippians 2:3). What Benedict added was the training programme.

(Q) "Without a doubt, we understand this ascending and descending to be nothing else but that we descend by pride and ascend by humility." + Source: Rule of St Benedict, chapter 7 (Verheyen translation). Benedict has just quoted Jacob’s dream. He reads the ladder as a single life rather than as a hierarchy of persons, which is why the twelve rungs that follow are all things a man does to himself and nothing he does to anyone else (T4).

(T5) Every guest who knocks is Christ arriving, and every sick brother is Christ in bed. + Begin at the gate. Benedict puts an old and sensible monk in a room beside it, so that a caller never has to wait or wander, and tells him that the moment anyone knocks, or a poor man calls, he is to answer "Thanks be to God" or to invoke a blessing, and to reply "speedily in the fervor of charity," with "the meekness of the fear of God." What happens next is startling if you have not read it before. Guests are to be received as Christ, because Christ will say, "I was a stranger and you took Me in." The superior and the brothers go out to meet them. They pray together first, then greet each other, and Benedict wants the greeting made "with the head bowed down or the whole body prostrate on the ground," because it is Christ who is being adored in them. The abbot pours water over the guest’s hands, and the abbot and the whole community wash the guests’ feet. The superior breaks his own fast to eat with a visitor. And where a wealthy guest will get deference anyway, Benedict says, the greatest care is to be taken over the poor and the traveller, "because Christ is received more specially in them." Set beside all that, one small administrative sentence shows the practical mind at work: the abbot and the guests are given a kitchen of their own, with two brothers appointed to it for the year, so that people arriving at unpredictable hours, and Benedict notes drily that they never stop arriving, do not wreck the rhythm of the house. That is the whole trick of the chapter. The door is genuinely open and the household still functions. The same reasoning runs through the chapter on the sick, which opens by saying that before and above all things the sick are to be cared for, and served in very truth as Christ is served, "because He hath said, ‘I was sick and you visited Me.’" The abbot is warned to make sure they are not neglected, and the sick are given a separate room, an attendant who fears God, baths as often as they need, and meat, which nobody else in the house is eating. Benedict then turns round and tells the sick not to trade on it, since patients can grieve those who serve them. He is not sentimental about anybody, which is part of why the arrangement lasted.

(Q) "Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: ‘I was a stranger and you took Me in.’" + Source: Rule of St Benedict, chapter 53 (Verheyen translation), quoting Matthew 25:35. The opening sentence of the chapter on hospitality, and the source of the phrase "Benedictine hospitality" that abbeys and retreat houses still use of themselves. Benedict is not inventing a policy; he is reading a parable of Jesus about the judgment of the nations and treating it as a set of instructions for the front door (T5).

(Q) "Let them fear God and love their Abbot with sincere and humble affection; let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may He lead us all together to life everlasting." + Source: Rule of St Benedict, chapter 72 (Verheyen translation). The last words of the second-to-last chapter, "Of the Virtuous Zeal Which the Monks Ought to Have," which is fifteen lines long and is the nearest thing in the book to a summary of it. Benedict has just told the brothers to outdo one another in showing honour, to bear each other’s weaknesses of body and character with the utmost patience, to compete in obedience, and to seek what is good for the other man rather than for themselves. Then the whole seventy-three chapters come down to one clause, and the last verb in it is not one of theirs: may He lead us.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) A pope told his life fifty years later, and that telling is the only life there is. + About thirty years after Benedict died, the Lombards came over Monte Cassino at night and burned it. The monks escaped to Rome, carrying, among other things, a copy of the Rule. That is how the book reached the city, and it is probably how its author reached Gregory. Gregory the Great was a Roman aristocrat who had turned his family house into a monastery and lived in it before he was dragged out to be pope in 590. Around 593 he wrote four books of Dialogues, conversations with a deacon named Peter about the holy men of Italy, and gave the whole of the second book to Benedict alone. He names his witnesses, which is more than most hagiography does. (Hagiography is writing about the saints, a genre with its own rules and its own purpose: it holds a life up to be imitated, and it is no more embarrassed about that than a sermon is.) The witnesses are four men who had known Benedict personally, including Constantine, who succeeded him as abbot at Cassino, and Honoratus, who was still alive at Subiaco when Gregory wrote. It is worth being clear about what kind of book this is. Gregory is writing to build faith, not to compile a chronicle, and his Benedict moves through a world of broken sieves mended, iron rising out of a lake to rejoin its handle, ravens carrying off poisoned bread, and a dead boy raised. A reader who wants a modern biography will not find one here, and Gregory would not have understood the complaint. In the 1980s Francis Clark argued that the Dialogues were not Gregory’s work at all but a forgery of the late seventh century; the case was examined at length and has not carried the field, and the ordinary judgment remains that the book is Gregory’s and that its historical core sits comfortably in sixth-century Italy. The most useful sentence in it, for anyone who wants the man rather than the wonders, is Gregory’s own aside. He says that Benedict wrote a rule for monks "both excellent for discretion and also eloquent for the style," and that whoever wishes to know his character and his life more exactly may find all of it there, "for the holy man could not otherwise teach, than himself lived." The book is offered as the portrait, and the miracles as the frame.

(†) Charlemagne’s empire made his rule the rule, and the abbeys became the schools of the West. + For two centuries the Rule was one option among many. An abbot founding a house would commonly take a rule from here and a custom from there, and Benedict’s book competed with Cassian, Basil, Caesarius of Arles, and the fierce Irish rule of Columbanus. It travelled well, though. Monte Cassino was refounded in 718, and by then the Rule had already reached England: the oldest surviving manuscript of it, Oxford, Bodleian MS Hatton 48, was copied in England early in the eighth century, while Bede was still at work in his monastery at Jarrow. Then politics took an interest. In 787 Charlemagne visited Monte Cassino and had the monks copy out their most ancient manuscript of the Rule, believed there to be Benedict’s own autograph; a descendant of that Carolingian copy survives at the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland as Codex Sangallensis 914, and it is still the basis of the best modern editions, whatever one makes of the claim about the autograph. A generation later Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious took up the project with the help of a second Benedict, Benedict of Aniane, and the councils held at Aachen in 816 and 817 imposed the Rule on every monastery in the empire. From then on, in the Latin West, "the Rule" meant this one. Everything after that is variation on the same text, and the variations are worth setting side by side, because they pull in opposite directions from one book. Cluny, founded in 910, kept the Rule and expanded the Office, adding psalms and processions and ceremony until the singing filled most of the waking day and there was very little room left for anything else. Cîteaux, founded in 1098 by men who thought Cluny had drifted, kept the same Rule and cut everything else away in order to get back to its letter; the Cistercians who came out of it went into the marshes and the forests and farmed, which is what chapter 48 had told monks to be ready to do. The English cathedrals staffed by monks, the Irish and German mission houses, the Italian and Spanish reforms: all of them are readings of the same seventy-three chapters. Men who could not agree with one another about how to sing a psalm could each open that book and find themselves in it, which says something about how carefully it was written. And the by-products outran the intention. A rule that required daily reading meant houses that needed libraries and copyists. A rule that required stability meant institutions that could still be there in a hundred years, which almost nothing else in early medieval Europe could promise. A rule that required hospitality meant that the abbeys were the inns of a continent with no inns, and one that required the sick to be served as Christ meant they were its infirmaries. None of that was the goal. Benedict was trying to get a few dozen men to heaven without making them miserable on the way.

(†) Protestants pulled down the monasteries and kept his habits. + The Reformation quarrel was not with Benedict’s timetable but with what a vow was thought to accomplish. Luther, who had been living under monastic vows himself as an Augustinian friar since 1505, wrote On Monastic Vows at the Wartburg in 1521 and had it printed the next year, arguing that a vow taken as a higher road to God contradicts the freedom of the gospel and quietly demotes the ordinary callings, the farm and the workshop and the marriage bed, that God actually assigns to most Christians. Calvin devoted a long stretch of the Institutes (IV.13) to vows, allowed that the older monasticism Augustine described was a better thing than what he saw in his own day, said that even in that older form there was much he did not like, and was careful to add that he had "spoken of monachism rather than of monks," marking "not the vices which cleave to a few, but vices which are inseparable from the very mode of life." In England the houses were dissolved between 1536 and 1541, and a form of life that had been part of English Christianity for nine centuries simply stopped. What did not stop is easy to overlook. Thomas Cranmer, drawing up the English Book of Common Prayer, folded Benedict’s eight offices down into two, Morning and Evening Prayer, with the psalter, the whole book of Psalms, read through every month, the Old Testament once a year and the New Testament three times over, and handed them to parish churches and to families. The daily office survived the dissolution by being given away. So did the habit of set hours, the reading of Scripture in course rather than by favourite passages, and the assumption that ordinary work is a Christian occupation rather than an interruption of one. Elsewhere the line never broke at all. Catholic and Orthodox monasticism continued, and in the twentieth century the Rule found a new set of readers with no intention whatever of taking vows: Esther de Waal’s Seeking God (1984) introduced it to Anglican laypeople as a manual for family and working life, and the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre closed After Virtue (1981) by saying that what the West is now waiting for is not a Godot but another and doubtless very different St Benedict. In 1964 Paul VI named him patron of Europe, on the day he reconsecrated Monte Cassino, which had been flattened by Allied bombing in 1944 and rebuilt stone by stone. It was the fourth time in fourteen centuries that the abbey had been destroyed, and the fourth time it had been rebuilt, which is a fair emblem of the thing Benedict actually made.

(†) Where his own Rule invites correction: the lash on a boy’s back, and an obedience with few doors out. + Two things in the Rule are Benedict’s own and deserve to be named rather than admired around. - The rod. The chapters on discipline work up a careful ladder of correction: private warning, public rebuke, then exclusion from the common table and the common prayer. But when that fails, Benedict reaches for the whip. A brother often corrected who will not amend is to be dealt with by "corporal punishment," and the abbot is told to use "the blows of the lash" as the last of his medicines before prayer. Worse, the chapter on children says that boys, and any others who cannot grasp what exclusion means, are to be given severe fasting or "corporal punishment, that they may be corrected." These were boys handed over by their parents to be raised in the house. It is true that this was gentler than a Roman schoolroom or a sixth-century magistrate, and true that Benedict frames it as a physician’s last resort rather than as a right. It remains the beating of children by men who had promised to be their fathers in God, and Scripture had already told fathers not to provoke their children to anger, and not to provoke them lest they become discouraged (Ephesians 6:4; Colossians 3:21). On this the Rule is of its century and no better than its century. - The abbot. Benedict says the abbot "is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery," and wants obedience given "without delay," as though the command came from God himself. He supplies most of the correction himself, and it is substantial: the abbot must summon the whole community for counsel on anything weighty, and hear the youngest, "because the Lord often revealeth to the younger what is best"; he must temper everything by discretion; he must never command anything against the law of God; there is even a chapter for the brother who is told to do something impossible, telling him to explain patiently why it cannot be done. And the abbot is reminded, more than once, that he will answer at the judgment for every soul in his care. Still, every one of those safeguards lives inside the house and depends on the conscience of the man being restrained. Where an abbot was a bad man, the Rule left the community very little it could do, and the later history of monastic houses shows what that costs. Neither point touches the substance of what he taught, and both are the sort of thing a reader should know before being handed a book that is often recommended without qualification. The Rule is a wise book written by a man of his time, which is what nearly every wise book is.