Totila and the Prophecies

The prophetic Benedict of the Monte Cassino years, as Gregory’s Dialogues present him: the gift of reading hearts and foreseeing the future displayed in a string of episodes, the most famous of which is the confrontation with the Ostrogothic king Totila (Dialogues II.14–15) — the king’s test by a disguised retainer, the unmasking of the deception, the rebuke, and the prophecy of Totila’s reign and death. The file gathers the chief prophecy-and-discernment episodes of the Cassino period, including the foretelling of the monastery’s own destruction (Dialogues II.17) and the culminating mystical vision of the whole world gathered in a single ray of light (Dialogues II.35), each pinned to its chapter in Gregory.

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

The King Who Came to Test Him

The best-known of all the Monte Cassino episodes is the meeting with Totila, king of the Ostrogoths from 541 to 552, who in the course of his long war against the armies of the Eastern emperor Justinian marched through Campania past the foot of Benedict’s mountain (Dialogues II.14–15; ed. de Vogüé, SC 260). The encounter is the one point in the whole life where Gregory’s narrative touches a securely datable figure of political history — Totila is firmly attested in the histories of Procopius — and so it has long been used to anchor the chronology of Benedict’s last years (the meeting must fall after 541, when Totila became king, and is usually placed c. 542–546).

Gregory relates that Totila, hearing of the holy man’s gift of prophecy and “wishing to make trial whether it were true,” resolved to test him. He sent ahead one of his own retainers, a man named Riggo, dressed in the king’s own purple robes and royal finery and attended by three counts, with orders to present himself to Benedict as if he were Totila himself (Dialogues II.14). But as Riggo came forward in the royal dress, Benedict, who was seated, cried out to him while he was still some way off: “Put off, my son, put off that apparel which you wear, for it is not yours” (Dialogues II.14; trans. after Gardner 1911). Riggo fell to the ground in terror at having presumed to mock so great a man, and all his company with him; rising, they dared not approach, but went back and reported to the king what had happened.

The Rebuke and the Prophecy

Totila then came himself, and seeing Benedict seated at a distance, was so awed that he would not stand but fell prostrate to the ground. Benedict bade him rise, again and again, and when the king would not, the man of God went to him and raised him up himself (Dialogues II.15). Then Benedict rebuked him for his deeds and, in a few words, foretold all that should befall him: “Much wickedness do you daily commit, and many sins have you done: now at length give over your sinful life. Into the city of Rome you shall enter, and over the sea you shall pass; nine years you shall reign, and in the tenth you shall depart this life” (Dialogues II.15; trans. after Gardner 1911). The king, Gregory says, was terrified, asked for his prayers, and departed — and “from that time forward was less cruel” than he had been before.

Gregory’s readers knew that the prophecy had been fulfilled to the letter. Totila did enter Rome (he took the city in 546), did cross into Sicily, did reign about nine years, and was killed in 552 at the battle of Taginae against the imperial general Narses — the tenth year, as Gregory frames it (Dialogues II.15). The episode is the showpiece of Benedict’s prophetic gift in the Dialogues, and it carries a clear political-spiritual lesson: the holy man stands above the king, unmoved by his power, reading his sins and his future alike, and the king — the conqueror who terrified Italy — abases himself before the unarmed monk. It is the late-antique theme of the holy man as the true authority, set over against worldly power, given its most memorable form.

As with every episode in the life, this is Dialogues II — Gregory’s narrative, written some fifty years after the events. The historical core (that Totila passed through Campania and may have met or heard of a famous local holy man) is plausible and the king is real; the precise words of the prophecy, given by Gregory after the events they foretell, are reported here per METHODOLOGY §3.5 as what Gregory attests, not as a verbatim transcript. The vaticinium that comes true in every particular is, after all, a standard feature of the hagiographic genre (see Reading the Dialogues).

The Reader of Hearts

The Totila episode is the most famous of a whole cluster of prophecy-and-discernment stories that Gregory gathers in the Cassino chapters to display Benedict’s spiritus prophetiae. The man of God knows, from his cell, things done at a distance and thoughts concealed in the heart:

He knows when monks, sent on a journey, have broken the rule by eating and drinking outside the monastery (Dialogues II.12), and when a young monk has accepted forbidden gifts of handkerchiefs (Dialogues II.19).
He reads the proud thought of a monk who held the lamp for him at table and inwardly resented serving him (Dialogues II.20).
He detects, far off, the hiding of a flagon of wine that a messenger had concealed for himself by the wayside, and warns him not to drink of it — for a serpent lurked in it (Dialogues II.18).
He foretells, weeping, that Monte Cassino itself would one day be overrun and laid waste by the heathen — a prophecy Gregory’s readers saw fulfilled when the Lombards destroyed the abbey around 577, the monks escaping with their lives and, the tradition holds, with the manuscript of the Rule (Dialogues II.17).

These episodes are the narrative correlate of what the Rule itself prescribes for the abbot: that he must “know what a difficult and arduous task he has undertaken, of ruling souls and adapting himself to many dispositions,” and that he will have to give an account of every soul in his charge (RB 2). The clairvoyant Benedict of the Dialogues is the perfect realization of the discerning abbot the Rule legislates — the father who sees into his sons (see The Abbot and the Community).

The Vision of the Whole World

The prophetic and visionary thread of the Cassino chapters reaches its summit in one of the most celebrated passages in all of Christian mystical literature: the vision of the whole world gathered, as it were, into a single beam of light (Dialogues II.35).

Gregory relates that one night, while Benedict was praying at his window before the hour of the night office, “the whole world was gathered together before his eyes, as it were under one beam of the sun” (Dialogues II.35; trans. after Gardner 1911). At the same moment he saw the soul of Germanus, bishop of Capua, carried up to heaven by angels in a fiery sphere; sending to Capua, he learned that the bishop had died in that very hour. Gregory then has his interlocutor Peter raise the natural difficulty — how can a man’s eye take in the whole world? — and Gregory answers with a sentence that became a classic definition of the contemplative vision: “To the soul that sees the Creator, all creation is narrow [angusta est omnis creatura]; for he who sees a little of the Creator’s light finds all that is created to be little” (Dialogues II.35; trans. after Gardner 1911). The point is not that Benedict’s physical eye somehow encompassed the globe, but that in the light of God all creation is shown to be small — the soul lifted into the divine light sees everything from God’s side, and from there the whole world is a single point.

This passage is the high-water mark of the Dialogues as spiritual theology, and it is the most quoted single sentence of the book in the contemplative tradition, East and West. It places Benedict among the great mystics; it is the moment at which the wonder-working “man of God” of the earlier chapters is shown to be, at root, a contemplative whose miracles flow from union with God. It is reported here as what Gregory attests of Benedict — and, more than the wonders, as Gregory’s own theology of the contemplative vision, offered for meditation rather than as a reportable physical event.

References

Gregory the Great. Dialogues II.12–20, 35 (the monks who ate on a journey; the hidden handkerchiefs; the proud lamp-holder; the flagon and the serpent; the foretold destruction of Monte Cassino; Riggo in the king’s robes and the unmasking; Totila prostrate, the rebuke, and the prophecy of his reign and death; the vision of the whole world in one ray and the soul of Germanus of Capua; “to the soul that sees the Creator, all creation is narrow”). 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 2, the abbot’s discernment and accountability.)
Procopius. History of the Wars, Books V–VIII (Gothic War). For the independent attestation of Totila, his capture of Rome (546), and his death at Taginae (552), used to date the meeting.
Kardong, Terrence G. Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. (On the Dialogues’ portrait of Benedict’s discernment and the abbot of RB 2.)