The Mountain Monastery

The great foundation of Benedict’s maturity: the move (traditionally c. 529) from Subiaco to Monte Cassino, the high hill above the town of Cassino in Campania, where a pagan cult of Apollo still survived; the smashing of the idol and the felling of the sacred grove; the conversion of the temple into oratories of St Martin and St John the Baptist and the catechizing of the surrounding country; the assaults of the devil during the building of the monastery, and the raising of a monk crushed under a fallen wall (Dialogues II.8, 11). It was here that Benedict wrote his Rule and spent the rest of his life. The episodes are pinned to their chapters in Gregory; the date and a few details are flagged as reconstructed.

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

The Move to the Mountain

Driven from Subiaco by the malice of the priest Florentius (see The Twelve Monasteries), Benedict came with a few disciples to Monte Cassino — the steep, isolated hill rising some five hundred meters above the town of Cassino, on the old road between Rome and Naples, in the Campanian country (Dialogues II.8). This move marks the great turning of his life: from the scattered small houses of the Anio valley to the single great abbey that would become the mother-house of Western monasticism and the place where the Rule was written.

Gregory gives no year. The conventional date of c. 529 is a later reconstruction — it is the figure transmitted by the medieval Cassinese tradition and adopted in most handbooks, and it has the rough symbolic neatness of falling in the same period as Justinian’s closing of the philosophical schools of Athens (529), as though monastic Cassino rose as pagan Athens fell. But the date is not in Gregory and is not secure.

[Disputed: The traditional date for the foundation of Monte Cassino is c. 529, transmitted by later Cassinese tradition and given in most reference works (e.g., the Catholic Encyclopedia; RB 1980, intro.). Gregory’s Dialogues supply no date, and some scholars treat any precise year as conjectural, preferring “c. 525–530” or simply “the later 520s.” The figure is used here as a conventional anchor, not an attested fact.]

The Idol of Apollo

What Gregory dwells on is not the date but the spiritual character of the place. On the summit, he says, there stood “a very ancient temple, in which, after the manner of the old heathens, the foolish and rustic people of the country worshipped the god Apollo”; around it grew groves dedicated to demons, where “even to that very time the mad multitude of infidels offered most wicked sacrifices” (Dialogues II.8; trans. after Gardner 1911). That so late in the Christian era a working pagan cult survived on a hilltop in central Italy is itself a historically interesting datum — paganism died slowly in the rural uplands — and it gives Benedict’s foundation the character of a frontier mission.

Benedict, coming there, “broke the idol, overthrew the altar, burned down the groves,” and in the very temple of Apollo built an oratory of St Martin of Tours (the soldier-saint and monk-bishop, patron of Western asceticism), and where the altar of Apollo had stood he built an oratory of St John the Baptist (Dialogues II.8). Then, by his continual preaching, he called the people of the surrounding country away from their idolatry to the faith (Dialogues II.8). The symbolism is total and deliberate: the man of God plants the cross on the high place of the old gods, and the dedication to the Baptist — the forerunner, the ascetic of the desert — over the ruins of Apollo, the god of the lyre and the oracle, makes the point that Christian monasticism succeeds and supplants the religion of the classical world. Gregory’s Benedict is, in this chapter, the Christianizer of the Italian countryside.

The Devil’s Resistance

Gregory then narrates a series of assaults by the devil, who would not yield his ancient seat without a struggle, and who appears throughout the Cassino chapters as a defeated but furious enemy. The ancient enemy showed himself to Benedict openly, Gregory says — not in dreams but waking — “all on fire, with flaming mouth and eyes,” railing against him (Dialogues II.8). When the monks were building, the devil sat upon a stone that they wished to lift and made it immovable by any number of hands, until Benedict came and prayed, and at his blessing the stone was lifted as if it had no weight, “so easily that you would have thought the devil had been holding it down” (Dialogues II.9). The fiend then conjured a phantom fire in the monastery kitchen, so that the monks ran to fetch water to quench what seemed a blaze consuming the building; Benedict, perceiving it to be an illusion, signed his eyes with prayer, and they saw the kitchen whole and the fire gone (Dialogues II.10).

The most dramatic of these episodes is the raising of the crushed boy (Dialogues II.11). As the brethren were raising a wall, the devil threw it down upon a young monk who was working there and crushed him to death, his body broken and mangled. The monks, grieving, carried the corpse to Benedict on a blanket, for it could not be borne otherwise. Benedict had the body laid in his own cell, on the mat where he was accustomed to pray, put the brethren out, shut the door, and prayed over the boy more intently than usual — and “in the very same hour” sent him back to his work, sound and whole, “to help the brethren in finishing the wall which the old enemy had thought, by killing him, to have hindered” (Dialogues II.11; trans. after Gardner 1911). It is one of the resurrection-miracles of the Dialogues, deliberately set in the lineage of Elijah, Elisha, the apostles, and Christ — the man of God restoring the dead, the strongest sign of all.

How the Episodes Are Reported

All of this is, again, Dialogues II — Gregory’s narrative, drawn (he says) from the testimony of Benedict’s disciples some fifty years after the events, in the genre of hagiography. The destruction of the Apollo cult has a plausible historical kernel (the survival and suppression of rural paganism is well attested for the period); the open visions of the flaming devil, the unmovable and then weightless stone, the phantom fire, and the raising of the dead boy are reported here, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, as what Gregory attests of Benedict and as expressions of the theology the Dialogues are written to convey — the man of God as victor over the devil and sharer in the power of the prophets and apostles — not as independently established physical events. On reading these wonders as the genre they are, see Reading the Dialogues.

Paganism on the Heights

The detail of the surviving Apollo cult repays a moment’s attention, because it is one of the points where the Dialogues touch verifiable history. By the 520s, Christianity had been the official religion of the empire for nearly two centuries, and the cities of Italy were thoroughly Christianized. But the countryside — the pagus, from which the very word “pagan” derives — lagged far behind, and the remote uplands lagged most of all. A working shrine of Apollo with an attending population of sacrificers on an isolated mountaintop in the 520s is entirely credible historically; rural and mountain paganism is well attested in the sixth century and would persist in pockets for generations more. Gregory’s account thus preserves a genuine memory of the religious frontier of his world: the monastery as a mission outpost, planted deliberately on the high place of the old gods to convert the surrounding country. Benedict’s destruction of the idol and his “continual preaching” to the country people (Dialogues II.8) cast him, accurately enough, as an evangelist of the still-half-pagan hinterland — a role the Benedictine monasteries would play across Europe for centuries to come, on every frontier where the Rule was carried (see The Rule Conquers the West).

The dedications Benedict chose for his two oratories are themselves a small theological program. St Martin of Tours (d. 397), the soldier who became a monk and a bishop and the great patron of Western ascetic Christianity, was the obvious patron for a monastery built on a battlefield against the old gods; and St John the Baptist, the forerunner, the desert ascetic, the herald of repentance, set over the very spot where Apollo’s altar had stood, proclaimed that the religion of the desert had supplanted the religion of the oracle. Where the lyre and the laurel had been, now stood the camel’s-hair and the cry “Repent.” The whole episode is Gregory’s compact image of what Benedict’s monasticism was: the desert come to Italy, the cross planted on the high place, the old world’s beauty and its bondage alike given over to Christ.

The House on the Mountain

Monte Cassino became the center of Benedict’s world and remained so until his death. Here the loose pattern of the twelve Subiaco houses gave way to a single, ordered community living a fully cenobitic life; here Benedict received the great and the lowly, the Gothic king and the starving peasant alike (see Totila and the Prophecies); and here, in the maturity of his experience as an abbot, he wrote the Rule that organizes that life — the document treated in The Regula Benedicti. The abbey he founded would be destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries — by the Lombards (c. 577, an event Gregory says Benedict himself foretold; see Dialogues II.17), by the Saracens (883), by an earthquake (1349), and most famously by Allied bombing in 1944 — and rebuilt every time on the same summit, the most visible single emblem of the permanence of what Benedict began on that hill.

See Also

References

  • Gregory the Great. Dialogues II.8–11 (the move to Monte Cassino; the temple and grove of Apollo; the idol broken, the altar overthrown, the grove burned; the oratories of St Martin and St John the Baptist; the preaching to the country people; the flaming devil; the immovable stone; the phantom fire in the kitchen; the boy crushed by the falling wall and raised). Ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. Gardner (1911) and Zimmerman (FOTC 39, 1959). For the foretold Lombard destruction, Dialogues II.17.
  • Fry, Timothy, ed. RB 1980. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (Introduction: the c. 529 foundation date as traditional; Monte Cassino’s history; the survival of rural paganism.)
  • Kardong, Terrence G. Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. (The move to Cassino and the maturation of Benedict’s cenobitism.)
  • de Vogüé, Adalbert. Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, SC 251, 260. Paris: Cerf, 1978–1979. (The Cassino chapters; notes on the date and topography.)