He lived three entire years in this tomb. The shepherds who discovered him there at first took him for a wild beast, but by his discourses, and the efforts he made to instil grace and piety into their rustic souls, they recognised in him a servant of God. Temptations were not wanting to him. The allurements of voluptuousness acted so strongly on his excited senses, that he was on the point of leaving his retreat to seek after a woman whose beauty had formerly impressed him, and whose memory haunted him incessantly. But there was near his grotto a clump of thorns and briers: he took off the vestments of skins, which was his only dress, and rolled himself among them naked till his body was all one wound, but also till he had extinguished for ever the infernal fire which inflamed him even in the desert.
Seven centuries later, another saint, father of the most numerous monastic family which the church has produced after that of S. Benedict, S. Francis of Assisi, came to visit that wild site, which was worthy to rival the bare Tuscan rock, where the stigmata of the passion were imprinted on himself. He prostrated himself before the thicket of thorns which had been a triumphal bed to the masculine virtue of the patriarch of the monks, and after having bathed with his tears the soil of that glorious battle-field, he planted there two rose trees. The roses of S. Francis grew, and have survived the Benedictine briers. This garden, twice sanctified, still occupies a sort of triangular plateau, which projects upon the side of the rock, a little before and beneath the grotto which sheltered S. Benedict. The eye, confined on all sides by rocks, can survey freely only the azure of heaven. It is the last of those sacred places visited and venerated in the celebrated and unique monastery of the Iagro Speco, which forms a series of sanctuaries, built one over the other, backed by the mountain which Benedict has immortalized. Such was the hard and savage cradle of the monastic order in the West. It was from this tomb, where the delicate son of the last patricians of Rome buried himself alive, that the definite form of monastic life—that is to say, the perfection of Christian life—was born.
The solitude of the young anchorite was not long respected. The faithful in the neighbourhood, who brought him food for the body, asked the bread of life in return. The monks of a neighbouring monastery, situated near Vico Varo, obtained, by dint of importunity, his consent to become their ruler, but, soon disgusted by his austerity, they endeavoured to poison him. He made the sign of the cross over the vessel which contained the poison, and it broke as if it had been struck with a stone. He left these unworthy monks, to re-enter joyfully his beloved cavern, and to live by himself alone. But it was in vain: he soon found himself surrounded by such a multitude of disciples, that, to give them a shelter, he was compelled to found in the neighbourhood of his retreat twelve monasteries, each inhabited by twelve monks. He kept some with him, in order to direct them himself, and was thus finally raised to be the superior of a numerous community of cenobites.
Clergy and laymen, Romans and barbarians, victors and vanquished, alike flocked to him, attracted by the fame of his virtue and miracles. While the celebrated Theodoric, at the head of his Goths, up to that time invincible, destroyed the ephemeral kingdom of the Hercules, seized Rome, and overspread Italy, other Goths came to seek faith, penitence, and monastic discipline under the laws of Benedict. At his command they armed themselves with axes and hatchets, and employed their robust strength in rooting out the brushwood and clearing the soil, which, since the time of Nero, had again become a wilderness. The Italian painters of the great ages of art have left us many representations of the legend told by S. Gregory, in which S. Benedict restores to a Goth who had become a convert at Subiaco, the tool which that zealous but unskilled workman had dropped to the bottom of the lake, and which the abbot miraculously brought forth. "Take thy tool," said Benedict to the barbarian woodcutter,—"take it, work, and be comforted." Symbolical words, in which we find an abridgment of the precepts and examples lavished by the monastic order on so many generations of conquering races: Ecce labora.
S. BENEDICT EXORCISING AN EVIL SPIRIT WHICH HAD INTERRUPTED THE WORKMEN EMPLOYED IN BUILDING A CHAPEL.
From a Fresco, by Spinelli d'Arezzo, in the Church of San Miniato, near Florence.
March 21.
Beside these barbarians already occupied in restoring the cultivation of that Italian soil which their brethren in arms still wasted, were many children of the Roman nobility, whom their fathers had confided to Benedict to be trained to the service of God. Among these young patricians are two whose names are celebrated in Benedictine annals: Maur, whom the abbot Benedict made his own coadjutor; and Placidus, whose father was lord of the manor of Subiaco, which did not prevent his son from rendering menial services to the community, such as drawing water from the lake of Nero. The weight of his pitcher one day overbalanced him, and he fell into the lake. We shall leave Bossuet to tell the rest, in his panegyric, delivered twelve centuries afterwards before the sons of the founder of Subiaco:—