The Twelve Monasteries

The turn from solitude to the common life at Subiaco: the disastrous abbacy of the monks of a neighboring monastery (later tradition locates it at Vicovaro), whose dissolute brethren tried to poison their too-strict abbot and saw the cup shattered when Benedict blessed it (Dialogues II.3); the disciples who then gathered around him; the founding of twelve small monasteries of twelve monks each, with Benedict over a thirteenth (Dialogues II.3); the disciples Maurus and Placid; and the jealousy of the priest Florentius, whose gift of poisoned bread was carried off and dropped by a raven (Dialogues II.8) — the episode that drove Benedict to leave Subiaco for Monte Cassino. Each episode is pinned to its chapter in Gregory.

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

The Reluctant Abbot and the Poisoned Cup

Benedict’s reputation, spreading from the cave, soon reached a community of monks whose own abbot had died. They came and begged him, repeatedly, to take up the government over them. He long refused, Gregory says, warning them that his manner of life and theirs would not agree; but at last, overcome by their importunity, he consented (Dialogues II.3; ed. de Vogüé, SC 260). Later tradition places this monastery at Vicovaro, in the Anio valley; Gregory himself does not name it.

The arrangement failed exactly as Benedict had foreseen. He held the monks to the discipline of the Rule of righteousness, and the lax brethren, who would not be reformed and could not bear the contrast between their own ways and his, fell to murmuring against him, and at length conspired to be rid of him: they mixed poison into a glass of wine and offered it to him at table for the customary blessing (Dialogues II.3). Benedict stretched out his hand and made the sign of the cross over the cup — and the glass, “as if a stone had been thrown against it,” shattered in pieces, so that the deadly drink was spilled (Dialogues II.3). The man of God understood at once that the cup could not bear the sign of life because it held the drink of death. He rose, and with a calm and untroubled face gathered the brethren and addressed them: “Almighty God have mercy upon you, and forgive you: why have you used me in this manner? Did I not tell you beforehand that my manner of life would never agree with yours? Go, and seek out some father suitable to your own conditions, for me you can have no longer” (Dialogues II.3; trans. after Gardner 1911). And he returned to the wilderness he loved, “and there lived alone with himself in the sight of his heavenly Father” (Dialogues II.3).

The episode is one of the most famous in the book — the shattered cup is among the standard attributes of Benedict in art, alongside the raven and a book of the Rule. It is reported here, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, as what Gregory narrates: a story whose point is at once the malice that strict reform provokes, the protection God gives His servant, and above all the meekness of Benedict’s response — he neither curses the conspirators nor stays to fight them, but forgives them and withdraws. The pattern of wonder-and-withdrawal, established at Enfide and the cave, holds.

The Twelve Monasteries

The return to solitude was again short-lived, and this time the gathering disciples were not lax monks to be inherited but free followers drawn to him. “Many,” Gregory says, “began to abandon the world and hasten to put themselves under his direction” — and now, freed of the temptations of the flesh (see The Hermit Years), Benedict was fit to be their master (Dialogues II.2–3). With the multitude that came to him he founded, in the region of Subiaco, twelve monasteries, and in each he placed twelve monks with a superior (“father”) over them; a few he kept with himself, “whom he thought to instruct in his own presence,” living at a thirteenth (Dialogues II.3). The number twelve is plainly symbolic — the apostolic college multiplied — and the arrangement is the first appearance of Benedict as an organizer of community, the embryo of the cenobitic legislator he would become. It is a striking foreshadowing that the founder of the great unified abbey-life of the West began with small, scattered, twelve-man houses rather than one large monastery.

Maurus and Placid

Among the disciples of these years Gregory singles out two boys, sent to Benedict by their noble Roman fathers to be brought up in the fear of God: Maurus, somewhat older, who grew to be Benedict’s trusted helper, and Placid, still a small child (Dialogues II.3–4). They recur in the wonder-stories of the period. In one celebrated episode (Dialogues II.7), the little Placid went to fetch water and fell into the lake, and was being carried far out by the current; Benedict, perceiving it in his cell, called Maurus, gave him his blessing, and bade him run to the rescue — and Maurus, in obedience, ran out across the surface of the water, pulled the boy out by the hair, and only on reaching dry land realized that he had walked on the lake. Gregory uses the story to stage a humble dispute over whose merit had worked the wonder: Maurus ascribed it to the abbot’s command, Benedict to the disciple’s obedience, while the rescued Placid said he had seen, over his head, the cloak of the abbot drawing him from the water (Dialogues II.7). The theme — that the miracle belongs neither to the commanding faith of the master nor simply to the obedience of the disciple, but to God who honors both — is exactly the lesson the later Rule will build into its theology of obedience (RB 5; see Stability, Obedience, Conversion). The Maurus and Placid of the Dialogues would later be elaborated by medieval tradition into the founders of Benedictine life in Gaul and the protomartyr of Sicily respectively — developments far beyond Gregory’s text and not asserted here as history.

Florentius and the Poisoned Bread

The Subiaco period closes, in Gregory’s narrative, with a second poisoning — and it is this episode that drives Benedict from the region altogether. A priest of a neighboring church named Florentius, “the grandfather of our subdeacon Florentius,” Gregory specifies (anchoring the story to a man his own readers knew), was consumed with envy at Benedict’s holiness and the crowds it drew, and set himself to ruin him (Dialogues II.8). When he could not turn others against the man of God, Florentius sent him, as a present, a loaf of bread that he had poisoned. Benedict received the gift with thanks — but he knew, by the spirit, what was hidden in it. At his meal a raven was accustomed to come and take bread from his hand; when the raven came that day, Benedict set the poisoned loaf before it and commanded it, in the name of the Lord, to carry the bread away and drop it where no man could find it. The bird, after circling and croaking as if it understood the danger, at last obeyed, took up the loaf, bore it off, and returned hours later to receive its usual food (Dialogues II.8; trans. after Gardner 1911). The raven, like the shattered cup, became one of Benedict’s enduring attributes in art.

Florentius, failing to kill the master, turned to corrupt the disciples: Gregory relates that he sent seven naked young women into the monastery garden to dance before the monks and stir them to lust (Dialogues II.8). At this, Benedict, “fearing the danger of his younger monks,” and unwilling that his presence should be the occasion of another man’s deepening sin, resolved to leave. He set the monasteries he had founded in order, appointed superiors over them, and departed Subiaco with a few disciples for the place where the rest of his life would be spent (Dialogues II.8). Gregory adds, with grim economy, that no sooner had Benedict gone than Florentius, standing on a gallery of his house rejoicing at the saint’s departure, was killed when the gallery suddenly collapsed beneath him — the whole rest of the house standing untouched. Maurus sent word of it after Benedict, who, far from rejoicing, mourned for the dead man and laid a penance on Maurus for having reported his enemy’s death with satisfaction (Dialogues II.8). The detail is pointed: Benedict will not gloat over the destruction of the man who tried to murder him.

To Monte Cassino

So Benedict left Subiaco. Behind him stood twelve monasteries and the memory of a holiness the region would never forget — Subiaco remained, and remains, a Benedictine shrine, the Sacro Speco preserved in its rock. Before him lay the mountain in the Campania where he would build the abbey that gave the Rule to the world. That move, traditionally dated c. 529, and the destruction of the pagan cult he found on the summit, belong to The Mountain Monastery.

See Also

References

  • Gregory the Great. Dialogues II.2–4, 7, 8 (the reluctant abbacy and the poisoned cup shattered by the cross; the twelve monasteries of twelve monks; Maurus and Placid; Maurus walking on the water and the dispute over merit; Florentius, the poisoned bread and the raven; the seven dancing girls; the departure for Monte Cassino; the collapse of Florentius’s gallery and Benedict’s mourning). Ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. Gardner (1911) and Zimmerman (FOTC 39, 1959).
  • de Vogüé, Adalbert, ed. La Règle de saint Benoît, SC 181–182. Paris: Cerf, 1972. (RB 5 on obedience, against which the Maurus episode is read.)
  • Fry, Timothy, ed. RB 1980. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (Subiaco and the twelve monasteries; the later legends of Maurus and Placid noted as later developments.)
  • Kardong, Terrence G. Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. (On the symbolic twelve and Benedict’s early communities.)