The Rule of St. Benedict: An Introduction to the Contemplative Life

By St Benedict

A timeless source of wisdom for people looking to lead a life of simplicity, purpose, and serenity

The Rule of St. Benedict has governed monastic communities for centuries, but it is far more than a standard religious text. The Rule is, above all, a handbook for living a deliberate life—no matter your religious background or beliefs. It teaches the importance of contemplation and silence, of solitude, and the power of community and unity.

With lessons focusing on the simple acts of everyday life, like eating and daily work, along with wisdom for the deeply personal and internal facets of living, such as cultivating humility and practicing forgiveness, The Rule of St. Benedict is a profound guide to living a good and meaningful life.

An award-winning translator, Philip Freeman’s version of The Rule is beautifully accessible in its language. With a simple and direct style, the book lays out a way of living that is transformative in its simplicity and striking in its power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250246509

St Benedict

ST. BENEDICT OF NURSIA is a Christian saint born in 480. He is best known for his Rule which he wrote in 516 to guide and instruct monks living together in community.

Book preview

The Rule of St. Benedict by St. Benedict

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author and Translator

Copyright Page

Thank you for buying this

St. Martin’s Press ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

For email updates on St. Benedict, click here.

For email updates on Philip Freeman, click here.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For the welcoming brothers and sisters

in monasteries around the world who continue even today

to follow the path of St. Benedict

Introduction

Listen.

The first word of The Rule of St. Benedict is the hardest.

We live in a world filled with constant noise and a multitude of competing voices. Hearing someone is hard enough, but listening—really listening—is a very difficult thing to do.

When I teach the Rule in my university classes, I tell the students that they can learn a lot about how to live a good life from listening to an old monk who died almost fifteen hundred years ago. When some object that he lived in a different age or that they aren’t religious, I say it doesn’t matter, because Benedict’s words are timeless, and he speaks to the human heart, whatever one’s beliefs might be.

Like us, Benedict lived in an age of tremendous uncertainty about the future. Empires were collapsing around him, social values that had held the world together for centuries were vanishing, and many were losing faith in religion, whether the worship of the old gods or the new faith of Christianity.

Benedict’s answer was not power or money, but spiritual renewal.

His Rule is a short, practical guide on how to be a monk—but look deeper and you can discover much more. He asks crucial questions about what really matters in life and how we can discover something more in and beyond ourselves.

Benedict’s Rule is above all a handbook for living a deliberate life. It emphasizes the importance of looking outside yourself, of seeking something greater, of living as more than just surviving another day. It teaches the importance of contemplation, silence, and solitude, but is also a book about caring for others, forgiveness, and community, for no one can make it through life alone.

It is, in short, a book for all of us.

The Life of Benedict of Nursia

Compared to many early Christian authors, we know relatively little about the life of Benedict. No one during his lifetime bothered to mention him, and no contemporary historical documents record his deeds. He seemed destined to be forgotten by the world—a fate which would surely have pleased a man so devoted to giving glory to God alone.

But there was someone in the generation after Benedict who was determined he wouldn’t be forgotten. This was Gregory the Great, as he would be known to future ages, who became bishop of Rome and pope in the year 590. Gregory was born into a wealthy Roman family and received an excellent secular education, but chose the monastic life and service to the church instead of fortune or fame. Among his priorities after becoming pope was to promote the stories of Italian saints as equal to those of the celebrated holy men from Egypt and Gaul. Gregory admits that he never knew Benedict, who died when the future pope was still a boy, but he drew on accounts of the monastic founder from several of Benedict’s own disciples. A few years into his papacy he composed the Dialogues, an imaginary conversation between himself and a young deacon named Peter. The second chapter of this book is devoted entirely to discussing the life of Benedict.

The story which Gregory presents is entirely within the tradition of earlier Christian hagiography—writings about the lives of holy men and women—showing Benedict as a man of profound devotion to God who worked astonishing miracles. Hagiography was not biography or scientific history in the modern sense, but was instead meant to provide inspiration and an ideal model of the Christian life to readers. Yet among the miraculous and fanciful stories are some revealing details about the life of this remarkable man.

From Gregory we learn that Benedict was born around the year 480—four years after the last Roman emperor was deposed in the West—in the small Italian town of Nursia (modern Norcia) in the hills northeast of Rome. As Gregory stresses, Benedict came from a free-born family with enough wealth to send their son to Rome for a fine education. But the young man abandoned his studies for fear that literature would lead him away from God.

Benedict renounced the world and moved to a church dedicated to St. Peter in the town of Effide (modern Affile) east of Rome, accompanied only by a devoted old nurse. While there he reportedly performed his first miracle, repairing a sieve, used to sift grain, that the nurse had broken.

From Effide, Benedict, seeking to be only with God, fled alone to a nearby cave in a remote place called Subiaco, where there were springs of cool, clear water. He was met on the way by a monk named Romanus who sympathized with the young man’s desire for solitude and would regularly lower bread from his own meager rations on a long rope to Benedict’s inaccessible cave. There Benedict remained content for three years, devoting himself to prayer and—in common with other ascetic holy men of the age—battling against the temptations of the devil.

One story from this time in his life relates how young Benedict was overwhelmed by sexual desire and almost abandoned his calling as a chaste hermit after the devil placed in his mind the image of a beautiful young woman. But by heaven’s grace he was inspired to strip naked and throw himself onto sharp thorns and stinging nettles, rolling around in them until he extinguished the flames of sinful passion. After this, as he later told his disciples, the temptations of the flesh never troubled him again.

Despite his isolation, Benedict’s dedication to God began to attract the notice of neighbors, including a group of monks at a nearby monastery who begged him to become their leader. After refusing repeatedly he at last agreed, but warned the brothers that his austere way of life and strict adherence to a rule of poverty, chastity, and obedience might not suit them. He was right. When Benedict forced them to give up their wayward lifestyle and unvirtuous activities, they decided to murder him. But the poison they put in his wine shattered the cup after Benedict made the sign of the cross over it. He then told them to find some other abbot more suited to their ungodly desires and left them to return to his life of solitude in the forest.

But eventually, according to Gregory, Benedict left his hermitage and founded twelve monasteries, each with twelve monks in imitation of the twelve disciples who followed Jesus. Men of all backgrounds came to him to seek the monastic life, including wealthy noblemen from Rome and even a poor Goth from one of the Germanic tribes that had invaded Italy in the previous century. But Benedict’s success provoked jealousy among other Christian leaders, including a priest of a neighboring church who tried, again in vain, to poison him. When this failed, the priest supposedly sent seven beautiful young women to dance naked before Benedict’s young disciples and tempt them from the path of virtue, prompting the holy man to move his followers to a new monastery high on a mountain between Rome and Naples.

This was Casinum, today’s Monte Cassino, an ancient holy place dedicated to Apollo, where in the summit grove of trees country folk still danced in Benedict’s day to honor the old gods. In that place Benedict built a church dedicated to the memory of St. Martin of Tours, along with a shrine to St. John the Baptist. There he received visitors, reportedly including the Gothic King Totila, who tried to test Benedict’s power but repented when the holy man chastised him.

For the rest of his life Benedict worked to establish his monastery and performed many miracles, according to Gregory, including raising a young man from the dead, casting out demons, and driving off an invisible dragon

One final story Gregory relates is of Benedict’s sister Scolastica, who would come to visit him in a hut outside the monastery walls once a year. Being a holy woman, she spent the day in joyous conversation with her brother about things divine. When evening drew near and Benedict said he needed to return to the monastery, his sister begged him to stay and keep talking. He refused, so she tearfully prayed to God for a powerful rainstorm, which trapped Benedict there for the whole night.

Before his death and burial at Monte Cassino, Gregory says that Benedict wrote a rule for his monastic brothers to follow which was remarkable for its discretion and clarity of language. Gregory then recommended the Rule to anyone who wished to learn more about the character of Benedict.

The Rule of Benedict, while lacking biographical detail, can indeed tell us something