The Flight from the World

The opening of the narrated life: Benedict’s birth at Nursia into a family of free standing (c. 480), his being sent to Rome for the liberal studies of his class, and his decision — recoiling from the dissipation he saw around him — to abandon those studies and the world together, “knowingly ignorant and wisely unlearned,” as Gregory frames it. The withdrawal to Enfide (Affile), the first miracle of the broken sieve, and the flight from even that small fame into the wilderness of Subiaco, where the monastic vocation proper begins. Every fact rests on Dialogues II, prologue and chapter 1.

Tradition: Pre-Schism Western (Latin) / Orthodox reception

Born at Nursia

Gregory opens the life with a sentence that has become almost a creed of Western monasticism: “There was a man of venerable life, Benedict by name and by grace [gratia] blessed [benedictus], who from the very time of his childhood carried the heart of an old man” (Dialogues II, prologue; ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. after Gardner 1911). The wordplay on the name — Benedictus, “blessed” — is Gregory’s, not a later embellishment, and it sets the key for the whole book: this is the life of a man whose name is his vocation.

He was born, Gregory says, “in the province of Nursia, of honorable parentage” (Dialogues II, prologue) — that is, at Nursia (Norcia), the mountain town in the Sabine Apennines northeast of Rome, into a family of free and respectable standing. Gregory gives no date; the conventional c. 480 is a modern reconstruction working back from the (also conventional) later landmarks, and it is uncertain (see the disputed-dates note in The Source Problem). Later tradition supplied a twin sister, Scholastica, and a noble lineage; Gregory mentions Scholastica only at the end of the book, as a holy woman dedicated to God from infancy (Dialogues II.33), and says nothing of twinship — the twin tradition is a later inference, treated in His Sister Scholastica.

Sent to Rome, and the Recoil

According to Gregory, the young Benedict was sent to Rome to be educated in the liberal studies — the grammar, rhetoric, and law that were the path to a public career for a young man of his class (Dialogues II, prologue). What he found there appalled him. Gregory writes that, seeing many of his fellow-students “falling headlong into vice,” and fearing to be drawn after them, Benedict “drew back his foot, which he had as it were now set forth into the world,” lest in acquiring its learning he should fall into “the bottomless gulf” of its manners (Dialogues II, prologue).

So he left. He abandoned his studies, his father’s house, and his inheritance, and set out to find God — and Gregory frames the renunciation in a famous paradox: he departed scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus, “knowingly ignorant and wisely unlearned” (Dialogues II, prologue; trans. after Gardner 1911). The phrase is precise and deliberate: Benedict did not fail to acquire the world’s learning; he renounced it with his eyes open, choosing the wisdom of God over the wisdom of the schools. It is the founding gesture of the whole life — a fuga mundi, a flight from the world, in the tradition of Antony of Egypt hearing the gospel in church and giving away all he had (compare St. Antony the Great, the prototype of the monastic flight).

The phrase scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus deserves a moment’s weight, because it is the key to the whole figure as the tradition received him. It is a deliberate paradox in the manner of St Paul — “if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise” (1 Corinthians 3:18), and “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Benedict’s “ignorance” is not a defect but an achievement: he has the wisdom to know that the world’s wisdom is not worth his soul, and he is “unlearned” only in the sense that he has refused to learn what would have made him a man of the world. Gregory, himself a Roman aristocrat of deep learning, is not disparaging education; he is describing a renunciation that only a man who could have had the learning was in a position to make. The point is the choice, not the deprivation.

It is worth noting what this renunciation does not mean. Benedict turned from the secular liberal arts, not from sacred learning; the Rule he would later write is steeped in Scripture, in Cassian, in Basil, and in the Lives of the Fathers, and it makes the daily reading of holy books (lectio divina) a pillar of the life (RB 48). The “wisely unlearned” man legislated for a deeply literate monasticism. The flight was from the world’s wisdom as a path of ambition, not from the mind as such.

Enfide and the Broken Sieve

Benedict did not go directly to the desert. Gregory says he first stopped at a place called Enfide — usually identified with the modern Affile, in the hills east of Rome — accompanied by his old nurse, who loved him and would not leave him (Dialogues II.1). There a small domestic miracle occurred that is, by Gregory’s design, the first wonder of the book and the hinge of the narrative.

The nurse borrowed from the neighbors an earthenware sieve (or tray, capisterium) to clean wheat, and by carelessness let it fall and break in two. She wept bitterly. Benedict, seeing her grief, took the broken pieces, prayed over them in tears, and rose to find the sieve whole and unbroken, with no trace of the break (Dialogues II.1). The neighbors were so struck that they hung the mended sieve up at the entrance of the church, where, Gregory says, it could still be seen “even to these troublesome times of the Goths” — a small detail by which Gregory anchors his account to a relic his contemporaries could point to (Dialogues II.1).

Gregory draws the lesson himself, and it is the engine of the whole subsequent life: the miracle made Benedict famous, and the fame was unbearable to him. “Benedict, more desirous of the miseries of the world than the praises of men… secretly departed from his nurse and fled into a desert place called Subiaco” (Dialogues II.1; trans. after Gardner 1911). This is the pattern that will repeat across the book — wonder, fame, flight — and it is theologically pointed: the holy man flees his own reputation, because the love of God’s glory and the love of human praise cannot live together. (On reading such episodes as the genre they are, see Reading the Dialogues.)

The Flight into the Wilderness

With that flight to Subiaco — Sublacus, “below the lake,” the wild and beautiful gorge of the Anio river some forty miles east of Rome, where the emperor Nero had once built villas and dammed the river into artificial lakes — the introductory phase of the life ends and the monastic vocation proper begins. Benedict was, Gregory implies, still a very young man; he went not to a monastery but to solitude, to be a hermit before he was ever an abbot. The next stage — the cave, the monk Romanus who alone knew where he was, and the long years of hidden ascetic struggle — belongs to The Hermit Years.

The shape of this opening is worth holding in mind, because it is the shape of the man as the tradition received him. He is born blessed; he renounces the world’s wisdom with open eyes; he works a quiet miracle of mercy; and he flees the fame it brings him into the desert. The father of Western cenobitism — the man who would gather thousands into communities under a Rule — began by running away from people. The Rule he later wrote would build the common life precisely on the foundation of that solitude conquered first: in its own reckoning of monastic kinds, the strongest monks are the cenobites, “the most steadfast kind,” but the hermit’s solitary combat is the harder warfare for which the monastery is the training-ground (RB 1.1–5).

References

Gregory the Great. Dialogues II, prologue and 1 (the Benedictus/blessed wordplay; born at Nursia of honorable parentage; sent to Rome; the recoil and scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus; Enfide/Affile and the nurse; the broken sieve and the relic; the flight to Subiaco). Ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. Gardner (1911) and Zimmerman (FOTC 39, 1959).
Fry, Timothy, ed. RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (RB 1 on the kinds of monks; introduction on the topography of Subiaco and the identification of Enfide with Affile.)
de Vogüé, Adalbert. Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, SC 251. Paris: Cerf, 1978. (Introduction: the date of the Dialogues; topography of Subiaco.)
Norcia/Nursia and Subiaco topography cross-checked against the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Benedict of Nursia” (used to locate the geographic identifications; chronology and miracle accounts cited to Gregory directly).