Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

BENEDICT OF NURSIA.
Ill
France, were exercising a very powerful influence on the
culture and life of their times. They were opposed
to overrigid
fasting, and recognised
that in the hardier climates of the
North-west men need more food than in the sunny South.
Much eating, they said, is
gormandising among the Greeks,
but natural among the Gauls. The truth is that fasting is
absolutely useless and senseless, except
the brain and heart for their higher
in so far as it clears
work. Some men it
invigorates, others it sickens and depresses. Let each study
honestly the habit of his own nature, and observe the discipline
which is best for his intellectual and spiritual powers. There
is no doubt, however, that in the Middle Ages people ate
enormously too much, and let us thank the monk who
reminded his age how little a man could live upon, and who
did something thereby
to form the habit of moderation which
on the whole reigns benignly in these modern days.
Until the beginning of
the sixth century
the monasteries of
the West were isolated, and each did what was right in its
own
eyes. Not a few grew rich and wanton, and the danger was
that in the general decay of everything in the empire, in the
dark days which were at once the deathbed of the Eoman and
the cradle of the modern world, the monastic institution would
be swept away with the wreck. Then arose Benedict of
Nursia (c. 480 c.
542), and by
his celebrated rule settled the
character of Western monachism for all time. Like other
great leaders he had the eye to see the special character of
the facts with which he set himself to deal. He gave a per
manent form to what was already the instinctive tendency of
the monachism of the West
;
he interpreted to itself the
spirit which was abroad in society around him, and gave it
wider and freer range.
Benedict was born of a noble family at Nursia, a descendant
of the Anician house, and early devoted himself to the solitary
life in its austerest form, at Subiaco, in the Eoman Campagna.