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

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