Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

monasticism 773
rule is preoccupied with vertical communication between superior and
subject rather than with relationships among the subjects themselves. The
document is presented as a series of questions and answers, the disciple
seeking guidance, evoking the style of Cassian or Basil, but to different
effect.
Here, then, was one of Benedict’s sources; but one only. He was in many
ways a syncretist, working in a world where Caesarius and his associates
could influence developments in Ravenna as easily as in Poitiers. 103 For
some considerable time, his own Rule was to be popularized most effectively
in conjunction with Caesarius and with the later Columbanus. Even more
important, his use of the Regula magistri was tempered in a fundamental way
by his dependence on the more social emphases of Augustine. Reading his
Rule, one is reminded constantly of the ‘Master’, and yet astonished no less
frequently by the skilfully interwoven attention to community life. In the
combination that did most to characterize his achievement, the community
now balanced, within a trinity of influences, the impact of both the abbot
and the rule. Obviously by the time his own Rule had developed, circumstances
in Italy had changed once again, with the Gothic kingdom in disarray,
the armies and administrators of Justinian increasingly in command,
and the loyalties of Italians at once weakened and divided. It was a world in
which the very definition of community was open to reassessment, and
where the ability to maintain an effective economy was subject not only to
the stress of war but also to the loss of political focus and identity. No
wonder Benedict was more hesitant than his most famous Italian model,
offering in his own Rule no more than ‘the rudiments of monastic observance’,
a ‘little rule for beginners’. Cassian, the Vitæ patrum and the rules of
Basil were deemed more exhaustive guides. 104
We owe our biographical knowledge of Benedict to Gregory the Great.
The critical problem is whether the portrait provided in the latter’s Dialogues
(completed in a.d. 594) has accurately recorded the milieu of the Regula
magistri and of Benedict’s own Rule. Did Gregory, one might almost say,
invent the Benedict who has become so familiar to history? In fact, the correspondences
are numerous and convincing. As Gregory wrote himself,
‘his life could not have differed from his teaching’. 105 In so far as doubts
remain, we have no reason to expect that a biographical account, with its
attention to change and incident, should reproduce exactly the impressions
we may gain from a series of static prescriptions. Rules are not biographies
103 See Gregory the Great, Ep. 12.6; Venantius Fortunatus, Carm. viii.1, and Greg. Tur. Hist. iii.7,
vi.29f.
104 Regula Benedicti (ed. A. de Vogüé, 6 vols. (SChrét. 181–6)) lxxiii: initium conversationis . . . hanc
minimam inchoationis regulam, ed. McCann, 160/162.
105 Gregory the Great, Dialogues (ed. A. de Vogüé, 3 vols. (SChrét. 257, 260, 265)) ii.36: nullo modo potuit
aliter docere quam vixit, ed. De Vogüé, 2.242. Gregory’s own point was that the Rule itself was almost a
biography, a portrait of the man.
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