The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (13 page)

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The two different styles of asceticism that appeared in late-third-century Egypt would mark the traditions of Western monasteries for following centuries. One was the individualist, the tradition of the hermit, or anchorite (from the Greek for withdrawal), of which Saint Anthony was the founder and patron. The other was the communal, or cenobitic (from Greek
koinos bios
for living a common life), of which Saint Pachomius was the father. Pachomius, born in Upper Egypt about 287, when in his twenties was guided by an older man to try the solitary life. After seven years as a hermit, he had discovered the trials of the solitary life and he founded a community of monks on the right bank of the Nile north of Thebes. There the monks lived a “cenobitic” life grouped in houses (each holding thirty to forty men) within a circling wall. They gathered for prayer and meals and followed a rule of 194 chapters devised by Pachomius. At his death in 346 there were nine of his monasteries for men with several thousand monks and two for women. Then there developed the laura (or
lavra
), combining features of the hermitage and the monastery in a collection of the cells of individual hermits who gathered on regular occasions.

Enthusiastic ascetic Seekers exhausted their imaginations in quest of personal ways up “the steep and thorny path of eternal happiness.” With diabolical ingenuity they devised obstacles on the angelic path. The most famous of these was Saint Simeon Stylites, a passionate shepherd born about 390 near modern Aleppo in Syria and who died in 459. When his strict ascetic habits made him unwelcome in his monastery, he became a hermit and was soon venerated for his miracles. Then what Gibbon called his “singular invention of an aerial penance” helped him escape people demanding his blessing, and punished him at the same time that it separated him from importunate admirers. To pursue his divine meditations without interruption, he began living on top of a single column, and so acquired the name of “Stylites” (from the Greek for pillar dweller). At first the column was only six feet high but was gradually extended till it reached about fifty feet. There, beginning about 420, he is said to have remained day and night until his death in 459. The narrow platform surrounded by a railing was exposed to the elements and too small for him to do anything but stand or sit. While the railing prevented him from falling, a ladder communicated with the ground where acolytes brought small gifts of food. Only occasionally would he descend to give pilgrims his blessing or his counsel. Awe at his performance converted many visitors to Christianity and was said to have persuaded the Eastern Roman Emperor Leo I to the orthodox view of the dual nature of Christ. Simeon’s example inspired other ascetics.

Simeon Stylites was only the most ingenious and conspicuous of the self-mortifying hermits, Seekers desperate to separate themselves from the common life. The Dendrites lived in trees or in hollow tree trunks. The “Browsers” subsisted on roots and grass. Some dwelt in tombs or in huts with roofs so low that it was impossible to stand inside. Others loaded themselves with chains.

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The later history of monasticism reminds us again and again of the moderating influence of community on the excesses of self-regarding virtue. Saint Basil of Caesarea (329-379), rare among the Church Fathers in doubting the possibility of a good solitary life, insisted that only in community could fallen mankind repair human weakness by the works of charity. His “Rules” declared “That it is necessary with a view to pleasing God to live with like-minded persons, and that solitude is difficult and dangerous.”

Quest for the good monastic life produced Saint Benedict’s
Rule,
one of the most remarkable documents of Seekers in Western Christendom and one of the most durable institutions of Western communal life. The leader and creator of the movement of moderate communal asceticism, Saint Benedict came from Umbria, northeast of Rome. Here was another story, like that of Saint Anthony and Saint Thomas Aquinas, of a rich man’s son seeking through Christian withdrawal to escape the meaningless world of dissipation. The transformation of Western monasticism was a legacy of this Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547).

Most of what we know of Benedict’s life comes from the
Dialogues
of his admiring disciple Saint Gregory the Great (540-604; pope, 590-604). Gregory, himself a rich man’s son, had given away his landed inheritance to establish a half-dozen monasteries and fled into the retreat of a monastery. In 590 he was reluctantly summoned by acclamation of the people of Rome from his monastic cell to the throne of Saint Peter. Architect of the medieval papacy, he also left the Gregorian chant as his legacy. His
Dialogues
report the life and miracles of Saint Benedict, which would endure in Christian tradition.

Benedict lived when Theodoric and his Ostrogoths were conquering the cities of northern Italy. Totila, king of the Goths, repeatedly besieged Rome and finally took the city in 549. Sent to Rome for a liberal education, Benedict was repelled by the dissipation and decadence he saw. “He withdrew the foot he had just placed in the entry to the world; and despising the pursuit of letters, and abandoning his father’s home and property, desiring to please God alone, he determined to become a monk.” Benedict tried living in a village (Enfide) about thirty miles from Rome. There when one day by earnest prayer he miraculously mended an earthenware tray that had been shattered, he attracted a throng of visitors. To find a more secure retreat, Benedict, under the influence of a holy man nearby, settled into a desolate cave in a rocky cliff, where he remained isolated for three years. He was fed only the bread that the holy man drew up in a basket and let down in a rope over the rock. When shepherds discovered him, clothed in the skin of beasts, they first took him for a wild animal. As his reputation spread people brought him food and asked his blessing and his advice.

In these years, Gregory reports, Benedict was repeatedly besieged by Satan. “The tempter came in the form of a little blackbird, which began to flutter in front of his face. It kept so close that he could easily have caught it with his hand. Instead he made the sign of the Cross and the bird flew away. . . . The evil spirit recalled to his mind a woman he had once seen, and before he realized it his emotions were carrying him away. . . . Almost overcome in the struggle, he was on the point of abandoning the lonely wilderness when suddenly with the help of God’s grace he came to himself.” To defeat temptation he suddenly threw off his clothes and flung himself into a nearby patch of nettles and briars. “There he rolled and tossed till his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain off the poison of temptation from his body.” He never again suffered a temptation of this kind.

Benedict’s reputation for holiness brought him the invitation to become abbot of a nearby rock-hewn monastery. But when the monks found his discipline too strict, they tried to get rid of him by poisoning his wine. “A glass pitcher containing this poisoned drink,” Saint Gregory reports, “was presented to the man of God for customary blessing. As he made the sign of the Cross over it with his hand, the pitcher was shattered even though it was well beyond his reach at the time. It broke at his blessing as if he had struck it with a stone.” He organized the disciples attracted by his “signs and wonders” into twelve monasteries with an abbot and twelve monks in each in the neighborhood of Subiaco about fifty miles east of Rome.

In 529, when a jealous local priest drove him away, he moved eighty miles south of Rome to Monte Cassino, where he built his famous monastery on the site of a pagan temple he destroyed. (Menaced by Lombards and Saracens, and shaken by earthquakes, this was the key point in the German defensive line in World War II, blocking the Allied advance on Rome, but it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. It has since been rebuilt.) At first Benedict seems to have lived at Monte Cassino as a hermit. Later he no longer put his disciples in separate houses, but collected them under his supervision. And here he wrote his famous
Rule,
his prescription for the communal monastic life, initially for the monks of Monte Cassino, but eventually to become a norm for monasteries in the West. So Benedict’s good sense attracted many into Christian faith and opened the gates of the Western Heritage to other Seekers. His Benedictine Rule was an inspired treaty of otherworldly faith with the demands of this world. A pact between asceticism and common sense, it was the farthest cry from the self-flagellating hermits of the Egyptian desert.

Benedict’s “little Rule for beginners” we can read today in a pamphlet of seventy-three chapters, less than a hundred pages. “We are about to open a school for God’s service,” the Prologue announces, “in which we hope nothing harsh or oppressive will be directed.” He opposes all self-inflicted pain, assuming that the world itself will provide enough. Having heard that a monk in a cave near Monte Cassino had chained his foot to the rock, Benedict sent him a message, “If you are truly a servant of God, chain not yourself with a chain of iron but with the chain of Christ.”

Benedictine asceticism was moderate. Except, perhaps, for the classic monastic rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it was not an unsuitable life for the devout layman. The Fathers of the Egyptian desert who made sleeplessness a virtue took their rest on bare ground with rocks for pillows. But Benedict’s
Rule
allowed eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for most of the year, with “mattress, coverlet, blanket and pillow.” There was no fetish of bare feet. Shoes were to be provided and “suitable clothing . . . dependent on the climate.” Not starvation, but frugality, was the dietary rule, and wine was drunk sparingly. “Idleness is an enemy of the soul,” prescribed Chapter 48. “Therefore the brothers should be occupied according to schedule in either manual labor or holy reading.”

The schedule depended on the season and the hours of daylight, of course limited by the crudity of their timepieces and the problems of the water clock. The twenty-four hours of a normal Benedictine day in summer would include about four hours for the Divine Office (
Opus Dei
), including eight periods of communal prayer throughout day and night; four hours for reading (all were expected to be or become literate and to read); six and a half hours for work (which helped make the monasteries self-sufficient); eight and a half hours for sleep; and one hour for meals. All were to read in the Bible and the writings of the Fathers, whose Latin was no obstacle, since it was the monastery vernacular.

There was no privacy in the monastery. Nor was there any oppressive rule of silence. Again moderation was the rule—not
silentium
but
taciturnitas.
The vice was not talking but talkativeness, with a ban only on “all small talk and jokes.”

The Benedictine community, or community of communities, made a model of autonomy and self-regulation. There is no evidence that Benedict himself was ever ordained as a priest. It seems, too, that he never intended to found an “order” aimed at one special kind of work. The only preparation, the Benedictines said, was for Heaven. Unlike the Franciscans and others with a centralized international authority, each Benedictine monastery was independent, electing its own abbot (from Aramaic
Abba,
“Father”), who stood in Christ’s place and governed the community for life.

Another distinctive Benedictine contribution to monastic life was stability. Benedict’s Rule begins by distinguishing the kinds of monks. Best were “the Cenobites . . . who live in a monastery waging their war under a rule and an abbot.” The Anchorites by living in a monastery “learn to fight against the devil,” preparing themselves “for the single combat of the hermit.” “The Sarabaites (the worst kind), unschooled by any rule,” lie to the world by their tonsured heads, live together in twos and threes, and whatever they wish they call holy. Finally, there are “the gyratory monks,” who wander about staying in various monasteries three or four days at a time.

To Benedict’s community, no one was to be admitted lightly—only after a year of probation. Stability meant that once a novice had taken his vows he was committed until death to the house that had accepted his profession. This was wholesome insurance against the tendency, among Egyptian ascetics and others, to make the monastery only a way station toward the life of a hermit. And it gave each monk his own Benedictine family to replace what he had left outside. If members of one monastery were commanded by their abbot to found a new house, their vows of stability were transferred.

Saint Benedict’s legacy has survived for fifteen hundred years as a norm for the monastic life of Western Christendom. The era from the sixth to the twelfth centuries in Europe was christened “The Benedictine Centuries” by Cardinal Newman. During these years the Benedictines were the chief religious, civilizing, and educating influence in the Western Church. Others have called this the Golden Age of Monasteries. In 817 at the Synod of Aachen, the city that Charlemagne (742-814) had made the capital of Western culture, Benedict’s
Rule
was adopted as the basic text for all Western monks.

A tradition of Benedictine mysticism—Benedict’s way of seeking union with God—inspired Western Christendom in the Middle Ages. His most influential disciples were Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), who fought against the rationalist philosophy of Abelard. Thus Benedict had nourished two disparate tendencies—the inward-reaching upward-reaching and the love of learning and the book. In the libraries of the Benedictines the literary treasures of antiquity and of Christianity were preserved throughout the Middle Ages, and Benedict became the patron saint of the manuscript book. The Benedictines spread the belief that “A monastery without a library is like a castle without an armory,” and none were more effective than the Benedictines in preserving and strengthening that armory. The alliance of the monasteries with learning under the patronage of the Frankish, Visigothic, and Anglo-Saxon kings kept Western culture alive through turbulent times.