The Death of Benedict

The close of the life, in which the Dialogues gather all their themes into a single scene: Benedict foretelling the day of his own death to his disciples (Dialogues II.37), having the tomb opened six days before; carried weak to the oratory, receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord for the last time; and dying upright — standing in the oratory, his failing body upheld by the hands of his disciples, his own hands raised to heaven, his last breath spent in prayer. The same night two monks, one in his cell and one far away, saw the same vision: a road strewn with rich carpets and lit by countless lamps, stretching east from Benedict’s cell straight up to heaven, by which “the man of God dear to God ascended.” Traditionally dated c. 547 (21 March); buried with Scholastica in the oratory of St John on Monte Cassino. The account rests on Dialogues II.37 and is reported as what Gregory attests.

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

The Death Foretold

In keeping with the prophetic portrait the whole book has drawn (see Totila and the Prophecies), Gregory has Benedict foresee his own death as he had foreseen so much else. “In the same year in which he was to depart this life,” Gregory writes, Benedict foretold the day of his most holy death to certain of his disciples who lived with him, and to others who dwelt at a distance — charging the near ones to keep silence about what they had heard, and signifying to the far ones by what token they should know when his soul had left his body (Dialogues II.37; ed. de Vogüé, SC 260; trans. after Gardner 1911). The man who had spent his life reading the secrets of others read, last of all, the hour of his own end, and went to meet it with open eyes — as he had left the world at the first, “knowingly” (see The Flight from the World).

Six days before his death, Gregory continues, Benedict gave orders that his tomb should be opened (Dialogues II.37). He was a man preparing, deliberately and without fear, for a death he knew was upon him.

The Last Communion and the Upright Death

Then he was seized with a fever, and his strength failed from day to day. On the sixth day, Gregory relates, Benedict had his disciples carry him into the oratory, and there “he fortified himself for his departure by receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord” — the Eucharist as viaticum, the food for the journey, the last and greatest of the consolations of the dying (Dialogues II.37). And then comes the detail that has fixed the scene in Christian memory: too weak to stand on his own, Benedict had his disciples hold up his failing limbs; and so, standing upright in the oratory, supported by the hands of his brethren, with his own hands raised toward heaven, he breathed out his last in the words of prayer (Dialogues II.37; trans. after Gardner 1911). He did not die in his bed but on his feet, in the place of prayer, in the act of prayer, having just received the Lord whom he had served — the death, the tradition has always felt, of a soldier of Christ who fell at his post, hands lifted to the King he had followed since he was a boy.

The Vision of the Shining Road

Gregory crowns the death, as he had crowned Scholastica’s (see His Sister Scholastica), with a vision — and this time the vision is doubled, granted in the same hour to two monks far apart, one of whom was with him and one of whom was away in his own monastery, exactly as Benedict had promised them a sign (Dialogues II.37). Both saw the identical thing: a road (via), stretching eastward from Benedict’s cell straight up toward heaven, strewn with rich coverings and shining with innumerable lamps, ranged in order along its whole length. At the top of it stood a man of venerable aspect, in shining garments, who asked them whose road this was that they beheld. They confessed they did not know. And he said to them: “This is the way [haec est via] by which Benedict, the beloved of the Lord, ascended into heaven” (Dialogues II.37; trans. after Gardner 1911). So, Gregory says, those who were present saw the death with their bodily eyes, and those absent knew it by the appointed token; and the man of God, who in life had seen the whole world gathered in a single ray of light (II.35), departed this world by a road of light that led to the very heaven he had contemplated.

The vision is the seal of the whole Dialogues. The book that had set out to prove that the saints of Italy were as great as the saints of old, and that God’s wonders had not ceased, ends by showing its hero received into glory by a shining road — the via that is at once the road to heaven and, in a quiet echo, the way of life the Rule had charted, the “school for the Lord’s service” whose Prologue promised that the faithful would “run the way of God’s commandments” (Prol. 49). The man who wrote the way for others is shown the Way home.

The Date and the Burial

Gregory gives no year and no calendar date for the death. The traditional figures — c. 547, on 21 March — are later reconstructions, the date of 21 March being the day on which the Western Church long kept his principal feast (the day of his death), and c. 547 being the conventional year computed back from the (also conventional) Monte Cassino chronology. Both are uncertain, like all the dates of the life (see the disputed-dates note in The Source Problem).

[Disputed: The date of Benedict’s death. The traditional date is 21 March c. 547. Gregory gives neither year nor day; both are later reconstruction. Some scholars, noting the thinness of the chronology, give only “c. 547” or “mid-sixth century,” and a few argue for a slightly later year. The figures are conventional anchors, not attested facts. The Orthodox feast falls on 14 March; the Roman Catholic Church since 1969 keeps 11 July (a translation date), retaining 21 March in the older calendar — see The Orthodox Veneration and Patron of Europe.]

He was buried, as Gregory has already told us in the Scholastica chapter, in the tomb he had prepared for himself — the oratory of St John the Baptist that he had built on the summit of Monte Cassino over the ruined altar of Apollo (see The Mountain Monastery) — and there his sister Scholastica had been laid before him, so that “those whose souls had always been one in God were not, even in the grave, separated in body” (Dialogues II.34, 37). Brother and sister rest together on the mountain, beneath the church that the centuries would destroy and rebuild and destroy and rebuild again, always on the same spot. The later claim of the abbey of Fleury (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire) to possess Benedict’s relics, translated to Gaul in the seventh century, is contested by Monte Cassino and is a matter of medieval translation-history rather than of the Dialogues (it is noted in Patron of Europe).

The Death as the Seal of the Life

It is worth seeing how completely the death-scene gathers up the whole Dialogues — for Gregory has composed it as a summation. The prophecy of the day of death recalls the prophetic gift displayed throughout the Cassino chapters (II.12–20; see Totila and the Prophecies): the man who read the hearts of others and the future of kings reads, last, his own end. The Eucharist received as viaticum makes the death sacramental and ecclesial — Benedict dies not as a solitary wonderworker but as a son of the Church, fed by her mysteries. The upright posture, hands raised in prayer, makes the death an act of the Opus Dei, the “work of God” to which the Rule said nothing should be preferred (RB 43; see The Opus Dei and the Horarium): Benedict dies at prayer, in the oratory, as he had lived. And the doubled vision of the road of light, granted to near and far disciples alike by the token he had appointed, both confirms his prophecy and crowns the whole book’s argument — that the man of God is received into the glory he had served. Every major theme of the Dialogues converges in these last verses, which is one more reason to read them, as this collection reads the whole book, as carefully wrought hagiography rather than as a coroner’s report (see Reading the Dialogues).

There is also a quiet symmetry with the opening of the life. Benedict had left the world scienter — “knowingly,” with open eyes (see The Flight from the World); he leaves it now the same way, having foreseen and prepared for his death, going to meet it on his feet and at prayer. The man who began by renouncing the world’s wisdom for God ends by being shown the road to God; the fuga mundi that opened the life is completed by the via that closes it. The flight from the world reaches its destination.

See Also

References

  • Gregory the Great. Dialogues II.37 (the death foretold; the tomb opened six days before; the fever; carried to the oratory and the last reception of the Body and Blood of the Lord; dying standing, upheld by his disciples, hands raised in prayer; the doubled vision of the shining lamp-lit road to heaven and “this is the way by which Benedict, beloved of the Lord, ascended”). With II.34 (the burial with Scholastica). 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. (The death chapter; the date question.)
  • RB 1980, ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. (The traditional date c. 547/21 March as reconstruction; the burial on Monte Cassino; the Fleury translation claim.)
  • Feast dates (14 March Orthodox; 21 March and 11 July Western) cross-checked against the OCA and OrthodoxWiki entries on St Benedict and the Catholic Encyclopedia (used to locate the calendar data; the death narrative cited to Gregory directly).