Five days of knocking, just to get in the door

MONTE CASSINO, this decade, 530 AD — Four or five days of standing outside, knocking. That’s what a man had to do before the monks on this mountain would let him in as far as the guest house. All that time he had to put up with “the harsh treatment offered him and the difficulty of admission.”

Saint Benedict of Nursia is the abbot here at Monte Cassino, about eighty miles south of Rome. He came up to this mountain from Subiaco in 529 AD. Before that he spent years running the twelve monasteries he had built down in that valley. Now he has finished a book for the monks who live with him. It runs to 73 chapters. It settles when they get up, what they eat, what they may own and whom they must obey.

Three readings and no way out

After the knocking, the man is still not a monk. Two months later the whole book is read out loud to him. These are the words that go with it: “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 after that. Then a third time, four months later. Only then may he promise. And from the day he promises he may not leave the monastery. In St. Benedict’s own words, he may not “withdraw his neck from under the yoke of the Rule.”

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. They live in one house, under one abbot, for life. He wrote it partly to put an end to two kinds of monk. The Sarabites live in twos and threes under no rule at all, and call holy whatever they happen to like. The Gyrovagues tramp from province to province all their lives.

Bread, wine, and no meat

In winter a monk gets up at the eighth hour of the night for the Night Office. That’s after a bit more than half a night’s sleep. He works, then reads, then works again. St. Benedict gives the reason in that chapter: “idleness is the enemy of the soul.”

Food: a good pound of bread for the day, and two cooked dishes at dinner. A third dish is added if there’s fruit or green vegetables to be had. No meat from four-footed animals, unless a monk is sick and very weak. There’s a daily measure of wine as well. The book calls it a hemina (probably about half a pint).

When the abbot gives an order, the monk puts down the work in his hands and goes, even if it isn’t finished. St. Benedict opens chapter 5 like this: “The first degree of humility is obedience without delay.” That obedience is owed to the abbot. The abbot, St. Benedict writes, “is believed to hold the place of Christ” in the monastery.

And then he calls it a minimum

Then comes the last chapter. After all of it — the knocking, the promise, the night rising, the bread, the obedience — St. Benedict calls his book a minimum, written for beginners. These are the last words in it: “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.”

Anyone who wants more than his book gives should go and read other books, he says in that same chapter. Scripture comes first, 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.”