The view now held by all serious students of the RB that it is dependent upon the RM does not entirely change our appreciation of St. Benedict and his Rule nor diminish his importance. It does, however, alter our approach to him and his work, for we cannot abstract from the present state of the question regarding the RM controversy. The dispute has, in fact, been of enormous value to anyone interested in the life and Rule of St. Benedict, for it has shed light upon previously obscure areas in Western monastic development and more accurately delineated his real contribution to this evolution. The truth is always a gain. It is against the background of these recent studies, then, that we shall attempt to reconstruct an account of St. Benedict and of the Rule that has played such an important role in the Western Church for more than a thousand years.
3. ST. BENEDICT OF NURSIA
Unlike Caesarius, Cassiodorus and other monastic figures of the period, St. Benedict is not mentioned by any of his contemporaries nor in any literature that can be dated earlier than the end of the sixth century. He does not even identify himself in the Rule, and hence it cannot be used as a source of information about him until his authorship can be otherwise established. Nor has he left any other writings. For our knowledge of him, we are entirely dependent upon a single source, the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great. Of the four books composing this work, written in 593–594, the second is entirely devoted to Benedict, and he is mentioned once again in Book 3, and twice in Book 4.
Gregory, one of the most important personages ever to occupy the papal throne, was a vital link between the Patristic period and the Middle Ages. Born about 540 of a patrician family, he received an excellent education and became prefect of Rome in 570. Five years later, however, after his father’s death, he converted the family home on the Coelian into a monastery and established six other monasteries on his estates in Sicily. Nothing is known of the observance followed in his Roman monastery of St. Andrew. The monastic life was congenial to him, but about 579 the Pope called him from it to serve as apocrisiarius, or nuncio, to the Byzantine court at Constantinople. Accompanied there by monks, he continued to live the monastic life in the capital, and returned to St. Andrew’s when his mission was completed in 586. But he was then chosen deacon to Pope Pelagius II, and when the Pontiff died in 590, was constrained to succeed him despite his unwillingness. He never ceased to mourn the loss of his contemplative peace during the fourteen years of his extremely active pontificate.13
Gregory’s writings, while displaying a high degree of culture, have an essentially pastoral and practical character. At a time when the institutions of society were collapsing and men believed that the world was coming to an end, he strove to maintain peace and order, and to provide encouragement for all classes of the faithful suffering from the evils of the times. Gregory had a marked mystical bent, yet at the same time, everything he wrote is pedagogically oriented. He says often that the best way to teach is not by explanation but by concrete example. Abstraction and speculation were foreign to his manner; he was always the moralizing teacher. Of all his works, the Dialogues are doubtless the most characteristic of this genre. Adopting the ancient form of the dialogue, which goes back at least as far as Plato, he presents his deacon, Peter, as the eager listener who asks naïve and sometimes rather obtuse questions to elicit the pontiff’s teaching. The real purpose of the work is to convey Gregory’s spiritual and moral instruction; but this is done by telling stories about the saints of Italy, particularly those of the vicinity of Rome. Their example was meant to assure his contemporaries that the gifts of God are still poured forth in their own times, evil as they seem, as much as in previous ages.14
Of all these saints adduced as witnesses, St. Benedict holds the most important place. Recent studies have disclosed the careful construction of the work.15 The stories about him in Book 2 are framed by 12 lesser personages in Book 1, and 37 others in Book 3, making 50 all together, but in such a fashion that Benedict holds the central place. Book 4 corresponds to Book 2 in that it also develops a single theme, that of life after death, a question frequently posed in the earlier books, especially in their concluding episodes. It is especially linked to Book 2 by its opening reference to Germanus of Capua, and its 62 chapters, with the 38 of Book 2, make 100 in all; the addition of Book 3, also with 38, and Book 1, with 12, gives a grand total of 150.
There is a similar organization within the account of Benedict in Book 2 itself. While Gregory follows the principal stages of Benedict’s career, he is primarily interested in the gift of prophecy and the power of working miracles. These charisms frequently reproduce biblical models, so that Benedict is shown to be the Vir Dei, filled with the spirit of all the just. The account of his early experience depicts his progress toward holiness. There is a discernible sequence of temptation, followed by victory, followed in turn by the increasing radiation of his holiness for the benefit of others. Four times this sequence is repeated, with growing intensity, until Benedict has won the spiritual combat within himself and is ready to be set like a light upon a still higher candlestick, the mountain of Cassino. There he joins battle with the demon outside himself, manifested in the paganism that still survives in the countryside, which he combats by destroying the idols and preaching the faith. Four encounters with the demon then serve to display the power of God in the Man of God. His career at Montecassino is then depicted by two series of twelve miracles each, the first displaying powers of knowledge; the second, powers of action. These are followed by four accounts of visions and miracles concerning the afterlife, forming a pendant to the four demonic assaults that preceded the miracle series.
Clearly, this “Life” is not a biography in any modern sense of the term. The author’s purpose is not primarily to tell us what really happened nor to set events in their chronological order. The entire development of his account is ruled by quite different preoccupations. Benedict is an example who shows forth the working of God in man’s life. He illustrates the law of paradox: genuine fruitfulness comes from what at first sight seems sterile; life comes forth from death; the man who concentrates upon his own sanctification becomes an apostle, an instrument of God for the good of others. Through Benedict, Gregory teaches his readers the stages through which a man advances toward God.
The pedagogical purpose is so apparent in all this that one may wonder about the reality of the events narrated. Certainly the stories have a symbolic intent; recently a number of attempts have been made by scholars to elucidate the meaning behind some of Gregory’s narratives.16 Symbolism, however, does not exclude historicity, and the basic facts of Benedict’s career in Gregory’s account are too well founded to be inventions for some symbolic purpose. He tells us the sources of his information: Constantine and Simplicius, the second and third abbots of Montecassino, who probably knew Benedict in his old age and certainly knew the community’s traditions about him; Valentinian, abbot of the Lateran monastery; and Honoratus, who was abbot of Subiaco when Gregory was writing. It is unlikely that the latter could have known Benedict, but Gregory does not say that all these men knew him personally nor that he got his information from them directly. But he surely drew upon sources close to reliable traditions. Moreover, the narrative mentions nearby places such as Enfide, Subiaco, Cassino, Terracina, and historical personages such as Germanus and Sabinus. It is not plausible that a fictitious person could be passed off as real when mingled with known places and people who were still living or only recently deceased. A well-documented and early cult of St. Benedict also testifies to the historical reality of his life.
Consequently, there can be no question that Gregory gives us genuine facts about the life of St. Benedict, even if it is not easy to separate them from what is purely symbolic and imaginative. The Dialogues testify that Benedict was born in the region of Nursia, northeast of Rome, in the mountains; the traditional date of 480 cannot be far from the truth. He was sent to Rome for school and there experienced the religious conversion that led him to renounce the world. He
is depicted as first living with what seems to have been a group of ascetics at Enfide (now Affile), east of Rome, then in utter solitude for three years at Subiaco. After a bitter experience as head of a group of false monks (probably the “sarabaites” of the Rule or the “remnuoth” of Jerome), he returned to Subiaco, where he was joined by numerous disciples, for whom he established twelve monasteries of twelve monks each and appointed deans over them. Some have seen in this a reproduction of the Pachomian system, but the parallel is by no means compelling.
After these monasteries had been firmly established, Benedict left this region with a few disciples and founded a fully cenobitic monastery on top of the mountain rising above Cassino, some eighty miles south of Rome on the way to Naples. Here he acquired a widespread reputation as a holy man invested with divine charisms (his annual visit with his sister, St. Scholastica, and his vision of her death, for example), sent a delegation to found another monastery at Terracina, and died around the middle of the sixth century. A quarter of a century later his monastery was destroyed by the invading Lombards, but the community escaped without loss of life.17
Not everything in this sketch is equally certain, and many questions are left unanswered; most modern readers would be happy to trade some of Gregory’s miracle stories for a few more hard facts, but his interests were different from ours. Nevertheless, Benedict’s activity in the area around Rome and his role as a monastic founder are beyond question. There is one other point Gregory regarded as important, though again he is less specific than we would like: he testifies that Benedict wrote a monastic rule “notable for its discernment (discretione praecipuam) and its clarity of language (sermone luculentam).”18 The Dialogues describe his activity; for his teaching, the reader is referred to his Rule, which is a mirror of his own virtuous life.19
Presumably Gregory had a personal acquaintance with this Rule written by Benedict; surely he could have had access to it through his sources. In the past it has often been supposed that Gregory himself was a “Benedictine,” that he followed what we know as the Rule of St. Benedict in his own monastery on the Coelian, and that the monks he sent to England were likewise “Benedictines.” Now, however, the increased complexity surrounding the origin of the RB requires a re-examination of these assumptions.20 Surely it is an anachronism to speak of Gregory and his monks as “Benedictine” in the later sense of that term, for in the sixth century a rule did not serve as a detailed code regulating the life except in the monastery for which it was written. Monasteries frequently made use of several rules, taking from each what they found suitable. There is no evidence that the RB regulated the life at St. Andrew’s nor that it was taken to Canterbury in 596; its first clear attestation in England is much later in the seventh century, and in the north rather than at Canterbury.
Attempts have been made to show that the monastic customs mentioned by Gregory in the Dialogues and elsewhere do or do not agree with the RB, as a means of establishing whether or not the rule of which Gregory speaks is the one we know as St. Benedict’s. In fact, the evidence points in both directions—if in fact it can be called evidence, since the literary form of the Dialogues hardly lends itself to such precision. Although it is impossible to show that Gregory regarded the RB as normative, however, there cannot be any reasonable doubt that he was acquainted with it. In the Commentary on 1 Kings, now accepted as authentically Gregorian even if given its present form by a disciple, Gregory cites RB 58 (and perhaps alludes to other passages), though he identifies the author only as arctissimae vitae magister optimus. It is the earliest known citation of the RB. Indeed, Gregory does not here explicitly say that he is citing the Rule of Benedict mentioned in the Dialogues, and we have no clear historical proof that what Gregory thought to be the Rule of Benedict was really the work of the Patriarch of Cassino. But the chain of evidence seems continuous enough to resist all but the most demanding skepticism.
To this can be added the evidence of the manuscript tradition. In none of the hundreds of existing manuscripts is the RB ever attributed to anyone else. Not all of them mention the author, but those that do, among which are some of the best and most ancient, attribute it to Benedict. Others do so equivalently by associating it with other literature about him, e.g., Book 2 of the Dialogues. It is true that this fact alone is not compelling; the oldest manuscripts do not antedate the middle or, at the earliest, the opening years of the eighth century, some two centuries after Benedict’s death. By that time a universal tradition of authorship could have been established even without historical basis. But the witness of Gregory takes it back quite reliably to the sixth century. It is, if not capable of apodictic proof, at least of the highest probability that the Benedict of Nursia of whom St. Gregory wrote is in fact responsible for the Rule attributed to him for more than a thousand years.21
4. RELATIONSHIP OF THE RULE TO THE REGULA MAGISTRI
The RM, as we have seen, is now known to be a work of the sixth century. Aside from all hypotheses, this dating is certain from the manuscript tradition alone. The RM probably was not often copied because of its length and because it was not followed in many monasteries after the time of its author. Therefore, we have but few manuscripts—only three complete and several fragmentary copies. Two of these, however, are older than any manuscript of the RB. The Paris Codex P, which contains the entire rule, dates from the early seventh century, and Codex E, the only surviving copy of the florilegium attributed to Eugippius, which contains sixteen extracts from the RM, is probably even earlier, from the end of the sixth century. The composition of the rule, therefore, must belong to the sixth century at the very latest, and internal evidence points to the opening decades of the century. This puts it quite close in time to the RB, assigned to the early or middle part of the sixth century both by the testimony of Gregory and by internal evidence. Only a close comparison of the two rules can show which is earlier; it is now generally agreed that the RM came first. The reasons for this judgment are as follows.22
First, the vocabulary of the two rules favors the precedence of the RM. A number of words in the passages common to the two rules are also used in sections proper to the RM, but rarely or never in passages proper to the RB. Conversely, some words belonging to the vocabulary of the RB rarely or never occur in the common passages or in those proper to the RM. One of the striking cases noted early in the dispute is that of autem: a favorite word of St. Benedict, it occurs 82 times in the parts proper to the RB, only 8 times in the RM, and never in the passages they have in common. Likewise, St. Benedict writes omnino 18 times, but the RM and the common passages do not use it at all. On the other hand, there are no less than 163 words that occur both in the RM and in the common parts but are never used by St. Benedict, while only 12 words absent from the RM appear in both the common parts and in the RB, some of them only once in each. The unity of vocabulary between the common part and the RM suggests that these two are by the same author, but that the RB, which has a different vocabulary in the sections proper to itself, also has a different author, who has taken over the common passages from the RM.
Among other items that could be cited, the words used to designate monastic superiors are significant. The term doctor occurs once in the common passages and 12 times in the RM, never in the RB. Maior occurs 4 times in the common passages and 28 times in the RM, never in the RB. On the other hand, the RB uses the term prior 11 times to mean ‘superior,’ whereas it never occurs with this meaning either in the common passages or in the RM. Likewise, senior appears 13 times in the RB, never in the common parts, and only once in the RM. Prior in the sense of ‘the older’ and iunior in the sense of ‘the younger’ occur 8 and 11 times, respectively, in the RB, never in the RM or the common parts. A member of the community is usually called discipulus or frater by the RM, and the common parts generally prefer this usage, while avoiding monachus. The RB likewise uses all these terms, but in inverse proportion: the word monachus occurs 31 times, compared to 7 in the RM and only 2 in the common pa
rts.
A second argument is drawn from the sources utilized by the two rules. The argument runs as follows. In the passages common to both, there are citations from earlier works. The form in which these citations appear in the RM is more faithful to the original than their form in the RB. Thus in several places in the Prologue and chapter 1, the RB contains citations from Cassian. These same citations occur in the parallels in the RM, but in every case the RM reproduces the citation more exactly than the RB. It looks, therefore, as if the Master is Following the text of Cassian, while the RB is following the RM and introducing slight changes, perhaps unaware that the passages are citations. The alternative hypothesis would require us to suppose that the Master, following the RB, checked each citation (or knew it by heart) and corrected it according to the original text of Cassian. Though not impossible, this is less likely, unless there is question of citations extremely well known, such as texts from Scripture.
Some of the citations, moreover, are from apocryphal books such as the Passion of Sebastian and the Sentences of Sextus. Now, it appears certain that these books were used by the Master, because he cites them elsewhere in his rule, in passages that do not occur in the RB. On the other hand, there is no evidence that the author of the RB had independent access to them (as he certainly did to Cassian), since he never cites them in those portions of his rule not paralleled by the RM. It looks, therefore, as if he derived these citations from the RM. The contrary hypothesis, though not totally excluded, is highly improbable. Indeed, the precedence of the RM has been argued precisely from its more liberal attitude toward, and usage of, apocryphal books, in contrast to the RB. The so-called Gelasian Decree, which purports to express the Roman clergy’s disapproval of certain books such as the Sentences of Sextus, seems to have been issued in the early sixth century, and it has been suggested that the RM, with its liberal attitude toward the apocrypha, preceded this decree, while the RB, from a somewhat later period, shares the Decree’s reservations about the use of these books.
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