Virgin Saints and Martyrs

by S. Baring-Gould

Throughout the Church there rose the wail to God—“Thine adversaries roar in the midst of Thy congregations: and set up their banners for tokens. He that hewed timber afore out of the thick trees was known to bring it to an excellent work. But now they break down all the carved work thereof with axes and hammers. They have set fire upon Thy holy places: and have defiled the dwelling-place of Thy Name, even unto the ground. Yea, they said in their hearts, Let us make havock of them altogether: thus have they burnt up all the houses of God in the land. We see not our tokens, there is not one prophet more: no, not one is there among us, that understandeth any more. O God, how long shall the adversary do this dishonour: how long shall the enemy blaspheme Thy Name, for ever?”

Confusion, corruption, despair and death, were everywhere; social dismemberment was complete. The empire that had embraced the known world was crumbling to dust under the blows of the mysterious multitudes passing out of the darkness beyond the pale. Odoacer, the chief of the Heruli, had snatched the purple of the Cæsars from the shoulders of their last representative in 476, but himself disdained to wear a mantle that was stained with cowardice and dishonour. Authority, morals, laws, science, the arts, religion itself, all seemed to be sinking into the vortex of death.

Germany was wholly pagan, a breeding-place of hordes that burst forth periodically to devastate the land that had been cultivated, and to extinguish the light wherever it burned. Gaul had been overwhelmed by successive waves of barbarism. Spain was ravaged by Visigoths, Suevi, Alani, and Vandals. These latter had swept over Northern Africa, and had given it up to unpitying persecution. Britain had been invaded by the Anglo-Saxons, who had driven the Britons and their Christianity to the mountains of Strathclyde, Wales, and to the peninsula of Cornwall. Over the frozen Danube, the Goths had passed on their cumbrous waggons, and had spread from the woody shores of Dalmatia to the walls of Constantinople.

The condition of Italy, the heart and soul of the Empire that had been dissolved, was deplorable to the last degree. For centuries agriculture had decayed in it, as the farms were absorbed by the great senatorial families and worked by their slaves. The people had come to expect their grain from Egypt and Africa, and now these tributary harvests were withdrawn. War, famine, pestilence stalked over its fair plains, and mowed down such as remained of the population. Pope Gelasius affirmed, with some exaggeration, that in Æmilia, Tuscany and the adjacent provinces, the human species was almost extirpated. “The plebeians of Rome,” says Gibbon, “who were fed by the hand of their master, perished or disappeared, as soon as his liberality was suppressed; the decline of the arts reduced the industrious mechanic to idleness and want; and the senators, who might support with patience the ruin of their country, bewailed their private loss of wealth and luxury. One-third of those ample estates, to which the ruin of Italy is originally imputed, was extorted for the use of the conquerors. Injuries were aggravated by insults; the sense of actual sufferings was embittered by the fear of more dreadful evils; and as new lands were allotted to new swarms of barbarians, each senator was apprehensive lest the arbitrary surveyors should approach his favourite villa, or his most profitable farm. The least unfortunate were those who submitted without a murmur to the power which it was impossible to resist.”

The general despair produced in religious minds the conviction that the fashion of the world was passing away, there was nothing further to be hoped for in it, and that the only direction in which the eternal spring of hope could flow was in the channels of religion that led to heaven.

This was the condition of affairs in Italy, and this explains the origin and the enormous expansion of the Benedictine Order.

S. Benedict was born along with his sister Scholastica in the year 480. They were twins, and loved each other with that tenderness which so generally exists between twins; they were of one heart and one soul.

They belonged to the noble Anician family, whose history is traceable to the second century before Christ.

Benedict and his twin sister were born at Nursia, a Sabine town, situated high up in the mountains near the source of the Nar. It was here that Vespasia Polla, mother of the Emperor Vespasian, was also born. Virgil speaks of the coldness of its climate, as the chilly cradle of the waters of Tiber and Febaris. To the east tower up the Apennines to the peak of the Monte della Sibilla. Two centuries after the death of Benedict, the vast ruins of his ancestral palace were still to be seen outside the town gates.

Doubtless it was to this Alpine retreat that the family had fled to hide themselves from the Gothic invaders who were devouring the land. Benedict and his twin sister, as their minds opened, became aware of the universal hopelessness that possessed men’s minds. The doom of the great nobles was as certainly sealed as at the French Revolution. No prospect was open to them of any work, any career in political life. They could not fly the fatherland to the colonies, for the colonies were in the throes as well.