Benedict of Nursia
c. 480 – c. 547 · Nursia
Also known as St Benedict
Feast: 11 July (Catholic) · 14 March (Orthodox)
Founder of Western monasticism. Established Monte Cassino c. 529 and authored the Rule of St Benedict, which became the foundational rule for Western cenobitic life. Known almost entirely through Gregory the Great's Dialogues Book 2.
The Rule of St. Benedict is seventy-three short chapters telling a community how to pray, work, eat, sleep, and treat each other. For fifteen hundred years it organised Western monasticism, and through monasticism it organised the preservation of every classical text we still have. Without Benedict's monks copying manuscripts in the dark centuries after Rome fell, we wouldn't have Plato or Aristotle in our libraries. The Rule itself is also still readable — moderate, kind, weirdly modern.
Notable works
- ·The Rule of Saint Benedict · 540
Primary sources
- ·Benedict, Regula
- ·Gregory the Great, Dialogues 2
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