The Hermit Years

The solitary years at Subiaco, where Benedict became a monk before he was ever an abbot: the cave in the rock above the Anio, the monk Romanus who alone knew of him and lowered bread to him on a rope, the three years hidden from all men, and the great temptation of the flesh overcome by rolling naked in briars and nettles — the episode by which, Gregory says, Benedict was never troubled by such temptation again. All of it rests on Dialogues II.1–2, and all of it is reported here as what Gregory narrates.

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

The Cave

Fleeing the fame the broken sieve had brought him (see The Flight from the World), Benedict came to Subiaco — the wild gorge of the Anio some forty miles east of Rome, where Nero had once dammed the river into lakes beneath his villas. There, Gregory says, he found a narrow cave in the mountainside and hid himself in it (Dialogues II.1; ed. de Vogüé, SC 260). This is the cave later venerated as the Sacro Speco, the “Holy Grotto,” around which a monastery would in time be built. Benedict went into it not as the head of any community but as a solitary, an anchorite seeking God alone in the silence — the oldest form of the monastic vocation, the desert reenacted in the Italian hills.

Romanus

He did not arrive entirely unaided. On the way, Gregory relates, Benedict met a monk named Romanus, from a nearby monastery, who asked him where he was going. Learning of the young man’s purpose, Romanus kept his secret, helped him, clothed him in the monastic habit (the “habit of holy conversation”), and undertook to supply him (Dialogues II.1). The detail Gregory dwells on is vivid and has fixed itself in the iconography: Romanus could not easily reach the cave, which lay below a sheer cliff, so he would save what bread he could from his own portion and lower it to Benedict on a long rope, with a little bell attached, so that the sound would tell Benedict when the loaf was coming down (Dialogues II.1).

Gregory adds a characteristic touch: the ancient enemy, envying both the charity of the one and the sustenance of the other, threw a stone and broke the bell — but Romanus did not therefore cease to serve him (Dialogues II.1). The story sets the key for the whole Subiaco period: the solitude is real and severe, but it is not absolute self-sufficiency. Even the hermit lives by another’s charity, fed as Elijah was fed in the wilderness — a parallel Gregory’s readers would have caught at once.

Of the duration Gregory is explicit: Benedict “lived alone with himself in the sight of his Creator, who beholds the hearts of all men,” for three years, unknown to everyone except this one monk Romanus (Dialogues II.1). The phrase “lived alone with himself” — habitavit secum, “he dwelt with himself” — became a celebrated formula in the monastic tradition for the self-possession of the contemplative, the man who has gathered his scattered attention back into the presence of God.

The Discovery

The hidden life ended, as such lives in hagiography characteristically end, by a providential disclosure. Gregory relates that God revealed Benedict’s presence to a certain priest some distance away, on Easter day, while the priest was preparing a feast for himself: a vision rebuked him — you prepare delicacies for yourself, while my servant Benedict starves with hunger in such a place. The priest sought him out, found the cave, and the two kept Easter together, the priest insisting that the day of the Lord’s Resurrection was no day to fast (Dialogues II.1). Soon after, shepherds came upon him; at first, seeing him clad in skins among the rocks, they took him for a wild beast, but coming to speak with him they were turned from their bestial life to grace, and through them his name and the desire to seek him began to spread through the surrounding country (Dialogues II.1).

So the solitude that Benedict had sought was broken — not by his own seeking, but by the spread of his reputation, the same dynamic that had driven him from Enfide. From this point disciples begin to gather, and the hermit is, against his own first desire, drawn toward the common life that is treated in The Twelve Monasteries.

The Great Temptation

Between the solitude and the first community Gregory places one further episode, the second chapter of the book, and it is among the most discussed in the whole Dialogues: the overcoming of a great temptation of the flesh (Dialogues II.2).

One day, Gregory relates, while Benedict was alone, the tempter came in the form of a small black bird — a blackbird (merula) — that fluttered insistently about his face, so near that he could have seized it; but when he made the sign of the cross, the bird flew away. There followed at once a temptation of the flesh more violent than he had ever known: the memory of a woman he had once seen was so vividly set before his mind by the evil spirit that the fire of desire nearly overmastered him, and he was on the point — “almost overcome” — of leaving the wilderness (Dialogues II.2). Then grace returned to him; he came to himself; and seeing a thick growth of nettles and briars near at hand, he threw off his garment and cast himself naked into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles, rolling in them until his whole body was torn and his skin afire — so that the wound of the body might draw out the wound of the mind, and the pain of the flesh quench the fire of lust (Dialogues II.2).

Gregory’s verdict is emphatic: by this means Benedict so thoroughly conquered the temptation that “from that time forward, as he himself afterward told his disciples, he was never troubled again in like manner” (Dialogues II.2). Gregory frames the victory as a turning-point: now, “tempted no more,” Benedict was fit to be a master of souls, and many began to forsake the world and put themselves under his teaching — for “being now freed from these temptations, he might worthily, like the husbandman of good ground, bring forth plentiful fruit of virtues” (Dialogues II.2). A late but cherished tradition holds that the briar patch was later grafted by St Francis of Assisi into roses that grow at Subiaco still; that pious accretion is centuries removed from Gregory and is not part of the Dialogues account.

The episode must be handled with the discipline the whole collection observes. It is, in Gregory’s telling, a story about the ascetic warfare against the logismoi — the assaulting thoughts — that the Eastern desert tradition mapped in exhaustive detail, and about the violence the holy are willing to do to their own flesh to keep their souls. Its closest analogues are in the Lives of the Fathers and in the desert sayings; Benedict’s nettles answer the desert fathers’ austerities. It is reported here, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, as what Gregory attests of Benedict — the testimony of his disciples, as Gregory says — and as a window onto the spirituality the tradition received, not as a clinically verified event. On reading the Dialogues’ wonders and combats in this way, see the flagship file Reading the Dialogues.

Habitavit Secum: Dwelling With Oneself

The little phrase Gregory uses of the Subiaco years — that Benedict habitavit secum, “dwelt with himself” (Dialogues II.3, in the reflection on the three years) — became one of the most meditated formulas in the monastic tradition, and it is worth drawing out, because it names what the solitude was for. Gregory glosses it himself: the man who is scattered abroad among many cares and distractions is, in a sense, “outside himself,” dispersed; the contemplative who has gathered his attention back into the presence of God “dwells with himself,” recollected, present to his own soul and so present to God. The hermit’s solitude is not loneliness but recollection — the drawing-in of a mind that the world pulls apart, until the man is whole enough to stand in God’s presence. This is the inner work that the cave at Subiaco accomplished, beneath the dramatic surface of the bird and the briars: the making of a recollected soul, a man who “dwells with himself in the sight of his Creator.” Everything Benedict would later build for others — the ordered day, the silence, the lectio, the Opus Dei (see The Opus Dei and the Horarium) — is, in the end, machinery for producing in community the recollection he first won alone in the cave.

The Hermit Behind the Cenobite

The Subiaco solitude is easy to pass over on the way to the Rule and the great monastery, but it is the indispensable foundation of both. Benedict legislated for the common life as a man who had first conquered the harder, lonelier warfare; and his Rule keeps that hierarchy explicit. In its opening chapter it ranks the hermits (anchorites) above the cenobites in the severity of their combat — they have learned “to fight against the devil with their own hand and arm,” but only “after long probation in the monastery,” “no longer with the support of others but with their own hand and arm, God aiding them” (RB 1.3–5; ed. de Vogüé, SC 181). The cenobitic monastery the Rule builds is, in Benedict’s own framing, the “school” and the training-ground in which men are formed for exactly the solitary combat he had waged first at Subiaco. The cave comes before the Rule, and the Rule never forgets it.

See Also

References

  • Gregory the Great. Dialogues II.1–2 (the cave at Subiaco; Romanus, the rope and the bell, the broken bell; three years “alone with himself”; the Easter priest and the shepherds; the blackbird and the temptation of the flesh; the briars and nettles; “never troubled again”; disciples gathering). Ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. Gardner (1911) and Zimmerman (FOTC 39, 1959).
  • de Vogüé, Adalbert, ed. La Règle de saint Benoît, SC 181. Paris: Cerf, 1972. (RB 1, the kinds of monks; the hermit’s combat ranked above the cenobite’s.)
  • Fry, Timothy, ed. RB 1980. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (The Subiaco topography; the Sacro Speco; the relation of RB 1 to the solitary ideal.)
  • Kardong, Terrence G. Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. (Commentary on RB 1, the anchoritic ideal in Benedict.)