His Sister Scholastica

St Scholastica, Benedict’s sister, consecrated to God from her earliest years, who lived near Monte Cassino and met her brother once a year for a day of holy conversation; and the famous story of their last meeting, when Scholastica, longing to prolong the night in talk of God and refused by her brother’s wish to keep his rule, prayed — and a sudden, violent storm broke that made it impossible for Benedict to leave, so that “she was more powerful, because she loved more” (Dialogues II.33). Three days later she died; Benedict saw her soul ascend to heaven in the form of a dove, and had her buried in the tomb he had prepared for himself, so that “those whose minds had ever been united in God should not, even in the grave, be separated in body” (Dialogues II.34). The whole account rests on Dialogues II.33–34 and is reported as what Gregory attests.

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

Scholastica

Gregory introduces Scholastica only near the close of the life, but the chapter he gives her is among the most cherished in the whole book. “His sister, named Scholastica,” he writes, “dedicated to almighty God from her very infancy, was wont to come once a year to visit her brother” (Dialogues II.33; ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. after Gardner 1911). That is nearly all the biography Gregory supplies: a woman consecrated to God from childhood, a nun (the tradition holds she led a community of women not far from Monte Cassino), and a sister whom Benedict loved and met yearly. She is, in Gregory’s account, the great female figure of the Benedictine origins, and she has been venerated alongside her brother ever since.

The familiar tradition that Scholastica was Benedict’s twin is later and is not in Gregory. Gregory says only that she was his sister, consecrated from infancy; the twinship is a medieval inference, natural enough but unattested in the sixth-century source.

[Disputed: That Scholastica was Benedict’s twin sister. Gregory’s Dialogues II.33 call her simply his sister, “dedicated to God from her infancy,” and do not mention twinship. The twin tradition is a later medieval development, widely repeated but without support in the earliest source; it is reported here as tradition, not as Gregorian fact.]

The Yearly Meeting

Because the Rule did not permit women within the monastery enclosure, and Benedict’s stability kept him at Monte Cassino, brother and sister met once a year at a house belonging to the monastery a little way down the mountain, where Benedict would come with some of his disciples (Dialogues II.33). There they would spend the whole day “in the praise of God and in holy conversation [in laudibus Dei et sanctis colloquiis],” and at nightfall Benedict would return to his monastery. The picture is one of a deep and disciplined spiritual friendship — the two given wholly to God, meeting rarely, and spending their rare day not in family gossip but in talk of heavenly things. It is this annual rhythm that sets up the story of the last meeting.

The Last Visit and the Storm

At their final meeting — though neither knew it would be the last — Scholastica, Gregory says, seemed to have a presentiment of her death, and longed for the holy conversation to continue. As evening came and Benedict prepared to leave, she begged him: “I pray you, do not leave me this night, that we may talk till morning of the joys of the heavenly life” (Dialogues II.33). But Benedict refused: “What is this you say, sister? I may not by any means tarry out of my monastery” — for the Rule that bound the brethren bound the abbot too, and he would not spend a night outside its walls (Dialogues II.33; trans. after Gardner 1911).

What followed is the heart of the story. Scholastica, hearing her brother’s refusal, bowed her head upon her hands on the table and prayed to almighty God; and when she raised her head, there broke out of a clear and quiet sky so violent a storm of thunder, lightning, and rain that neither Benedict nor any of his companions could set foot outside the door (Dialogues II.33). Benedict, dismayed, complained: “God almighty forgive you, sister; what have you done?” And she answered: “I asked you, and you would not hear me; I asked my God, and He has heard me. Now therefore go, if you can; leave me and return to your monastery” (Dialogues II.33; trans. after Gardner 1911). But he could not go, and so, unwillingly, he stayed; and the two passed the whole night, as she had wished, in holy talk of the spiritual life.

Gregory draws the moral with a boldness that has delighted readers for fourteen centuries. The woman’s prayer prevailed over the man’s resolve; and Gregory, far from finding this scandalous, glories in it: “It is no wonder,” he writes, “that the woman who desired to see her brother longer should at that time prevail more than he — for, since according to the word of John ‘God is love,’ by a most just judgment she had the greater power who had the greater love [quia iustissimo iudicio illa plus potuit, quae amplius amavit]” (Dialogues II.33; trans. after Gardner 1911). The “rule-keeping” brother is gently overruled by the “love-keeping” sister, and the storm is, in Gregory’s reading, heaven’s vindication of love over law — though it is love that has the last night, and law that has had all the others. It is the one place in the whole Dialogues where Benedict is, so to speak, bested, and the source of his being bested is a holiness greater even than his own discipline.

Her Death and the Dove

The sequel is brief and luminous. The next morning the two parted, and three days later, Gregory says, Benedict, standing in his cell and lifting up his eyes, saw the soul of his sister, departing her body, ascend into heaven “in the likeness of a dove [in columbae specie]” (Dialogues II.34). Rejoicing at her glory even as he grieved her death, he gave thanks to God and announced her passing to the brethren; and he sent monks to bring her body to the monastery and laid it in the tomb that he had long since prepared for himself (Dialogues II.34). Gregory closes the chapter with one of his most moving sentences: it came to pass that, “as their souls had always been one in God, so their bodies were not separated in the grave [quorum mens una semper in Deo fuerat, eorum quoque corpora nec sepultura separavit]” (Dialogues II.34; trans. after Gardner 1911). Brother and sister, who in life could meet but one day a year, were joined in death in a single tomb.

Reading the Account

The Scholastica chapters are reported here, like all the narrative of the life, as what Gregory’s Dialogues II attest, in the genre of hagiography (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The storm summoned by prayer and the soul seen as a dove are wonder-narratives of the same kind as the rest of the book — the dove, in particular, is the ancient and biblical sign of a holy soul (as at the Lord’s baptism), and the same vision-motif recurs when Benedict sees the soul of Germanus of Capua and, soon, when his own death is announced (see Totila and the Prophecies and The Death of Benedict). What the chapters convey, beyond any individual wonder, is a theology — that love is the highest power in the spiritual life, higher even than the holy discipline that orders it — and a human portrait, of a brother and sister whose whole earthly affection had been transfigured into a shared longing for God. It is no accident that this, more than any miracle of power, is the episode of the Dialogues that has most endeared Benedict and Scholastica to later ages.

References

Gregory the Great. Dialogues II.33–34 (Scholastica consecrated from infancy; the yearly meeting “in the praise of God and holy conversation”; the last visit, Benedict’s refusal, Scholastica’s prayer and the storm; “she had the greater power who had the greater love”; her death three days later; the soul seen ascending as a dove; the shared tomb, “their bodies not separated in the grave”). Ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. Gardner (1911) and Zimmerman (FOTC 39, 1959).
de Vogüé, Adalbert. Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, SC 251, 260. Paris: Cerf, 1978–1979. (Notes on the Scholastica chapters; the absence of the twin tradition in Gregory.)
RB 1980, ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (Scholastica and women’s monasticism in the Benedictine context; the later twin tradition noted as later.)
Scholastica’s feast (10 February) and cult cross-checked against the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Scholastica” (used to locate the cult; the narrative cited to Gregory directly).