St. Benedict finishes his rule for monks, calling it a beginners' minimum

MONTE CASSINO, this decade, 530 AD — Saint Benedict of Nursia has finished a book for the monks of this mountain. It runs to seventy-three chapters, and it settles when they get up, what they eat, what they may own and whom they must obey. In the last chapter he calls it a minimum written for beginners, and tells any reader who wants more than it gives to go and read other men’s books instead.

St. Benedict is the abbot here at Monte Cassino, about eighty miles south of Rome. He came up to this mountain from Subiaco in 529 AD, after years of governing the twelve monasteries he had built in that valley. St. Benedict wrote the book for laymen, not for priests. It is for men who want to live the Gospel as fully as they can, in one house, under one abbot, for life. He wrote it in part to put an end to two kinds of monk. His first chapter describes the Sarabites, who live in twos and threes under no rule at all and call holy whatever appeals to them. It describes the Gyrovagues too, who tramp from province to province all their lives.

The claim about his own book comes in the epilogue, and he makes it twice. “Now we have written this Rule in order that by its observance in monasteries we may show that we have attained some degree of virtue and the rudiments of the religious life,” St. Benedict writes. Then he ends the book with this sentence: “Whoever you are, therefore, who are hastening to the heavenly homeland, fulfil with the help of Christ this minimum Rule which we have written for beginners.”

He had said the same at the front of the book. The prologue closes with the sentence that names what he is founding: “And so we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord. In founding it we hope to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome.” The Latin is nihil asperum, nihil grave (nothing harsh or burdensome). The next sentence takes part of the promise back. St. Benedict writes: “But if a certain strictness results from the dictates of equity for the amendment of vices or the preservation of charity, do not be at once dismayed and fly from the way of salvation, whose entrance cannot but be narrow.”

The entrance is narrow from the first day. A man who arrives asking to be admitted is left knocking, and only if he is still there after four or five days, bearing “the harsh treatment offered him and the difficulty of admission,” is he taken as far as the guest house. Then he is put in the novitiate. At two months the whole Rule is read aloud to him, with these words: “Here is the law under which you wish to fight. If you can observe it, enter; if you cannot, you are free to depart.” It is read to him again six months later, and a third time four months after that. Only then may he promise, and from the day he promises he may not leave the monastery or, in St. Benedict’s phrase, “withdraw his neck from under the yoke of the Rule.”

What he has agreed to, day by day, is this. In winter he gets up at the eighth hour of the night, having slept somewhat more than half the night, for the Night Office. From Easter to October he works from Prime until about the fourth hour, then reads until about the sixth hour, then works again until Vespers. St. Benedict gives the reason in that chapter: “idleness is the enemy of the soul.” The monk gets a good pound of bread for the day and two cooked dishes at dinner. A third dish is added if there is fruit or green vegetables to be had. He eats no flesh of four-footed animals unless he is sick and very weak. He is allowed a daily measure of wine the Rule calls a hemina (probably about half a pint). St. Benedict sets that allowance down with an apology attached: “It is therefore with some misgiving that we regulate the measure of other men’s sustenance.”

St. Benedict opens chapter 5: “The first degree of humility is obedience without delay.” The monk drops the work in his hands unfinished and goes. St. Benedict writes that “as it were at the same moment the master’s command is given and the disciple’s work is completed.” That obedience is owed to the abbot. The abbot, St. Benedict writes, “is believed to hold the place of Christ” in the monastery.

That is the minimum. In the same last chapter St. Benedict names the books he is pointing past it to. Scripture comes first: “what page or what utterance of the divinely inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not a most unerring rule for human life?” Then the Fathers, and then “the Conferences and the Institutes and the Lives of the Fathers, as also the Rule of our holy Father Basil.” Of those books he writes: “But for us who are lazy and ill-living and negligent they are a source of shame and confusion.”