"S. Benedict ordered S. Maur, his faithful disciple, to run quickly and draw the child out. At the word of his master, Maur went away without hesitation, ... and full of confidence in the order he had received, walked upon the water with as much security as upon the earth, and drew Placidus from the whirlpool, which would have swallowed him up. To what shall I attribute so great a miracle, whether to the virtue of the obedience or to that of the commandment? A doubtful question, says S. Gregory, between S. Benedict and S. Maur. But let us say, to decide it, that the obedience had grace to accomplish the command, and that the command had grace to give efficacy to the obedience. Walk, my fathers, upon the waves with the help of obedience; you shall find solid support amid the inconstancy of human things. The waves shall have no power to overthrow you, nor the depths to swallow you up; you shall remain immovable, as if all was firm under your feet, and issue forth victorious."
However, Benedict had the ordinary fate of great men and saints. The great number of conversions worked by the example and fame of his austerity, awakened a homicidal envy against him. A wicked priest of the neighbourhood attempted first to decry and then poison him. Being unsuccessful in both, he endeavoured at least to injure him in the object of his most tender solicitude—in the souls of his young disciples. For that purpose he sent, even into the garden of the monastery, where Benedict dwelt, and where the monks laboured, seven wretched women, whose gestures, sports, and shameful nudity, were designed to tempt the young monks to certain fall. When Benedict, from the threshold of his cell, perceived these shameless creatures, he despaired of his work; he acknowledged that the interest of his beloved children constrained him to disarm so cruel an enmity by retreat. He appointed superiors to the twelve monasteries which he had founded, and, taking with him a small number of disciples, he left for ever the wild gorges of Subiaco, where he had lived for thirty-five years.
Without withdrawing from the mountainous region which extends along the western side of the Apennines, Benedict directed his steps toward the south, along the Abruzzi, and penetrated into that land of labour, the name of which seems naturally suited to a soil destined to be the cradle of the most laborious men whom the world has known. He ended his journey in a scene very different from that of Subiaco, but of incomparable grandeur and majesty. There upon the boundaries of Sammim and Campania, in the centre of a large basin, half-surrounded by abrupt and picturesque heights, rises a scarped and isolated hill, the vast and rounded summit of which overlooks the course of the Liris near its fountain head, and the undulating plain which extends south towards the shores of the Mediterranean, and the narrow valleys which, towards the north, the east, and the west, lost themselves in the lines of the mountainous horizon. This is Monte Cassino.
It was here, amidst this solemn nature, and upon that predestinated height, that the patriarch of the monks of the west founded the capital of the monastic order. He found paganism still surviving there. Two hundred years after Constantine, in the heart of Christendom, and so near Rome, there still existed a very ancient temple of Apollo, and a sacred wood, where a multitude of peasants sacrificed to the gods and demons. Benedict preached the faith of Christ to these forgotten people; he persuaded them to cut down the wood, to overthrow the temple and the idol.
Upon these remains Benedict built two oratories, one dedicated to S. John the Baptist, the first solitary of the new faith; the other to S. Martin, the great monk-bishop, whose ascetic and priestly life had edified Gaul, and reached as far as Italy.
Round these chapels rose the monastery which was to become the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe; celebrated especially because there Benedict wrote his rule, and at the same time formed the type which was to serve as a model to innumerable communities submitted to that sovereign code. It is for this reason that emulous pontiffs, princes, and nations have praised, endowed, and visited the sanctuary where monastic religion, according to the expression of Pope Urban II., "flowed from the heart of Benedict as from a fountain-head of Paradise."
Benedict ended his life at Monte Cassino, where he lived for fourteen years, occupied, in the first place, with extirpating from the surrounding country the remnants of paganism, afterwards in building his monastery by the hands of his disciples, in cultivating the arid sides of his mountain, and the devastated plains around, but above all, in extending to all who approached him the benefits of the law of God, practised with a fervour and charity which none have surpassed. Although he had never been invested with the priestly character, his life at Monte Cassino was rather that of a missionary and apostle than of a solitary. He was, notwithstanding, the vigilant head of a community which flourished and increased more and more. Accustomed to subdue himself in everything, and to struggle with the infernal spirits, whose temptations and appearances were not wanting to him more than to the ancient fathers of the desert, he had acquired the gift of reading souls, and discerning their most secret thoughts. He used this faculty not only to direct the young monks, who always gathered in such numbers round him, in their studies and the labours of agriculture and building which he shared with them; but even in the distant journeys on which they were sometimes sent, he followed them by a spiritual observation, discovered their least failings, reprimanded them on their return, and bound them in everything to a strict fulfilment of the rule which they had accepted. He exacted from all, the obedience, sincerity, and austerely regulated life of which he himself gave the first example.
Many young men of rich and noble families came here, as at Subiaco, to put themselves under his direction, or were confided to him by their parents. They laboured with the other brethren in the cultivation of the soil and the building of the monastery, and were bound to all the services imposed by the rule. Some of the young nobles rebelled in secret against that equality. Among these, according to the narrative of S. Gregory, was the son of a defender—that is to say, of the first magistrate of a town or province. One evening, it being his turn to light the Abbot Benedict at supper, while he held the candlestick before the abbotial table, his pride rose within him, and he said to himself, "What is this man that I should thus stand before him while he eats, with a candle in my hand like a slave? Am I then made to be his slave?" Immediately Benedict, as if he had heard him, reproved him sharply for that movement of pride, gave the candle to another, and sent him back to his cell, dismayed to find himself at once discovered and restrained in his most secret thoughts. It was then that the great legislator inaugurated in his new-formed cloister that alliance of aristocratic races with the Benedictine Order which we shall shall have many generous and fruitful examples to quote.
He bound all—nobles and plebians, young and old, rich and poor—under the same discipline. But he would have excess or violence in nothing, and when he was told of a solitary in the neighbouring mountain, who, not content with shutting himself up in a narrow cave, had attached to his foot a chain, the other end of which was fixed in a rock, so that he could not move beyond the length of this chain, Benedict sent to tell him to break it, in these words, "If thou art truly a servant of God, confine thyself not with a chain of iron, but with the chain of Christ."
And extending his solicitude and authority over the surrounding populations, he did not content himself with preaching eloquently to them the true faith, but also healed the sick, the lepers and the possessed, provided for all the necessities of the soul and body, paid the debts of honest men oppressed by their creditors, and distributed in incessant alms the provisions of corn, wine, and linen which were sent to him by the rich Christians of the neighbourhood.