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Benedict of Aniane

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Saint Benedict of Nursia

(born c. 480, Nursia, Kingdom of the Lombards — died c. 547) Founder of the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy, and father of Western monasticism. Born into a prominent family at Nursia in central Italy, he rejected the immoral and profligate life of the rich and became a hermit outside Rome, where he attracted disciples. At his monastery at Cassino he formulated the Benedictine Rule, which became standard in monasteries throughout Europe. The Rule includes a probationary year prior to the vow of obedience and lifelong residence at one monastery, a ban on personal property, an abbot elected for life who appoints all other officers, and a precisely ordered day that includes five to six hours of liturgy and prayer, five hours of manual work, and four hours of scriptural and spiritual reading.

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Saints: Benedict of Aniane
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Benedict of Aniane (750–821), abbot. Born of a noble family, the son of Aigulf of Maguelone, Benedict served the emperors Pepin and Charlemagne at court. At the age of twenty, he experienced a conversion and became a monk at Saint-Seine, near Dijon. After about three years, seeking a more solitary life, he became a hermit on his own estate by the river Aniane. Here he was joined by other hermits: they worked in the fields and at other remunerative manual labour, as well as at copying books. Their food was reputed to be bread and water only, except on Sundays and feasts. Extreme poverty and solitude were prominent at this stage of his monastic life, but both were somewhat modified later.

Monasteries in the empire had suffered from the twin evils of lay ownership and Viking attacks which had caused decay both internal and external. Emperors of the 8th and 9th centuries had legislated in favour of the Rule of St. Benedict as the fundamental and stable code of monastic life throughout their dominions. As Boniface had co-operated with Carloman and Pepin, so did Benedict with Louis the Pious. All were concerned that monastic reform should be effective and permanent: to ensure this, legislation was made at the council of Aachen in 817, presided over by Benedict, who was by then established a few miles away from the emperor's court as abbot of Inde, afterwards called Cornelimunster. Already he had become prominent in the reform of many monasteries in the neighbourhood. His life-work, his biographer said, was to restore the Rule of St. Benedict in the whole kingdom of the Franks.   

The legislation emphasized the fundamental guidelines of the Rule of St. Benedict, stressing individual poverty and chastity with obedience to a properly constituted abbot who was himself a monk. Under imperial pressure for uniformity in food, drink, clothing, and the Divine Office (which could be compared with Charlemagne's insistence on the Roman Rite), there was also some attempt (often exaggerated by commentators) to impose uniformity of monastic observance in less important details. Some of these were abandoned in Benedict's quest for peaceful and orderly acceptance of substantial reforms. These were summarized in the Capitula of Aachen which were attached to the Rule and made obligatory throughout the empire. In practice, however, complete uniformity was, at this time and given the diverse origins of many monasteries, unrealizable.

Benedict's reforms, however, substantially and permanently affected Benedictine life. He rightly insisted on its liturgical character, developed in a daily conventual Mass and, to meet benefactors' demands, by substantial additions to the basic monastic office, but he also stressed the clerical element in monasticism which led to the development of teaching and writing as opposed to ‘servile’ manual work, regarded as more suitable for the serfs tied to the lands given to the monasteries. His influence can be seen in the reforms of Cluny, Gorze, and in 10th-century England, where similar legislation was enacted by Dunstan and Ethelwold at Winchester.

Benedict's works include the Codex Regularum (a collection of monastic rules from East and West, beginning with Basil's) and the Concordia Regularum (which assembles texts of other monastic Fathers to illustrate the text of the Rule of St. Benedict). Like his patron and namesake, Benedict of Aniane had turned away from a very austere eremitical life to a more moderate community monasticism in which there was a place for art, learning, and the sanctification of property in endowment for splendid architecture. Benedict, worn out by continual sickness in his last years, died at Inde. Feast: 11 February.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

  • Life by his disciples Ardo in M.G.H. Scriptores xv (part i), 198–220, also with Benedict's writings in P.L., ciii. 353–1440. Decrees of the synod of Aachen in K. Hallinger, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, i (1963), 451–81. J. Winandy, ‘L'Oeuvre monastique de saint Benoît d'Aniane’ in Mélanges bénédictins (1947), 235–58; P. Schmitz, ‘L'influence de saint Benoît d'Aniane dans l'histoire de l'ordre de saint Benoît’ in Settimano di Studio…sull' Alto Medioevo, iv (1957), 401–15 and W. Williams, ‘St. Benedict of Aniane’ in Downside Review, liv (1936), 357–74; M.O., 25–30
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Saint Benedict of Aniane
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Benedict of Aniane, Saint, c.750-821, French abbot who became a monastic adviser to Louis I. He first founded (c.780) an austere monastic community at Aniane in Languedoc, based on Eastern asceticism. In 799, he founded a large monastery based on the more moderate Benedictine Rule (see Benedict, Saint). As the leading reformer of French monastic houses, he presided over a series of councils of abbots at Aachen (816-819) that centralized and imposed regulations on all Carolingian monasteries. This legislation was essential to the development of Benedictine dominance in Western monasticism. Feast: Feb. 11. See Benedictines; monasticism.
Dictionary: Benedict of Nur·si·a   (nûr'shē-ə, -shə) pronunciation, Saint A.D. 480?-547?.
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Italian monk who as founder of the Benedictine order (c. 529) is considered the patriarch of Western monasticism.


Wikipedia: Benedict of Aniane
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Saint Benedict of Aniane
Born 747, France
Died 11 February 821
Venerated in Roman Catholicism
Feast 11 February

Saint Benedict of Aniane (c. 747 – 11 February 821), born Witiza and called the Second Benedict, was a Benedictine monk and monastic reformer, who left a large imprint on the religious practice of the Carolingian Empire. His feast day is February 11.

According to Ardo, Benedict's biographer, the saint was the son of a Visigoth, Aigulf, Count of Maguelonne (Magalonensis comes) in 752. Originally given the Gothic name Witiza, he was educated at the Frankish court of Pippin the Younger, and entered the royal service. He served at the court of Charlemagne, and took part in the Italian campaign of Charlemagne in 773 where he almost drowned in the Ticino near Pavia while trying to save his brother. He later left the court to become a monk. He was received into the monastery of Saint Sequanus (Saint-Seine).

Around 780, he founded a monastic community based on Eastern asceticism at Aniane in Languedoc. This community did not develop as he had intended. In 799, he founded another monastery based on Benedictine Rule, at the same location. His success there gave him considerable influence, which he used to found and reform a number of other monasteries, and eventually becoming the effective abbot of all the monasteries of Charlemagne's empire.[1]

He was the head of a council of abbots which in 817 at Aachen created a code of regulations, or "Codex regularum", which would be binding on all their houses. Shortly thereafter, he compiled a "Concordia regularum". Although these new codes fell into disuse shortly after the deaths of Benedict and his patron, Emperor Louis the Pious, they did have lasting effects on Western monasticism.

Louis built the abbey of Maurmunster as a model abbey for Benedict in Alsace. Benedict died at Kornelimünster Abbey, a monastery Louis had built for him to serve as the base for Benedict's supervisory work.

Works

  • For Benedict's writings, see Codex regularum monasticarum et canonicarum in Patrologia Latina, CIII, 393-702;
  • Concordia regularum, loc. cit;
  • Letters, loc. cit., 703-1380.

Other treatises (loc. cit., 1381 sqq.) ascribed to him are probably not authentic.

  • Ardo Smaragdus, Life, op. cit., CIII, 353 sqq.;
  • Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Script., XV, I, 200-220;
  • Acta Sanctorum, Feb., II, 606 sqq.;
  • NICOLAI, Der hl. Benedict, Gründer von Aniane und Cornelimünster (Cologne, 1865);
  • PAULINIER, S. Benoit d'Aniane et la fondation du monastere de ce nom (Montpellier, 1871);
  • FOSS, Benedikt von Aniane (Berlin, 1884);
  • PUCKERT, Aniane und Gellone (Leipzig, 1899);
  • HAUCK, Kirchengesch. Deutschlands (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1900), II, 575 sqq.;
  • BUTLER, Lives of the Saints, 12 Feb.

References

  1. ^ Attwater, Donald and Catherine Rachel John. The Penguin Dictionary of Saints. 3rd edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. ISBN 0-140-51312-4.

External links

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.


 
 

 

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